I can think of worse. Howabout Splat! or D'oh!, or Bounce, Rust Bucket, Crash-n-Burn, Cockpit Reefer ("Hey, Pass me that Reefer"), Maintenance is for Sissies, or We Got Motha-Fuckin Snakes!.
It's inevitable. Kinda what makes us human is our desire to make life easier. We've gone from doing everything ourselves, to using tools, to using animals, to using other humans... and very very recently, using machines. And that's generally been a really good thing. Ask your wife (or your mom, whatever) if she'd like to give up the washing machine and the dishwasher and start doing all that shit by hand. Faced with giving up one afternoon reading a magazine with hard labor every fucking day, she'll happily sell you to the traffickers before she gives up her machines.
For everything that people think is drudgery, some mutant smarty-pants will develop a machine to do the work. There'll probably be robots wiping our asses in the nursing homes of the future IF WE'RE LUCKY, because the robot nurses won't get tired, frustrated, short-tempered, forgetful, offended, or grossed-out at the mess we just made of ourselves. They'll listen to us tell the same fucking story about our grandkids over and over and always act (convincingly) like it's the first fucking time.
What will all the humans do that are displaced from these jobs? Fuck knows, seriously. Maybe the robots will lead to everything being so cheap and abundant, we have no reason not to embrace socialism with free food and board for everybody, entertaining ourselves all day like the survivors on the Axiom in Wall-E. or maybe we put our spare time to work and educated everybody and put together some kind of utopian Star Trek future and put all our idle hands into exploring the stars. or maybe we'll go all ISIS, Boko Haram ape-shit crazy and start a real big war, and then the robots will finally figure out that the the planet's better off without us.
Microsoft seems to be trying to co-opt every other platform to fill the empty user space that is Windows 10-exclusive. They're supposedly rigging a way for iOS apps to run on Windows 10 (aka "Islandwood"), and they had a plan for Android apps (aka "Astoria") to run on the platform but recently dropped it in favor of Xamarin.
Astoria enabled Android apps written in Java to run on Windows, sometimes with no modifications at all. Xamarin allows developers to share a large proportion of their code between Android, iOS, Windows, and beyond, but it requires that all that code must use.NET, and typically C#.
This seems a little desperate. In the short run, maybe more stuff makes its way into the Windows Store, and salesmen can say "Windows 10 does that!" for any reason you'd stick with another platform. But if the quickest way to develop for the broadest market is not to develop for Metro but instead target a different platform and port it later, wouldn't Metro (or Modern or Windows 10 mobile or Edge, whatever) always remain an afterthought, last to get ported and last to receive bug-fixes?
Microsoft appears to admit that apart from Win32, Windows 10 is a Johnny-come-real-real-lately, but isn't interested in doing the work to develop any killer apps on its own.
Kids today expect cupholders, but back in the day we had ashtrays! My '94 had back seats that no-one bigger than a tween would fit into, but they had a fuckin' ASHTRAY!
I sympathize, but don't get in no accident. I remember my little rocket from '94, fun but no sun-roof, no power windows, no power locks, had to jury-rig a chirp-chirp alarm/kill-switch, no side-airbags, no anti-lock brakes. Fast, but it did NOT crash well.
Not quite the suicide machine as my college car, a '72 Olds with NON-POWER DRUMS on ALL WHEELS (you had to stand on the pedal to stop hard... if it worked at all due to a flaky master cylinder), but still, by today's standards, even my '94 was a death trap.
Now, we're going to see all cars with automatic braking in six years. More electronics, more complexity. But if it works, it will save lives. Shit, I used to think anti-lock brakes were too complex to mass-produce and work well, like I didn't want some jiggy contraption getting between me and my brakes. Sho' nuff, it's 2016 and they work great. They even got 'em on motorcycles.
So, particularly if you got kids, you're way better off in a new car then taking your chances in some old bolt bucket. Maybe car hacks raise the risk of theft, but older cars are child's play to break into. Maybe some monster hack might tinker with your car while you're driving, and that would be bad, but I'll warrant the BEST ODDS of that happening to you are TINY compared to being T-boned by a drunk. So, you're WAY better off in a new car, hackable or no.
Don't worry, you're not wrong. It's just hard to say it right, and the best lies are always tightly intertwined with something good.
Yes, there's a wink-wink association with cries for "state's rights" and Jim Crowe, but now it's being used for a lot of other stuff, not just knee-jerk dog-whistle issues. And political professionals, influence peddlers, high-priced consultants know this, because, well, that's their job. It ain't a tin-foil hat conspiracy... public relations and political professionals make their living thinking about this stuff, 7 days a week, just like there are people at Taco Bell working every fucking day on some new sweet, salty, crunchy, mouth-watering monstrosity to clog our arteries, spike our blood sugars, drive us into orgasmic euphoria and liberate the dollars held prisoner in our wallets.
The successful influence peddlers get rich, and in turn get hired by bigger clients, like AT&T, so they can use their bag of tricks to get AT&T what it wants. If there's a sucker for something, there's gonna be a guy for hire out there who knows how to turn his screws.
...but a step in the right direction. After a long string of charlatan political hacks at the helm, DC Metro finally has a guy in charge with the balls to do something so terribly impolitic as shut down the system for 29 hours during the week with little warning, to fix stuff.
This was a ballsy move, any way you slice it. He's gonna take some heat for this, but it was the right thing to do. But he has a long way to go. 3-flight escalators in and out of stations haven't run in years, cars desperately need upgrades, track work, and not a small bit of morale for a work force that often seems to care less.
DC Metro was the newest, cleanest, nicest, bestest subway in the world when it opened in 1977. Trouble is, politicians haven't learned how to make maintenance sexy (but I give props to NYC... their system looks better each time I visit, pretty good for a system going on 100 years... you put up with some rats, urine and crazies every so often, depending on the stop, but in NYC, it's amazing how quickly you get used to is as just part of the flavor of the City).
Real nice to have an actual human posting up about what's going on, and responding to comments. Thanks for thinking about us users (yeah, how about that!) and glad to be looking forward to future/.
I think what you may be talking about is the Milton Friedman principle: a company’s primary purpose, and the purpose to which the CEO should solely focus, is to maximize shareholder value. A couple of generations have now grown up never knowing anything else. But the idea only dates back to the 1970's, but yet would have profound effects on the country, including the binding of executive pay to stock performance, and would ultimately contribute to the slash and burn antics of the buy 'em, split 'em, and sell 'em off for a quick-buck mayhem of the 1980's.
Have no idea whether this goo can ever be stuffed back into the tube. But the cult of feverishly favoring shareholders over employees and customers, where shareholders care only about quarterly portfolio values (if they're paying attention at all), tends to reward short-term cost-cutting, and does not inspire employee or customer loyalty. The best CEO's shield shareholder matters from employees, so that employees can concentrate on a future with the company rather than the next wave of layoffs.
Okay... how does Apple build a phone they can't break into, but is capable of updates and bug fixes?
Remember, the means by which the FBI proposes Apple "break into" the phone is to push an update that just happens to omit some security features, like the self-imposed delay for processing subsequent PIN attempts. So, no updates? Bugs remain unfixed? No recourse if you accidentally brick your phone if you, say, forget your PIN?
No as a matter of fact janitors do NOT work harder and longer than the CEOs
Depends on the company, depends on the CEO. An emerging tech company, shoe-string budget, heated competition, something to prove? Work like hell.
Established commodity company? Government contractor? Off to the golf course... machine runs better without you around messing with it. Indeed, if you were to show up, all the Presidents and VP's feel the need to stop by and report to you (read: schmooze). Disappear, and they get back to work. Besides, don't you have a charity event or a board meeting that needs attending?
Janitor, on the other hand, has to clock in and clock out just right or get fired by the assistant assistant manager's assistant who's responsible for his department.
Oh, and budget cut time? Who's gonna feel the pain? The CEO? He fuck-well gives himself a raise. Why, Mr. Board Chairman? Because cutting jobs is stressful, and there's other CEO jobs out there beckoning for talent and willing to pay more. Just the cost of doing business. Better to pay up now than to go through the disruption (and stock price hit) of hiring someone new, right? Gotta form a search committee, issue press releases... better to just pay up.
or don't. Golden parachute. It's in the contract drawn up by my lawyer that you signed when you hired me.
Janitor... no contract? No lawyer on retainer? Not even a union rep? or health insurance? and you still ain't got your title back from TitleMax? Huh... you in some shit!
I'm far from management, but even I wouldn't want 1% of some of those kinds of responsibilities, even if they can be abused or "overlooked" for quite a long period of time.
If you're thinking about the owner of a small business, who has to handle everything from payroll to inventory to facilities-management all by herself and a copy of Quickbooks, then yes, that's crazy hard.
But a CEO of a public company is a whole different world, because he has the budget to hire a staff, and thereby offload all the hard stuff to someone else (the word used at Yale business school is: "delegate"). Yes, so long as the cronies at the Board like you, you can be as dumb as a box of rocks, so long as you're just smart enough to hire a bunch of VP's eager to compete with each other for a promotion. Problem solved. One meeting a week, tell me what I need to know, tell me what I should decide, done. Off to the golf course to see and be seen... yes, everything's running just fine.
And something goes wrong? Two things: limited liability ("corporate veil"), and golden parachute. Why the latter? Well, if the Board were to kick a CEO to the curb, nobody would step forward to replace him.
It's a different world, up there, upstairs, among the Boardrooms and the Foundations. The richer you are, the more stuff people offer you for free, including sympathy. Michael Milken and Martha Stewart went to jail, and it still wasn't enough to get kicked out of the country club.
You are absolutely right. There is a court order, and a public one at that, so the 4th amendment is not at issue. That's what distinguishes this from the whole Snowden thing, where government intelligence-gathering entities either act without a court order, or else on a secret court order by a secret court (which is really the same thing, 'cause who knows what happened, 'cause it's a secret).
No, the thing going on here is that Apple is being asked, or even forced, to compromise their own product using means available only to them. If I understand correctly from this article from Ars Technica, that means is their private key, used to push updates to iphones. By using their key to push a custom update to this iphone to shut off some of this iphone's security measures, the FBI would have an easier time brute-forcing the PIN and thereby unlocking this phone.
Obviously, Apple doesn't want to comply. But there's plenty of precedent for why they should. Again, this is all above-board and legal... not a back-door deal done in secret where the CIA gets a special key to unlock any iphone. Instead, this is like the cops getting a warrant to a bank's safety deposit box. The bank has one key, but the owner's key is not available - so, to comply, the bank is going to have to take a drill to their box and break the owner's key socket. But with the right warrant, banks comply.
Methinks Apple's problem is the appearance of their products being hackable with compromised privacy, something dogging Microsoft and Windows 10. Methinks Apple wants to appear to offer an active role in defending the privacy of their users, whereas competitors like Google and Microsoft make it their business to snoop on their users for ad revenue. Methinks Apple is making a fuss over this because they're afraid consumers might flock to Android in the misguided belief that Android is more safe from a legal search sanctioned by a warrant.
Methinks the only issue here is whether Apple can be compelled to help the FBI break this phone. Unlike the bank and it's safety deposit box, the phone doesn't belong to Apple. It rightfully belongs to the cops as evidence in a crime, and before that it belonged to some shmuck who shot a bunch of people, and they can do what they want with it. It just so happens that Apple has something that could make breaking into it a lot easier, but Apple is arguing that they have no responsibility or liability to do so - once the phone is sold, it's out there and Apple's done... if a consumer wants to apply an update from Apple via the private key, that's their decision and that by no way implies Apple take some responsibility over the device and how it's used. Therefore, just because Apple has a private key that can help in hacking the phone, their argument is the government has no authority to compel them to use it, because although the user of the phone might have committed a crime with the phone, Apple didn't play any part in such crime and therefore are under no obligation to get involved.
Methinks, therefore, maybe Apple has perhaps one legitimate concern: complying might suggest they are somehow complicit in an alleged crime committed with their product because of the privacy measures they bake in. Unfortunately, there can be a fine line between volunteering to help with the government, and being obligated to assist the government because of some legal connection with the bad guy establishing a liability. Once Apple gives it up over this phone, Apple fears prosecutors everywhere will start hitting them up with thousands of break-this-iphone warrants, until Apple has to dedicate an entire skyscraper-full of engineers and lawyers to deal with it all. Come to think of it, that's a shitty business to be in (and I wonder how Microsoft and Google would handle it, because they'd be next).
It WOULD have been nice. Microsoft's grand-unified platform included some good ideas, and potential for more, which would have benefited everyone. But they were so way way way late to the game. They needed to be pouring out product once Android started to stick, preferably sooner. Instead, their desperate catch-up strategy of leveraging Windows Desktop as a platform to sell Phone (looking at you, Windows 8) only angered the public... forcing live-tiles and "modern" apps on desktop users did NOT make them turn around and buy Phones, at least because it was part of a new, buggy, immature platform, where iOS and Android had had time to become reliable and ubiquitous.
Microsoft could try again in a few years, by making touch-friendly desktop and Surface really really great (somehow), along with really great iOS and Android tie-in apps, which get used so extensively that a market comes into existence for a phone more dedicated to those functions. Or, Microsoft could just "back in" to a new phone market by offering, over years and years, smaller and smaller Surfaces, with phone capabilities, but also with BlueTooth and HDMI ports that drive a desktop (in other words, a pocket-sized PC with Skype and a built-in touch-screen). This, of course, remains to be seen. iOS and Android are not going to wait for Microsoft to catch up. That's what happens when you miss the boat (looking at you, Steve Ballmer).
A Boeing plant in China would cause trouble. China will, sooner or later, start building fleets of their own passenger jets, if for no other reason than they need them and want to pay for them without using a foreign currency, 'cause they like to over and undervalue their own currency at will. And then there's the national pride thing, building up a middle class, and all the spillover for a more powerful and modern military... everything to keep a Communist regime in power in modern times when communism as an economic practice is all but dead.
Going protectionist on Boeing wouldn't be too hard, because we already have the factories here in the U.S. The worst that would happen is China would deal with Airbus instead, and the vast Chinese market would go to Europe. Boeing stock price goes bye-bye, layoffs to follow, and China gets what it wants regardless. Life can be funny like that.
OTOH, going protectionist on Apple would mean building factories and infrastructure that the U.S. no longer has. I'd love nothing else but to see an American Foxconn on U.S. soil populated with skilled U.S. high-tech workers, but who's gonna pay for it? How're you gonna train hundreds of thousands of Americans to work like hungry Chinese, eager for a new life out of the sticks whatever the cost? Not saying it's impossible, but it's going to be expensive. Where's Trump going to find the money? Mexicans? Their vast riches are already earmarked for a great big fence. Apple's got cash, sure, but if they spend it away, their stock price will plummet until Samsung can afford to buy them out. And whaddya think FoxConn in China will do with all that capacity but no iPhones to build? Ya think China will let them close and scatter? Or can they think of a military use for all that know-how? Missile guidance systems, anyone?
Being President is complicated. Not as easy as hiring general contractors to build overpriced golf courses and casinos, Mr. Trump.
"Great USA" returns from... what exactly? Red scare 50's? Vietnam nuke-testing 60's (although the moon landing was cool...)? Gas-crisis disco 70's? Roth-era Van Halen Reagan Hardcore Punk 80's? Grunge? Be more specific. I don't remember any golden-age USA so much I want Trump to bring it "back" (although I miss the hardcore).
Ultimately, the point here is if we don't keep working (spending) on nukes, advancing them, new models and all, the people who know about nukes will retire and die off, and no young-uns will learn the trade... which would be all cool, except that Iran and NK and Pakistan and fuck knows who else has started making them, and their politician bosses are going to sabre-rattle to get what they want. Strong first-world deterrent is, unfortunately, the only way to make sure those sabres stay buried in their scabbards, unused. OTOH, if all the expertise in nuclear weapons is overseas, we will be, in the words of Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, in a world of shit.
There are two things to nukes: the warheads, and the delivery system. Turns out, the brass balls are in the latter. The nation with the biggest swinging dick is the one that can deliver nukes quickly, quietly, and precisely enough that the target cannot fire off a response. To maintain this, the U.S. is working on improving precision, and Vlad the Putin is working on stealth.
The Cold War is alive, people. Kim Jong-un may have already smuggled a nuke into a harbor near you, buried in one of a thousand shipping containers sitting around on the lot. The only difference between us and them? Ours are better, smaller, faster, and we got a shitload more of 'em. NK might be capable of taking out Long Beach, but with that he will have blown his wad, whereas our response can dig a crater big enough to permanently separate the South from the Korean peninsula. So, Kimmy keeps careful to keep all the nuke talk to just that.... talk.
It helps that we don't rely on Saudi oil as much as we used to. Fracking is kinda filthy, but for the first time in my lifetime we don't need to be muscled around by the Saudis to keep our nation moving. And they feel the hurt - to raise cash, they've announced they may offer shares of their state-owned oil company to the pubic. And that's not the worst... the whole region is literally heating up, to the point it may become uninhabitable in 80 or 90 years.
That's the tragedy of all this nagware... upgrading is not guaranteed to work and can lead to a hosed system.
Best thing to do is mothball your old drive, get a new SSD, and install fresh. All you need is here to create a legit installable DVD or USB stick, and a license key from any of Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or 10, and you don't really even need the key because unlicensed Windows 10 doesn't do much to bitch at you except put up a water-mark on the desktop and present an alert from time to time about how great it is to have a fully legal copy. Unlicensed Windows 10 does none of that auto logout or shutdown nonesense (at least, not for now).
If you think you have too much installed cruft on your machine to start fresh, well, all that cruft is more likely to fuck up the magic upgrade process. Catch-22. Back up your shit, find your old install media, check out ninite for installing free software and Steam or Gog for installing games. Besides, new SSDs these days are way good and affordable. Better than taking a chance at some hit-or-miss upgrade routine. Even Linux distros haven't perfected major in-place upgrades. Always safer to start over fresh, and your rig will thank you for it.
So people at Microsoft are sitting around, thinking about users everywhere and what they may be doing to keep themselves on Win 7 or 8 or 8.1, brain-storming how to get around whatever those pesky users have done to protect themselves (e.g., GWX_control_panel), and then ordering a team OS-level programmers to get it done. Perhaps this division of the corporate structure have a code name? Team Borg, perhaps? Do you get a pay hike if you're part of the spacial operation to assimilate users into the Windows 10 collective? Is this where you go to be a Big Swinging Dick at Microsoft?
These managers and minions feel entitled to spend company time and resources thinking this kind of stuff up Reminds me of those guys at Comcast who say "they're our pipes" when they want to justify poor service, data caps, price hikes, or net non-neutrality. These people are not trolls in Mama's basement with nothing better to do... these are career suits who could be spending effort making Windows suck less. Instead, They're all Vladimir Harkonnen, scheming to fuck customers to... what? please the almighty god of Windows 10 penetration statistics?
Power hungry fucks. Windows 10 sucks less than it did, but I, for one, do not want my PC penetrated.
It's too bad that CO2 is plant food. No CO2 no plants. No plants no humans. This CO2 as pollution is so much bullshit.
Will answer your over-simplification with another one: the CO2 created comes at the cost of O2, you know, oxygen, the stuff we need to breathe to stay alive. No oxygen, no humans. A further over-simplistic check at wikipedia shows that the atmosphere is only 20% O2, not much to spare, whereas CO2 in concentrations of just 7% to 10% will kill you.
There was plenty enough CO2 to keep plants healthy before humans started liberating massive amounts of the stuff from inside the Earth, like gas out of a bag. Just for one minute, just one, look at the cars going back and forth on any Interstate near a city, all day, every day, non-stop, every one of 'em turning tanks of fuel into gas out the tailpipe. Ever get stuck in traffic? More cars than you can count spewing out gas that will kill you in a closed garage, and nobody's even moving. Humans liberate exhaust gases from 19 million barrels of oil every fucking day, and that's just the U.S. Just because you can't see it, don't mean it ain't there. Where do you think it all goes?
Seen from space, we're like the yeast in making beer, only instead of turning sugars into CO2, we're turning coal and crude into CO2, freeing carbon trapped in the ground into CO2 running free in the air. The simple of it is, that CO2 wasn't in the air before - it got there because humans put it there from where it used to be in the ground. If you can get your head around that, the only question remaining is whether all that extra CO2 is going to just hang around in the atmosphere and not fuck with anything. Well, gasses gonna do what gasses gonna do. Ain't no wishful thinking or head-in-the-sand shit gonna change the laws of chemistry, any more than thinking happy thoughts and taking short breaths is gonna keep you alive when the garage is closed and the car's running. Nighty-night.
Uh, is that $1.4 billion for Phantom's first 28 days, or it's entire run? Force Awakens made $1 billion in just 28 days, and it damn-well hasn't even begun. The only question is whether Awakens is good enough for anyone to want to see more than once, and push it into hyper-money.
OTOH, once was more than enough for Phantom - I think it sold so many tickets because people wouldn't believe the stories of how bad it was. But nobody would pay to sit through that twice. Maybe catch it on cable, just to see if they maybe missed something interesting... (nope, nothing).
Slashdot Mirror
I can think of worse. Howabout Splat! or D'oh!, or Bounce, Rust Bucket, Crash-n-Burn, Cockpit Reefer ("Hey, Pass me that Reefer"), Maintenance is for Sissies, or We Got Motha-Fuckin Snakes!.
It's inevitable. Kinda what makes us human is our desire to make life easier. We've gone from doing everything ourselves, to using tools, to using animals, to using other humans... and very very recently, using machines. And that's generally been a really good thing. Ask your wife (or your mom, whatever) if she'd like to give up the washing machine and the dishwasher and start doing all that shit by hand. Faced with giving up one afternoon reading a magazine with hard labor every fucking day, she'll happily sell you to the traffickers before she gives up her machines.
For everything that people think is drudgery, some mutant smarty-pants will develop a machine to do the work. There'll probably be robots wiping our asses in the nursing homes of the future IF WE'RE LUCKY, because the robot nurses won't get tired, frustrated, short-tempered, forgetful, offended, or grossed-out at the mess we just made of ourselves. They'll listen to us tell the same fucking story about our grandkids over and over and always act (convincingly) like it's the first fucking time.
What will all the humans do that are displaced from these jobs? Fuck knows, seriously. Maybe the robots will lead to everything being so cheap and abundant, we have no reason not to embrace socialism with free food and board for everybody, entertaining ourselves all day like the survivors on the Axiom in Wall-E. or maybe we put our spare time to work and educated everybody and put together some kind of utopian Star Trek future and put all our idle hands into exploring the stars. or maybe we'll go all ISIS, Boko Haram ape-shit crazy and start a real big war, and then the robots will finally figure out that the the planet's better off without us.
Microsoft seems to be trying to co-opt every other platform to fill the empty user space that is Windows 10-exclusive. They're supposedly rigging a way for iOS apps to run on Windows 10 (aka "Islandwood"), and they had a plan for Android apps (aka "Astoria") to run on the platform but recently dropped it in favor of Xamarin.
Astoria enabled Android apps written in Java to run on Windows, sometimes with no modifications at all. Xamarin allows developers to share a large proportion of their code between Android, iOS, Windows, and beyond, but it requires that all that code must use .NET, and typically C#.
This seems a little desperate. In the short run, maybe more stuff makes its way into the Windows Store, and salesmen can say "Windows 10 does that!" for any reason you'd stick with another platform. But if the quickest way to develop for the broadest market is not to develop for Metro but instead target a different platform and port it later, wouldn't Metro (or Modern or Windows 10 mobile or Edge, whatever) always remain an afterthought, last to get ported and last to receive bug-fixes?
Microsoft appears to admit that apart from Win32, Windows 10 is a Johnny-come-real-real-lately, but isn't interested in doing the work to develop any killer apps on its own.
Ashtray??? Fuckin' WORD!
Kids today expect cupholders, but back in the day we had ashtrays! My '94 had back seats that no-one bigger than a tween would fit into, but they had a fuckin' ASHTRAY!
I sympathize, but don't get in no accident. I remember my little rocket from '94, fun but no sun-roof, no power windows, no power locks, had to jury-rig a chirp-chirp alarm/kill-switch, no side-airbags, no anti-lock brakes. Fast, but it did NOT crash well.
Not quite the suicide machine as my college car, a '72 Olds with NON-POWER DRUMS on ALL WHEELS (you had to stand on the pedal to stop hard... if it worked at all due to a flaky master cylinder), but still, by today's standards, even my '94 was a death trap.
Now, we're going to see all cars with automatic braking in six years. More electronics, more complexity. But if it works, it will save lives. Shit, I used to think anti-lock brakes were too complex to mass-produce and work well, like I didn't want some jiggy contraption getting between me and my brakes. Sho' nuff, it's 2016 and they work great. They even got 'em on motorcycles.
So, particularly if you got kids, you're way better off in a new car then taking your chances in some old bolt bucket. Maybe car hacks raise the risk of theft, but older cars are child's play to break into. Maybe some monster hack might tinker with your car while you're driving, and that would be bad, but I'll warrant the BEST ODDS of that happening to you are TINY compared to being T-boned by a drunk. So, you're WAY better off in a new car, hackable or no.
Oh, this. Wish I had mod points for you.
Don't worry, you're not wrong. It's just hard to say it right, and the best lies are always tightly intertwined with something good.
Yes, there's a wink-wink association with cries for "state's rights" and Jim Crowe, but now it's being used for a lot of other stuff, not just knee-jerk dog-whistle issues. And political professionals, influence peddlers, high-priced consultants know this, because, well, that's their job. It ain't a tin-foil hat conspiracy... public relations and political professionals make their living thinking about this stuff, 7 days a week, just like there are people at Taco Bell working every fucking day on some new sweet, salty, crunchy, mouth-watering monstrosity to clog our arteries, spike our blood sugars, drive us into orgasmic euphoria and liberate the dollars held prisoner in our wallets.
The successful influence peddlers get rich, and in turn get hired by bigger clients, like AT&T, so they can use their bag of tricks to get AT&T what it wants. If there's a sucker for something, there's gonna be a guy for hire out there who knows how to turn his screws.
...but a step in the right direction. After a long string of charlatan political hacks at the helm, DC Metro finally has a guy in charge with the balls to do something so terribly impolitic as shut down the system for 29 hours during the week with little warning, to fix stuff.
This was a ballsy move, any way you slice it. He's gonna take some heat for this, but it was the right thing to do. But he has a long way to go. 3-flight escalators in and out of stations haven't run in years, cars desperately need upgrades, track work, and not a small bit of morale for a work force that often seems to care less.
DC Metro was the newest, cleanest, nicest, bestest subway in the world when it opened in 1977. Trouble is, politicians haven't learned how to make maintenance sexy (but I give props to NYC... their system looks better each time I visit, pretty good for a system going on 100 years... you put up with some rats, urine and crazies every so often, depending on the stop, but in NYC, it's amazing how quickly you get used to is as just part of the flavor of the City).
Real nice to have an actual human posting up about what's going on, and responding to comments. /.
Thanks for thinking about us users (yeah, how about that!) and glad to be looking forward to future
I think what you may be talking about is the Milton Friedman principle: a company’s primary purpose, and the purpose to which the CEO should solely focus, is to maximize shareholder value. A couple of generations have now grown up never knowing anything else. But the idea only dates back to the 1970's, but yet would have profound effects on the country, including the binding of executive pay to stock performance, and would ultimately contribute to the slash and burn antics of the buy 'em, split 'em, and sell 'em off for a quick-buck mayhem of the 1980's.
Have no idea whether this goo can ever be stuffed back into the tube. But the cult of feverishly favoring shareholders over employees and customers, where shareholders care only about quarterly portfolio values (if they're paying attention at all), tends to reward short-term cost-cutting, and does not inspire employee or customer loyalty. The best CEO's shield shareholder matters from employees, so that employees can concentrate on a future with the company rather than the next wave of layoffs.
You know, if I hadn't been commenting, I'd mod you up insightful. Well said.
Okay... how does Apple build a phone they can't break into, but is capable of updates and bug fixes?
Remember, the means by which the FBI proposes Apple "break into" the phone is to push an update that just happens to omit some security features, like the self-imposed delay for processing subsequent PIN attempts. So, no updates? Bugs remain unfixed? No recourse if you accidentally brick your phone if you, say, forget your PIN?
No as a matter of fact janitors do NOT work harder and longer than the CEOs
Depends on the company, depends on the CEO. An emerging tech company, shoe-string budget, heated competition, something to prove? Work like hell.
Established commodity company? Government contractor? Off to the golf course... machine runs better without you around messing with it. Indeed, if you were to show up, all the Presidents and VP's feel the need to stop by and report to you (read: schmooze). Disappear, and they get back to work. Besides, don't you have a charity event or a board meeting that needs attending?
Janitor, on the other hand, has to clock in and clock out just right or get fired by the assistant assistant manager's assistant who's responsible for his department.
Oh, and budget cut time? Who's gonna feel the pain? The CEO? He fuck-well gives himself a raise. Why, Mr. Board Chairman? Because cutting jobs is stressful, and there's other CEO jobs out there beckoning for talent and willing to pay more. Just the cost of doing business. Better to pay up now than to go through the disruption (and stock price hit) of hiring someone new, right? Gotta form a search committee, issue press releases... better to just pay up.
or don't. Golden parachute. It's in the contract drawn up by my lawyer that you signed when you hired me.
Janitor... no contract? No lawyer on retainer? Not even a union rep? or health insurance? and you still ain't got your title back from TitleMax?
Huh... you in some shit!
I'm far from management, but even I wouldn't want 1% of some of those kinds of responsibilities, even if they can be abused or "overlooked" for quite a long period of time.
If you're thinking about the owner of a small business, who has to handle everything from payroll to inventory to facilities-management all by herself and a copy of Quickbooks, then yes, that's crazy hard.
But a CEO of a public company is a whole different world, because he has the budget to hire a staff, and thereby offload all the hard stuff to someone else (the word used at Yale business school is: "delegate"). Yes, so long as the cronies at the Board like you, you can be as dumb as a box of rocks, so long as you're just smart enough to hire a bunch of VP's eager to compete with each other for a promotion. Problem solved. One meeting a week, tell me what I need to know, tell me what I should decide, done. Off to the golf course to see and be seen... yes, everything's running just fine.
And something goes wrong? Two things: limited liability ("corporate veil"), and golden parachute. Why the latter? Well, if the Board were to kick a CEO to the curb, nobody would step forward to replace him.
It's a different world, up there, upstairs, among the Boardrooms and the Foundations. The richer you are, the more stuff people offer you for free, including sympathy. Michael Milken and Martha Stewart went to jail, and it still wasn't enough to get kicked out of the country club.
You are absolutely right. There is a court order, and a public one at that, so the 4th amendment is not at issue. That's what distinguishes this from the whole Snowden thing, where government intelligence-gathering entities either act without a court order, or else on a secret court order by a secret court (which is really the same thing, 'cause who knows what happened, 'cause it's a secret).
No, the thing going on here is that Apple is being asked, or even forced, to compromise their own product using means available only to them. If I understand correctly from this article from Ars Technica, that means is their private key, used to push updates to iphones. By using their key to push a custom update to this iphone to shut off some of this iphone's security measures, the FBI would have an easier time brute-forcing the PIN and thereby unlocking this phone.
Obviously, Apple doesn't want to comply. But there's plenty of precedent for why they should. Again, this is all above-board and legal... not a back-door deal done in secret where the CIA gets a special key to unlock any iphone. Instead, this is like the cops getting a warrant to a bank's safety deposit box. The bank has one key, but the owner's key is not available - so, to comply, the bank is going to have to take a drill to their box and break the owner's key socket. But with the right warrant, banks comply.
Methinks Apple's problem is the appearance of their products being hackable with compromised privacy, something dogging Microsoft and Windows 10. Methinks Apple wants to appear to offer an active role in defending the privacy of their users, whereas competitors like Google and Microsoft make it their business to snoop on their users for ad revenue. Methinks Apple is making a fuss over this because they're afraid consumers might flock to Android in the misguided belief that Android is more safe from a legal search sanctioned by a warrant.
Methinks the only issue here is whether Apple can be compelled to help the FBI break this phone. Unlike the bank and it's safety deposit box, the phone doesn't belong to Apple. It rightfully belongs to the cops as evidence in a crime, and before that it belonged to some shmuck who shot a bunch of people, and they can do what they want with it. It just so happens that Apple has something that could make breaking into it a lot easier, but Apple is arguing that they have no responsibility or liability to do so - once the phone is sold, it's out there and Apple's done... if a consumer wants to apply an update from Apple via the private key, that's their decision and that by no way implies Apple take some responsibility over the device and how it's used. Therefore, just because Apple has a private key that can help in hacking the phone, their argument is the government has no authority to compel them to use it, because although the user of the phone might have committed a crime with the phone, Apple didn't play any part in such crime and therefore are under no obligation to get involved.
Methinks, therefore, maybe Apple has perhaps one legitimate concern: complying might suggest they are somehow complicit in an alleged crime committed with their product because of the privacy measures they bake in. Unfortunately, there can be a fine line between volunteering to help with the government, and being obligated to assist the government because of some legal connection with the bad guy establishing a liability. Once Apple gives it up over this phone, Apple fears prosecutors everywhere will start hitting them up with thousands of break-this-iphone warrants, until Apple has to dedicate an entire skyscraper-full of engineers and lawyers to deal with it all. Come to think of it, that's a shitty business to be in (and I wonder how Microsoft and Google would handle it, because they'd be next).
I believe this is a prank called "goosing". Here's an example where Robert De Niro gooses Zac Efron on the set of Bad Grandpa.
It WOULD have been nice. Microsoft's grand-unified platform included some good ideas, and potential for more, which would have benefited everyone. But they were so way way way late to the game. They needed to be pouring out product once Android started to stick, preferably sooner. Instead, their desperate catch-up strategy of leveraging Windows Desktop as a platform to sell Phone (looking at you, Windows 8) only angered the public... forcing live-tiles and "modern" apps on desktop users did NOT make them turn around and buy Phones, at least because it was part of a new, buggy, immature platform, where iOS and Android had had time to become reliable and ubiquitous.
Microsoft could try again in a few years, by making touch-friendly desktop and Surface really really great (somehow), along with really great iOS and Android tie-in apps, which get used so extensively that a market comes into existence for a phone more dedicated to those functions. Or, Microsoft could just "back in" to a new phone market by offering, over years and years, smaller and smaller Surfaces, with phone capabilities, but also with BlueTooth and HDMI ports that drive a desktop (in other words, a pocket-sized PC with Skype and a built-in touch-screen). This, of course, remains to be seen. iOS and Android are not going to wait for Microsoft to catch up. That's what happens when you miss the boat (looking at you, Steve Ballmer).
A Boeing plant in China would cause trouble. China will, sooner or later, start building fleets of their own passenger jets, if for no other reason than they need them and want to pay for them without using a foreign currency, 'cause they like to over and undervalue their own currency at will. And then there's the national pride thing, building up a middle class, and all the spillover for a more powerful and modern military... everything to keep a Communist regime in power in modern times when communism as an economic practice is all but dead.
Going protectionist on Boeing wouldn't be too hard, because we already have the factories here in the U.S. The worst that would happen is China would deal with Airbus instead, and the vast Chinese market would go to Europe. Boeing stock price goes bye-bye, layoffs to follow, and China gets what it wants regardless. Life can be funny like that.
OTOH, going protectionist on Apple would mean building factories and infrastructure that the U.S. no longer has. I'd love nothing else but to see an American Foxconn on U.S. soil populated with skilled U.S. high-tech workers, but who's gonna pay for it? How're you gonna train hundreds of thousands of Americans to work like hungry Chinese, eager for a new life out of the sticks whatever the cost? Not saying it's impossible, but it's going to be expensive. Where's Trump going to find the money? Mexicans? Their vast riches are already earmarked for a great big fence. Apple's got cash, sure, but if they spend it away, their stock price will plummet until Samsung can afford to buy them out. And whaddya think FoxConn in China will do with all that capacity but no iPhones to build? Ya think China will let them close and scatter? Or can they think of a military use for all that know-how? Missile guidance systems, anyone?
Being President is complicated. Not as easy as hiring general contractors to build overpriced golf courses and casinos, Mr. Trump.
"Great USA" returns from... what exactly? Red scare 50's? Vietnam nuke-testing 60's (although the moon landing was cool...)? Gas-crisis disco 70's? Roth-era Van Halen Reagan Hardcore Punk 80's? Grunge? Be more specific. I don't remember any golden-age USA so much I want Trump to bring it "back" (although I miss the hardcore).
Ultimately, the point here is if we don't keep working (spending) on nukes, advancing them, new models and all, the people who know about nukes will retire and die off, and no young-uns will learn the trade... which would be all cool, except that Iran and NK and Pakistan and fuck knows who else has started making them, and their politician bosses are going to sabre-rattle to get what they want. Strong first-world deterrent is, unfortunately, the only way to make sure those sabres stay buried in their scabbards, unused. OTOH, if all the expertise in nuclear weapons is overseas, we will be, in the words of Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, in a world of shit.
There are two things to nukes: the warheads, and the delivery system. Turns out, the brass balls are in the latter. The nation with the biggest swinging dick is the one that can deliver nukes quickly, quietly, and precisely enough that the target cannot fire off a response. To maintain this, the U.S. is working on improving precision, and Vlad the Putin is working on stealth.
The Cold War is alive, people. Kim Jong-un may have already smuggled a nuke into a harbor near you, buried in one of a thousand shipping containers sitting around on the lot. The only difference between us and them? Ours are better, smaller, faster, and we got a shitload more of 'em. NK might be capable of taking out Long Beach, but with that he will have blown his wad, whereas our response can dig a crater big enough to permanently separate the South from the Korean peninsula. So, Kimmy keeps careful to keep all the nuke talk to just that.... talk.
It helps that we don't rely on Saudi oil as much as we used to. Fracking is kinda filthy, but for the first time in my lifetime we don't need to be muscled around by the Saudis to keep our nation moving. And they feel the hurt - to raise cash, they've announced they may offer shares of their state-owned oil company to the pubic. And that's not the worst... the whole region is literally heating up, to the point it may become uninhabitable in 80 or 90 years.
It may not hurt now to re-think who's side we have to be on in the weird cat-fight between the Saudis and Iran that serves to fuck up the entire region. The way it used to be, we'd bend-over backward for the Saudis, even in spite of their frequent violations of human rights (like this one)... all because we needed a friend in the region with oil. Now, maybe not so much. Hell, Iran is actually trying to make nice with us. Changing times, maybe.
That's the tragedy of all this nagware... upgrading is not guaranteed to work and can lead to a hosed system.
Best thing to do is mothball your old drive, get a new SSD, and install fresh. All you need is here to create a legit installable DVD or USB stick, and a license key from any of Windows 7, 8, 8.1 or 10, and you don't really even need the key because unlicensed Windows 10 doesn't do much to bitch at you except put up a water-mark on the desktop and present an alert from time to time about how great it is to have a fully legal copy. Unlicensed Windows 10 does none of that auto logout or shutdown nonesense (at least, not for now).
If you think you have too much installed cruft on your machine to start fresh, well, all that cruft is more likely to fuck up the magic upgrade process. Catch-22. Back up your shit, find your old install media, check out ninite for installing free software and Steam or Gog for installing games. Besides, new SSDs these days are way good and affordable. Better than taking a chance at some hit-or-miss upgrade routine. Even Linux distros haven't perfected major in-place upgrades. Always safer to start over fresh, and your rig will thank you for it.
So people at Microsoft are sitting around, thinking about users everywhere and what they may be doing to keep themselves on Win 7 or 8 or 8.1, brain-storming how to get around whatever those pesky users have done to protect themselves (e.g., GWX_control_panel), and then ordering a team OS-level programmers to get it done. Perhaps this division of the corporate structure have a code name? Team Borg, perhaps? Do you get a pay hike if you're part of the spacial operation to assimilate users into the Windows 10 collective? Is this where you go to be a Big Swinging Dick at Microsoft?
These managers and minions feel entitled to spend company time and resources thinking this kind of stuff up Reminds me of those guys at Comcast who say "they're our pipes" when they want to justify poor service, data caps, price hikes, or net non-neutrality. These people are not trolls in Mama's basement with nothing better to do... these are career suits who could be spending effort making Windows suck less. Instead, They're all Vladimir Harkonnen, scheming to fuck customers to... what? please the almighty god of Windows 10 penetration statistics?
Power hungry fucks. Windows 10 sucks less than it did, but I, for one, do not want my PC penetrated.
It's too bad that CO2 is plant food. No CO2 no plants. No plants no humans. This CO2 as pollution is so much bullshit.
Will answer your over-simplification with another one: the CO2 created comes at the cost of O2, you know, oxygen, the stuff we need to breathe to stay alive. No oxygen, no humans. A further over-simplistic check at wikipedia shows that the atmosphere is only 20% O2, not much to spare, whereas CO2 in concentrations of just 7% to 10% will kill you.
There was plenty enough CO2 to keep plants healthy before humans started liberating massive amounts of the stuff from inside the Earth, like gas out of a bag. Just for one minute, just one, look at the cars going back and forth on any Interstate near a city, all day, every day, non-stop, every one of 'em turning tanks of fuel into gas out the tailpipe. Ever get stuck in traffic? More cars than you can count spewing out gas that will kill you in a closed garage, and nobody's even moving. Humans liberate exhaust gases from 19 million barrels of oil every fucking day, and that's just the U.S. Just because you can't see it, don't mean it ain't there. Where do you think it all goes?
Seen from space, we're like the yeast in making beer, only instead of turning sugars into CO2, we're turning coal and crude into CO2, freeing carbon trapped in the ground into CO2 running free in the air. The simple of it is, that CO2 wasn't in the air before - it got there because humans put it there from where it used to be in the ground. If you can get your head around that, the only question remaining is whether all that extra CO2 is going to just hang around in the atmosphere and not fuck with anything. Well, gasses gonna do what gasses gonna do. Ain't no wishful thinking or head-in-the-sand shit gonna change the laws of chemistry, any more than thinking happy thoughts and taking short breaths is gonna keep you alive when the garage is closed and the car's running. Nighty-night.
Uh, is that $1.4 billion for Phantom's first 28 days, or it's entire run?
Force Awakens made $1 billion in just 28 days, and it damn-well hasn't even begun. The only question is whether Awakens is good enough for anyone to want to see more than once, and push it into hyper-money.
OTOH, once was more than enough for Phantom - I think it sold so many tickets because people wouldn't believe the stories of how bad it was. But nobody would pay to sit through that twice. Maybe catch it on cable, just to see if they maybe missed something interesting... (nope, nothing).