Personally I think that if a web site demands that we see advertisements, then that site should disallow showing its contents if adblock is in place. Some places actually do something similar, detecting adblock and giving a message to turn it off. That's a solution I could live with, as it also means I will just never go to those sites at all, win-win. But they don't do this, instead they whine about us "stealing" their income (it's a stupid blog by a stupid person, if they want money they can get a real job instead of trying to get a hobby to pay).
Notice the increasing number of people "cutting the cord" with cable. This was once considered unthinkable, the monopolies felt that they could do anything they wanted and still collect their cable tax. So don't think that people feel that they are forced to visit web pages either, they may decide enough is enough and cut the cord there too. The interesting thing is that cutting the cord with cable also meant many people cutting cord with satellite service, hurting the competition along with the monopolies. Which means that as far as advertising goes, the good guys out there should not just stand by passively but instead work to get the bad players to shape up lest they be lumped together with them.
I use adblock, and not because I want stuff for free. I use it because the ads have become amazingly agnostic, slowing down my computer noticeably, slowing down my internet service, etc. My mother on dialup got an amazing speedup in service when I added adblock to her browser. Ads are service up malware, etc.
In the early days most ads were static, most were of a very fixed size, and the "bad players" were the pop-ups and pop-unders. So the feature people used to maintain their sanity against the enemy was to block popups and popunders. There was a possibility of an adblock style, and some people did that, but for most the remaining ads were mostly sane. The problem is that over time advertsers have engaged in a war against browser users, and became increasingly hostile and aggressive. The very few good players in the advertiser world were sadly lumped in with the majority, but the users are acting only in self defense.
It's bizarre that today the richest corporations in the world are essentially advertising houses and purveyors, a business that used to be considered a sideline.
There are several companies now that are "inventing" their origina stories. Like all superheros or people who mistaenly think they are superheros, they feel they must have a cool original story. Some of these stories end up being exaggerations but some are outright lies. Few want to say that their origin was to get a small group to leave their old company and take a list of clients with them. Or say, for Google, a story of "we were rich students at a rich school using school equipment and we pulled ourselves up by gold plated bootstraps, and we continue the tradition of wasting money to this day."
My first though is all the times I need to use a password where a physical device can not be used. Ie, log into my email from home over a web-only https connection. I can't wave a token at the web page, it wants me to type in the password. Similarly the same password is used when I use the email from my phone, and I presume it could use some expensive app but it's MY phone and I'd rather not get email than be forced install someone else's app.
Right now there is not the functionality and technology to be able to get rid of passwords, at least in the pragmatic sense. Sure, there may be a solution for one person on one computer, but there is no standard in place to allow this to work easily across a full corporation and the large number of devices and services. This is yet again another of those silly Slashdot things where a person is not asking a sincere question but instead proclaiming "I am technologically more advanced than all the dinosaurs."
Not really new. Apple has long been in the business of convincing schools to buy equipment they don't need, and it started with the Apple ][. Schools are told that they need to get kids ready for the new computer age, they get a bunch of computers, but then they have no training, no one knows what to do with them, and they end up getting dusty either in a warehouse or a seldom visited computer corner of a library or classroom.
When I was in college, it was more like 75% men in the hard math and programming classes. If the percentages have changed that much then it is not some innate gender bias that causes this, it's clearly sociological.
There are many parts of Europe that are very heavily religious as well. There are rednecks, bigots, zealots, and right wingers, as well. Some countries in Europe still automatically enroll all newborns into the state church, stores and even restaurants would shut down on Sundays in some places, etc. The notion that America is a unique anomaly in the industrialized world is somewhat short sighted, though it does tend to make people feel better about their own country's problems.
One reason this is more common in America is that government is highly decentralized, whereas Europe tends to have stronger central control. This story in particular is about one single person from a small town that was elected to a school board. Europe has a much higher percentage of population in cities, and cities tend to be more liberal overall, and thus enough percentage to dominate elections means that those on the center or right are easily ignored (though it's changing in the last decade or two). American on the other hand has a higher rural/semi-rural population and is not dominated by just one party, it changes often and the tug of war goes back and forth. If you look at the solidly liberal versions solidly conservative states in the US, it is only by a few percentage points either way.
Except that this point is irrelevant when the argument is on the basis of some church teachings (it's not universal and even with then Roman Catholic church there are disagreements). The point of contention is not based upon whether or not it is abortion but about when the soul is created.
Thing is, none of this, contraception or abortion, is prohibited or discouraged in the Bible itself. Except if you mistake the sin of Onan to be contraception. The reasoning against contraception is purely an convoluted argument based upon certain assumptions. I suspect many catholics don't even know the theological arguments against it, only that it's one of the things that distinguishes catholics from protestants.
This only applies in the PC world, which means it applies to FreeBSD. But there are BSD alternatives that like to target more than PCs where 32-bit CPUs are more common.
We've had outages because people have dug up power lines by mistake, same with phone lines. Most of the outages from falling trees are minor, they don't affect many people (but annoying when it's you). However outages that hit substations affect lots of people and aren't mitigated by putting them underground.
A big problem is that so much is not automated. Utilities don't even know when there's an outage, there's no light that starts blinking in the office to alert anyone. Usually it takes 3 phone calls before the utility treats it as a real outage; they can't send out a team for a single phone call because those are almost always a blown fuse in the basement. When they do have to fix something they have to send out trucks, checking manually which is the transformer that's blown.
Seriously, we have paranoid people scared of smart grids, but most of the US effectively has 50s era local and distribution grids (though the transmission grid is much better).
If it works that is. If it can get to your home and to your job, not 4 miles from your home and 5 miles from your job, but door to door service, any time of day or night, and no mileage limit. This must include the uncool places where real people live, suburbs, rural towns. Today we have huge number of people commuting from suburb to suburb, the old hub model is dead and no one wants to go to a crime ridden and grime filled downtown. Nobody puts a technology park in an urban core.
If some people today can use mass transit, then that is great. However it is not the norm and not something you can expect everyone today given the huge limitations it has.
Self driving cars could fix some of this, but I see a lot that it won't fix. For one, it's not 'mass transit' and it's not even 'car pool', it won't reduce the number of cars on the road and it won't encourage mass transit to move away from downtown and out to where people need it.
"Hey guys, I don't know anything about computers or technology, but I just got a lead on $10 million in funding from the morons in Menlo Park, so can you get me something working by Friday for the dog and pony show?"
I admit I laughed when I saw "ambitious and capable innovation companies". I agree, Google is ambitious. But more egotistical than capable, and much of their "innovation" comes from acquiring other projects.
Corporations are set up so that you never have to blame yourself. If you do something a bit shady, it's because the boss told you to, and it was likely due to a bout of group-think. If you are the boss, then you're doing it because some executive told you to do it, during a session of group-think. If you're an executive or even the CEO then you did it because the board expects you to do it, and you do whatever it takes to make the quarterly numbers look right. If you're on the board you get excused because you're not actually running the company or doing any management whatsoever, you're just there to make sure the books look correct and keeping the execs from stealing your money.
So who do you blame? It's all group think. It only falls down when a CEO is stupid enough to actually admit an intention to do something unethical, as in the Uber case.
It's a big train wreck. Maybe it's systemd, but maybe it's just lack of good leadership and teamwork. Overall though when you see a trainwreck like that people should stop and figure out what happened.
There are two ways to view this conflict. One view is that the fight is between those who are implementing systemd as a necessary feature and those who are obstructionists. The other view is that the fight is between those who want to keep systemd optional and those who want to make it mandatory. Because those two perspectives see the world in very different ways, people who don't see the same reality will tend to assume the opposition must be irrational. Thus no resolution is possible.
Why explore it though when there's work to do? Systemd is still in the experimental stage, let some offshoot branches try it out for a few YEARS before attempting to make it mainstream.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think that if a web site demands that we see advertisements, then that site should disallow showing its contents if adblock is in place. Some places actually do something similar, detecting adblock and giving a message to turn it off. That's a solution I could live with, as it also means I will just never go to those sites at all, win-win. But they don't do this, instead they whine about us "stealing" their income (it's a stupid blog by a stupid person, if they want money they can get a real job instead of trying to get a hobby to pay).
Notice the increasing number of people "cutting the cord" with cable. This was once considered unthinkable, the monopolies felt that they could do anything they wanted and still collect their cable tax. So don't think that people feel that they are forced to visit web pages either, they may decide enough is enough and cut the cord there too. The interesting thing is that cutting the cord with cable also meant many people cutting cord with satellite service, hurting the competition along with the monopolies. Which means that as far as advertising goes, the good guys out there should not just stand by passively but instead work to get the bad players to shape up lest they be lumped together with them.
Is there an apkblock plugin out there?
I use adblock, and not because I want stuff for free. I use it because the ads have become amazingly agnostic, slowing down my computer noticeably, slowing down my internet service, etc. My mother on dialup got an amazing speedup in service when I added adblock to her browser. Ads are service up malware, etc.
In the early days most ads were static, most were of a very fixed size, and the "bad players" were the pop-ups and pop-unders. So the feature people used to maintain their sanity against the enemy was to block popups and popunders. There was a possibility of an adblock style, and some people did that, but for most the remaining ads were mostly sane. The problem is that over time advertsers have engaged in a war against browser users, and became increasingly hostile and aggressive. The very few good players in the advertiser world were sadly lumped in with the majority, but the users are acting only in self defense.
It's bizarre that today the richest corporations in the world are essentially advertising houses and purveyors, a business that used to be considered a sideline.
Asking a question while assuming the premise is true is a time tested method of propaganda.
If it weren't for Shockley being a royal pain to work with, we'd never have a Silicon valley.
There are several companies now that are "inventing" their origina stories. Like all superheros or people who mistaenly think they are superheros, they feel they must have a cool original story. Some of these stories end up being exaggerations but some are outright lies. Few want to say that their origin was to get a small group to leave their old company and take a list of clients with them. Or say, for Google, a story of "we were rich students at a rich school using school equipment and we pulled ourselves up by gold plated bootstraps, and we continue the tradition of wasting money to this day."
My first though is all the times I need to use a password where a physical device can not be used. Ie, log into my email from home over a web-only https connection. I can't wave a token at the web page, it wants me to type in the password. Similarly the same password is used when I use the email from my phone, and I presume it could use some expensive app but it's MY phone and I'd rather not get email than be forced install someone else's app.
Right now there is not the functionality and technology to be able to get rid of passwords, at least in the pragmatic sense. Sure, there may be a solution for one person on one computer, but there is no standard in place to allow this to work easily across a full corporation and the large number of devices and services. This is yet again another of those silly Slashdot things where a person is not asking a sincere question but instead proclaiming "I am technologically more advanced than all the dinosaurs."
I've tried that once, but I passed out from the smell.
Not really new. Apple has long been in the business of convincing schools to buy equipment they don't need, and it started with the Apple ][. Schools are told that they need to get kids ready for the new computer age, they get a bunch of computers, but then they have no training, no one knows what to do with them, and they end up getting dusty either in a warehouse or a seldom visited computer corner of a library or classroom.
A joke told in Finland is that they'd have no birthrate at all if it were not for alcohol.
IT skills are also a good start to move elsewhere, like programming or engineering. Assuming people realize that there's a difference.
When I was in college, it was more like 75% men in the hard math and programming classes. If the percentages have changed that much then it is not some innate gender bias that causes this, it's clearly sociological.
There are many parts of Europe that are very heavily religious as well. There are rednecks, bigots, zealots, and right wingers, as well. Some countries in Europe still automatically enroll all newborns into the state church, stores and even restaurants would shut down on Sundays in some places, etc. The notion that America is a unique anomaly in the industrialized world is somewhat short sighted, though it does tend to make people feel better about their own country's problems.
One reason this is more common in America is that government is highly decentralized, whereas Europe tends to have stronger central control. This story in particular is about one single person from a small town that was elected to a school board. Europe has a much higher percentage of population in cities, and cities tend to be more liberal overall, and thus enough percentage to dominate elections means that those on the center or right are easily ignored (though it's changing in the last decade or two). American on the other hand has a higher rural/semi-rural population and is not dominated by just one party, it changes often and the tug of war goes back and forth. If you look at the solidly liberal versions solidly conservative states in the US, it is only by a few percentage points either way.
Except that this point is irrelevant when the argument is on the basis of some church teachings (it's not universal and even with then Roman Catholic church there are disagreements). The point of contention is not based upon whether or not it is abortion but about when the soul is created.
Thing is, none of this, contraception or abortion, is prohibited or discouraged in the Bible itself. Except if you mistake the sin of Onan to be contraception. The reasoning against contraception is purely an convoluted argument based upon certain assumptions. I suspect many catholics don't even know the theological arguments against it, only that it's one of the things that distinguishes catholics from protestants.
The less you learn about it the more you know.
Basically the overlap between CS and iOS programming of apps, is near zero.
This only applies in the PC world, which means it applies to FreeBSD. But there are BSD alternatives that like to target more than PCs where 32-bit CPUs are more common.
We've had outages because people have dug up power lines by mistake, same with phone lines.
Most of the outages from falling trees are minor, they don't affect many people (but annoying when it's you). However outages that hit substations affect lots of people and aren't mitigated by putting them underground.
A big problem is that so much is not automated. Utilities don't even know when there's an outage, there's no light that starts blinking in the office to alert anyone. Usually it takes 3 phone calls before the utility treats it as a real outage; they can't send out a team for a single phone call because those are almost always a blown fuse in the basement. When they do have to fix something they have to send out trucks, checking manually which is the transformer that's blown.
Seriously, we have paranoid people scared of smart grids, but most of the US effectively has 50s era local and distribution grids (though the transmission grid is much better).
If it works that is. If it can get to your home and to your job, not 4 miles from your home and 5 miles from your job, but door to door service, any time of day or night, and no mileage limit. This must include the uncool places where real people live, suburbs, rural towns. Today we have huge number of people commuting from suburb to suburb, the old hub model is dead and no one wants to go to a crime ridden and grime filled downtown. Nobody puts a technology park in an urban core.
If some people today can use mass transit, then that is great. However it is not the norm and not something you can expect everyone today given the huge limitations it has.
Self driving cars could fix some of this, but I see a lot that it won't fix. For one, it's not 'mass transit' and it's not even 'car pool', it won't reduce the number of cars on the road and it won't encourage mass transit to move away from downtown and out to where people need it.
"Hey guys, I don't know anything about computers or technology, but I just got a lead on $10 million in funding from the morons in Menlo Park, so can you get me something working by Friday for the dog and pony show?"
I admit I laughed when I saw "ambitious and capable innovation companies". I agree, Google is ambitious. But more egotistical than capable, and much of their "innovation" comes from acquiring other projects.
Careful, you might anger the cult of Tesla.
Corporations are set up so that you never have to blame yourself. If you do something a bit shady, it's because the boss told you to, and it was likely due to a bout of group-think. If you are the boss, then you're doing it because some executive told you to do it, during a session of group-think. If you're an executive or even the CEO then you did it because the board expects you to do it, and you do whatever it takes to make the quarterly numbers look right. If you're on the board you get excused because you're not actually running the company or doing any management whatsoever, you're just there to make sure the books look correct and keeping the execs from stealing your money.
So who do you blame? It's all group think. It only falls down when a CEO is stupid enough to actually admit an intention to do something unethical, as in the Uber case.
It's a big train wreck. Maybe it's systemd, but maybe it's just lack of good leadership and teamwork. Overall though when you see a trainwreck like that people should stop and figure out what happened.
There are two ways to view this conflict. One view is that the fight is between those who are implementing systemd as a necessary feature and those who are obstructionists. The other view is that the fight is between those who want to keep systemd optional and those who want to make it mandatory. Because those two perspectives see the world in very different ways, people who don't see the same reality will tend to assume the opposition must be irrational. Thus no resolution is possible.
Why explore it though when there's work to do? Systemd is still in the experimental stage, let some offshoot branches try it out for a few YEARS before attempting to make it mainstream.