I had my packages stolen, and then started having them delivered to my work location and/or amazon lockers when available. It is inconvenient, however safer.
The main driver of the issue is that police will not have the resources to look at small crimes. In fact, it seems like they will not be able to prosecute if the item costs less than $1000 or so: https://www.latimes.com/opinio...
The thieves know this, and they would not care even if they get caught. This is not a good thing for our society. If we do not have resources to prosecute them we should at least put some method of discouragement. Community service, or financial penalties, or some another method to prevent future thefts.
Otherwise we would essentially give up the sanctuary of homes, and hence civilized society.
One needs the receipts longer than my height filled with coupons, right? What will we do if we lose those $2 discounts on the shampoo, and buy one get one offers on vitamins?
However while people are talking about breaking up tech (which I don't like as a tech worker), the retail has long consolidated, and there is almost no choice in brands anymore.
This is not how free markets are supposed to work. We need more coverage on this issue, so that we can start a real dialogue towards a solution / solutions.
This is a cycle designed to keep politicians in power, and their cronies in charge of contracts.
The base rate is never enough to finish the work. However if the company continues to support the politicians, with very legal campaign contributions, they will continue to get piecemeal funding.
On the other hand, if the politicians keep granting the same companies newer (and more lucrative) contracts, they themselves will receive ongoing support.
This is a vicious cycle. Any entity earning the contract, but not supporting the politicians will go bankrupt (since the funding will not increase), and politicians not playing this game will not be (re-)elected.
This event is actually one of the good occurrences, where the losses are cut, and the public will no longer support (this particular) expensive project.
There has been more discussions about monetization of open source projects. While coding as a hobby and helping projects as a philanthropy work is very good, long term stable projects need continuous funding.
This has worked for RedHat and other enterprise oriented companies with their support contract offerings. It also worked nice for existing companies -- including even Microsoft -- which uses open source partially. However if you only have a single offering, like MongoDB the situation was not as clear.
A while ago, I decided to clean up some clutter by selling all my extra chargers, cables, and whatnot. But I had to cancel that, since it turned out that I had to pay more for postage than what they sell the same thing for from China. Yes, even if I were to sell the used stuff at $0, a new one from China was cheaper than the USPS package price.
This is not sustainable, and US might bet a fair deal if one year period is used correctly.
From an economic perspective is coal better than natural gas in any way? Is is even better than frakking, which US has already developed very well?
Or the more important question: is keeping coal subsidized gives benefit anyone other than coal mine owners in the long run? Even the workers would be better off switching to another profession, like solar panel installers. Is it as "manly"? No, However is is manly to die of cancer at young age? And solar installation also pays better as a bonus (it is kind of a contractor/construction job anyways).
There is still a lot of potential here in US. It would be better not to waste it trying to keep dying industries alive.
VMs can have direct access to hardware. Once I tried adding a Windows virtual machine on top of Linux (KVM) with a PCI graphics card dedicated to that machine. I was able to get almost 100% performance out of the card (tested with a mining software) and can even overclock it.
The issue is you need a separate PCI card for each virtual machine, (or purchase an extremely expensive server class GPU with multiple VM access). There are guides for similar setups, where you'd most likely to have the on board GPU for the Linux desktop, and a PCI one for Windows gaming VM. That also requires a KVM of sorts, since they would have discrete outputs.
Their model usually works, but they overextended at this cloud thing.
First they got the Amazon to shut down the unlimited offering. Basically what Plex enables with "cloud" is that serving your own content, on 3rd party cloud providers, including Amazon, Dropbox etc. However when people uploaded their entire libraries to Amazon "unlimited" layer, all of a sudden Amazon decided to no longer provide such a storage.
Then Plex seem to have struggled just to keep the indexing / serving infrastructure for this service. These costs real CPU cycles, and they add up. Even if you pay, it would not be enough. So they are shutting down the "frontend".
At least you can still serve your own content on your own hardware (or vps). However I don't think you can serve thru Dropbox / etc directly anymore.
Some electronics require rare earth materials to manufacture, which currently are sources from China or other countries. Those have export restrictions from China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , and they ask the products to be manufactured there.
US now asks products to be manufactured here, and will add additional taxes (tariffs) if this request is not complied with.
So Apple and other manufacturers are split between two bad choices. They will have to weigh which one is less worse, and go in that direction. In all cases it will most likely be the consumers that suffer.
They would just get rid of low pay employees, and hire them into a contracting subsidiary. The CEO will keep their job, and the employees will lose their benefits.
As long as they have access to sufficient pool of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyist, they will get around those kind of restrictions.
Our current city / suburb design does not allow proper public transportation, but requires us to drive everywhere in personal vehicles. The place where people live, where they work, and where they spend their times are too far away, and not coordinated.
Back in time, the malls were actually designed to solve this problem by having enclosed living spaces. However given tax incentives that business had there, malls are currently (almost) always used by shopping, and not a tiny city as initially envisioned.
Also cities, especially here in Bay Area, want to have business offices built without supporting housing inside their limits. This causes a big unbalance. Also public transport are a patchwork of uncoordinated systems, where even biking to a place can take much less than using public transport. People voted for this system, and people got what they asked for.
We already have several ways to "pay for" free and open software.
1) Dual licensing: Several high profile projects, including QT, Ghostware, and MySQL use these for benefiting both closed source commercial, and open software. There is even research on this topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
2) "Patronage": Since middle ages artists depended on wealthy "patrons" to commission their work. The end result was "open" in sense they were usually presented in cathedrals, or museums, but the work was paid for powerful individuals. Now we have companies like IBM, RedHat, and even Microsoft sponsoring open source projects that benefit all.
3) Amateur work. The work itself has an intrinsic value in terms of intellectual gratification. Many people will contribute to open source projects just because they can on their own time.
The system actually is tested and works. It has produced great results, and used by billions of people today. Of course new ideas for patronage could arise, but it does not mean the current ones are broken.
There seems to be a grey area between fiction, and really harmful content. However the line between free speech, and being uncomfortable about something is very hard to draw.
I'm not sure how to objectively draw a boundary. However if the game is setup to allow real life footage to be amended with zombie shooting, this would have happened sooner or later.
How this finally plays out is actually important for the future boundaries of free speech.
(Note: I have a few INTC stock, so I might be biased).
Intel is generally terrible at scaling down. I had an ASUS tablet with an Atom processor, and it was not up par with ARM competitors. ARM can just sip tiny bits of power can go for all day, while Atom was not as efficient. (That is why they exited the mobile market, and currently only have Atom chips for server platforms).
That being said, if your goal is running x86 applications it is still better to go with the native processor. Until Windows can have really "universal" applications, Intel will still be a better choice for their platform compared to emulation.
They obviously do not want to file for bankruptcy. However at this point it looks like the best action to stop the suffering.
Their business plan relied on people not using their service. However it being "too good to be true", people actually wanted to use the subscription to the fullest. If you let people to watch one movie every day of the year, there would be people who would want to watch one movie per day. Not everyone is a family with kids with very little time, and can only go to theaters a few times a year. Many people, do have the time to go to the movies.
Sorry but your plan would have never worked, it failed miserably in the real life. Just accept it.
I once read the salary of an employee (or CEO) is based on their "replacement cost". There are of course other factors, like bargaining power, however it basically comes down to how much other CEOs make in a comparative market.
As long as CEO pay goes up nationwide, individual CEOs will also ask for (slightly) higher wages. And this will continue to feed in a never ending loop up an upwards spiral.
On the other hand the workers wages (especially for non-skill based positions) seem to be going down. As long as the trend continues, the "replacement cost" of workers would be very cheap for companies.
Even though these have become self fulfilling prophecies, the cycle can be broken by external factors. It probably won't be the government (since their good intentions do not fail to backfire, in miserable ways), but if the society as a whole demands the trends to move in the other direction, then they will slowly move the needles.
" "welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento's 193,000 recipients." "
I would guess it would be much more easier and cheaper to help 500 people get off welfare than tracking the same amount (not necessarily the same people).
If we spend our energy making sure people don't need welfare, then there would be less need to track down offenders.
If it is your router, you should look at OpenWRT, DD-WRT or similar alternative Linux router distributions. This way you can ensure the updates for many years. (Or better, you can invest in a low-power PC and just install pf-sense, which would be leaps and bounds more capable than a tiny ARM machine).
If it is a security system, camera, alarm, etc. you'd need to make sure they are in a separate network. If possible a distinct network for each and every device with proper router rules, so that for example your NVR recording hub can access the camera only, etc. Of course Internet access should be disabled, since they usually happen to connect to a backdoor server. You might have a temporary rule to update firmware if necessary, or setup a VPN to access for your mobile devices. (Both iOS and Android can be setup to connect to your pf-sense router from outside of your LAN, Windows and Mac require some more steps due to self signed certificate issues).
If it is a "smart" device like a fridge, thermostat, or a light controller which needs to connect to the internet, you can keep them in a separate network to minimize damage, and replace them, as soon as the manufacturer stops updating. Unfortunately it might not be easy to letting to of a functional smart power outlet with monitoring, etc. but if there are known un-patched holes, you would not want the entire internet to be able to cause damage to whatever equipment you have down that connector.
Overall use your own judgment, and learn networking basics. Also do not be lazy (I still have some cameras that I need to finish securing).
When you enable 2FA, you'll get 10 backup codes which you can print and store offline (in a safe place). You can also associate more than once device for 2FA. I actually have 4 active devices on my account. (One on the keychain, another on my badge, 2 backups at home).
Even if you were to lose all of them, it would still be possible to recover your account, however would of course require some effort.
Please do not engage publicly (or privately) with customers in a negative manner. This is a big "no-no", and can result in a negative outcome, similar to this one.
I agree that firing could be excessive, but it is still within the bounds of how HR can approach these issues.
If you are worried about someone being wrong in the internet, remember the xkcd: https://xkcd.com/386/
It is one of the things that is easy to learn, but takes many years to master.
The proper way to do things take a lot of discipline, and looking at the culmination of effort bringing really stable and predictable systems is satisfying. It is no longer as "visible" as other languages, but many of the software people use daily is still mostly C++ (and C of course). For Linux there is still heavy C usage (in the Kernel, X11/Wayland, and Gnome). However KDE desktop, LibreOffice, VLC, Firefox and many other projects are done in C++. Similarly for Windows low level interfaces are already in C++, and MacOS kernel and UI libraries also use C++, and Objective C++ (but not exclusively).
Yes, they are not "sexy" software items, but they work, and I have seen much less exceptions, crashes, and failures in proven C++ code, compared to many Java, Python, or JavaScript code.
A few new low level programming languages are trying to change the situation, but the progress is slow. It could be said that D was the initial one, later Go, and Rust came along. But still most non-experimental low level and mission critical software is still developed in C or C++.
So, no C++ is not a terrible language. It gets results, and many organizations still prefer to keep using it. Unlike older generation languages like COBOL (abandoned by banks), FORTRAN (abandoned for R/Python in scientific research), or Pascal (abandoned by Apple for ObjC++), the C++ community is still thriving.
US has widely varying costs of living across the states. For example, it was recently announced that making $100k/year puts you in lower income in Silicon Valley, while one could possibly live comfortably with $20k/year in rural places. This also depends on whether they have a house, or need to rent one, size of the families, and any medical or mental conditions that require ongoing care.
It could be argued that a fixed $20k amount would actually incentivize people to move from expensive areas into more reasonably prices ones. However in practice human behavior is difficult to change, and many, if not most such people would not do the move.
The one time US actually managed to do this with the "new deal", where people were actually put to work, and built the infrastructure we still use today. Given that infrastructure is crumbling after more than half a century of mostly neglect, it might be a good idea to renew the deal, and push people into working in places where labor is actually needed. Otherwise we'll run into an endless sprial of rising UBI costs, and dwindling tax revenue which will eventually bankrupt the country.
Slashdot Mirror
I had my packages stolen, and then started having them delivered to my work location and/or amazon lockers when available. It is inconvenient, however safer.
The main driver of the issue is that police will not have the resources to look at small crimes. In fact, it seems like they will not be able to prosecute if the item costs less than $1000 or so: https://www.latimes.com/opinio...
The thieves know this, and they would not care even if they get caught. This is not a good thing for our society. If we do not have resources to prosecute them we should at least put some method of discouragement. Community service, or financial penalties, or some another method to prevent future thefts.
Otherwise we would essentially give up the sanctuary of homes, and hence civilized society.
One needs the receipts longer than my height filled with coupons, right? What will we do if we lose those $2 discounts on the shampoo, and buy one get one offers on vitamins?
(jk)
This was covered in Last Week Tonight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And also in "Adam Ruins Everything":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
However while people are talking about breaking up tech (which I don't like as a tech worker), the retail has long consolidated, and there is almost no choice in brands anymore.
This is not how free markets are supposed to work. We need more coverage on this issue, so that we can start a real dialogue towards a solution / solutions.
This is a cycle designed to keep politicians in power, and their cronies in charge of contracts.
The base rate is never enough to finish the work. However if the company continues to support the politicians, with very legal campaign contributions, they will continue to get piecemeal funding.
On the other hand, if the politicians keep granting the same companies newer (and more lucrative) contracts, they themselves will receive ongoing support.
This is a vicious cycle. Any entity earning the contract, but not supporting the politicians will go bankrupt (since the funding will not increase), and politicians not playing this game will not be (re-)elected.
This event is actually one of the good occurrences, where the losses are cut, and the public will no longer support (this particular) expensive project.
There has been more discussions about monetization of open source projects. While coding as a hobby and helping projects as a philanthropy work is very good, long term stable projects need continuous funding.
This has worked for RedHat and other enterprise oriented companies with their support contract offerings. It also worked nice for existing companies -- including even Microsoft -- which uses open source partially. However if you only have a single offering, like MongoDB the situation was not as clear.
And it is not AWS's fault that they don't want to pay per-seat licensing fees: https://www.techrepublic.com/a...
It seems like 50% of "blockchain" media outlets had journalistic integrity. I would call this a win.
It seems like a reasonable thing to do.
A while ago, I decided to clean up some clutter by selling all my extra chargers, cables, and whatnot. But I had to cancel that, since it turned out that I had to pay more for postage than what they sell the same thing for from China. Yes, even if I were to sell the used stuff at $0, a new one from China was cheaper than the USPS package price.
This is not sustainable, and US might bet a fair deal if one year period is used correctly.
From an economic perspective is coal better than natural gas in any way? Is is even better than frakking, which US has already developed very well?
Or the more important question: is keeping coal subsidized gives benefit anyone other than coal mine owners in the long run? Even the workers would be better off switching to another profession, like solar panel installers. Is it as "manly"? No, However is is manly to die of cancer at young age? And solar installation also pays better as a bonus (it is kind of a contractor/construction job anyways).
There is still a lot of potential here in US. It would be better not to waste it trying to keep dying industries alive.
VMs can have direct access to hardware. Once I tried adding a Windows virtual machine on top of Linux (KVM) with a PCI graphics card dedicated to that machine. I was able to get almost 100% performance out of the card (tested with a mining software) and can even overclock it.
The issue is you need a separate PCI card for each virtual machine, (or purchase an extremely expensive server class GPU with multiple VM access). There are guides for similar setups, where you'd most likely to have the on board GPU for the Linux desktop, and a PCI one for Windows gaming VM. That also requires a KVM of sorts, since they would have discrete outputs.
Their model usually works, but they overextended at this cloud thing.
First they got the Amazon to shut down the unlimited offering. Basically what Plex enables with "cloud" is that serving your own content, on 3rd party cloud providers, including Amazon, Dropbox etc. However when people uploaded their entire libraries to Amazon "unlimited" layer, all of a sudden Amazon decided to no longer provide such a storage.
Then Plex seem to have struggled just to keep the indexing / serving infrastructure for this service. These costs real CPU cycles, and they add up. Even if you pay, it would not be enough. So they are shutting down the "frontend".
At least you can still serve your own content on your own hardware (or vps). However I don't think you can serve thru Dropbox / etc directly anymore.
Some electronics require rare earth materials to manufacture, which currently are sources from China or other countries. Those have export restrictions from China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , and they ask the products to be manufactured there.
US now asks products to be manufactured here, and will add additional taxes (tariffs) if this request is not complied with.
So Apple and other manufacturers are split between two bad choices. They will have to weigh which one is less worse, and go in that direction. In all cases it will most likely be the consumers that suffer.
Unfortunately that would not work.
They would just get rid of low pay employees, and hire them into a contracting subsidiary. The CEO will keep their job, and the employees will lose their benefits.
As long as they have access to sufficient pool of lawyers, accountants, and lobbyist, they will get around those kind of restrictions.
Our current city / suburb design does not allow proper public transportation, but requires us to drive everywhere in personal vehicles. The place where people live, where they work, and where they spend their times are too far away, and not coordinated.
Back in time, the malls were actually designed to solve this problem by having enclosed living spaces. However given tax incentives that business had there, malls are currently (almost) always used by shopping, and not a tiny city as initially envisioned.
Also cities, especially here in Bay Area, want to have business offices built without supporting housing inside their limits. This causes a big unbalance. Also public transport are a patchwork of uncoordinated systems, where even biking to a place can take much less than using public transport. People voted for this system, and people got what they asked for.
We already have several ways to "pay for" free and open software.
1) Dual licensing: Several high profile projects, including QT, Ghostware, and MySQL use these for benefiting both closed source commercial, and open software. There is even research on this topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/...
2) "Patronage": Since middle ages artists depended on wealthy "patrons" to commission their work. The end result was "open" in sense they were usually presented in cathedrals, or museums, but the work was paid for powerful individuals. Now we have companies like IBM, RedHat, and even Microsoft sponsoring open source projects that benefit all.
3) Amateur work. The work itself has an intrinsic value in terms of intellectual gratification. Many people will contribute to open source projects just because they can on their own time.
The system actually is tested and works. It has produced great results, and used by billions of people today. Of course new ideas for patronage could arise, but it does not mean the current ones are broken.
There seems to be a grey area between fiction, and really harmful content. However the line between free speech, and being uncomfortable about something is very hard to draw.
I'm not sure how to objectively draw a boundary. However if the game is setup to allow real life footage to be amended with zombie shooting, this would have happened sooner or later.
How this finally plays out is actually important for the future boundaries of free speech.
(Note: I have a few INTC stock, so I might be biased).
Intel is generally terrible at scaling down. I had an ASUS tablet with an Atom processor, and it was not up par with ARM competitors. ARM can just sip tiny bits of power can go for all day, while Atom was not as efficient. (That is why they exited the mobile market, and currently only have Atom chips for server platforms).
That being said, if your goal is running x86 applications it is still better to go with the native processor. Until Windows can have really "universal" applications, Intel will still be a better choice for their platform compared to emulation.
They obviously do not want to file for bankruptcy. However at this point it looks like the best action to stop the suffering.
Their business plan relied on people not using their service. However it being "too good to be true", people actually wanted to use the subscription to the fullest. If you let people to watch one movie every day of the year, there would be people who would want to watch one movie per day. Not everyone is a family with kids with very little time, and can only go to theaters a few times a year. Many people, do have the time to go to the movies.
Sorry but your plan would have never worked, it failed miserably in the real life. Just accept it.
I once read the salary of an employee (or CEO) is based on their "replacement cost". There are of course other factors, like bargaining power, however it basically comes down to how much other CEOs make in a comparative market.
As long as CEO pay goes up nationwide, individual CEOs will also ask for (slightly) higher wages. And this will continue to feed in a never ending loop up an upwards spiral.
On the other hand the workers wages (especially for non-skill based positions) seem to be going down. As long as the trend continues, the "replacement cost" of workers would be very cheap for companies.
Even though these have become self fulfilling prophecies, the cycle can be broken by external factors. It probably won't be the government (since their good intentions do not fail to backfire, in miserable ways), but if the society as a whole demands the trends to move in the other direction, then they will slowly move the needles.
"
"welfare fraud is statistically speaking, extremely rare. In 2012, the DHA found only 500 cases of fraud among Sacramento's 193,000 recipients."
"
I would guess it would be much more easier and cheaper to help 500 people get off welfare than tracking the same amount (not necessarily the same people).
If we spend our energy making sure people don't need welfare, then there would be less need to track down offenders.
If it is your router, you should look at OpenWRT, DD-WRT or similar alternative Linux router distributions. This way you can ensure the updates for many years. (Or better, you can invest in a low-power PC and just install pf-sense, which would be leaps and bounds more capable than a tiny ARM machine).
If it is a security system, camera, alarm, etc. you'd need to make sure they are in a separate network. If possible a distinct network for each and every device with proper router rules, so that for example your NVR recording hub can access the camera only, etc. Of course Internet access should be disabled, since they usually happen to connect to a backdoor server. You might have a temporary rule to update firmware if necessary, or setup a VPN to access for your mobile devices. (Both iOS and Android can be setup to connect to your pf-sense router from outside of your LAN, Windows and Mac require some more steps due to self signed certificate issues).
If it is a "smart" device like a fridge, thermostat, or a light controller which needs to connect to the internet, you can keep them in a separate network to minimize damage, and replace them, as soon as the manufacturer stops updating. Unfortunately it might not be easy to letting to of a functional smart power outlet with monitoring, etc. but if there are known un-patched holes, you would not want the entire internet to be able to cause damage to whatever equipment you have down that connector.
Overall use your own judgment, and learn networking basics. Also do not be lazy (I still have some cameras that I need to finish securing).
Actually you can have backups.
When you enable 2FA, you'll get 10 backup codes which you can print and store offline (in a safe place).
You can also associate more than once device for 2FA. I actually have 4 active devices on my account. (One on the keychain, another on my badge, 2 backups at home).
Even if you were to lose all of them, it would still be possible to recover your account, however would of course require some effort.
Please do not engage publicly (or privately) with customers in a negative manner. This is a big "no-no", and can result in a negative outcome, similar to this one.
I agree that firing could be excessive, but it is still within the bounds of how HR can approach these issues.
If you are worried about someone being wrong in the internet, remember the xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/386/
It is not your job to fix the internet.
It is one of the things that is easy to learn, but takes many years to master.
The proper way to do things take a lot of discipline, and looking at the culmination of effort bringing really stable and predictable systems is satisfying. It is no longer as "visible" as other languages, but many of the software people use daily is still mostly C++ (and C of course). For Linux there is still heavy C usage (in the Kernel, X11/Wayland, and Gnome). However KDE desktop, LibreOffice, VLC, Firefox and many other projects are done in C++. Similarly for Windows low level interfaces are already in C++, and MacOS kernel and UI libraries also use C++, and Objective C++ (but not exclusively).
Yes, they are not "sexy" software items, but they work, and I have seen much less exceptions, crashes, and failures in proven C++ code, compared to many Java, Python, or JavaScript code.
A few new low level programming languages are trying to change the situation, but the progress is slow. It could be said that D was the initial one, later Go, and Rust came along. But still most non-experimental low level and mission critical software is still developed in C or C++.
So, no C++ is not a terrible language. It gets results, and many organizations still prefer to keep using it. Unlike older generation languages like COBOL (abandoned by banks), FORTRAN (abandoned for R/Python in scientific research), or Pascal (abandoned by Apple for ObjC++), the C++ community is still thriving.
US has widely varying costs of living across the states. For example, it was recently announced that making $100k/year puts you in lower income in Silicon Valley, while one could possibly live comfortably with $20k/year in rural places. This also depends on whether they have a house, or need to rent one, size of the families, and any medical or mental conditions that require ongoing care.
It could be argued that a fixed $20k amount would actually incentivize people to move from expensive areas into more reasonably prices ones. However in practice human behavior is difficult to change, and many, if not most such people would not do the move.
The one time US actually managed to do this with the "new deal", where people were actually put to work, and built the infrastructure we still use today. Given that infrastructure is crumbling after more than half a century of mostly neglect, it might be a good idea to renew the deal, and push people into working in places where labor is actually needed. Otherwise we'll run into an endless sprial of rising UBI costs, and dwindling tax revenue which will eventually bankrupt the country.
Steam has an offline mode.
It is not perfect, but should allow continuing playing of these games:
https://support.steampowered.c...
Another option is gog connect, which will liberate (a small subset of) your games from drm
https://www.gog.com/connect