Also, are you actually defending Ghostbusters and The Last Jedi? I haven't seen the former, but by all accounts it was rather poor. I did see the latter, however, and it ranks down there with the prequels in my book. Between the opening credit crawl that tossed out everything established in the immediately prior film, the warp attack and the palace fight scene that sacrificed any semblance maintaining a coherent universe for the sake of stuff that looks cool, the third of the movie wasted on the casino, the Mary Poppins moment for Leia, the wasted opportunity to have real consequences by either sacrificing Finn to the laser or having Rose's choice to save him result in the loss of everyone else, and all of the purposeful middle fingers given to the fans (e.g. Luke's portrayal that made no sense to even Mark Hamill, Snoke's demise, Rey's parents, etc.), it was a bad movie. Not the worst in the series, but certainly not a good one. Mind you, I was looking forward to see it going in, since the director was saying all the right things to tick the checkboxes I was looking for. After The Force Awakens, which was basically just a giant push of the reset button on the universe, I was looking forward to moving things forward in a new and exciting direction. He just failed to deliver.
That said, I'm really looking forward to Captain Marvel. We already have tickets for a Friday showing and I'm eager to see it, albeit, with a bit of apprehension that they may not knock it out of the park and that it'll leave me less excited as the MCU heads to its climax. We'll see.
My wife and I have started playing the "guess the RT scores" game after watching movies for the first time. We'll try to guess the critic and audience scores and see who can get closest. After I went to an early screening of Alita: Battle Angel on the Tuesday before its full release, I was disappointed (but not surprised) to find out that the Audience Score wasn't yet available since the film hadn't yet had its full release. To say the least, the notion that Captain Marvel's Audience Score would be posted weeks in advance of its release is a bit absurd.
Sure, but early off-the-record comments from reviewers for this one have actually been surprisingly positive. I was honestly expecting it to detract from the lead-up to Endgame and I questioned the wisdom in introducing a game-changing character this close to the climax of the story they've been telling for the last decade. By all indications, however, it sounds like the bet may pay off. In a quick roundup I read last week, most of the off-the-record reviewers were saying that it's increased their anticipation and the buildup leading to Endgame, even more so than where things left off at the end of Infinity War last year. That was not at all what I was expecting.
Do you agree it's not that simple, or are you an absolutist, denying any complexity?
As with all rights—yours, mine, or otherwise—none are absolute in their scope and strength. My reason for asserting a business' (non-absolute) ability to choose its own business offerings is because you have seemingly been taking the opposing absolutist stance: that businesses have "no rights" at all. Clearly they have some rights, otherwise you'd be able to walk into a bank and demand a 2000% interest rate for your saving account or walk into a French restaurant and demand that they serve sushi.
Chosing [sic] not to distribute your own content, based on the content, is self-censorship.
Agreed. But as you said next, that's not what happening here, so I'm not sure why we're continuing to talk about something that we agree is irrelevant.
But that's not what's happening here: it's about refusing to allow targeted advertising to a specific demographic. They are censoring the advertisements
I agree that they are "refusing to allow targeted advertising to a specific demographic", but I don't see how you made the mental leap from that to "they are censoring the advertisements". Advertisers can still run those same ads in the same quantities. No one is being censored here.
If you're not an absolutist, how do you balance the rights of the owners vs the rights of the customers?
The rights of one extend insomuch as they don't trample the rights of others, which has the corollary that in the absence of others' rights, one's rights reign supreme. When rights bump against each other, the courts have drawn the line such that the stronger right is protected. It's the reason why yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is illegal: you're trampling on the right to life and health of the other patrons. Likewise, most of your examples (e.g. eHarmony) involved businesses violating the rights of others, hence why they were compelled to change.
But I'm trying to get you to recognize that this is a two-way street: businesses have rights too.
Despite your assertion that publicly-owned businesses have no rights, businesses (public or not) have a well-established right to "business expression". It's far weaker than an individual's right to personal expression, but it's the reason why you can't walk into a bank and demand a savings account with a 2000% interest rate or walk into a French restaurant and demand sushi. Those demands—which you are free to express but which you have no right to receive—would trample their rights, hence why they need not heed your unreasonable demands.
In the absence of others' rights being trampled, a business' rights—weak as they may be—reign supreme, so they have the ability to choose their own business offerings. That's why they can kick out unruly customers, why they can post "no shirt, no shoes, no service" signs, and why they can choose not to hire unqualified candidates. Likewise, it's why Facebook can choose to drop an option from what they offer advertisers. Doing so violates no one's rights, so it's Facebook's choice to make.
To me, one draws the line at privately owned, where the rights of the owners should prevail, vs a publicly traded corporation
Why do you believe that should be the case? You keep advocating for it, but you refuse to make an argument, or even answer any related questions.
I think it as self-evident as the notion that you can’t walk into a French restaurant and demand sushi at a price you set. If you seriously believe that businesses don’t get to choose their own business offerings, what’s stopping you from walking into a bank and demanding that they give you all their money as a new form of “it all belongs to me” account that you just created for them? After all, it’s not their call to make, right?
You seem unclear on the concept.. When anyone chooses not to distribute content for any content-based reason, that's censorship.
And you have yet to point to a single thing here that matches that definition. They are choosing to not distribute their own content for business reasons. That’s not censorship (unless you want to dilute the meaning of “censorship” to the point that any form of silence is treated as “self-censorship”, at which point you’d have made the term meaningless).
Once again, you're asking questions that are wholly unrelated to the situation at hand. Facebook chose to stop selling a product they previously offered. That's...
A) Their choice to make, not yours B) Not censorship
So, why is it in society's best interest to allow them to censor speech they disagree with?
When did you stop beating your wife?
Again, no censorship is happening in the situation at hand. If you have different information, clue me in, but so far as I can tell your brain short circuited when it saw "censorship" mentioned in the comments, since you continue to talk about a hypothetical problem that has nothing to do with what's described in the summary.
The problem with your theory is that you need the user to unlock the keyvault.
While that's true for the sort of malware described in the summary, that's hardly the only way to approach the issue. After all, if the problem is that confidential data is being persisted in memory when it shouldn'tbe, there's nothing stopping a forensic investigator from dumping the contents of memory after the fact to exploit these weaknesses, hence my suggestion.
But I do agree that if you're installing malware on their system and expect them to use it again after you do, you'd be better off with a keylogger.
Do you support the right of a privately-held restaurant to turn away black customers?
Questions like this frustrate me because they're as (ir)relevant to the situation at hand as me asking when you stopped beating your wife.
Facebook isn't turning Nazis away from their platform: they're choosing not to make "advertise to Nazis" a menu item that advertisers can select. If we're putting it in restaurant terms, this has nothing to do with whether a restaurant is willing to serve black customers; it's instead about whether the restaurant can remove foie gras from its menu. That's it. No one is kicking foie gras lovers out. No one is checking to see if you like foie gras before you get in. No one is preventing you from talking about foie gras in the restaurant. The restaurant is simply choosing to no longer offer foie gras because the dish is too controversial for their tastes (pun intended), so they'd rather not make it available any longer.
Suggesting that Facebook has no right to set their own menu is as silly as suggesting that French restaurants are legally obligated to continue offering the dated dishes they served decades ago, or, even worse, that they are obligated to serve any dish that a customer requests, no matter how absurd.
I support freedom of speech, i.e. freedom from government interference in my speech. I do not support the right to infringe on other's speech by compelling them to print someone else's speech on their privately-held platform. But we're not even talking about that here; we're talking about whether Facebook should be allowed to allow advertisers to target people with an interest in certain topics. That's a freedom of speech issue regarding what Facebook itself is allowed to say to advertisers. As such, I support their right to say—or not say—what they want on their own platform. If they choose not to offer "Nazi supporter" as a category that advertisers can target, that's their right.
To be fair, there may be forensic value in what they’re doing, such as if the PC has been confiscated as evidence and the user won’t be returning to unlock it anytime soon. Being able to unlock the vault without the need for a keylogger could be a major victory in that situation.
As long as it wasn't able to be used by google or anyone else prior to this update that made it a virtual assistant, then this isn't all that big a deal.
Pragmatically and without surrounding context? Perhaps. But given the frequency and scope of privacy violations happening on a regular basis, I don't think it's "hyper-awareness" that's leading people to express concern over this revelation. I think it's simply one more link in a long and constantly growing chain of "coincidences", "accidents", and worse (e.g. negligence, intentional violation), each of which undermines our privacy and each of which have served to undermine the public's trust in the companies engaging in these practices.
If a friend every now and then started poking you so softly that you barely even noticed, you might dismiss it as an odd quirk, assuming you even noticed it. If, over the course of several years, this behavior escalated to the point that they're constantly flailing their arms, you won't be able to ignore it, particularly so if they deliver an occasional fist to your face. At some point most reasonable people would reconsider whether this "friendship" was worth the effort, but some people are more patient and tolerant than others, so they stick with that "friend". If one day this "friend" comes by your house for what has seemingly become a daily flailing session, only to head into your bedroom closet and come back out with a shovel, a tarp, and a box full of bleach, you'd have cause for concern. If they respond to your, "WHAT THE HELL?! WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?!", with an, "Oh, sorry, didn't I tell you that I shipped it here and snuck it into your closet a few years ago because I figured everyone loves this stuff? No? Oops!", you'd have good cause to question the motives and intent of this "friend" and whether they're actually looking out for your best interests.
For some, this mic may feel like the first fist to the face from someone they think their friend. For others, an undisclosed microphone being planted in their home is nothing short of a declaration of hostile intent. Either way, I haven't yet found a normal person who responded to the news with, "That's neat!"
Sounds like your business had a service agreement with Dell and didn't have one with Apple, so that's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison and on a wholly unrelated topic from the subject of whether bugs get fixed, which was what the OP was talking about.
It's a bit sad that you don't realize the absurdity in trying to assert "no one does X" as a response to someone demonstrating X.
But who the fuck am I fooling? You got a 7 digit UID.
Having failed at getting a rise via banal homophobia, you're now falling back on the juvenile staple of saying my e-peen is small? What next? Suggest my mother is an easy woman? Respond with "nah uh!"? Insult my face? Sling gratuitous vulgarity?
I'll say it again: step up your game. At this point, given the caliber of trolling taking place, I'm forced to question whether you were even alive at the time that I discovered Slashdot in 2001.
I beg to differ. In fact, so far as I can see, you never even contradicted a single thing I said. My best guess is that you read something into what I said that I didn't actually say, but if you still think I got things wrong, I'd be eager to hear what specifically you think I got wrong.
According to multiple sources Disney+ cannot do anything with those characters until years from now.
According to your own source, those characters start becoming available next year, which is quite a bit sooner than "years from now". Given that Disney+ launches later this year, they could theoretically have shows based on these characters airing within the first year of Disney+.
That said, I don't know why you're bringing it up at all. I never claimed anything about timing. I simply said that they were wanting to bring these IPs back in-house.
Also Disney does not get ownership of the current shows they stay with netflix.
Disney already owns the shows and always has. Netflix ordered the shows from Marvel Television and ABC Studios, beating out other networks for the right, so they're the exclusive distributor for the time being. That said, they've made it pretty clear that—just like with pretty much every show on TV—their distribution rights have an expiration date. For instance, in the Daredevil cancellation announcement they said (emphasis mine), "While the series on Netflix has ended, the three existing seasons will remain on the service for years to come". Not "in perpetuity", just "for years to come". And really, this is what we'd expect. I mean, surely you've heard of "syndication" and are aware that popular shows air on other networks/services after their initial exclusivity period expires?
Moreover, we don't know whether their first run rights (i.e. the right to air new episodes first) were negotiated separately. If they were, as is often the case, they might expire before they lose distribution rights for the episodes on their service. As such, it's entirely possible that in the same way Netflix bought the first run rights to Black Mirror out from under Channel 4, Disney could simply let those rights expire for Netflix, then continue the shows on some other service while the original seasons remain available on Netflix. Netflix's cancellation announcement for Daredevil even said that "the Daredevil character will live on in future projects for Marvel", so whether that's in new shows or as a continuation of the existing one, it's clear that there's more coming.
Netflix has hinted at the reasons why they are doing it. 1) The cost they pay to Disney are too high; netflix has tried to renegotiate the deal.
Sure. I already said that when I said that "Disney would have been turning the screws during those licensing contract negotiations". You can say "This is netflix [sic] decision", but it takes two to tango in a negotiation. I agree it's a Netflix decision, but Disney also played a huge part in why those shows got cancelled. I'm not blaming anyone for what happened or upset at either side; it's just business, after all. Each of them need to make decisions based on the value they're getting from those rights.
If the best you've got is tired ad hominem, you're clearly not working with much. Slashdot deserves better trolls. Step up your game if you're going to keep trying to swim with the adults.
Oh, it's absolutely because of Disney. Or rather, Disney plays a huge role in what's going on.
The original four shows were originally only under contract for one season each, with the fifth season to be The Defenders. When Daredevil's first season ended up being a huge hit and huge exclusive at a time for Netflix when it was trying to establish its brand through its exclusives, they realized they'd do well to renew it for a second season. Frankly, I was surprised that they even did that, since by then it was already rumored that Disney was planning its own service, so you gotta figure that Disney would have been turning the screws during those licensing contract negotiations. Likewise with the Punisher spin-off, which I wouldn't have expected to happen. Even more so for the third season of Daredevil.
Now that Disney+ is imminent, it's clear that Disney is trying to reclaim control of its various IPs so that it can establish its own exclusives. Given the series they've announced so far (e.g. The Mandalorian in the Star Wars universe, a Loki spin-off in the MCU, etc.), it seems like they're aiming for their shows to be a serving of action on the side, rather than the main course that we'd be served in the films. Towards that end, street-level heroes like the ones that have been on Netflix are exactly the sort of thing that Disney seems to be wanting for Disney+, and Disney has even already said that some of these characters will likely see their stories continued on Disney+. Whether that means new seasons of the existing series or reboots remains to be seen, but either way they likely turned the screws on Netflix because they wanted to bring these characters in-house after Netflix did the hard work of (re-)introducing the characters to a new generation of viewers.
If you're gonna troll, at least know the material you're working with, since you're clearly outing yourself with a comment about CGI (and your other complaints are similarly off-base). Unlike the Marvel films, the Netflix/Marvel shows are remarkably light-handed in their use of CGI. About the most notable instance of it between Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Defenders, and Punisher is that Iron Fist's fist glows occasionally.
That's really about it. No super metal suits. No big green monsters. No gods of thunder. No wizards. No flying aircraft carriers. No aliens. Just five people, some with modest powers, none who want to be called "hero", all with serious personal issues that get explored, each entirely different in tone and style from the other, but every one of them engaged in street-level vigilantism set in a universe where the civilization-ending events of the movies are off-handedly mentioned about once a season so that you know those events are part of the fabric of the world in which these people live and operate.
1. Single player Adventure Games [...] 2. Platform Games [...] 3. Strategy Games [...] 4. Building Simulators [...]
I do agree that there's a lot of mediocre sameness when it comes to the popular games, but I think there's a combination of rose-colored glasses and straining to make your point going on, since of the four genres you say died out, none of those are actually dead. Many of them are thriving in the indie space, which you really shouldn't being excluding from consideration. After all, when it comes to single-player experiences, how popular a game is has absolutely nothing to do with how good a game is, nor should it have any impact on your enjoyment of the game.
Of the four you listed, adventure games are the closest to being extinct, but that's mostly because it's had to go through the biggest visual changes on account of its core point-and-click, screen-to-screen mechanics aging the poorest. If we're being honest, those mechanics (like the text-based ones before them) were only ever a rudimentary means to convey the actual gameplay that was enjoyable (e.g. exploration, collection, dialog, puzzling, etc.), so while the mechanics may be largely dead, the core gameplay of classic adventure games is still common in games today. We see it in abundance in adventure puzzlers like The Witness and Obduction, we see it in action games like Uncharted and Tomb Raider, but they even still exist unto themselves. While some, such as Broken Age, are more visibly linked to their classic roots, most modern adventure games look very different than the classic ones. Even so, you don't have to squint too hard before you realize that games like Firewatch or The Walking Dead series—while thematically very different—are still just adventure games at heart.
Platform games are still huge business, both in 2D and 3D. LittleBigPlanet was a marquee title for Playstation, but Nintendo is still going big in this space with the Donkey Kong Country and New Super Mario Bros. series both putting out releases in the last year, and of course Super Mario Odyssey if you're considering 3D platformers. The indie scene has absolutely exploded in the last decade with great games like Braid, VVVVVV, Celeste, etc., not to mention a number of variations of the genre that are thriving as well (e.g. Metroidvania games like Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night soon, action platformers like Megaman 9, 10, 11, and Mighty No. 9, etc.). We've had a glut of great platformers in the last decade that's absolutely spoiled us.
Strategy games are still going strong too. The godfather franchise of the genre, Civilization, is still huge, with Civ 6 releasing just a few years ago. Total War is still a powerhouse franchise with new releases seemingly all the time. We've seen quite a bit of reinvigoration in the tactical end of this genre recently, what with the XCOM reboot games, Into the Breach, and other indie titles. There's even rumblings of an Advance Wars reboot.
As for building simulators, while SimCity is largely a dead brand at this point after several significant missteps and cash grabs, Cities Skylines has carried the torch after stealing SimCity's thunder. And if you want to build something on a smaller scale, there are literally thousands of simulation games available on virtually every topic imaginable, from building gaming rigs to house flipping. I'll admit that I still boot up an old copy of SimTower every now and then, since nothing else ever quite scratched that itch for me, but there are plenty of games in that sub-genre (elevator simulator) as well.
No. Just, no. What matters is the amount you gave the government relative to the amount you earned, both as an absolute amount and as a percentage of your earnings. Your refund only represents a loan that you gave the government that they are now paying back.
If looking at your refund amount is the sole metric you use to determine whether you are "worse off" or not as far as taxes, then I'm sorry, there is literally no way anyone can make it simple enough for you.
You really should try to make it further into someone’s post before you rush to snap judgments, especially so if you’re going to put your screen name to something that’s clearly inapplicable. You clearly either stopped reading by the third sentence, or else failed to understand what I meant by it, since I precluded everything you just pointed out by—in as many words—saying that I kept my withholding fixed as a percent.
If reading just the first two sentences of someone’s comment is your sole metric for determining whether they’re wrong, then I’m sorry, there is literally no way anyone can make it simple enough for you (particularly on Slashdot, where many of us are fond of nuanced arguments).
For our part, our tax return is worse off this year by quite a wide margin. We've gotten back $1500-2000 at tax time for the last few years. Our life situation was unchanged in 2018 (e.g. no moves, no kids, etc.) and I withheld a tad more in 2018 to compensate for a pay raise, so I'd have expected a similar result this year. Instead, based on what I saw when I punched some quick numbers into my tax software, it looks like we'll owe about $200 this year, making for a $1700-2200 swing in an unfavorable direction.
I think we're getting hit especially hard because the increased standard deduction was designed to offset most of the damage people would have otherwise seen, but we don't benefit from that change because the new deduction is just a hair over what we'd have itemized anyway (i.e. what we've itemized for the last several years). We basically get the beating of having various tax credits removed without the soothing balm of a massively better deduction that most others received.
Fundamentally, I do like the idea of having taxes be easier for normal people (and hate that Intuit et al. lobbies to keep taxes complicated), and I like removing credits and deductions that create loopholes big enough to steer a cargo ship through them, but that doesn't mean I supported this tax plan or like where the rubber met the road this time around. No one I've talked to so far came out ahead. Perhaps if I ran in more affluent circles, I'd know some who benefitted.
if corporations did not impose such rules then most people would choose passwords that were entirely lower case; ie 26^8 (208,827,064,576) combinations. Any self respecting cracker would try all lower case before considering other possibilities.
This was my thinking as well. While OP is quite correct that the volume of the attack space is significantly reduced by the imposition of requirements, the fact is that the vast majority of people are selecting passcodes that minimally meet the requirements rather than being constrained by the requirements. Or, put differently, while requirements reduce the upper bound of the address space, thus reducing the volume of the space, they also raise the lower bound of the space quite significantly, thus increasing the minimum amount of work necessary. Given that the vast majority of passwords live in the lower portions of whatever the address space happens to be (e.g. if passwords can be 8-64 characters, most people will have an 8-character password), pushing the lower boundary up is generally more important.
Besides which, how often does a hacker need to resort to searching the entire space? Again, if work allows up to X characters, most people will have whatever the minimum requires. If work requires that the password not be in the dictionary, most people will use one of a few common symbol swaps (e.g. a > @, s > $, i > !, etc.) to satisfy the requirement, only slightly increasing the complexity for a hacker engaging in a dictionary attack.
This is the same thing that Facebook and Google were recently caught doing, except for even more illicit purposes. Apple hasn't been policing this space at all up to this point, since they've intentionally been hands-off with how enterprises choose to use their own certificates, so long as the enterprises keep their certificates to themselves. Now that it's clear that hasn't been happening, I suspect changes may be coming in the next year or two to how enterprise certificates operate.
Just as we tech people say. Lets hire a convinced black hat hacker, as your IT security expert, because they would know how it is done. Lets hire a lawyer convicted in insider trading
You've got your facts wrong; he's never been convicted. The CNBC article and Slashdot summary are rather ambiguous in their phrasing, hence your understandable confusion, but if you check otherreporting on the story, you'll see that what's actually going on is that he's just now being accused of crimes committed in 2011 and 2012, as well as 2015 and 2016. Apple didn't hire a convicted inside trader and he's never been charged with insider trading prior to now.
In fact, so far as Apple's response to his activities go, they put him on a leave of absence last summer when they were first notified that he was being investigated, then fired him themselves a few weeks later when their internal investigation turned up evidence of wrongdoing. The SEC is now following up with formal charges of their own, again, for the first time.
Having purchased trip insurance, which operates rather similarly to this insurance product, they'll almost certainly demand proof of payment before they pay out, specifically to avoid the sort of fraud you're suggesting here.
The way this stuff usually works, you tell them how much you actually paid for the thing you're insuring. If you got it for below face value, that's what you tell them because they'll lower the premium you pay accordingly, which is in your best interests. If you fraudulently say you paid more than you actually did, they'll raise the premium you pay accordingly, but then they'll only pay out whatever you can prove you paid.
For some quicks examples, say, with a premium of 10%: - If you paid $300 the premium would be $30. In the case of a claim, you'd have suffered a net loss of $30. - If you paid $100 the premium would be $10. In the case of a claim, you'd have suffered a net loss of $10. - If you paid $100 but said $300, the premium would be $30. In the case of a claim, you'd lose the $30 and possibly a lot more (e.g. refusal to pay out even $100, fraud charges, etc.)
This is a third-party insurance product, no different than most other insurance products, though I'd say it most closely resembles trip insurance.
We were on the hook for a few thousand bucks when we booked a major trip recently, so we wanted to make sure that the car breaking down on the way to the point of departure, or one of us getting sick, or me losing my job, or a death in the family, or us having to move across the country for my job, or any number of other things outside our control wouldn't mean that we had thrown good money away on a trip that we wouldn't be able to take. We paid the insurance company that money and didn't have to make a claim, but even if we had, they would have kept the premium we paid anyway because it covered the cost of a product we purchased from them. I've had friends who did have to make claims, whether because of illness, hurricanes in the Caribbean, or deaths in the family. It's nice to know that there's a safety net there when those sorts of situations emerge that are out of our control. And while I couldn't care less about who's playing in a game, I know that some people do, so it makes some sense to offer an insurance product aimed at guaranteeing what you thought you were paying for.
Gambling, in contrast, is almost the inverse of insurance. In the case of gambling, not playing means you suffer no loss (i.e. the only way to win is to not play), whereas with insurance you may still suffer loss if you don't play. With gambling, a small minority comes out well ahead of where they started by riding on the backs of everyone who lost, whereas no one comes out ahead in insurance, though a few people have their losses mitigated by riding on the backs of everyone who lost less. With gambling, the house controls the object of chance, but an insurance company has no control over the object of chance.
Or, put simply, gambling introduces instability (i.e. peaks and valleys) into one's otherwise stable fortunes, whereas insurance introduces stability (i.e. filling valleys) into one's otherwise unstable fortunes. Gambling serves no net benefit to society, whereas insurance mitigates major losses by amortizing those losses over large populations, thus creating financial stability for society.
This thing is an insurance product. A silly, rather frivolous one in my opinion, but it's definitely insurance, not gambling.
Slashdot Mirror
What's an "incel"? OED has no clue.
Also, are you actually defending Ghostbusters and The Last Jedi? I haven't seen the former, but by all accounts it was rather poor. I did see the latter, however, and it ranks down there with the prequels in my book. Between the opening credit crawl that tossed out everything established in the immediately prior film, the warp attack and the palace fight scene that sacrificed any semblance maintaining a coherent universe for the sake of stuff that looks cool, the third of the movie wasted on the casino, the Mary Poppins moment for Leia, the wasted opportunity to have real consequences by either sacrificing Finn to the laser or having Rose's choice to save him result in the loss of everyone else, and all of the purposeful middle fingers given to the fans (e.g. Luke's portrayal that made no sense to even Mark Hamill, Snoke's demise, Rey's parents, etc.), it was a bad movie. Not the worst in the series, but certainly not a good one. Mind you, I was looking forward to see it going in, since the director was saying all the right things to tick the checkboxes I was looking for. After The Force Awakens, which was basically just a giant push of the reset button on the universe, I was looking forward to moving things forward in a new and exciting direction. He just failed to deliver.
That said, I'm really looking forward to Captain Marvel. We already have tickets for a Friday showing and I'm eager to see it, albeit, with a bit of apprehension that they may not knock it out of the park and that it'll leave me less excited as the MCU heads to its climax. We'll see.
My wife and I have started playing the "guess the RT scores" game after watching movies for the first time. We'll try to guess the critic and audience scores and see who can get closest. After I went to an early screening of Alita: Battle Angel on the Tuesday before its full release, I was disappointed (but not surprised) to find out that the Audience Score wasn't yet available since the film hadn't yet had its full release. To say the least, the notion that Captain Marvel's Audience Score would be posted weeks in advance of its release is a bit absurd.
Sure, but early off-the-record comments from reviewers for this one have actually been surprisingly positive. I was honestly expecting it to detract from the lead-up to Endgame and I questioned the wisdom in introducing a game-changing character this close to the climax of the story they've been telling for the last decade. By all indications, however, it sounds like the bet may pay off. In a quick roundup I read last week, most of the off-the-record reviewers were saying that it's increased their anticipation and the buildup leading to Endgame, even more so than where things left off at the end of Infinity War last year. That was not at all what I was expecting.
Do you agree it's not that simple, or are you an absolutist, denying any complexity?
As with all rights—yours, mine, or otherwise—none are absolute in their scope and strength. My reason for asserting a business' (non-absolute) ability to choose its own business offerings is because you have seemingly been taking the opposing absolutist stance: that businesses have "no rights" at all. Clearly they have some rights, otherwise you'd be able to walk into a bank and demand a 2000% interest rate for your saving account or walk into a French restaurant and demand that they serve sushi.
Chosing [sic] not to distribute your own content, based on the content, is self-censorship.
Agreed. But as you said next, that's not what happening here, so I'm not sure why we're continuing to talk about something that we agree is irrelevant.
But that's not what's happening here: it's about refusing to allow targeted advertising to a specific demographic. They are censoring the advertisements
I agree that they are "refusing to allow targeted advertising to a specific demographic", but I don't see how you made the mental leap from that to "they are censoring the advertisements". Advertisers can still run those same ads in the same quantities. No one is being censored here.
If you're not an absolutist, how do you balance the rights of the owners vs the rights of the customers?
The rights of one extend insomuch as they don't trample the rights of others, which has the corollary that in the absence of others' rights, one's rights reign supreme. When rights bump against each other, the courts have drawn the line such that the stronger right is protected. It's the reason why yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is illegal: you're trampling on the right to life and health of the other patrons. Likewise, most of your examples (e.g. eHarmony) involved businesses violating the rights of others, hence why they were compelled to change.
But I'm trying to get you to recognize that this is a two-way street: businesses have rights too.
Despite your assertion that publicly-owned businesses have no rights, businesses (public or not) have a well-established right to "business expression". It's far weaker than an individual's right to personal expression, but it's the reason why you can't walk into a bank and demand a savings account with a 2000% interest rate or walk into a French restaurant and demand sushi. Those demands—which you are free to express but which you have no right to receive—would trample their rights, hence why they need not heed your unreasonable demands.
In the absence of others' rights being trampled, a business' rights—weak as they may be—reign supreme, so they have the ability to choose their own business offerings. That's why they can kick out unruly customers, why they can post "no shirt, no shoes, no service" signs, and why they can choose not to hire unqualified candidates. Likewise, it's why Facebook can choose to drop an option from what they offer advertisers. Doing so violates no one's rights, so it's Facebook's choice to make.
To me, one draws the line at privately owned, where the rights of the owners should prevail, vs a publicly traded corporation
We're getting pretty far afield of what's relevant, but I'll respond anyway. While the rights (e.g. artistic expression) of privately-owned businesses are certainly stronger than those of public ones when it comes to matters such as these (e.g. the landmark Hobby Lobby case that upheld their rights), those rights aren't absolute. For instance, the landmark case that cemented the federal government's ability to enforce desegregation in private businesses was against a privately-owned
Why do you believe that should be the case? You keep advocating for it, but you refuse to make an argument, or even answer any related questions.
I think it as self-evident as the notion that you can’t walk into a French restaurant and demand sushi at a price you set. If you seriously believe that businesses don’t get to choose their own business offerings, what’s stopping you from walking into a bank and demanding that they give you all their money as a new form of “it all belongs to me” account that you just created for them? After all, it’s not their call to make, right?
You seem unclear on the concept.. When anyone chooses not to distribute content for any content-based reason, that's censorship.
And you have yet to point to a single thing here that matches that definition. They are choosing to not distribute their own content for business reasons. That’s not censorship (unless you want to dilute the meaning of “censorship” to the point that any form of silence is treated as “self-censorship”, at which point you’d have made the term meaningless).
Once again, you're asking questions that are wholly unrelated to the situation at hand. Facebook chose to stop selling a product they previously offered. That's...
A) Their choice to make, not yours
B) Not censorship
So, why is it in society's best interest to allow them to censor speech they disagree with?
When did you stop beating your wife?
Again, no censorship is happening in the situation at hand. If you have different information, clue me in, but so far as I can tell your brain short circuited when it saw "censorship" mentioned in the comments, since you continue to talk about a hypothetical problem that has nothing to do with what's described in the summary.
The problem with your theory is that you need the user to unlock the keyvault.
While that's true for the sort of malware described in the summary, that's hardly the only way to approach the issue. After all, if the problem is that confidential data is being persisted in memory when it shouldn'tbe, there's nothing stopping a forensic investigator from dumping the contents of memory after the fact to exploit these weaknesses, hence my suggestion.
But I do agree that if you're installing malware on their system and expect them to use it again after you do, you'd be better off with a keylogger.
Do you support the right of a privately-held restaurant to turn away black customers?
Questions like this frustrate me because they're as (ir)relevant to the situation at hand as me asking when you stopped beating your wife.
Facebook isn't turning Nazis away from their platform: they're choosing not to make "advertise to Nazis" a menu item that advertisers can select. If we're putting it in restaurant terms, this has nothing to do with whether a restaurant is willing to serve black customers; it's instead about whether the restaurant can remove foie gras from its menu. That's it. No one is kicking foie gras lovers out. No one is checking to see if you like foie gras before you get in. No one is preventing you from talking about foie gras in the restaurant. The restaurant is simply choosing to no longer offer foie gras because the dish is too controversial for their tastes (pun intended), so they'd rather not make it available any longer.
Suggesting that Facebook has no right to set their own menu is as silly as suggesting that French restaurants are legally obligated to continue offering the dated dishes they served decades ago, or, even worse, that they are obligated to serve any dish that a customer requests, no matter how absurd.
I support freedom of speech, i.e. freedom from government interference in my speech. I do not support the right to infringe on other's speech by compelling them to print someone else's speech on their privately-held platform. But we're not even talking about that here; we're talking about whether Facebook should be allowed to allow advertisers to target people with an interest in certain topics. That's a freedom of speech issue regarding what Facebook itself is allowed to say to advertisers. As such, I support their right to say—or not say—what they want on their own platform. If they choose not to offer "Nazi supporter" as a category that advertisers can target, that's their right.
To be fair, there may be forensic value in what they’re doing, such as if the PC has been confiscated as evidence and the user won’t be returning to unlock it anytime soon. Being able to unlock the vault without the need for a keylogger could be a major victory in that situation.
As long as it wasn't able to be used by google or anyone else prior to this update that made it a virtual assistant, then this isn't all that big a deal.
Pragmatically and without surrounding context? Perhaps. But given the frequency and scope of privacy violations happening on a regular basis, I don't think it's "hyper-awareness" that's leading people to express concern over this revelation. I think it's simply one more link in a long and constantly growing chain of "coincidences", "accidents", and worse (e.g. negligence, intentional violation), each of which undermines our privacy and each of which have served to undermine the public's trust in the companies engaging in these practices.
If a friend every now and then started poking you so softly that you barely even noticed, you might dismiss it as an odd quirk, assuming you even noticed it. If, over the course of several years, this behavior escalated to the point that they're constantly flailing their arms, you won't be able to ignore it, particularly so if they deliver an occasional fist to your face. At some point most reasonable people would reconsider whether this "friendship" was worth the effort, but some people are more patient and tolerant than others, so they stick with that "friend". If one day this "friend" comes by your house for what has seemingly become a daily flailing session, only to head into your bedroom closet and come back out with a shovel, a tarp, and a box full of bleach, you'd have cause for concern. If they respond to your, "WHAT THE HELL?! WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?!", with an, "Oh, sorry, didn't I tell you that I shipped it here and snuck it into your closet a few years ago because I figured everyone loves this stuff? No? Oops!", you'd have good cause to question the motives and intent of this "friend" and whether they're actually looking out for your best interests.
For some, this mic may feel like the first fist to the face from someone they think their friend. For others, an undisclosed microphone being planted in their home is nothing short of a declaration of hostile intent. Either way, I haven't yet found a normal person who responded to the news with, "That's neat!"
Sounds like your business had a service agreement with Dell and didn't have one with Apple, so that's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison and on a wholly unrelated topic from the subject of whether bugs get fixed, which was what the OP was talking about.
Seriously? No one cares.
It's a bit sad that you don't realize the absurdity in trying to assert "no one does X" as a response to someone demonstrating X.
But who the fuck am I fooling? You got a 7 digit UID.
Having failed at getting a rise via banal homophobia, you're now falling back on the juvenile staple of saying my e-peen is small? What next? Suggest my mother is an easy woman? Respond with "nah uh!"? Insult my face? Sling gratuitous vulgarity?
I'll say it again: step up your game. At this point, given the caliber of trolling taking place, I'm forced to question whether you were even alive at the time that I discovered Slashdot in 2001.
Except is there is no truth in what you wrote.
I beg to differ. In fact, so far as I can see, you never even contradicted a single thing I said. My best guess is that you read something into what I said that I didn't actually say, but if you still think I got things wrong, I'd be eager to hear what specifically you think I got wrong.
According to multiple sources Disney+ cannot do anything with those characters until years from now.
According to your own source, those characters start becoming available next year, which is quite a bit sooner than "years from now". Given that Disney+ launches later this year, they could theoretically have shows based on these characters airing within the first year of Disney+.
That said, I don't know why you're bringing it up at all. I never claimed anything about timing. I simply said that they were wanting to bring these IPs back in-house.
Also Disney does not get ownership of the current shows they stay with netflix.
Disney already owns the shows and always has. Netflix ordered the shows from Marvel Television and ABC Studios, beating out other networks for the right, so they're the exclusive distributor for the time being. That said, they've made it pretty clear that—just like with pretty much every show on TV—their distribution rights have an expiration date. For instance, in the Daredevil cancellation announcement they said (emphasis mine), "While the series on Netflix has ended, the three existing seasons will remain on the service for years to come". Not "in perpetuity", just "for years to come". And really, this is what we'd expect. I mean, surely you've heard of "syndication" and are aware that popular shows air on other networks/services after their initial exclusivity period expires?
Moreover, we don't know whether their first run rights (i.e. the right to air new episodes first) were negotiated separately. If they were, as is often the case, they might expire before they lose distribution rights for the episodes on their service. As such, it's entirely possible that in the same way Netflix bought the first run rights to Black Mirror out from under Channel 4, Disney could simply let those rights expire for Netflix, then continue the shows on some other service while the original seasons remain available on Netflix. Netflix's cancellation announcement for Daredevil even said that "the Daredevil character will live on in future projects for Marvel", so whether that's in new shows or as a continuation of the existing one, it's clear that there's more coming.
Netflix has hinted at the reasons why they are doing it. 1) The cost they pay to Disney are too high; netflix has tried to renegotiate the deal.
Sure. I already said that when I said that "Disney would have been turning the screws during those licensing contract negotiations". You can say "This is netflix [sic] decision", but it takes two to tango in a negotiation. I agree it's a Netflix decision, but Disney also played a huge part in why those shows got cancelled. I'm not blaming anyone for what happened or upset at either side; it's just business, after all. Each of them need to make decisions based on the value they're getting from those rights.
If the best you've got is tired ad hominem, you're clearly not working with much. Slashdot deserves better trolls. Step up your game if you're going to keep trying to swim with the adults.
Oh, it's absolutely because of Disney. Or rather, Disney plays a huge role in what's going on.
The original four shows were originally only under contract for one season each, with the fifth season to be The Defenders. When Daredevil's first season ended up being a huge hit and huge exclusive at a time for Netflix when it was trying to establish its brand through its exclusives, they realized they'd do well to renew it for a second season. Frankly, I was surprised that they even did that, since by then it was already rumored that Disney was planning its own service, so you gotta figure that Disney would have been turning the screws during those licensing contract negotiations. Likewise with the Punisher spin-off, which I wouldn't have expected to happen. Even more so for the third season of Daredevil.
Now that Disney+ is imminent, it's clear that Disney is trying to reclaim control of its various IPs so that it can establish its own exclusives. Given the series they've announced so far (e.g. The Mandalorian in the Star Wars universe, a Loki spin-off in the MCU, etc.), it seems like they're aiming for their shows to be a serving of action on the side, rather than the main course that we'd be served in the films. Towards that end, street-level heroes like the ones that have been on Netflix are exactly the sort of thing that Disney seems to be wanting for Disney+, and Disney has even already said that some of these characters will likely see their stories continued on Disney+. Whether that means new seasons of the existing series or reboots remains to be seen, but either way they likely turned the screws on Netflix because they wanted to bring these characters in-house after Netflix did the hard work of (re-)introducing the characters to a new generation of viewers.
CGI
If you're gonna troll, at least know the material you're working with, since you're clearly outing yourself with a comment about CGI (and your other complaints are similarly off-base). Unlike the Marvel films, the Netflix/Marvel shows are remarkably light-handed in their use of CGI. About the most notable instance of it between Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Defenders, and Punisher is that Iron Fist's fist glows occasionally.
That's really about it. No super metal suits. No big green monsters. No gods of thunder. No wizards. No flying aircraft carriers. No aliens. Just five people, some with modest powers, none who want to be called "hero", all with serious personal issues that get explored, each entirely different in tone and style from the other, but every one of them engaged in street-level vigilantism set in a universe where the civilization-ending events of the movies are off-handedly mentioned about once a season so that you know those events are part of the fabric of the world in which these people live and operate.
1. Single player Adventure Games [...]
2. Platform Games [...]
3. Strategy Games [...]
4. Building Simulators [...]
I do agree that there's a lot of mediocre sameness when it comes to the popular games, but I think there's a combination of rose-colored glasses and straining to make your point going on, since of the four genres you say died out, none of those are actually dead. Many of them are thriving in the indie space, which you really shouldn't being excluding from consideration. After all, when it comes to single-player experiences, how popular a game is has absolutely nothing to do with how good a game is, nor should it have any impact on your enjoyment of the game.
Of the four you listed, adventure games are the closest to being extinct, but that's mostly because it's had to go through the biggest visual changes on account of its core point-and-click, screen-to-screen mechanics aging the poorest. If we're being honest, those mechanics (like the text-based ones before them) were only ever a rudimentary means to convey the actual gameplay that was enjoyable (e.g. exploration, collection, dialog, puzzling, etc.), so while the mechanics may be largely dead, the core gameplay of classic adventure games is still common in games today. We see it in abundance in adventure puzzlers like The Witness and Obduction, we see it in action games like Uncharted and Tomb Raider, but they even still exist unto themselves. While some, such as Broken Age, are more visibly linked to their classic roots, most modern adventure games look very different than the classic ones. Even so, you don't have to squint too hard before you realize that games like Firewatch or The Walking Dead series—while thematically very different—are still just adventure games at heart.
Platform games are still huge business, both in 2D and 3D. LittleBigPlanet was a marquee title for Playstation, but Nintendo is still going big in this space with the Donkey Kong Country and New Super Mario Bros. series both putting out releases in the last year, and of course Super Mario Odyssey if you're considering 3D platformers. The indie scene has absolutely exploded in the last decade with great games like Braid, VVVVVV, Celeste, etc., not to mention a number of variations of the genre that are thriving as well (e.g. Metroidvania games like Axiom Verge and Hollow Knight and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night soon, action platformers like Megaman 9, 10, 11, and Mighty No. 9, etc.). We've had a glut of great platformers in the last decade that's absolutely spoiled us.
Strategy games are still going strong too. The godfather franchise of the genre, Civilization, is still huge, with Civ 6 releasing just a few years ago. Total War is still a powerhouse franchise with new releases seemingly all the time. We've seen quite a bit of reinvigoration in the tactical end of this genre recently, what with the XCOM reboot games, Into the Breach, and other indie titles. There's even rumblings of an Advance Wars reboot.
As for building simulators, while SimCity is largely a dead brand at this point after several significant missteps and cash grabs, Cities Skylines has carried the torch after stealing SimCity's thunder. And if you want to build something on a smaller scale, there are literally thousands of simulation games available on virtually every topic imaginable, from building gaming rigs to house flipping. I'll admit that I still boot up an old copy of SimTower every now and then, since nothing else ever quite scratched that itch for me, but there are plenty of games in that sub-genre (elevator simulator) as well.
No. Just, no. What matters is the amount you gave the government relative to the amount you earned, both as an absolute amount and as a percentage of your earnings. Your refund only represents a loan that you gave the government that they are now paying back.
If looking at your refund amount is the sole metric you use to determine whether you are "worse off" or not as far as taxes, then I'm sorry, there is literally no way anyone can make it simple enough for you.
You really should try to make it further into someone’s post before you rush to snap judgments, especially so if you’re going to put your screen name to something that’s clearly inapplicable. You clearly either stopped reading by the third sentence, or else failed to understand what I meant by it, since I precluded everything you just pointed out by—in as many words—saying that I kept my withholding fixed as a percent.
If reading just the first two sentences of someone’s comment is your sole metric for determining whether they’re wrong, then I’m sorry, there is literally no way anyone can make it simple enough for you (particularly on Slashdot, where many of us are fond of nuanced arguments).
For our part, our tax return is worse off this year by quite a wide margin. We've gotten back $1500-2000 at tax time for the last few years. Our life situation was unchanged in 2018 (e.g. no moves, no kids, etc.) and I withheld a tad more in 2018 to compensate for a pay raise, so I'd have expected a similar result this year. Instead, based on what I saw when I punched some quick numbers into my tax software, it looks like we'll owe about $200 this year, making for a $1700-2200 swing in an unfavorable direction.
I think we're getting hit especially hard because the increased standard deduction was designed to offset most of the damage people would have otherwise seen, but we don't benefit from that change because the new deduction is just a hair over what we'd have itemized anyway (i.e. what we've itemized for the last several years). We basically get the beating of having various tax credits removed without the soothing balm of a massively better deduction that most others received.
Fundamentally, I do like the idea of having taxes be easier for normal people (and hate that Intuit et al. lobbies to keep taxes complicated), and I like removing credits and deductions that create loopholes big enough to steer a cargo ship through them, but that doesn't mean I supported this tax plan or like where the rubber met the road this time around. No one I've talked to so far came out ahead. Perhaps if I ran in more affluent circles, I'd know some who benefitted.
if corporations did not impose such rules then most people would choose passwords that were entirely lower case; ie 26^8 (208,827,064,576) combinations. Any self respecting cracker would try all lower case before considering other possibilities.
This was my thinking as well. While OP is quite correct that the volume of the attack space is significantly reduced by the imposition of requirements, the fact is that the vast majority of people are selecting passcodes that minimally meet the requirements rather than being constrained by the requirements. Or, put differently, while requirements reduce the upper bound of the address space, thus reducing the volume of the space, they also raise the lower bound of the space quite significantly, thus increasing the minimum amount of work necessary. Given that the vast majority of passwords live in the lower portions of whatever the address space happens to be (e.g. if passwords can be 8-64 characters, most people will have an 8-character password), pushing the lower boundary up is generally more important.
Besides which, how often does a hacker need to resort to searching the entire space? Again, if work allows up to X characters, most people will have whatever the minimum requires. If work requires that the password not be in the dictionary, most people will use one of a few common symbol swaps (e.g. a > @, s > $, i > !, etc.) to satisfy the requirement, only slightly increasing the complexity for a hacker engaging in a dictionary attack.
This is the same thing that Facebook and Google were recently caught doing, except for even more illicit purposes. Apple hasn't been policing this space at all up to this point, since they've intentionally been hands-off with how enterprises choose to use their own certificates, so long as the enterprises keep their certificates to themselves. Now that it's clear that hasn't been happening, I suspect changes may be coming in the next year or two to how enterprise certificates operate.
Just as we tech people say. Lets hire a convinced black hat hacker, as your IT security expert, because they would know how it is done. Lets hire a lawyer convicted in insider trading
You've got your facts wrong; he's never been convicted. The CNBC article and Slashdot summary are rather ambiguous in their phrasing, hence your understandable confusion, but if you check other reporting on the story, you'll see that what's actually going on is that he's just now being accused of crimes committed in 2011 and 2012, as well as 2015 and 2016. Apple didn't hire a convicted inside trader and he's never been charged with insider trading prior to now.
In fact, so far as Apple's response to his activities go, they put him on a leave of absence last summer when they were first notified that he was being investigated, then fired him themselves a few weeks later when their internal investigation turned up evidence of wrongdoing. The SEC is now following up with formal charges of their own, again, for the first time.
Having purchased trip insurance, which operates rather similarly to this insurance product, they'll almost certainly demand proof of payment before they pay out, specifically to avoid the sort of fraud you're suggesting here.
The way this stuff usually works, you tell them how much you actually paid for the thing you're insuring. If you got it for below face value, that's what you tell them because they'll lower the premium you pay accordingly, which is in your best interests. If you fraudulently say you paid more than you actually did, they'll raise the premium you pay accordingly, but then they'll only pay out whatever you can prove you paid.
For some quicks examples, say, with a premium of 10%:
- If you paid $300 the premium would be $30. In the case of a claim, you'd have suffered a net loss of $30.
- If you paid $100 the premium would be $10. In the case of a claim, you'd have suffered a net loss of $10.
- If you paid $100 but said $300, the premium would be $30. In the case of a claim, you'd lose the $30 and possibly a lot more (e.g. refusal to pay out even $100, fraud charges, etc.)
You only stand to lose with this sort of fraud.
This is a third-party insurance product, no different than most other insurance products, though I'd say it most closely resembles trip insurance.
We were on the hook for a few thousand bucks when we booked a major trip recently, so we wanted to make sure that the car breaking down on the way to the point of departure, or one of us getting sick, or me losing my job, or a death in the family, or us having to move across the country for my job, or any number of other things outside our control wouldn't mean that we had thrown good money away on a trip that we wouldn't be able to take. We paid the insurance company that money and didn't have to make a claim, but even if we had, they would have kept the premium we paid anyway because it covered the cost of a product we purchased from them. I've had friends who did have to make claims, whether because of illness, hurricanes in the Caribbean, or deaths in the family. It's nice to know that there's a safety net there when those sorts of situations emerge that are out of our control. And while I couldn't care less about who's playing in a game, I know that some people do, so it makes some sense to offer an insurance product aimed at guaranteeing what you thought you were paying for.
Gambling, in contrast, is almost the inverse of insurance. In the case of gambling, not playing means you suffer no loss (i.e. the only way to win is to not play), whereas with insurance you may still suffer loss if you don't play. With gambling, a small minority comes out well ahead of where they started by riding on the backs of everyone who lost, whereas no one comes out ahead in insurance, though a few people have their losses mitigated by riding on the backs of everyone who lost less. With gambling, the house controls the object of chance, but an insurance company has no control over the object of chance.
Or, put simply, gambling introduces instability (i.e. peaks and valleys) into one's otherwise stable fortunes, whereas insurance introduces stability (i.e. filling valleys) into one's otherwise unstable fortunes. Gambling serves no net benefit to society, whereas insurance mitigates major losses by amortizing those losses over large populations, thus creating financial stability for society.
This thing is an insurance product. A silly, rather frivolous one in my opinion, but it's definitely insurance, not gambling.