No shortage of arrests. But what about convictions? The "To Catch A Predator" series is a farce. Some of the things are outright faked, some of them are complete and obvious miscarriages of justice (such as when as producers are running the "investigation" and not the cops), and otherwise they often fail to get convictions because no actual crime is committed - the person they're communicating with from the "Perverted Justice" (very apt name, by the way) and planning to meet is not an actual minor, but an adult who pushes for the meet up.
And why do they agree to "have a seat over there"? Because they get $$$ for agreeing to be interviewed by Chris Hansen or whoever else. In a real investigation / sting operation, the cops would move in immediately and arrest. They wouldn't wait for an interview with some non LEO to take place. The producers pay money for those interviews, thus funding their legal defense if charges are ever brought.
They do get convictions in certain instances, but the number of "repeat offenders" on the show should be enough to tell you that it's a bad joke overall.
Convicted murderers are often released early, or released once their sentence is up. The "sex offender" brand is for life. If someone's dangerous they should still be serving their sentence. If someone has served their sentence they shouldn't be treated as criminals.
I'd rather live next to a sex offender than live next to a politician, just as I'd rather live next to a "gun nut" with a vast arsenal of weaponry than live next to a cop. Don't even get me started on rabid raccoons vs. Floridians.
Now the new stuff coming out has been great! Arrival, Interstellar, Passenger, I'm forgetting a couple of others were written by real science fiction writers - Rodenberry wasn't.
You can't see it, but I'm shaking my head left and right.
Arrival was fucking stupid. We start with aliens and some interesting premise about communicating with them, but we end up with political bullshit that gets solved with time travel, telepathy, and essentially magic. The whole premise is shot when that shit happens because: Why couldn't the aliens use their time travel telepathy bullshit to help themselves? Why couldn't the aliens see / prevent the bomb? Or even more to the point, why couldn't the aliens see learning our language and then just communicate with us in out language? The whole fucking time they're sitting behind their glass barrier and watching Pam from The Office (I know it's not her) pantomime shit. The only thing missing was a Speak and Say toy. The aliens didn't do a damned thing to communicate with us, despite it being revealed that they'll need our help one day.
Interstellar? Are you fucking kidding me? It devolves into time travel and spiritual/magical wankery so fucking quickly. And the first half is more about the fucking dust bowl than it is about sci-fi. As with any time travel movie, there are plot holes out the ass. But it doesn't fucking matter, I guess, because the movie is focused on a couple of people and how they are sad and dumb. The final scenes are like they watched 2001's LSD trip and decided to try and make something that makes even less sense.
Passengers? Well that started out with some potential, at least. But it ended up being a romance/drama movie more than a sci-fi movie. I get that the dude struggled with the idea of opening someone's capsule up and all that. But once the decision was made to open one up, why did he have to choose a useless lady? I don't even remember her credentials. Oh wait - I do. She had none. She was writing a book. Maybe next time when you're browsing through all the records you'll pick a mechanic, a machinist, a tech, a security officer, or anyone who can help you fix shit. He had three problems.
1) Why did I wake up early / what's wrong with the ship? 2) How can I go back to sleep in a pod so I don't die alone? 3) How can I get through the security door?
He chose to solve problem 4 - I'm sad and lonely and haven't gotten laid in a long time.
I'm not saying problem 4 wasn't a problem that needed solving. But he could've also solved problems 1, 2, and 3 had he picked the right person (or people) to wake up. There's a lot of the hemming and hawing about not wanting to wake even a single person up because it would doom them to die on the ship and (nearly) alone. But you've got trouble in River City, son. Trouble with with a capital T. Every fucking day he spent enjoying the bar from The Shining and not working on the problem was irresponsible and, more importantly, stupid.
He had access to everyone's records. He could have found a few people with skills / clearance to help him repair/reset the pods, fix the ship, or get past the security door to wake up people with more clearance / skills to repair/reset the pods and fix the ship.
But no, he waits months (or years) to just choose Katniss Everdeen, who provides no help on the whole "shit's on fire, yo" front. And when they do get a 3rd person, the whole thing about "Oh no, they woke up and now they're doomed to die here." is still focused on Katniss instead of the new dude who is actively dying a painful, drawn out death.
I can look past the generic reactor core shit, and the ship is broke but it don't know it's broke setup. But the movie as a whole had so very little to do with sci-fi and much too much to do with romance.
As for ol' Gene Rberry, I agree. He wasn't really a sci-fi writer.
Standard procedure for bad news is to post it to your press/corporate site on a Friday, but not actively tell anyone. Standard procedure for good news (or new product news), is to hint, tease, and preannounce, then reveal early in the week with announcements on the press/corporate site, emails to journalists, branding and news "articles" on the main site, etc. Throw in some reviewers / tech "journalists" who are suckling at your teat and willing to sign NDAs and you'll have tons of coverage ready to go when you want it.
GPIO means general-purpose input/output. A GPIO pin is simply a pin you can connect to and do I/O with.
Typically, you connect these to other components to do whatever stuff you need to do. But they need to agree on voltage levels.
I don't do any of this shit, but if Intel went against the grain and requires a voltage that no one else uses, it would be a moderate pain in the ass to connect to their GPIO pins.
Okay, but how is he supposed to know which of those two to do?
Journalists used to tell you why something mattered or who it mattered to. Now they regurgitate press releases, government statements, and Tweets.
If some celebrity tweets something and it "goes viral" Wolf Blitzer will provide around the clock coverage of the situation and there will be talking heads going on and on about it being part of the most important national conversation going on today.
My BestBuy has the items ready to go on a shelf right by the customer service / online pickup counter. I've pretty much only done it with games and Amiibo, but they do have a closed off area just behind it where larger items could be stored. I also recently did an in-store pickup at a Target for a larger item. They had a similar deal where you get there and confirm the shit you're picking up, then they send someone to the back to go fetch the thing. I didn't time it, but it did take longer than I expected. They were fairly heavy items, so I don't fault them for not pulling it out in advance. For all they knew I wouldn't show up for days.
Other stores have a system where you reply to a text or click a link when you're arriving. This presumably gets the ball rolling. Amazon has it for their lockers. Even Taco Bell has it for online ordering.
A good driver doesn't care. The truck is always full and they always time out on their shift before delivering all their packages. They don't give a fuck if the undelivered package is for your house or not.
A shitty driver "cares" about getting everything "done". What this really means is they take a long lunch, sit in their truck jerking off, or whatever else. Then they scramble to "deliver" stuff. The other AC describes typical behavior. Shitty drivers who are lazy / trying to make up time (that they likely frittered away) will mass-scan shit in the truck to generate door tags, then go around putting door tags instead of delivering the packages. Door tags are light, and you can carry many at once. They assume people won't be home in the middle of the day to accept a delivery, so anything that isn't flagged as "drop and forget" gets the phantom delivery attempt treatment. If it's flagged as "drop and forget", it gets the "chuck it toward the door" treatment. If it hits the door you get bonus points because that counts as the knock!
I've witnessed a FedEx driver literally throw things at my door. I was sick of having food deliveries destroyed so I waited and watched, and I caught the fucker red handed. I walked out to him and his truck and fucking let him have it, out in the middle of the street for all to see. He denied it at first, until I fucking told him I had video. I chased that shit up FedEx's tree pretty far, and the problem stopped. The trick with FedEx is that none of the drivers are direct FedEx employees (I'm not sure if this is area-specific or only true for FedEx Express or FedEx Ground or...). So you have to bitch and moan and threaten pretty hard for them to give half a shit about contacting the actual guy who manages your area and then get them to contact the contractor that hires the actual drivers, and then get them to actually fucking do something. In my experience, video evidence that includes the FedEx logo helps a lot.
can they grow in a way that is profitable for the USPS that doesn't cost more than e-commerce is willing to pay?
In short, no. The USPS depends on a certain percentage of spam to exist. They also wouldn't exist without the deal to take small packages from UPS and FedEx. Without a federally-granted monopoly on delivering to your mailbox, the USPS would have gone away already, and good riddance. They are incompetent dickbags who do their best to only hire the dumbest people on the planet. Their autorouting system is so pathetic that it creates routing loops that can only be broken by deliberate human intervention. Their hours are garbage that robs the nation of productivity by expecting people to run their errands at the same time that their employer expects them to work. They suffer no penalties for failure, and there is no accountability. Every single package is scanned and the data handed to the government as part of the spying-on-citizens program. There is just no way in which the USPS is not crap.
Let's see which service you use if you want to mail legal documents.
The 3-generation pension thing is a myth. They are simply required to fund the benefits that they promise existing workers given standard actuarial tables which estimate lifetime. I would like this rule extended to the entire government, as we are sitting on a liability time bomb. My beef with the treatment of the USPS is I don't think congress phased in the new rules slowly enough for the business to adjust - but no matter what it was going to be traumatic.
From the government's perspective, there is no time bomb.
In the worst case scenario, pension/benefits funding is drained / costs grow way too high. The government just prints out a few trillion dollars to fund it.
The problem is solved, from the government's perspective. Congress critters are already wealthy, and if they don't like the inflation they'll give themselves a pay raise / demand more from lobbyists. Everyone with a government pension / benefits gets their shit fulfilled. It doesn't matter if their pension is now worth a third of what it was worth before, because fuck you. It doesn't matter if people are fighting for bread in the streets, because the ivory towers will be well stocked.
USPS has been growing like crazy. They do Sunday delivery now, and they do 3 or 4 delivery rounds in my area per day.
Years ago you'd only get one delivery round per day (and none on Sunday), unless you paid a ton for registered / certified / whatever the one with real tracking and direct signature confirmation is.
Maybe USPS isn't growing as fast as they'd like, but ecommerce isn't going to grow forever. In ye olden times, people would pick up their goods themselves from "stores". Today, people want everything delivered to them. Trucks handling deliveries for dozens of people is far more efficient than dozens of cars handling deliveries for individuals. And people also have more options to pick up items from a store, warehouse, or locker.
Amazon loves offering incentives to people to delay shipping and group multiple items together. Amazon does this because it reduces their shipping costs. If Amazon feels the pain of shipping costs, everyone does. So if the shipping carriers actually get overwhelmed, they can simply increase prices. This will ultimately be passed on to the consumer (even Prime members have to bundle cheap items and meet a threshold before anything ships), and the consumer ultimately drives demand.
It's a self-correcting problem. My guess is that whoever wrote this report doesn't like the "increase prices" part of the correction. They just expect carriers to infinitely increase capacity without raising prices.
File contents stored alongside metadata in the filesystem, because it fits? Not sure which FS you're using, and now sure on Windows 8/8.1/10 report on such things.
Proof: It doesn't matter what you divide it by, 0 is always 0. 0/100 == 0/1000 == 0/10000 == 0
Dam u dum.
If you're quantifying something in terms or percent, you're counting the number of things per 100 (possibly different) things. You absolutely need a % sign if you're presenting other data as a percentage alongside the data which ended up at 0.
Further, dividing it by something else and getting the same result has no effect on how you should present the data. And of course, dividing it by something else can give you a different effect if you're rounding. Consider a reading of some concentration of things being.004. With rounding, that's 0 percent, but 4 permil.
And finally, you useless sack of shit, it does matter what you divide 0 by. It's not always 0. 0/0 is undefined.
There's no insight, no tech content, no explanation - just a childish swipe at the elected president.
And to top it off, anyone with half a brain or more would immediately recognize that the times cited in the OP were years before Trump, and mostly during Obama... so that the post casts aspersions on Obama more than Trump.
We're supposed to be the smart people in the room. One side just got done ginning up a sniper to take out the other side - do we really have to stand for this nonsense?
This forum depends on our participation. Can't we just take back control and refuse to mod up this sort of crap?
Slashdot Mirror
No shortage of arrests. But what about convictions? The "To Catch A Predator" series is a farce. Some of the things are outright faked, some of them are complete and obvious miscarriages of justice (such as when as producers are running the "investigation" and not the cops), and otherwise they often fail to get convictions because no actual crime is committed - the person they're communicating with from the "Perverted Justice" (very apt name, by the way) and planning to meet is not an actual minor, but an adult who pushes for the meet up.
And why do they agree to "have a seat over there"? Because they get $$$ for agreeing to be interviewed by Chris Hansen or whoever else. In a real investigation / sting operation, the cops would move in immediately and arrest. They wouldn't wait for an interview with some non LEO to take place. The producers pay money for those interviews, thus funding their legal defense if charges are ever brought.
They do get convictions in certain instances, but the number of "repeat offenders" on the show should be enough to tell you that it's a bad joke overall.
Convicted murderers are often released early, or released once their sentence is up.
The "sex offender" brand is for life. If someone's dangerous they should still be serving their sentence. If someone has served their sentence they shouldn't be treated as criminals.
I'd rather live next to a sex offender than live next to a politician, just as I'd rather live next to a "gun nut" with a vast arsenal of weaponry than live next to a cop.
Don't even get me started on rabid raccoons vs. Floridians.
Now the new stuff coming out has been great! Arrival, Interstellar, Passenger, I'm forgetting a couple of others were written by real science fiction writers - Rodenberry wasn't.
You can't see it, but I'm shaking my head left and right.
Arrival was fucking stupid. We start with aliens and some interesting premise about communicating with them, but we end up with political bullshit that gets solved with time travel, telepathy, and essentially magic. The whole premise is shot when that shit happens because: Why couldn't the aliens use their time travel telepathy bullshit to help themselves? Why couldn't the aliens see / prevent the bomb? Or even more to the point, why couldn't the aliens see learning our language and then just communicate with us in out language? The whole fucking time they're sitting behind their glass barrier and watching Pam from The Office (I know it's not her) pantomime shit. The only thing missing was a Speak and Say toy. The aliens didn't do a damned thing to communicate with us, despite it being revealed that they'll need our help one day.
Interstellar? Are you fucking kidding me? It devolves into time travel and spiritual/magical wankery so fucking quickly. And the first half is more about the fucking dust bowl than it is about sci-fi. As with any time travel movie, there are plot holes out the ass. But it doesn't fucking matter, I guess, because the movie is focused on a couple of people and how they are sad and dumb. The final scenes are like they watched 2001's LSD trip and decided to try and make something that makes even less sense.
Passengers? Well that started out with some potential, at least. But it ended up being a romance/drama movie more than a sci-fi movie. I get that the dude struggled with the idea of opening someone's capsule up and all that. But once the decision was made to open one up, why did he have to choose a useless lady? I don't even remember her credentials. Oh wait - I do. She had none. She was writing a book. Maybe next time when you're browsing through all the records you'll pick a mechanic, a machinist, a tech, a security officer, or anyone who can help you fix shit. He had three problems.
1) Why did I wake up early / what's wrong with the ship?
2) How can I go back to sleep in a pod so I don't die alone?
3) How can I get through the security door?
He chose to solve problem 4 - I'm sad and lonely and haven't gotten laid in a long time.
I'm not saying problem 4 wasn't a problem that needed solving. But he could've also solved problems 1, 2, and 3 had he picked the right person (or people) to wake up. There's a lot of the hemming and hawing about not wanting to wake even a single person up because it would doom them to die on the ship and (nearly) alone. But you've got trouble in River City, son. Trouble with with a capital T. Every fucking day he spent enjoying the bar from The Shining and not working on the problem was irresponsible and, more importantly, stupid.
He had access to everyone's records. He could have found a few people with skills / clearance to help him repair/reset the pods, fix the ship, or get past the security door to wake up people with more clearance / skills to repair/reset the pods and fix the ship.
But no, he waits months (or years) to just choose Katniss Everdeen, who provides no help on the whole "shit's on fire, yo" front. And when they do get a 3rd person, the whole thing about "Oh no, they woke up and now they're doomed to die here." is still focused on Katniss instead of the new dude who is actively dying a painful, drawn out death.
I can look past the generic reactor core shit, and the ship is broke but it don't know it's broke setup. But the movie as a whole had so very little to do with sci-fi and much too much to do with romance.
As for ol' Gene Rberry, I agree. He wasn't really a sci-fi writer.
Standard procedure for bad news is to post it to your press/corporate site on a Friday, but not actively tell anyone.
Standard procedure for good news (or new product news), is to hint, tease, and preannounce, then reveal early in the week with announcements on the press/corporate site, emails to journalists, branding and news "articles" on the main site, etc. Throw in some reviewers / tech "journalists" who are suckling at your teat and willing to sign NDAs and you'll have tons of coverage ready to go when you want it.
GPIO means general-purpose input/output.
A GPIO pin is simply a pin you can connect to and do I/O with.
Typically, you connect these to other components to do whatever stuff you need to do. But they need to agree on voltage levels.
I don't do any of this shit, but if Intel went against the grain and requires a voltage that no one else uses, it would be a moderate pain in the ass to connect to their GPIO pins.
Okay, but how is he supposed to know which of those two to do?
Journalists used to tell you why something mattered or who it mattered to.
Now they regurgitate press releases, government statements, and Tweets.
If some celebrity tweets something and it "goes viral" Wolf Blitzer will provide around the clock coverage of the situation and there will be talking heads going on and on about it being part of the most important national conversation going on today.
My BestBuy has the items ready to go on a shelf right by the customer service / online pickup counter. I've pretty much only done it with games and Amiibo, but they do have a closed off area just behind it where larger items could be stored. I also recently did an in-store pickup at a Target for a larger item. They had a similar deal where you get there and confirm the shit you're picking up, then they send someone to the back to go fetch the thing. I didn't time it, but it did take longer than I expected. They were fairly heavy items, so I don't fault them for not pulling it out in advance. For all they knew I wouldn't show up for days.
Other stores have a system where you reply to a text or click a link when you're arriving. This presumably gets the ball rolling. Amazon has it for their lockers. Even Taco Bell has it for online ordering.
Thank you for calling that part of his bullshit out and following up. Saved me the work.
A good driver doesn't care. The truck is always full and they always time out on their shift before delivering all their packages. They don't give a fuck if the undelivered package is for your house or not.
A shitty driver "cares" about getting everything "done". What this really means is they take a long lunch, sit in their truck jerking off, or whatever else. Then they scramble to "deliver" stuff. The other AC describes typical behavior. Shitty drivers who are lazy / trying to make up time (that they likely frittered away) will mass-scan shit in the truck to generate door tags, then go around putting door tags instead of delivering the packages. Door tags are light, and you can carry many at once. They assume people won't be home in the middle of the day to accept a delivery, so anything that isn't flagged as "drop and forget" gets the phantom delivery attempt treatment. If it's flagged as "drop and forget", it gets the "chuck it toward the door" treatment. If it hits the door you get bonus points because that counts as the knock!
I've witnessed a FedEx driver literally throw things at my door. I was sick of having food deliveries destroyed so I waited and watched, and I caught the fucker red handed. I walked out to him and his truck and fucking let him have it, out in the middle of the street for all to see. He denied it at first, until I fucking told him I had video. I chased that shit up FedEx's tree pretty far, and the problem stopped. The trick with FedEx is that none of the drivers are direct FedEx employees (I'm not sure if this is area-specific or only true for FedEx Express or FedEx Ground or ...). So you have to bitch and moan and threaten pretty hard for them to give half a shit about contacting the actual guy who manages your area and then get them to contact the contractor that hires the actual drivers, and then get them to actually fucking do something. In my experience, video evidence that includes the FedEx logo helps a lot.
If the volume goes down enough they can do with less trucks and drivers.
Fewer.
can they grow in a way that is profitable for the USPS that doesn't cost more than e-commerce is willing to pay?
In short, no. The USPS depends on a certain percentage of spam to exist. They also wouldn't exist without the deal to take small packages from UPS and FedEx. Without a federally-granted monopoly on delivering to your mailbox, the USPS would have gone away already, and good riddance. They are incompetent dickbags who do their best to only hire the dumbest people on the planet. Their autorouting system is so pathetic that it creates routing loops that can only be broken by deliberate human intervention. Their hours are garbage that robs the nation of productivity by expecting people to run their errands at the same time that their employer expects them to work. They suffer no penalties for failure, and there is no accountability. Every single package is scanned and the data handed to the government as part of the spying-on-citizens program. There is just no way in which the USPS is not crap.
Let's see which service you use if you want to mail legal documents.
A ruling several decades ago states that SS is not a contract between you and the government so collecting any is not guaranteed.
Odd, them taking it out of my fucking paycheck is guaranteed.
The 3-generation pension thing is a myth. They are simply required to fund the benefits that they promise existing workers given standard actuarial tables which estimate lifetime. I would like this rule extended to the entire government, as we are sitting on a liability time bomb. My beef with the treatment of the USPS is I don't think congress phased in the new rules slowly enough for the business to adjust - but no matter what it was going to be traumatic.
From the government's perspective, there is no time bomb.
In the worst case scenario, pension/benefits funding is drained / costs grow way too high. The government just prints out a few trillion dollars to fund it.
The problem is solved, from the government's perspective. Congress critters are already wealthy, and if they don't like the inflation they'll give themselves a pay raise / demand more from lobbyists. Everyone with a government pension / benefits gets their shit fulfilled. It doesn't matter if their pension is now worth a third of what it was worth before, because fuck you. It doesn't matter if people are fighting for bread in the streets, because the ivory towers will be well stocked.
USPS has been growing like crazy. They do Sunday delivery now, and they do 3 or 4 delivery rounds in my area per day.
Years ago you'd only get one delivery round per day (and none on Sunday), unless you paid a ton for registered / certified / whatever the one with real tracking and direct signature confirmation is.
Maybe USPS isn't growing as fast as they'd like, but ecommerce isn't going to grow forever. In ye olden times, people would pick up their goods themselves from "stores". Today, people want everything delivered to them. Trucks handling deliveries for dozens of people is far more efficient than dozens of cars handling deliveries for individuals. And people also have more options to pick up items from a store, warehouse, or locker.
Amazon loves offering incentives to people to delay shipping and group multiple items together. Amazon does this because it reduces their shipping costs. If Amazon feels the pain of shipping costs, everyone does. So if the shipping carriers actually get overwhelmed, they can simply increase prices. This will ultimately be passed on to the consumer (even Prime members have to bundle cheap items and meet a threshold before anything ships), and the consumer ultimately drives demand.
It's a self-correcting problem. My guess is that whoever wrote this report doesn't like the "increase prices" part of the correction. They just expect carriers to infinitely increase capacity without raising prices.
What sorcery is this?
File contents stored alongside metadata in the filesystem, because it fits? Not sure which FS you're using, and now sure on Windows 8/8.1/10 report on such things.
Nah, you failed hard with your shit and you know it.
"Quantum teleportation" is not teleportation. You cannot use entanglement to violate causality. You are not exceeding c.
STOP REPEATING THIS BULLSHIT.
0 is always 0. No need for a % sign.
Proof:
It doesn't matter what you divide it by, 0 is always 0.
0/100 == 0/1000 == 0/10000 == 0
Dam u dum.
If you're quantifying something in terms or percent, you're counting the number of things per 100 (possibly different) things.
You absolutely need a % sign if you're presenting other data as a percentage alongside the data which ended up at 0.
Further, dividing it by something else and getting the same result has no effect on how you should present the data. .004.
And of course, dividing it by something else can give you a different effect if you're rounding. Consider a reading of some concentration of things being
With rounding, that's 0 percent, but 4 permil.
And finally, you useless sack of shit, it does matter what you divide 0 by. It's not always 0.
0/0 is undefined.
0% lead, 0 is a percentage
We're all somebody's children.
Did that make the melamine disappear?
Nothing wrong with eating less processed foods but please stop raising a pussy.
Fewer. Or singularize "foods".
How does this crap get modded up in a tech forum?
There's no insight, no tech content, no explanation - just a childish swipe at the elected president.
And to top it off, anyone with half a brain or more would immediately recognize that the times cited in the OP were years before Trump, and mostly during Obama... so that the post casts aspersions on Obama more than Trump.
We're supposed to be the smart people in the room. One side just got done ginning up a sniper to take out the other side - do we really have to stand for this nonsense?
This forum depends on our participation. Can't we just take back control and refuse to mod up this sort of crap?
I can explain how this happens.
We're consuming too much lead.
If you see something, say something.
Even if you don't understand what you saw.
Stay safe, citizen.
Straight lines nothing.
This exists for a reason: http://imgur.com/l3kYm