The only way to actually speak your mind today is to be independently wealthy. Participating in the democratic process can easily make you lose your job, even if you violate no laws. Corporations have more free speech than the average citizen (and more ability to get away with breaking the law without consequence). We are way down the slippery slope on this one.
Agreed. The promises and dreams of a high tech future increasingly are not worth it. Most smartphone and web stuff has become an ad service first, and a useful service second. Services to connect us have become creepy liabilities you have almost no control over.
Further, it should be mandated that every company like this have an easy way to exit and remove posts and personal information permanently. Facebook is one of the worst out there for making it hard to summarily delete your presence once you become thoroughly creeped out. Once they started tagging faces I disabled my account, but I'd rather that I could quickly cull what is left behind or completely NFO.
More to the point, those 4.25 Million people are likely the ones living in apartments or crime prone neighborhoods where rightly paranoid people currently shy away from delivery to the home due to theft fears. If people are already frustrated by difficult delivery issues Amazon will become a disproportionate winner with those customers. Not only will the paranoid buy stuff they were not ordering online previously, but they will buy stuff from Amazon that they could actually get cheaper elsewhere because of the reassurance that their stuff will not be stolen or require them to be present to sign (a major hassle for those with jobs...).
Gold is valuable beyond being rare. Not only is it pretty to look at (blockchains not so much), but it is used in a lot of electronics and industrial applications where its amazing corrosion resistant properties have no equal.
Gemstones like diamonds similarly have both fashion and industrial applications.
As for secure, it is only as secure as your wallet and many exchanges have been hacked or turned out to be outright frauds. I'd rather a thief have to physically enter my house to rob me, or to store my money in an FDIC backed account, thank you very much.
Among other things you can dig through reviews and salary data. If there is a consistent trend of females in the same job title and years of experience with equivalent review scores getting lower salaries/raises and fewer promotions you have about as clear cut evidence of discrimination as you are going to get.
Sure there are "ambulance chaser" type lawyers out there, but I don't know what so many people jump to concluding these sorts of suits are all frivolous.
I'm of the opinion that the "right" English is what is in common usage, rather than what some pedantic sot digs out of a book written by some other pedantic sot ages ago. I'd rather have an evolving growing language than a locked down regulated one with gatekeepers and enforcers shouting down every new variation and mis-usage.
It is not like the English language, with all its esoteric rules fell from the sky fairy on golden plates. Rather usage got documented and became a festering field upon itself.
Debts: Yes, the rich have the ear of congress and certainly played a role in oil related debacles like Iraq, and Revenge of Iraq. As such the rich should help foot the bill better for the overseas adventures they helped instigate and profited from. Much of the debt is due to tax cuts that mostly went to the rich in the past, so maybe it is time for the chickens to come home to roost.
Hand outs to poor: If you mean decent funding for public schools, fixing roads and bridges, having good job retraining and income replacement to those who lost jobs to off shoring, then yes. We need much more money spent to keep our nation and its workforce maintained. I would like to see the rich who can most afford to pay higher taxes and whose businesses benefit from well trained job applicants help foot that bill.
Yep. Our 5 year old has my old tablet. But that doesn't mean he is glued to it 12 hours a day. He probably uses it about 1-2 hours a week such as on Saturday mornings when we just are not read to get up when he is. It is also very nice to load it with a few favorite movies for car trips. Even then he only watches maybe an hour or two's worth of movies/shows over 8 hours of driving.
Like many things, there can be responsible use or irresponsible misuse. I see nothing wrong with modest amounts of TV watching, but I am also not about to use it as a baby sitter.
I want to be able to find the damn scroll bars. Either improve the colors, let me choose a classic theme, or otherwise give me some ability of get rid of the flat interface disaster. That is my requested feature.
We've also had a steady rise in the complexity and abundance of infotainment systems that needlessly complicate the few tasks you legitimately need to attend to while driving.
Tactile knobs have been replaced with menus and buttons to adjust the temperature. I can't use feel and peripheral vision like on my old car to adjust heat, vents, or volume. Worse yet, the buttons that remain are a smooth surface that I can't even make out without looking at them. Form over function.
AAA has shed some light on this as of late, but until car makers reverse course, it is just going to get worse and worse.
Tons of laws on the books. Cell phone laws are not enforced and violations are not villified.
Get caught drunk and your life will be ruined by the legal system and the attached stigma. Get caught texting, which arguably poses a similar risk to others, and you have a small chance of getting a small ticket.
Until cell phone users (and all others distracted drivers) get treated legally and socially commensurate with the danger they pose to others nothing will change.
Seriously, go outside and go for a walk or something that actually makes you happier.
We went from stores full of stuff being too much of a hassle to drive to and needed things delivered to our doorstep. now it is too much of a chore to pull up a browser to order crap, so we get voice assistants to do it for us. How effing lazy are people? How hollow are their lives?
go ride a bike, walk in the woods, talk with a human, or almost anything else is better for you than holing up with Alexa or Siri to try and fill your void of an existence.
The promise of the Apple eco-system was that everything worked together without fiddling, and there were no headaches. That promise is less and less true. More and more the damn things have gotten more buggy, and behaviors change (or get buried) for no obvious reason ("Courage" my ass).
Most recently the Apple router has occasionally stopped talking to the Apple TV when my Apple iPad is talking to the interwebs. Turn off WiFi (while I still can, since I am still on iOS10) and the Apple TV springs back to life for an hour or so.
How about a right-click->hide menu option? Have the first selection in EVERY menu be "show all menu items", allowing you to right-click->unhide menu option.
Also, provide default sets of displayed menu items aimed at new users, experienced users, and "Show everything damnit" mode.
We have Luddite/retard mode. It's called the Ribbon interface. It sucks.
A basic problem we have is that there are industry standard programs like Word/Excel that need to cater to too broad of a spectrum of users. Folks who need to do nuanced stuff need more features than the kid doing his homework. Frankly Word peaked in usability around Word 4.0/5.1 on the Mac side, and has been a too complicated mess ever since. The Ribbon is awful answer to this, resulting in a dumbed down interface that is still too complicated for simple work, while burying more complicated stuff in places that are even harder to unravel than before.
Other programs like Ansys EM let you modify menu bars and all, which is a time consuming headache, only to mangle them if you upgrade, or open it on too small a screen (remote desktop for example). I've mostly given up on customizing interfaces because it is work that has to be redone far too often, and makes it a real pain to get support (or to support others).
Similarly, what if the vacuum failed and the pod stopped in a low pressure section pipe in the middle of nowhere. The only way out if to wait for someone to figure out the exact location of the pod and cut you out. I've yet to see an estimate for how many hours (days?) you might be stuck in there in pitch blackness, likely getting cooked inside a metal tube sitting in the sun.
We have have 4 Canadians in my small design group of ~20, though only 2 at the moment. For them the pay delta was a 50% raise combined with many more tech options if they needed to change jobs for any reason.
So not only does pay need to be higher, but you need to attract enough companies that folks who move to work their will feel secure enough in the job market as a whole to be willing to put down roots. The magic of Silicon Valley is that despite being a traffic snarled expensive mess you know that if your current dotcom, or startup folds you can go a couple doors down and pick up a job at the next wiz-bang scam shop, likely with a raise.
Companies know that if they setup shop it is easy to hire just about any techy person, though it might cost a pretty penny. If time to market is important, then growing talent internally is foolish.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way to actually speak your mind today is to be independently wealthy. Participating in the democratic process can easily make you lose your job, even if you violate no laws. Corporations have more free speech than the average citizen (and more ability to get away with breaking the law without consequence). We are way down the slippery slope on this one.
You are welcome to speak your mind in America*.
*Must comply with HR rules of your company, must not offend anyone, infringe on any business interests, or otherwise cause incitement of the public.
Electric heat is usually one of costliest ways to heat your house, and come summer you have to pay even more to cool your now overheated house.
Once this sucker pops people are going be really baffled at how it managed to get so ludicrous in the first place.
Agreed. The promises and dreams of a high tech future increasingly are not worth it. Most smartphone and web stuff has become an ad service first, and a useful service second. Services to connect us have become creepy liabilities you have almost no control over.
Further, it should be mandated that every company like this have an easy way to exit and remove posts and personal information permanently. Facebook is one of the worst out there for making it hard to summarily delete your presence once you become thoroughly creeped out. Once they started tagging faces I disabled my account, but I'd rather that I could quickly cull what is left behind or completely NFO.
More to the point, those 4.25 Million people are likely the ones living in apartments or crime prone neighborhoods where rightly paranoid people currently shy away from delivery to the home due to theft fears. If people are already frustrated by difficult delivery issues Amazon will become a disproportionate winner with those customers.
Not only will the paranoid buy stuff they were not ordering online previously, but they will buy stuff from Amazon that they could actually get cheaper elsewhere because of the reassurance that their stuff will not be stolen or require them to be present to sign (a major hassle for those with jobs...).
Gold is valuable beyond being rare. Not only is it pretty to look at (blockchains not so much), but it is used in a lot of electronics and industrial applications where its amazing corrosion resistant properties have no equal.
Gemstones like diamonds similarly have both fashion and industrial applications.
As for secure, it is only as secure as your wallet and many exchanges have been hacked or turned out to be outright frauds. I'd rather a thief have to physically enter my house to rob me, or to store my money in an FDIC backed account, thank you very much.
Among other things you can dig through reviews and salary data. If there is a consistent trend of females in the same job title and years of experience with equivalent review scores getting lower salaries/raises and fewer promotions you have about as clear cut evidence of discrimination as you are going to get.
Sure there are "ambulance chaser" type lawyers out there, but I don't know what so many people jump to concluding these sorts of suits are all frivolous.
Cart meet horse.
I'm of the opinion that the "right" English is what is in common usage, rather than what some pedantic sot digs out of a book written by some other pedantic sot ages ago. I'd rather have an evolving growing language than a locked down regulated one with gatekeepers and enforcers shouting down every new variation and mis-usage.
It is not like the English language, with all its esoteric rules fell from the sky fairy on golden plates. Rather usage got documented and became a festering field upon itself.
Debts: Yes, the rich have the ear of congress and certainly played a role in oil related debacles like Iraq, and Revenge of Iraq. As such the rich should help foot the bill better for the overseas adventures they helped instigate and profited from. Much of the debt is due to tax cuts that mostly went to the rich in the past, so maybe it is time for the chickens to come home to roost.
Hand outs to poor: If you mean decent funding for public schools, fixing roads and bridges, having good job retraining and income replacement to those who lost jobs to off shoring, then yes. We need much more money spent to keep our nation and its workforce maintained. I would like to see the rich who can most afford to pay higher taxes and whose businesses benefit from well trained job applicants help foot that bill.
Yep. Our 5 year old has my old tablet. But that doesn't mean he is glued to it 12 hours a day. He probably uses it about 1-2 hours a week such as on Saturday mornings when we just are not read to get up when he is. It is also very nice to load it with a few favorite movies for car trips. Even then he only watches maybe an hour or two's worth of movies/shows over 8 hours of driving.
Like many things, there can be responsible use or irresponsible misuse. I see nothing wrong with modest amounts of TV watching, but I am also not about to use it as a baby sitter.
I want to be able to find the damn scroll bars. Either improve the colors, let me choose a classic theme, or otherwise give me some ability of get rid of the flat interface disaster. That is my requested feature.
We've also had a steady rise in the complexity and abundance of infotainment systems that needlessly complicate the few tasks you legitimately need to attend to while driving.
Tactile knobs have been replaced with menus and buttons to adjust the temperature. I can't use feel and peripheral vision like on my old car to adjust heat, vents, or volume. Worse yet, the buttons that remain are a smooth surface that I can't even make out without looking at them. Form over function.
AAA has shed some light on this as of late, but until car makers reverse course, it is just going to get worse and worse.
Tons of laws on the books. Cell phone laws are not enforced and violations are not villified.
Get caught drunk and your life will be ruined by the legal system and the attached stigma. Get caught texting, which arguably poses a similar risk to others, and you have a small chance of getting a small ticket.
Until cell phone users (and all others distracted drivers) get treated legally and socially commensurate with the danger they pose to others nothing will change.
100 cheaters getting various false log-ins banned thousands of times.
Seriously, go outside and go for a walk or something that actually makes you happier.
We went from stores full of stuff being too much of a hassle to drive to and needed things delivered to our doorstep. now it is too much of a chore to pull up a browser to order crap, so we get voice assistants to do it for us. How effing lazy are people? How hollow are their lives?
go ride a bike, walk in the woods, talk with a human, or almost anything else is better for you than holing up with Alexa or Siri to try and fill your void of an existence.
Sarcastic sarcasm is sarcastic.
If everyone was out to get you, you'd be paranoid too.
The promise of the Apple eco-system was that everything worked together without fiddling, and there were no headaches. That promise is less and less true. More and more the damn things have gotten more buggy, and behaviors change (or get buried) for no obvious reason ("Courage" my ass).
Most recently the Apple router has occasionally stopped talking to the Apple TV when my Apple iPad is talking to the interwebs. Turn off WiFi (while I still can, since I am still on iOS10) and the Apple TV springs back to life for an hour or so.
How about a right-click->hide menu option? Have the first selection in EVERY menu be "show all menu items", allowing you to right-click->unhide menu option.
Also, provide default sets of displayed menu items aimed at new users, experienced users, and "Show everything damnit" mode.
Cute.
We have Luddite/retard mode. It's called the Ribbon interface. It sucks.
A basic problem we have is that there are industry standard programs like Word/Excel that need to cater to too broad of a spectrum of users. Folks who need to do nuanced stuff need more features than the kid doing his homework. Frankly Word peaked in usability around Word 4.0/5.1 on the Mac side, and has been a too complicated mess ever since. The Ribbon is awful answer to this, resulting in a dumbed down interface that is still too complicated for simple work, while burying more complicated stuff in places that are even harder to unravel than before.
Other programs like Ansys EM let you modify menu bars and all, which is a time consuming headache, only to mangle them if you upgrade, or open it on too small a screen (remote desktop for example). I've mostly given up on customizing interfaces because it is work that has to be redone far too often, and makes it a real pain to get support (or to support others).
Similarly, what if the vacuum failed and the pod stopped in a low pressure section pipe in the middle of nowhere. The only way out if to wait for someone to figure out the exact location of the pod and cut you out. I've yet to see an estimate for how many hours (days?) you might be stuck in there in pitch blackness, likely getting cooked inside a metal tube sitting in the sun.
This. Money talks.
We have have 4 Canadians in my small design group of ~20, though only 2 at the moment. For them the pay delta was a 50% raise combined with many more tech options if they needed to change jobs for any reason.
So not only does pay need to be higher, but you need to attract enough companies that folks who move to work their will feel secure enough in the job market as a whole to be willing to put down roots. The magic of Silicon Valley is that despite being a traffic snarled expensive mess you know that if your current dotcom, or startup folds you can go a couple doors down and pick up a job at the next wiz-bang scam shop, likely with a raise.
Companies know that if they setup shop it is easy to hire just about any techy person, though it might cost a pretty penny. If time to market is important, then growing talent internally is foolish.
Bubble. Give it a week or two.
For less than 2 million you can RETIRE way early and spend all the time you want with kids.