Eugenics was never a particularly good idea. It was always a justification for bigots to legally enforce their bigotry in vile ways. The only reason anyone thinks it sounds like a good idea is because they assume they won't be the one being involuntarily sterilized "for the good of humankind".
Or it could be because the performance reviews they use as part of their process are biased. Unless they can guarantee that their managers aren't biased when reviewing employee performance, they've just pushed the level where the bias creeps in back one step.
I can break into your house because it's not secure enough. Is that OK too?
If the house has already been taken over by a criminal gang, it's a different matter. That's a better analogy with a lot of these insecure IoT devices. They aren't just sitting there innocently; if they're vulnerable to being shut down by this malware, they're also vulnerable to being taken over by botnets. This is not just a theoretical worry; some of the big recent DDOS attacks have been by IoT device botnets.
Even if the customer is legitimately throwing a tantrum, there are still better and worse ways of responding. The company in this case could have continued trying to help in the hopes of fixing the problem and getting the guy to change his review. Or it could have been polite about offering a refund, waiving restocking fees, etc. Throwing its own tantrum in response to a customer tantrum is neither productive nor likely to generate good publicity. Instead, it's likely to make people think the customer may have been on to something with his complaints about poor support.
And maybe expandable. It's neat when they can package everything into a nice tiny case, but the whole elegance factor is ruined when the only way to add stuff is in clunky external boxes. How about making sure there's plenty of free expansion slots and hard drive spaces so people can add stuff inside the original case?
Of course this shows another important point with reviewers: it's important to read the actual review rather than just the star rating. A good reviewer will explain not just whether they like a given movie (or book, album, etc.) but also why they feel that way. Even if your tastes differ from theirs, you can often get a good idea of whether you'll like something if you can see what they like and dislike about it in detail. Sites like Rotten Tomatoes give you the advantage of aggregating multiple reviews, but that comes at the expense of eliminating everything but the bottom line number.
Just make sure that hub isn't plugged into a computer, since the stick could have a malicious data payload. Note, though, that the same company that makes the USB Kill Stick also makes a plug in surge suppressor that protects USB ports against the Kill Stick. I'm sure they're planning on selling them to people like law enforcement who have to worry about malicious hardware.
Just remember, the only people who win in an arms race are arms manufacturers.
I challenge anyone here to name a remake that was better than the original.
Ben Hur (1959) springs immediately to mind. A number of movies in various comic book franchises would probably also qualify. Does anyone really think the Adam West Batman movie was better than the Tim Burton version? (I can get that some people might prefer the Tim Burton version to the Christopher Nolan version, though that would be more of a judgment call.)
It's also good to remember that the whole reason people tend to do remakes is because the original was good enough to be worth copying. With the possible exception of movies based on an original work in another medium (book, play, graphic novel, etc.), nobody is going to bother making a remake of a stinker. They're going to pick the stuff that was great and successful to copy, which inherently disadvantages the remake because it's being compared to something good.
Sure there is. Farmers, especially ones in areas where water is the limiting factor in how much they can grow, are worried about losses to evaporation. Those losses can be minimized by irrigating at night, when it's cooler and water evaporates more slowly. Depending on the economics and the water supply, it may make sense to adopt a more expensive irrigation strategy if it conserves water.
Why does this kind of culture crop up again and again in human history?
It's a very common way for insecure people to protect their positions. A person at the top is worried about being replaced by their subordinates, so they set their subordinates against each other. That way, the subordinates spend all their time on infighting rather than trying to replace the boss. You'll see this kind of thing all the time in dictatorships, but it shows up regularly with dictatorial managers of all stripes, too. It's one more variant on the old "divide and rule" strategy.
the HR person (if they were being honest) did the right thing.
At least according to the article, the HR person was not being honest. They said that it was the boss's first offense and they didn't want to put it on his record because it would hurt him. But the author spoke to other women who had complained about him before she did, so it wasn't his first offense. The most generous interpretation is that they were basing the claim of first offense on his blank official record, so that he could get an infinite number of "first" offenses left off.
It goes to show why that approach is a bad one. If you don't want people to get in trouble for a first offense, make that the policy. Put the offense in their record, but give them a free pass for it when it comes time to evaluate them. But leaving something out of the record makes it possible for somebody to get an indefinite number of "first offenses". Of course it seems far more likely that there was an informal policy of protecting offenders who were otherwise high performing, and the whole thing about it being a first offense was a ruse.
Apple should just give up on connectors for the iPhone completely. They've already removed the headphone jack in favor of wireless headphones. They should remove the lightning connector and go to wireless charging and WiFi/Wireless only for data. That would remove the last remaining open connector on the phone and make it much easier to make it really waterproof.
For the right price you can be hired to flood Twitter with whatever message you want.
Except that's of limited utility. A twitter feed only contains tweets by (or retweeted by) people the user is following, so tweeting by a bunch of bots with no followers won't flood the feeds of anyone else. You could use something like that to get a topic trending, but most people would ignore it once they realize it's just a bunch of bots tweeting the same message.
It's much more likely to be an army of followers for hire. There are apparently people who will pay real money to get an army of fake twitter followers to make them look more impressive. It apparently even works. People pay more attention to tweeters with more followers, so getting a bunch of fake followers can actually help you to get real ones.
And Economics 101. If you somehow managed to bring that much iron to the Earth, it would completely change price structures. Iron would become essentially free as a raw material, with only transportation and processing costs. People would develop all kinds of new applications for raw meteoric iron to take advantage of its low price, etc.
This isn't going to add to the number of routers, since the appliances are going to connect to the net through your existing router. It's just going to mean that homes are going to have a ton of devices connecting to their routers.
Supposedly slides are far superior to digital projection, and I could very well be persuaded to agree -- but at the same time, digital projection is kind of very crap these days at the low end, just like any other digital display technology.
Good digital projection beats the hell out of film, which is why the movie business has moved to digital*. Of course that good digital projection is expensive, but as a practical matter it takes a high quality, dedicated projection environment (e.g. a serious home theater room) before the quality of the projection is the limiting factor in quality.
*No, it's not just a cost reduction thing. In some of the tests where Hollywood was trying to figure out if digital projection was ready, film was literally booed off the screen in back-to-back comparisons. The qualitative difference, even with new prints, was that big.
Curly quotes are primarily an aesthetic thing. If you are nesting quotes to the point you genuinely need the direction of the curl to tell you what's inside and what's outside, you're doing it wrong. Go back and figure out a better way of distinguishing quoted from non-quoted material and showing the depth of nesting.
One reason people miss their flights is because they have busy, unpredictable schedules. They may be doing something like business negotiations that don't run on a nice schedule; they're finished when everybody agrees on terms. For someone like that, it's more convenient either to book multiple flights and then take whichever one works out or to pay the full, non-refundable fare that lets them keep changing their flight so they can push it back one day at a time. FWIW, this kind of thing is why there are still travel agencies specializing in business travel even in the day of online booking.
These are predicted to happen in several cities around the world in particular atmospheric conditions... if things keeps getting worse though, you can predict that soon, along with heavy snow days, we'll also have heavy smog days for some cities.
This is old hat here in Los Angeles. There is a whole series of defined smog levels with different suggested and mandatory actions associated with each. There hasn't been a stage 3 alert (the highest level) since 1974, and even the lower level alerts are extremely rare, largely because Southern California adopted a really comprehensive approach to cleaning up the air. So it's only going to get worse in other places if they are fatalistic about it. If they are aggressive about trying to prevent smog, they can succeed.
A possible use case would be an enterprise with a very specialized, expensive printer- like a super-high speed or large format printer- that's kept in a centralized location. Jobs would be submitted remotely and then the output would be shipped to the submitter. HP makes some very high-end printing products where that kind of workflow makes sense.
It doesn't have to be of unlimited length. In Outlook/Exchange, at least, it's possible to have a distribution group that is handled by the server, so including the group name in the To: (or CC: or BCC:) field will send it to everyone in that group, no matter how big. My organization has a #Everyone group that does actually go to everyone. I don't know if #Everyone is protected, but there are certainly some very large distribution groups- around 1/3 of the organization- that anyone is allowed to send to.
The problem is that Google isn't manufacturing all those phones, chargers, and cables. It's not clear how much power they have to enforce standard compliance even among Android vendors, much less among people selling third party accessories like chargers and cables. And it's really hard for the phone to check standard compliance for those third party devices. OTOH, Google does have at least one engineer whose job seems to be testing third party USB type-C cables for standards compliance and posting on-line reviews with his results. They know they'll take the blame if customers damage their devices with cheap, non-compliant third-party devices, so they put the knowledge out there so nobody can claim ignorance.
I don't think anyone is going to try charging a cell phone battery at 100W; that's so laptops can use a USB type-C connector for both power and connecting to peripherals. If you tried to use 100W to charge a tiny cell phone battery, you might very well put enough heat into the battery to get it to blow up, regardless of what cable you were using. I don't think any of the rapid chargers are drawing more than about 20 W.
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Eugenics was never a particularly good idea. It was always a justification for bigots to legally enforce their bigotry in vile ways. The only reason anyone thinks it sounds like a good idea is because they assume they won't be the one being involuntarily sterilized "for the good of humankind".
It's possible to think both that Google Home is an invasive piece of spyware and that Burger King is awful for exploiting it.
Or it could be because the performance reviews they use as part of their process are biased. Unless they can guarantee that their managers aren't biased when reviewing employee performance, they've just pushed the level where the bias creeps in back one step.
If insecure devices are likely to be bricked, security may become a selling point.
If the house has already been taken over by a criminal gang, it's a different matter. That's a better analogy with a lot of these insecure IoT devices. They aren't just sitting there innocently; if they're vulnerable to being shut down by this malware, they're also vulnerable to being taken over by botnets. This is not just a theoretical worry; some of the big recent DDOS attacks have been by IoT device botnets.
Even if the customer is legitimately throwing a tantrum, there are still better and worse ways of responding. The company in this case could have continued trying to help in the hopes of fixing the problem and getting the guy to change his review. Or it could have been polite about offering a refund, waiving restocking fees, etc. Throwing its own tantrum in response to a customer tantrum is neither productive nor likely to generate good publicity. Instead, it's likely to make people think the customer may have been on to something with his complaints about poor support.
And maybe expandable. It's neat when they can package everything into a nice tiny case, but the whole elegance factor is ruined when the only way to add stuff is in clunky external boxes. How about making sure there's plenty of free expansion slots and hard drive spaces so people can add stuff inside the original case?
Of course this shows another important point with reviewers: it's important to read the actual review rather than just the star rating. A good reviewer will explain not just whether they like a given movie (or book, album, etc.) but also why they feel that way. Even if your tastes differ from theirs, you can often get a good idea of whether you'll like something if you can see what they like and dislike about it in detail. Sites like Rotten Tomatoes give you the advantage of aggregating multiple reviews, but that comes at the expense of eliminating everything but the bottom line number.
Just make sure that hub isn't plugged into a computer, since the stick could have a malicious data payload. Note, though, that the same company that makes the USB Kill Stick also makes a plug in surge suppressor that protects USB ports against the Kill Stick. I'm sure they're planning on selling them to people like law enforcement who have to worry about malicious hardware.
Just remember, the only people who win in an arms race are arms manufacturers.
Ben Hur (1959) springs immediately to mind. A number of movies in various comic book franchises would probably also qualify. Does anyone really think the Adam West Batman movie was better than the Tim Burton version? (I can get that some people might prefer the Tim Burton version to the Christopher Nolan version, though that would be more of a judgment call.)
It's also good to remember that the whole reason people tend to do remakes is because the original was good enough to be worth copying. With the possible exception of movies based on an original work in another medium (book, play, graphic novel, etc.), nobody is going to bother making a remake of a stinker. They're going to pick the stuff that was great and successful to copy, which inherently disadvantages the remake because it's being compared to something good.
Sure there is. Farmers, especially ones in areas where water is the limiting factor in how much they can grow, are worried about losses to evaporation. Those losses can be minimized by irrigating at night, when it's cooler and water evaporates more slowly. Depending on the economics and the water supply, it may make sense to adopt a more expensive irrigation strategy if it conserves water.
It's a very common way for insecure people to protect their positions. A person at the top is worried about being replaced by their subordinates, so they set their subordinates against each other. That way, the subordinates spend all their time on infighting rather than trying to replace the boss. You'll see this kind of thing all the time in dictatorships, but it shows up regularly with dictatorial managers of all stripes, too. It's one more variant on the old "divide and rule" strategy.
At least according to the article, the HR person was not being honest. They said that it was the boss's first offense and they didn't want to put it on his record because it would hurt him. But the author spoke to other women who had complained about him before she did, so it wasn't his first offense. The most generous interpretation is that they were basing the claim of first offense on his blank official record, so that he could get an infinite number of "first" offenses left off.
It goes to show why that approach is a bad one. If you don't want people to get in trouble for a first offense, make that the policy. Put the offense in their record, but give them a free pass for it when it comes time to evaluate them. But leaving something out of the record makes it possible for somebody to get an indefinite number of "first offenses". Of course it seems far more likely that there was an informal policy of protecting offenders who were otherwise high performing, and the whole thing about it being a first offense was a ruse.
Apple should just give up on connectors for the iPhone completely. They've already removed the headphone jack in favor of wireless headphones. They should remove the lightning connector and go to wireless charging and WiFi/Wireless only for data. That would remove the last remaining open connector on the phone and make it much easier to make it really waterproof.
Except that's of limited utility. A twitter feed only contains tweets by (or retweeted by) people the user is following, so tweeting by a bunch of bots with no followers won't flood the feeds of anyone else. You could use something like that to get a topic trending, but most people would ignore it once they realize it's just a bunch of bots tweeting the same message.
It's much more likely to be an army of followers for hire. There are apparently people who will pay real money to get an army of fake twitter followers to make them look more impressive. It apparently even works. People pay more attention to tweeters with more followers, so getting a bunch of fake followers can actually help you to get real ones.
And Economics 101. If you somehow managed to bring that much iron to the Earth, it would completely change price structures. Iron would become essentially free as a raw material, with only transportation and processing costs. People would develop all kinds of new applications for raw meteoric iron to take advantage of its low price, etc.
This isn't going to add to the number of routers, since the appliances are going to connect to the net through your existing router. It's just going to mean that homes are going to have a ton of devices connecting to their routers.
Good digital projection beats the hell out of film, which is why the movie business has moved to digital*. Of course that good digital projection is expensive, but as a practical matter it takes a high quality, dedicated projection environment (e.g. a serious home theater room) before the quality of the projection is the limiting factor in quality.
*No, it's not just a cost reduction thing. In some of the tests where Hollywood was trying to figure out if digital projection was ready, film was literally booed off the screen in back-to-back comparisons. The qualitative difference, even with new prints, was that big.
Curly quotes are primarily an aesthetic thing. If you are nesting quotes to the point you genuinely need the direction of the curl to tell you what's inside and what's outside, you're doing it wrong. Go back and figure out a better way of distinguishing quoted from non-quoted material and showing the depth of nesting.
One reason people miss their flights is because they have busy, unpredictable schedules. They may be doing something like business negotiations that don't run on a nice schedule; they're finished when everybody agrees on terms. For someone like that, it's more convenient either to book multiple flights and then take whichever one works out or to pay the full, non-refundable fare that lets them keep changing their flight so they can push it back one day at a time. FWIW, this kind of thing is why there are still travel agencies specializing in business travel even in the day of online booking.
This is old hat here in Los Angeles. There is a whole series of defined smog levels with different suggested and mandatory actions associated with each. There hasn't been a stage 3 alert (the highest level) since 1974, and even the lower level alerts are extremely rare, largely because Southern California adopted a really comprehensive approach to cleaning up the air. So it's only going to get worse in other places if they are fatalistic about it. If they are aggressive about trying to prevent smog, they can succeed.
A possible use case would be an enterprise with a very specialized, expensive printer- like a super-high speed or large format printer- that's kept in a centralized location. Jobs would be submitted remotely and then the output would be shipped to the submitter. HP makes some very high-end printing products where that kind of workflow makes sense.
It doesn't have to be of unlimited length. In Outlook/Exchange, at least, it's possible to have a distribution group that is handled by the server, so including the group name in the To: (or CC: or BCC:) field will send it to everyone in that group, no matter how big. My organization has a #Everyone group that does actually go to everyone. I don't know if #Everyone is protected, but there are certainly some very large distribution groups- around 1/3 of the organization- that anyone is allowed to send to.
The problem is that Google isn't manufacturing all those phones, chargers, and cables. It's not clear how much power they have to enforce standard compliance even among Android vendors, much less among people selling third party accessories like chargers and cables. And it's really hard for the phone to check standard compliance for those third party devices. OTOH, Google does have at least one engineer whose job seems to be testing third party USB type-C cables for standards compliance and posting on-line reviews with his results. They know they'll take the blame if customers damage their devices with cheap, non-compliant third-party devices, so they put the knowledge out there so nobody can claim ignorance.
I don't think anyone is going to try charging a cell phone battery at 100W; that's so laptops can use a USB type-C connector for both power and connecting to peripherals. If you tried to use 100W to charge a tiny cell phone battery, you might very well put enough heat into the battery to get it to blow up, regardless of what cable you were using. I don't think any of the rapid chargers are drawing more than about 20 W.