If emergency alerts are to be rolled out in these sorts of situations, and if alerts should be able to reach us in more situations, then the only proper way to do it is on a per-device, basis, not a per-service basis.
The device can provide consistent alerts across ALL services it can run, without forcing each of those services to implement support for the alert system (plus, many of these devices are from manufacturers who make phones, so they already know how to support the alert system). The device can determine its own location and select the relevant alert channel without needing to provide your geolocation to anyone or anything else, meaning that maintaining your privacy is actually possible (though obviously not probable). The device can provide you with alerts even when you're not streaming via a service, meaning they can reach you more reliably. The device can continue to provide alerts so long as it can talk to the alert system itself, without the need for any third-party servers or ongoing infrastructure costs. The device can provide users with a centralized place where they can control and customize all alerts that might appear on the device, rather than needing to play whack-a-mole with dozens or hundreds of services.
Most importantly, the device provides me with a single thing that I can smash if the powers-that-be actually decide it's a good idea to make it impossible to disable the various ridiculous alerts that they are foisting on us these days (e.g. like the 2am amber alert I once received for a kid who had gone missing in a city that's four hours away from us by car).
The fact that the dictionary itself can’t even define the non-dairy definition of “milk” without referring to actual milk should tell you something about what the word inherently means. Here’s DuckDuckGo’s suggested definition:
A liquid, such as coconut milk, milkweed sap, plant latex, or various medical emulsions, that is similar to milk in appearance.
I agree that this is how things should happen, but what executive orders are you talking about in this context? To my knowledge, there haven't been any. It's just been the FCC overturning its own orders, which it is doing via the authority granted it by Congress in the Telecommunications Act and subsequent amendments to the Act.
Codifying important matters like these into law is certainly the way that things should work if we want them to have any permanence, but broadly speaking, it's not a bad thing for Congress to delegate the handling of day-to-day activities to an agency or commission. Not only can an agency act more quickly than a legislative body in response to issues that inevitably arise, but it can—when functioning properly—also have qualitatively better responses based on their awareness of and specialty in that particular field. Of course, these sorts of organizations don't always function properly, as has sadly been the case recently, so it's good that Congress retains the final authority in terms of directing the organizations towards serving their intended purposes.
Nobody is going to tell you that you can't discount those widgets until someone buys one at your inflated price.
That wasn't what I was saying. You can sell them for $50 whenever you want, but you can't advertise that $50 price as being "50% off" the $100 price at which you never managed to sell any. It's a truth in advertising issue, not a "what's a valid price" issue. You can set whatever price you want, but you can't advertise that price as being a discount from a fictitious value that they never actually sold at.
That said, it's worth pointing out that I was factually wrong about some of the other things I said and that I've already corrected myself in a followup post to another response. These sorts of regulations are not nearly as widespread as I had thought they were. They do exist (e.g. in California, which is not where I live, so I'm not sure why I thought these were common), but they are not at the federal level in the US as I suggested.
You know what? Fair point. In fact-checking myself, it looks like this form of regulation is not nearly as widespread as I thought. Most places refer to this sort of practice as using "fictitious prices", and California has fairly strict laws against their use and there are a number of lawsuits (notably: NOT criminal cases, as I implied might apply) that have been initiated, but there isn't the federal level of regulation in the US that I thought there was, so thank you for calling me on that. As for the EU, I don't check any further, but given how off-base I was about the US, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that I was wrong there as well.
So, I was wrong. Very wrong. I got some things right, but not nearly as well as I thought. Thank you again for calling me out on it.
That jeweler may be running afoul of the law, since that sort of slimy practice is exactly why it's illegal in many jurisdictions (e.g. US, Europe, etc.) to use arbitrary list prices. Generally speaking, the item must have sold at the listed price at some point in the previous X days if the seller wants to use that price as the one that they're marking it down from. So, for instance, if you wanted to sell an item at a sale price of $50 while marking it as 50% off, someone else would have had to have paid $100 to buy that same item from you in, say, the previous month.
I seem to recall that Amazon recently (a year or two ago) ran into this issue, since regulators were questioning whether the items were actually selling at the prices that Amazon was listing them as being marked down from. Of course, a shady jeweler isn't quite as likely to get noticed by federal regulators or whatnot...
Actually, the nice thing about this approach is that it still works fine even if 100% of the wild population is immune. So long as they can keep infecting the captive population, the males will continue being sterile, which is all they need for this to work.
Things only fall apart if the females begin selecting wild males to the exclusion of captive ones, or if scientists are unable to prevent immunity from spreading in the captive population (which would be a massive blunder on their part).
Who cares if you're running 32+ GB of RAM. Sucks if you're stuck on that modern new Macbook that caps out at 16 GB...
A) That’s like responding to a car analogy with “who cares if you own a private jet”? Suggesting that people should have 32GB of RAM to run a browser is preposterous.
B) The new MacBook Pros are configurable up to 32GB of RAM...
It's a film that is so popular that the line for movie tickets busts out into neighboring city blocks from the block where the theater is located.
Also, it's a store that was revolutionary in 1995 for its use of video rental fees that were 30 years ahead of their time. I mean, seriously, I can rent a movie tonight for less than my family did at Blockbuster in the early '90s.
I agree with everything you're saying about how things should function. Enforcing our laws is a good idea. Full stop. It's how other things function in real life and it's how things should work in the digital world as well. I'm not disagreeing with you about that. Nor am I disagreeing with you over what is or isn't a crime. We seem to be on the same page about all of that.
But how do we put it into practice? Your suggestion that "we start enforcing the laws" is predicated on the assumption that we are capable of enforcing the laws. I don't think we are. Going back to my original response:
Connected devices, however, flip those balances on their heads, with [...] low risks and high rewards for criminals (i.e. with the ability to automate and attack from anywhere, criminals can do a lot more damage with very little exposure to themselves). As such, our traditional deterrents and redresses no longer function as well as they once did.
Put differently, I think the laws are fine, and I agree that we should be enforcing them, but I think that we are already enforcing them to the best of our ability, which only serves to prove that our ability to enforce them is broken. We certainly should be working towards enforcing our laws more effectively, and where we have an inability to do so we should be figuring out how to overcome those hurdles. But, during periods where the law can't keep up with criminals, the only reasonable choice a person can make is to secure their property themselves.
That's all I'm advocating for. I'm not saying we should do it instead of enforcing the law. I'm saying that we should do it until we can enforce the law effectively.
Agreed, but that misses what I was saying. In real life, people like you are who I commonly deal with. In a connected world, unethical people are who I’m bound to encounter because the boundaries have been removed by connectivity. Ethics work fine when we surround ourselves with people like ourselves. They fail when anyone can reach us.
I'm no (longer a) fan of Google, but I'd disagree with a few of those inclusions. Sure, they may have bought them, but they don't serve to prove that Google doesn't innovate.
For instance, the Google Maps project may have been jumpstarted via an acquisition, but the thing they bought was a desktop application written in C++. Google Maps itself was actually highly innovative and influential when it launched, but not for any of the reasons that made the acquired product what it was.
You might recall that prior to (and even for a time after) the launch of Google Maps, Mapquest and its competitors all relied on page refreshes as you tried to move the map around. It's hard to believe that it was only 13 years ago, but it was revolutionary to be able to drag the map in Google Maps and have it load off-screen tiles without using a page refresh, all thanks to AJAX (this was back before AJAX had even been called that yet). Google Maps was a watershed moment for Javascript at large, which up to that time had largely earned a reputation as a cumbersome, clumsy technology with few uses and poor adoption, outside of its brief stint of popularity during the early aughts when DHTML was a thing and CSS adoption was still spotty. It's easy to claim that we knew better back then, but the fact is that many developers were dismissing Javascript prior to Google Maps' launch, and though it wasn't the first site to adopt AJAX (e.g. Kayak.com had done it the year before, as had Gmail), it was the first to make the benefits of it plainly obvious to everyone, showing the world wide web a different way forward.
Or, as an alternative summarization of its impact: you can blame Google Maps for Javascript bloating the web.
My father used to tell me that most crimes are crimes of opportunity, which I've largely found to be true in my experience. Someone leaves their car unlocked with valuables visible. Someone leaves their phone at the bar as they go to use the restroom. That sort of thing. In the real world, the criminals you're most likely to encounter are common ones with unsophisticated methods, so simple preventative steps coupled with the effective deterrents you mentioned are generally more than adequate to prevent any given person from becoming a target.
But in a world of connected devices, everything that isn't locked down is effectively just as insecure as a valuable left behind an open door. Everything becomes a crime of opportunity. Not only that, but the opportunity is open to any criminal in the world, rather than being limited to those in your immediate vicinity. Prosecution is an ineffective deterrent when the criminal remains anonymous in most situations. Insurance is an insufficient redress for a "genie can't be put back in the bottle" situation like identity theft, which can have unforeseen, lifelong ramifications.
Put differently, most traditional cases for physical security (e.g. your home example) come with low risks and simple remedies for the victims (i.e. things are mostly replaceable once there's a monetary payout, either via insurance or restitution), and low rewards with high risks for the criminals (i.e. they're physically limited in how much they can take, with each act increasing the likelihood they will be caught), meaning that our civilized, traditional approaches do well at handling those issues. Connected devices, however, flip those balances on their heads, with high risks and poor remedies for victims (i.e. important things can be lost and never fully recovered), and low risks and high rewards for criminals (i.e. with the ability to automate and attack from anywhere, criminals can do a lot more damage with very little exposure to themselves). As such, our traditional deterrents and redresses no longer function as well as they once did.
Ideally, we'd restore those balances, but until and unless we succeed in doing so, it isn't an overreaction or an unreasonable response for people to take their security more seriously when it comes to their connected devices.
P.S. The traffic example you gave was good, but I'll quibble about its inclusion, since it's addressing safety, not security.
1Password is not exclusively via the cloud, nor has it ever been. In fact, hosted cloud syncing is only a relatively recent addition to how 1Password can be used. The other ways you can use it are: - No syncing: Just use it as a standalone manager on any given device - Local WiFi syncing: Connect your devices on a local network and you can manually initiate a sync between them - DIY Cloud syncing: Point 1Password to your Dropbox or iCloud Drive directory and it will sync your vault via it automatically
(I think there may even be an option to only sync over a wired connection between mobile devices and a PC, but I haven't used that feature, so I can't say for sure)
AgileBits offers a hosted cloud syncing option as part of their subscription plan, but many of us old-timers who are using it still opt to do the one-time payments for the apps and then manage (or not) how we sync things ourselves, rather than going the subscription route with centralized cloud hosting.
To me, however, the bigger question is: why would a company (Apple) that's in the process of updating their own password manager (Keychain is getting a major overhaul in the already-announced next version of macOS) suddenly abandon the work they've done by adopting a competing app or acquiring it? It makes no sense. They either would have acquired AgileBits before the updates to Keychain, or else they would have (as they seem to be doing) updated Keychain and then kept going that route on their own...no need for 1Password at all.
When you pull up to a gas station and see an out of order placard on a pump, do you bother checking to see if free gas is being dispensed by it, or do you simply go to an open pump? For all I know, this problem is a common one, with none of us any the wiser.
Or, how about simply covering the pump with an “Out of Order” sign/bag/covering like they would for any other malfunction? No need to even shut it off when cutting off access to it is sufficient.
They were paid to deliver a package. They cannot deliver it to me if I am not where they are trying to deliver it.
UPS is paid to deliver to an address. If the sender opted for Signature On Delivery, UPS is being paid to deliver to a person at an address. They never agreed to deliver to you no matter where you are. The only couriers I'm aware of who will accept payment to do what you're describing are the ones who specialize in serving legal documents to hostile recipients.
Colo is not free, despite Netflix offering to provide a colocated server in Comcast's data center "for free".
Again, Comcast wasn't providing colocation, so the payments they were demanding had nothing to do with it.
Border congestion is not "throttling".
Agreed, but border congestion has nothing to do with what happened. Multiple Comcast users demonstrated that they were perfectly capable of streaming Netflix without any problem across the "congested" border link via VPN, which shouldn't have been possible if it was congested. Likewise, packets from Netflix that had been modified to indicate a different sender were shown to be able to traverse that link without issue, as were packets from entirely unrelated sites and services that also traversed that same link. In fact, no evidence for congestion was ever provided by either Comcast or any of the independent parties studying the situation.
Quite the contrary, all of the evidence that was ever presented pointed to Comcast singling out for throttling the packets that were marked as being sent by Netflix. Simple as that. Moreover, the fact that the "congestion" appeared suddenly and then disappeared the same day that Netflix ponied up the cash—even before they had begun colocating—demonstrated that the link was already more than capable of supporting the traffic, as well as that the fees Comcast was demanding were for something other than (or, at most, in addition to) colocation.
But, as with pretty much everything else you've said, whether they were throttling or congested is actually irrelevant to what I was talking about, since I was only mentioning throttling as a way to refer to when this incident started.
This is great news for all the people who have had to pay extra to redirect a package that UPS is trying to deliver to a place where they aren't. UPS has been paid to deliver it already. Charging $5 to readdress it enroute is a breach of contract.
Oh, wait, as a recipient of a package I have no contract with UPS.
You're actually making my point here. You're paying $5 because you're paying for something above and beyond what UPS was originally contracted to perform. You established your own contract with them to perform an additional service. What additional service was Comcast providing when it demanded extra payments? So far as I've seen, Comcast was demanding additional payments for exactly what they were already contracted to perform. If Comcast wants to charge Netflix extra to colocate or whatnot, I have no problem with that, but if their customers have already paid them to do a job, I expect them to do it, not to throttle Netflix and demand payment for the job they were already paid to do.
NN has nothing to do with charging other commercial operators a fee for co-locating their servers in the ISPs data center.
Given that Netflix wasn't colocating with Comcast in the first place when Comcast throttled them and demanded the fees I was talking about, it should be pretty obvious that I wasn't talking about colocation fees prior to your bringing them up. I agree that NN has nothing to say about colocation fees, and I'm actually perfectly fine with them, but that has no bearing on anything you were responding to.
No, nothing in the summary suggested anything of that sort. Nothing is stopping ISPs from charging heavy users for their heavy use, just as they can now. But once the user pays for their service, the ISP is obligated to provide the service. They don't get to double-dip by claiming that the payment they already accepted was insufficient and that the sender needs to pony up the difference if they want that data to arrive in a timely fashion. That's called extortion. If FedEx and Amazon agree to a contract and you then order something from Amazon, FedEx doesn't get to hustle you for money in order to deliver the package on time. They got paid to do the job and now they need to do it.
Moreover, contrary to your suggestion, this actually ensures that we DON'T end up subsidizing others. Without safeguards like these, the fees that ISPs like Comcast were trying to charge services like Netflix will inevitably be passed on to users by those services, at which point users on well-behaved ISPs (i.e. ones that don't charge these fees) will end up subsidizing the people stuck with misbehaving ISPs. Either that, or Netflix will have to add something like a Comcast Surcharge for its users who are stuck with misbehaving ISPs.
Someone ends up paying either way, but if these fees represent increased costs of business incurred by these ISPs, then the only proper thing to do is to increase the amount that they charge their customers (and accept the PR hit for having high prices), rather than illicitly trying to hide the costs by demanding that third-parties pay them for a job they had already accepted payment to do.
The Concorde flies 14 miles per gallon of fuel, while the Boeing 787 flies 104 miles per gallon. Also consider the Concorde only carried 128 passengers, while the 787-9 can carry 290. Doing the math, on a 3,470 mile flight from New York to London, a Concorde would consume 1.936 gallons of fuel per passenger, while a 787-9 would consume only 0.115 gallons per customer.
You’ve misunderstood the fuel economy numbers you quoted, which should have been readily apparent as soon as you tried to suggest that a Concorde got similar fuel economy (14 mpg) to an older car. The original numbers you gave were already on a miles per gallon per passenger basis, so dividing them again by the number of passengers gives you a useless number.
1 BTC = $6,574.50 USD right now 1 BTC = $6,199.80 USD one week ago 1 BTC = $7,717.00 USD one month ago 1 BTC = $16,041.00 USD six months ago 1 BTC = $2,649.60 USD one year ago
So, yes, you're correct about the prices, but so is the summary. Prices are far down from where they were before, but they're also up from where they were before, depending on how far back you look. Even so, it's the recent downturn that is having an immediate effect on reducing prices in the GPU market, just as the upward swing had an effect on the market a few months back. Moreover, the summary doesn't seem to exaggerate anything. They even explicitly acknowledged that this recent downturn does not necessarily indicate any sort of cryptocurrency bubble bursting.
AMD and their board partners were cautious and deliberately under-produced during the craze and now that things have died down they don't have the surplus stock Nvidia has. Nvidia has reportedly even had to resort to delaying the launch of their next generation of cards just so that they can shift their existing inventory without having to resort to fire sale prices.
Great points all around, but I wanted to draw special attention to this statement of yours in particular. The summary is suggesting that Nvidia’s next cards are coming soon, but Nvidia’s President said last month at Computex that we won’t see the new cards for “a long time”. People reading the tea leaves are expecting an announcement or leaks to start in earnest next month, but with word straight from the horse’s mouth and rumors about them having far too much inventory seeming to bear out, we have no good reason to expect new cards to be released anytime soon. At best, we may see something, but we shouldn’t expect to have it in ours hands anytime soon.
Surely the fact that eInk displays are far more prone to breaking and being hacked than the sheets of metal they’re replacing is a feature, right?
If you’re willing to throw money away like this, why not just go the Steve Jobs (yes, he really did this) route of leasing a new car every few months so you can take advantage of the no-plates grace period that comes with new cars in California, that way you don’t need any plates at all?
Slashdot Mirror
If emergency alerts are to be rolled out in these sorts of situations, and if alerts should be able to reach us in more situations, then the only proper way to do it is on a per-device, basis, not a per-service basis.
The device can provide consistent alerts across ALL services it can run, without forcing each of those services to implement support for the alert system (plus, many of these devices are from manufacturers who make phones, so they already know how to support the alert system). The device can determine its own location and select the relevant alert channel without needing to provide your geolocation to anyone or anything else, meaning that maintaining your privacy is actually possible (though obviously not probable). The device can provide you with alerts even when you're not streaming via a service, meaning they can reach you more reliably. The device can continue to provide alerts so long as it can talk to the alert system itself, without the need for any third-party servers or ongoing infrastructure costs. The device can provide users with a centralized place where they can control and customize all alerts that might appear on the device, rather than needing to play whack-a-mole with dozens or hundreds of services.
Most importantly, the device provides me with a single thing that I can smash if the powers-that-be actually decide it's a good idea to make it impossible to disable the various ridiculous alerts that they are foisting on us these days (e.g. like the 2am amber alert I once received for a kid who had gone missing in a city that's four hours away from us by car).
The fact that the dictionary itself can’t even define the non-dairy definition of “milk” without referring to actual milk should tell you something about what the word inherently means. Here’s DuckDuckGo’s suggested definition:
A liquid, such as coconut milk, milkweed sap, plant latex, or various medical emulsions, that is similar to milk in appearance.
But you see the same thing happening in other dictionaries as well, nearly all of which define “milk” in terms of its resemblance to actual milk:
https://www.merriam-webster.co...
https://www.thefreedictionary....
https://medical-dictionary.the...
I agree that this is how things should happen, but what executive orders are you talking about in this context? To my knowledge, there haven't been any. It's just been the FCC overturning its own orders, which it is doing via the authority granted it by Congress in the Telecommunications Act and subsequent amendments to the Act.
Codifying important matters like these into law is certainly the way that things should work if we want them to have any permanence, but broadly speaking, it's not a bad thing for Congress to delegate the handling of day-to-day activities to an agency or commission. Not only can an agency act more quickly than a legislative body in response to issues that inevitably arise, but it can—when functioning properly—also have qualitatively better responses based on their awareness of and specialty in that particular field. Of course, these sorts of organizations don't always function properly, as has sadly been the case recently, so it's good that Congress retains the final authority in terms of directing the organizations towards serving their intended purposes.
Nobody is going to tell you that you can't discount those widgets until someone buys one at your inflated price.
That wasn't what I was saying. You can sell them for $50 whenever you want, but you can't advertise that $50 price as being "50% off" the $100 price at which you never managed to sell any. It's a truth in advertising issue, not a "what's a valid price" issue. You can set whatever price you want, but you can't advertise that price as being a discount from a fictitious value that they never actually sold at.
That said, it's worth pointing out that I was factually wrong about some of the other things I said and that I've already corrected myself in a followup post to another response. These sorts of regulations are not nearly as widespread as I had thought they were. They do exist (e.g. in California, which is not where I live, so I'm not sure why I thought these were common), but they are not at the federal level in the US as I suggested.
You know what? Fair point. In fact-checking myself, it looks like this form of regulation is not nearly as widespread as I thought. Most places refer to this sort of practice as using "fictitious prices", and California has fairly strict laws against their use and there are a number of lawsuits (notably: NOT criminal cases, as I implied might apply) that have been initiated, but there isn't the federal level of regulation in the US that I thought there was, so thank you for calling me on that. As for the EU, I don't check any further, but given how off-base I was about the US, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that I was wrong there as well.
So, I was wrong. Very wrong. I got some things right, but not nearly as well as I thought. Thank you again for calling me out on it.
That jeweler may be running afoul of the law, since that sort of slimy practice is exactly why it's illegal in many jurisdictions (e.g. US, Europe, etc.) to use arbitrary list prices. Generally speaking, the item must have sold at the listed price at some point in the previous X days if the seller wants to use that price as the one that they're marking it down from. So, for instance, if you wanted to sell an item at a sale price of $50 while marking it as 50% off, someone else would have had to have paid $100 to buy that same item from you in, say, the previous month.
I seem to recall that Amazon recently (a year or two ago) ran into this issue, since regulators were questioning whether the items were actually selling at the prices that Amazon was listing them as being marked down from. Of course, a shady jeweler isn't quite as likely to get noticed by federal regulators or whatnot...
Actually, the nice thing about this approach is that it still works fine even if 100% of the wild population is immune. So long as they can keep infecting the captive population, the males will continue being sterile, which is all they need for this to work.
Things only fall apart if the females begin selecting wild males to the exclusion of captive ones, or if scientists are unable to prevent immunity from spreading in the captive population (which would be a massive blunder on their part).
Who cares if you're running 32+ GB of RAM. Sucks if you're stuck on that modern new Macbook that caps out at 16 GB...
A) That’s like responding to a car analogy with “who cares if you own a private jet”? Suggesting that people should have 32GB of RAM to run a browser is preposterous.
B) The new MacBook Pros are configurable up to 32GB of RAM...
I’ll disagree. Even the most expensive iTunes rentals today are simply on par with what Blockbuster was charging decades ago.
It's a film that is so popular that the line for movie tickets busts out into neighboring city blocks from the block where the theater is located.
Also, it's a store that was revolutionary in 1995 for its use of video rental fees that were 30 years ahead of their time. I mean, seriously, I can rent a movie tonight for less than my family did at Blockbuster in the early '90s.
I agree with everything you're saying about how things should function. Enforcing our laws is a good idea. Full stop. It's how other things function in real life and it's how things should work in the digital world as well. I'm not disagreeing with you about that. Nor am I disagreeing with you over what is or isn't a crime. We seem to be on the same page about all of that.
But how do we put it into practice? Your suggestion that "we start enforcing the laws" is predicated on the assumption that we are capable of enforcing the laws. I don't think we are. Going back to my original response:
Connected devices, however, flip those balances on their heads, with [...] low risks and high rewards for criminals (i.e. with the ability to automate and attack from anywhere, criminals can do a lot more damage with very little exposure to themselves). As such, our traditional deterrents and redresses no longer function as well as they once did.
Put differently, I think the laws are fine, and I agree that we should be enforcing them, but I think that we are already enforcing them to the best of our ability, which only serves to prove that our ability to enforce them is broken. We certainly should be working towards enforcing our laws more effectively, and where we have an inability to do so we should be figuring out how to overcome those hurdles. But, during periods where the law can't keep up with criminals, the only reasonable choice a person can make is to secure their property themselves.
That's all I'm advocating for. I'm not saying we should do it instead of enforcing the law. I'm saying that we should do it until we can enforce the law effectively.
Agreed, but that misses what I was saying. In real life, people like you are who I commonly deal with. In a connected world, unethical people are who I’m bound to encounter because the boundaries have been removed by connectivity. Ethics work fine when we surround ourselves with people like ourselves. They fail when anyone can reach us.
I'm no (longer a) fan of Google, but I'd disagree with a few of those inclusions. Sure, they may have bought them, but they don't serve to prove that Google doesn't innovate.
For instance, the Google Maps project may have been jumpstarted via an acquisition, but the thing they bought was a desktop application written in C++. Google Maps itself was actually highly innovative and influential when it launched, but not for any of the reasons that made the acquired product what it was.
You might recall that prior to (and even for a time after) the launch of Google Maps, Mapquest and its competitors all relied on page refreshes as you tried to move the map around. It's hard to believe that it was only 13 years ago, but it was revolutionary to be able to drag the map in Google Maps and have it load off-screen tiles without using a page refresh, all thanks to AJAX (this was back before AJAX had even been called that yet). Google Maps was a watershed moment for Javascript at large, which up to that time had largely earned a reputation as a cumbersome, clumsy technology with few uses and poor adoption, outside of its brief stint of popularity during the early aughts when DHTML was a thing and CSS adoption was still spotty. It's easy to claim that we knew better back then, but the fact is that many developers were dismissing Javascript prior to Google Maps' launch, and though it wasn't the first site to adopt AJAX (e.g. Kayak.com had done it the year before, as had Gmail), it was the first to make the benefits of it plainly obvious to everyone, showing the world wide web a different way forward.
Or, as an alternative summarization of its impact: you can blame Google Maps for Javascript bloating the web.
My father used to tell me that most crimes are crimes of opportunity, which I've largely found to be true in my experience. Someone leaves their car unlocked with valuables visible. Someone leaves their phone at the bar as they go to use the restroom. That sort of thing. In the real world, the criminals you're most likely to encounter are common ones with unsophisticated methods, so simple preventative steps coupled with the effective deterrents you mentioned are generally more than adequate to prevent any given person from becoming a target.
But in a world of connected devices, everything that isn't locked down is effectively just as insecure as a valuable left behind an open door. Everything becomes a crime of opportunity. Not only that, but the opportunity is open to any criminal in the world, rather than being limited to those in your immediate vicinity. Prosecution is an ineffective deterrent when the criminal remains anonymous in most situations. Insurance is an insufficient redress for a "genie can't be put back in the bottle" situation like identity theft, which can have unforeseen, lifelong ramifications.
Put differently, most traditional cases for physical security (e.g. your home example) come with low risks and simple remedies for the victims (i.e. things are mostly replaceable once there's a monetary payout, either via insurance or restitution), and low rewards with high risks for the criminals (i.e. they're physically limited in how much they can take, with each act increasing the likelihood they will be caught), meaning that our civilized, traditional approaches do well at handling those issues. Connected devices, however, flip those balances on their heads, with high risks and poor remedies for victims (i.e. important things can be lost and never fully recovered), and low risks and high rewards for criminals (i.e. with the ability to automate and attack from anywhere, criminals can do a lot more damage with very little exposure to themselves). As such, our traditional deterrents and redresses no longer function as well as they once did.
Ideally, we'd restore those balances, but until and unless we succeed in doing so, it isn't an overreaction or an unreasonable response for people to take their security more seriously when it comes to their connected devices.
P.S. The traffic example you gave was good, but I'll quibble about its inclusion, since it's addressing safety, not security.
1Password is not exclusively via the cloud, nor has it ever been. In fact, hosted cloud syncing is only a relatively recent addition to how 1Password can be used. The other ways you can use it are:
- No syncing: Just use it as a standalone manager on any given device
- Local WiFi syncing: Connect your devices on a local network and you can manually initiate a sync between them
- DIY Cloud syncing: Point 1Password to your Dropbox or iCloud Drive directory and it will sync your vault via it automatically
(I think there may even be an option to only sync over a wired connection between mobile devices and a PC, but I haven't used that feature, so I can't say for sure)
AgileBits offers a hosted cloud syncing option as part of their subscription plan, but many of us old-timers who are using it still opt to do the one-time payments for the apps and then manage (or not) how we sync things ourselves, rather than going the subscription route with centralized cloud hosting.
To me, however, the bigger question is: why would a company (Apple) that's in the process of updating their own password manager (Keychain is getting a major overhaul in the already-announced next version of macOS) suddenly abandon the work they've done by adopting a competing app or acquiring it? It makes no sense. They either would have acquired AgileBits before the updates to Keychain, or else they would have (as they seem to be doing) updated Keychain and then kept going that route on their own...no need for 1Password at all.
Moreover, the fact that AgileBits poured water all over this rumor via Twitter seems to suggest that there's a lot of smoke but no fire here.
When you pull up to a gas station and see an out of order placard on a pump, do you bother checking to see if free gas is being dispensed by it, or do you simply go to an open pump? For all I know, this problem is a common one, with none of us any the wiser.
Or, how about simply covering the pump with an “Out of Order” sign/bag/covering like they would for any other malfunction? No need to even shut it off when cutting off access to it is sufficient.
They were paid to deliver a package. They cannot deliver it to me if I am not where they are trying to deliver it.
UPS is paid to deliver to an address. If the sender opted for Signature On Delivery, UPS is being paid to deliver to a person at an address. They never agreed to deliver to you no matter where you are. The only couriers I'm aware of who will accept payment to do what you're describing are the ones who specialize in serving legal documents to hostile recipients.
Colo is not free, despite Netflix offering to provide a colocated server in Comcast's data center "for free".
Again, Comcast wasn't providing colocation, so the payments they were demanding had nothing to do with it.
Border congestion is not "throttling".
Agreed, but border congestion has nothing to do with what happened. Multiple Comcast users demonstrated that they were perfectly capable of streaming Netflix without any problem across the "congested" border link via VPN, which shouldn't have been possible if it was congested. Likewise, packets from Netflix that had been modified to indicate a different sender were shown to be able to traverse that link without issue, as were packets from entirely unrelated sites and services that also traversed that same link. In fact, no evidence for congestion was ever provided by either Comcast or any of the independent parties studying the situation.
Quite the contrary, all of the evidence that was ever presented pointed to Comcast singling out for throttling the packets that were marked as being sent by Netflix. Simple as that. Moreover, the fact that the "congestion" appeared suddenly and then disappeared the same day that Netflix ponied up the cash—even before they had begun colocating—demonstrated that the link was already more than capable of supporting the traffic, as well as that the fees Comcast was demanding were for something other than (or, at most, in addition to) colocation.
But, as with pretty much everything else you've said, whether they were throttling or congested is actually irrelevant to what I was talking about, since I was only mentioning throttling as a way to refer to when this incident started.
Actually, they do pay. Historically, most of their content has been hosted on AWS, and AWS charges based on bandwidth used, among other things.
Where do people like you get these ideas?
This is great news for all the people who have had to pay extra to redirect a package that UPS is trying to deliver to a place where they aren't. UPS has been paid to deliver it already. Charging $5 to readdress it enroute is a breach of contract.
Oh, wait, as a recipient of a package I have no contract with UPS.
You're actually making my point here. You're paying $5 because you're paying for something above and beyond what UPS was originally contracted to perform. You established your own contract with them to perform an additional service. What additional service was Comcast providing when it demanded extra payments? So far as I've seen, Comcast was demanding additional payments for exactly what they were already contracted to perform. If Comcast wants to charge Netflix extra to colocate or whatnot, I have no problem with that, but if their customers have already paid them to do a job, I expect them to do it, not to throttle Netflix and demand payment for the job they were already paid to do.
NN has nothing to do with charging other commercial operators a fee for co-locating their servers in the ISPs data center.
Given that Netflix wasn't colocating with Comcast in the first place when Comcast throttled them and demanded the fees I was talking about, it should be pretty obvious that I wasn't talking about colocation fees prior to your bringing them up. I agree that NN has nothing to say about colocation fees, and I'm actually perfectly fine with them, but that has no bearing on anything you were responding to.
No, nothing in the summary suggested anything of that sort. Nothing is stopping ISPs from charging heavy users for their heavy use, just as they can now. But once the user pays for their service, the ISP is obligated to provide the service. They don't get to double-dip by claiming that the payment they already accepted was insufficient and that the sender needs to pony up the difference if they want that data to arrive in a timely fashion. That's called extortion. If FedEx and Amazon agree to a contract and you then order something from Amazon, FedEx doesn't get to hustle you for money in order to deliver the package on time. They got paid to do the job and now they need to do it.
Moreover, contrary to your suggestion, this actually ensures that we DON'T end up subsidizing others. Without safeguards like these, the fees that ISPs like Comcast were trying to charge services like Netflix will inevitably be passed on to users by those services, at which point users on well-behaved ISPs (i.e. ones that don't charge these fees) will end up subsidizing the people stuck with misbehaving ISPs. Either that, or Netflix will have to add something like a Comcast Surcharge for its users who are stuck with misbehaving ISPs.
Someone ends up paying either way, but if these fees represent increased costs of business incurred by these ISPs, then the only proper thing to do is to increase the amount that they charge their customers (and accept the PR hit for having high prices), rather than illicitly trying to hide the costs by demanding that third-parties pay them for a job they had already accepted payment to do.
The Concorde flies 14 miles per gallon of fuel, while the Boeing 787 flies 104 miles per gallon. Also consider the Concorde only carried 128 passengers, while the 787-9 can carry 290. Doing the math, on a 3,470 mile flight from New York to London, a Concorde would consume 1.936 gallons of fuel per passenger, while a 787-9 would consume only 0.115 gallons per customer.
You’ve misunderstood the fuel economy numbers you quoted, which should have been readily apparent as soon as you tried to suggest that a Concorde got similar fuel economy (14 mpg) to an older car. The original numbers you gave were already on a miles per gallon per passenger basis, so dividing them again by the number of passengers gives you a useless number.
1 BTC = $6,574.50 USD right now
1 BTC = $6,199.80 USD one week ago
1 BTC = $7,717.00 USD one month ago
1 BTC = $16,041.00 USD six months ago
1 BTC = $2,649.60 USD one year ago
So, yes, you're correct about the prices, but so is the summary. Prices are far down from where they were before, but they're also up from where they were before, depending on how far back you look. Even so, it's the recent downturn that is having an immediate effect on reducing prices in the GPU market, just as the upward swing had an effect on the market a few months back. Moreover, the summary doesn't seem to exaggerate anything. They even explicitly acknowledged that this recent downturn does not necessarily indicate any sort of cryptocurrency bubble bursting.
AMD and their board partners were cautious and deliberately under-produced during the craze and now that things have died down they don't have the surplus stock Nvidia has. Nvidia has reportedly even had to resort to delaying the launch of their next generation of cards just so that they can shift their existing inventory without having to resort to fire sale prices.
Great points all around, but I wanted to draw special attention to this statement of yours in particular. The summary is suggesting that Nvidia’s next cards are coming soon, but Nvidia’s President said last month at Computex that we won’t see the new cards for “a long time”. People reading the tea leaves are expecting an announcement or leaks to start in earnest next month, but with word straight from the horse’s mouth and rumors about them having far too much inventory seeming to bear out, we have no good reason to expect new cards to be released anytime soon. At best, we may see something, but we shouldn’t expect to have it in ours hands anytime soon.
Surely the fact that eInk displays are far more prone to breaking and being hacked than the sheets of metal they’re replacing is a feature, right?
If you’re willing to throw money away like this, why not just go the Steve Jobs (yes, he really did this) route of leasing a new car every few months so you can take advantage of the no-plates grace period that comes with new cars in California, that way you don’t need any plates at all?