But then property prices skyrocket around large employers and many employees are still forced to commute to work simply to find property they can afford.
Its the ratrace; most employees could choose to live really close to work but it would mean an expensive move (if you own, moving costs tens of thousands of dollars) and higher (but affordable) monthly costs. Most gladly exchange an extra 30-45min on the daily commute for an extra 1000 sq feet in their house or perhaps enough money to take an annual vacation; that's just the way Americans like it.
Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
Certain businesses? Which sort? The kind that benefit from building all those amenities from scratch? I call bullshit unless you are operating an airport, naval base, or some other ridiculously large and specialized enterprise. Google, Apple, etc simply balked at the rent/taxes they would have to pay to locate somewhere with a good workforce, and instead camps outside the city limits and cherry picks employees with private buses to take advantage of the city without having to pay for it. If the suburbs were such an appealing location, why aren't the employees there too?
Please explain that to MY UPS delivery guy. He leaves it on the front porch regardless of the delivery instructions.
Delivery instructions are not delivery requirements: if they require an adult signature (the most strict delivery option) there is no way it's getting dropped on your doorstep. If that happens, report it to UPS and you will have a new driver within the week.
There's exactly two ways that UPS delivers packages to my door:
1) They leave it on the front door step, like a thief in the night. 2) They leave it on my front door step and play Ding-Dong-Ditch, or whatever PC name we pretend it's called today.
There are a lot of UPS service tiers, and most revolve around the insurance purchased. If the seller (i.e. most cheap ebay and online-only retailers) doesnt pay for a service tier that warrants that kind of handling, yeah it will get tossed on your doorstep with nary a second thought. Take that up with the seller though.
Is there a means to have UPS just leave it at the depot for you, without their attempting delivery first?
UPS MyChoice is rather convenient, you can have it held at the depot, held for a specific delivery date, or add additional instructions. UPS also immediately grants you "ownership" of the shipment as soon as they have it, via name/address matching, so you will always know about deliveries, even if the shipper is lame and doesnt send you tracking info for a few days. If you ship any amount via UPS you really should have it (its free).
They don't give a shit about our safety - that's why it has to be legislated and why they ALWAYS fight safety legislation. Always.
The updates are done at the dealership so while the software is being updated, you're walking around looking that the new models and it gives the salesperson to harass you.
It gets you to the dealership to shop.
When it comes to the intentions of business, cynism is always appropiate.
Strangely, the dealership/manufacturer model is rather adversarial, with dealerships lobbying (successfully) for control over who sells cars where, locking out the automakers from any attempt at selling directly to customers. The reason dealerships would balk at OTA software fixes is that they get a nice steady stream of revenue from the manufacturer by performing those recall updates. Its easy work: they plug the car in, double click, and collect $100 or more from the manufacturer. Who wouldn't want to run a shop that had guaranteed, easy to complete work that's always paid for on time? Time to lobby to make sure doing it any other way is illegal!
But I will not tech history in the last 20 years is littered with companies that were bought because of instant messaging in one form or another, stuff like Skype, that later on did not really bring it's parent company anything (eBay sold skype to Microsoft at a loss iirc).
The problem seems to be how to integrate and monetize these services without people jumping ship. Until then, they are hosting a free service that's quite a bit to fund with no obvious revenue stream in sight other than ads.
Of course, Facebook is an expert on that, so it may turn out well for them. Still, amazing returns on a 4 year old company.
Free service? It's $.99/year/user so they are currently drawing in about $450M/year and importantly, they are enrolling at a rate of 1M users/day which is adding another $1M to the net revenue, every day. By this time next year, they will have 1B users. Finally, a company charging what SMS is worth (too bad you have to bring your own data plan but I digress).
UPS/FedEx/USPS have efficient routing because your house doesn't move. They can plan the best way to get from the warehouse/depot to a set of locations throughout the day. I think this is akin to the traveling salesman problem...
Now, if you have it delivered to your car, which is mobile, how are they supposed to coordinate this? If the truck leaves the depot at 7am, and my car is detected at my house, the truck has a route optimized for delivery to my house. If I go to the grocery store at 9am, does the truck re-reroute to the grocery store and then if I go to the bank 30min later re-route again?
Doubt it.
This might work if you tell them that your car will be in a fixed location throughout the day. But I'm not sure that civilian GPS is sensitive enough to tell the driver where your car is when it's in a parking lot with 500 other cars.
Oh and, it's a version of the Travelling Salesman problem, but it's not "The" travelling salesman problem since the difference between P and NP to a delivery driver is rather hard to express. Delivery companies have no problem enumerating all routes since transistors have outnumbered roads for some time.
UPS/FedEx/USPS have efficient routing because your house doesn't move. They can plan the best way to get from the warehouse/depot to a set of locations throughout the day. I think this is akin to the traveling salesman problem...
Now, if you have it delivered to your car, which is mobile, how are they supposed to coordinate this? If the truck leaves the depot at 7am, and my car is detected at my house, the truck has a route optimized for delivery to my house. If I go to the grocery store at 9am, does the truck re-reroute to the grocery store and then if I go to the bank 30min later re-route again?
Doubt it.
This might work if you tell them that your car will be in a fixed location throughout the day. But I'm not sure that civilian GPS is sensitive enough to tell the driver where your car is when it's in a parking lot with 500 other cars.
Working backward: a modern GPS receiver in a car will get within 15', leaving a circle of maybe 10 cars. On top of that the driver no doubt has a description of the vehicle and the ability to flash/honk the vehicle.
The car delivery is likely to be practical/profitable when cars are concentrated (i.e. when you are at work) so no, someone who doesnt leave their car in the same place for 8-9 hrs/day is not likely to be a candidate for this.
Fortunately a good number of workers in the US work in high density areas, and park in surface lots with easy access. Its a lot easier than crisscrossing the suburbs, but then again until nearly every car can do it, the advantage of any major carrier picking up this technology is pretty limited.
You may want to refrain from having a 73" TV delivered to your car then.
Would it be much better being dropped off in front of your house, waiting for you to get home? Because that always works out well.
So instead of thieves pilfering porches, they will just follow the UPS/Fedex drivers around and smash/grab from cars. Welcome to the future! I might be lucky but my area of residence is littered with UPS, Fedex, and USPS pickups (all within 2mi, close to the highways) so package delivery has for some time been a non-issue, I simply pick it up from the depot on the way home from work, and that's that. Not sure why that "technology" isnt being investigated more (besides the Amazon locker idea) but oh well. PO Boxes are for homeless people, but porch deliveries are for folks who like having their electronics stolen.
....all the hatred for Kinect. People cite privacy and all that, but the hatred for Kinect goes back much farther than that. There was incredible hatred for the device at the initial release well before there were any privacy concerns. That's a shame, since it is the most innovative thing that Microsoft has ever developed.
That, and oddly enough a shitload of people bought the original Kinect, despite the hatred by the gaming elite. A ton more people bought the 360+Kinect combo. Did every one of them love the Kinect games, probably not. The kinect, to its credit, was the thing that finally gave the 360 the edge over the Wii, despite it costing a ton more to get a 360+Kinect than a Wii, people ate it up. And now we have more haters saying they dont want the Kinect with the One? Go sell it on ebay and quit whining, you are a minority and most people love the Kinect features.
Mobile phone reception is atrociously bad considering the prices mobile companies demand.
In 1960, a phone call could be placed from any point in the United States to any other point in the United States and the sound quality would be consistently good.
Now you can't make a call down the street without it sounding like the person at the other end is being beamed through an interdimensional time warp.
Your definition of "any point in the United States" leaves a lot to be desired, but yes cell phones do compromise sound quality for low power consumption and usable signal.
What does a site on the dark web that lists contraband and exchanges bitcoins (two very automatic things) do with employees in the first place? Oh that's right, get them arrested! Enjoy your complementary paycheck furlough and visit from the FBI.
I'll have to watch that later. But here's my opinion on the whole "why buying a car is awful". The reason it's awful, is that for most people, a car is the most expensive item (apart from real estate) that they will ever buy, by a huge margin. And, unlike real estate, cars depreciate at an exceptional rate. A car that costs as much as 1/4 of your yearly salary (which might even be low balling it a little, for people buying new), is going to be a huge decision. Plus people depend on their car. They need it to get back and forth to work. No car means they can't go to work, which means they won't get paid. So people are willing to spend large amounts of money to ensure they get something that will be dependable. Also, cars have become a status item. Half the reason most people buy a car, is probably just to show off to their friends which car they have.
None of those things you mentioned make the experience awful, just increasingly strenuous. The reason it's awful is (in a nutshell) face to face sales + lack of selection + lack of loan transparency = confusion from start to finish which leads to opportunity for buyers remorse.
Based on polls, Republicans are almost always the minority party, because they advocate positions that benefit the minority and harm the majority. Their electoral victories come from discouraging voting by the majority so that the committed minority can win.
Of course, because they've painted themselves into a corner and cannot imagine that their policies are the reason for their failures, they have to keep trying various tactics to "win" despite public opposition. But until they believe that they need to change, they can't change, and will keep losing.
Though if tactics such as gerrymandering and voter suppression continue to be allowed to succeed, then they'll never change.
When the eligible voter turnout ranges from 35% in off years to 60% in presidential races, no one is winning with a true majority, they are winning by convincing more supporters to turn out than the other side. Winning/losing in the margin hardly creates a mandate by the majority, but that's what has happened for several decades now. Americans just aren't interested enough in either party. The only real solution for that is mandatory voting (and moving election day to a weekend or running it for multiple days), but freedom to be a lazyass is one of our most cherished rights so we would rather not do anything about it.
In practice, it is far more secure to use a written signature than a 4-digit password that is exposed to eavesdroppers, video cameras, interception devices and a plethora of other attacks. That's secure for the person, you understand: it prevents the bank from saying "you must have lost your pin".
IF you could clearly sign all of those touch-screen signature pads, AND some system actually compared what was input to your signature on file, then maybe. But very few of those are properly positioned or are properly sensitive enough for anyone to sign more than a few squiggly lines. I used to just draw a picture of a cow on them and my signature was always accepted.
It's not about authentication, it's about nonrepudiation. Next time you are at a POS terminal with a digitizer, take a look around and count how many cameras are watching you. Then think about how you would deny it was you signing, and get away with it. Therein lies the importance of the signature. Remember, trust is required of *all* parties and the system is designed to generate it (except where it's not profitable, and then it's simply ignored).
"It's just as well," the Verizon spokesperson said, "It wasn't close to turning a profit, and that didn't even count the extra costs feeding the home info from all sensors to the NSA, whom we aren't even legally allowed to charge."
Are you kidding? The NSA (and other TLAs) get charged a *crapton* for siphoning data from private orgs: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ro...
It's only a "free" site if you consider that the time and effort that the participants put into it is valueless. And "Beta" is not a term generally used to mean "trial balloon". It usually means, Next Week In Production (unless you're Google, in which case "Next Week" can be removed).
The advertisers pay for the hosting services and infrastructure, but without content, the product is nothing. So users have a definite interest in keeping the site usable and comfortable.
I haven't actually seen the Beta yet, but if it's truly keeping with recent trends in other products towards removal of commonly-used features and insertion of empty glitz, as some anti-Beta whingers have asserted, I can see why there is cause for a major uproar.
We have a lot of self-professed Libertarians here, they chant the mantra claiming that if you don't like service pick a competitor. Consider Digg. That's basically the route that Digg went down, its users fled and Digg dug its own grave. There aren't so many competitors for Slashdot that its users want it too to be ruined, so they're trying to ensure that it doesn't go that route.
I don't often counsel this in the IT world, but if it ain't broke...
If it ain't broke, it must run at least as well as Friendster.... Right? Or maybe it runs as well as Altavista? Geocities? Need some more examples of services that failed to change at the right time? No one said "f--- this beta friendster s---, I'm going to facebook because I dont like this any more", did they? Nope, they said "well hell, 10 of my friends just joined facebook, what am I doing on friendster?" and the rest is history.
Isn't describing your surroundings in understandable terms supposed to be subjective? If I can't stand outside and give my honest opinion about how it feels, what the fuck is the point of the word subjective?
good engineer would take this into account when designing the system.
Found yer problem!
Clipped signals (no sign that VLC does this, or is the only software capable of this, etc) can indeed ruin speakers being driven at a fraction of their rated wattage. And, presuming that whoever spec'd the speaker AND whoever spec'd the amp circuit both took this into account is pretty crazy. They said to themselves "does it meet the requirement and is it cheap enough? Great use it."
Because it would be illegal, and they would be subject to legal repercussions, unlike now. What part of this do you find confusing?
The part where Verizon is demonstrably doing something to cause this. "slow speeds to netflix" can be explained a lot of ways that don't involve content based throttling. Short of a subpoena for exactly the right router configuration (good luck, they have about 20,000) you can't.
Never mind that you're saying you nearly avoided collisions four times (got your fenders straightened out yet?), but if you've made the same (to my mind, young driver's) mistake four times in recent memory, perhaps you need to turn off the radio, put down the fast food, stop playing with your phone and pay attention to what you're doing. I'm sorry that some quantity of silicone is required to bring your driving skills up to par; how is that going to happen if you're constantly relying upon technology is beyond me - and don't insist that I use the same crutch so that your crutch will work better. I don't happen to fancy what'll happen when people start driving their cars Anonymously; talk about open sores! Never mind the Minority Report thing about having my car collect me up for the dread Secret Police, what about that guy at the end of the block who gets off watching traffic accidents which always seem to happen near that radio transponder he buried in the front yard?
Slashdot Mirror
But then property prices skyrocket around large employers and many employees are still forced to commute to work simply to find property they can afford.
Its the ratrace; most employees could choose to live really close to work but it would mean an expensive move (if you own, moving costs tens of thousands of dollars) and higher (but affordable) monthly costs. Most gladly exchange an extra 30-45min on the daily commute for an extra 1000 sq feet in their house or perhaps enough money to take an annual vacation; that's just the way Americans like it.
Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.
Certain businesses? Which sort? The kind that benefit from building all those amenities from scratch? I call bullshit unless you are operating an airport, naval base, or some other ridiculously large and specialized enterprise. Google, Apple, etc simply balked at the rent/taxes they would have to pay to locate somewhere with a good workforce, and instead camps outside the city limits and cherry picks employees with private buses to take advantage of the city without having to pay for it. If the suburbs were such an appealing location, why aren't the employees there too?
The book was really great, sounds good, lets check it out:
"You can purchase The Plateau Effect: Getting from Stuck to Success from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes..."
Wait what the fuck book is that?
(yes the actual link destination is OK, but seriously editors you had _one_ _job_.)
I'd like to hear more about this.
Yeah, I remember getting twice as smart when I upgraded from a 14.4k to a 28.8k modem. Don't you?
Please explain that to MY UPS delivery guy. He leaves it on the front porch regardless of the delivery instructions.
Delivery instructions are not delivery requirements: if they require an adult signature (the most strict delivery option) there is no way it's getting dropped on your doorstep. If that happens, report it to UPS and you will have a new driver within the week.
There's exactly two ways that UPS delivers packages to my door:
1) They leave it on the front door step, like a thief in the night.
2) They leave it on my front door step and play Ding-Dong-Ditch, or whatever PC name we pretend it's called today.
There are a lot of UPS service tiers, and most revolve around the insurance purchased. If the seller (i.e. most cheap ebay and online-only retailers) doesnt pay for a service tier that warrants that kind of handling, yeah it will get tossed on your doorstep with nary a second thought. Take that up with the seller though.
Is there a means to have UPS just leave it at the depot for you, without their attempting delivery first?
UPS MyChoice is rather convenient, you can have it held at the depot, held for a specific delivery date, or add additional instructions. UPS also immediately grants you "ownership" of the shipment as soon as they have it, via name/address matching, so you will always know about deliveries, even if the shipper is lame and doesnt send you tracking info for a few days. If you ship any amount via UPS you really should have it (its free).
You give the car companies way too much credit.
They don't give a shit about our safety - that's why it has to be legislated and why they ALWAYS fight safety legislation. Always.
The updates are done at the dealership so while the software is being updated, you're walking around looking that the new models and it gives the salesperson to harass you.
It gets you to the dealership to shop.
When it comes to the intentions of business, cynism is always appropiate.
Strangely, the dealership/manufacturer model is rather adversarial, with dealerships lobbying (successfully) for control over who sells cars where, locking out the automakers from any attempt at selling directly to customers. The reason dealerships would balk at OTA software fixes is that they get a nice steady stream of revenue from the manufacturer by performing those recall updates. Its easy work: they plug the car in, double click, and collect $100 or more from the manufacturer. Who wouldn't want to run a shop that had guaranteed, easy to complete work that's always paid for on time? Time to lobby to make sure doing it any other way is illegal!
http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/2...
But I will not tech history in the last 20 years is littered with companies that were bought because of instant messaging in one form or another, stuff like Skype, that later on did not really bring it's parent company anything (eBay sold skype to Microsoft at a loss iirc).
The problem seems to be how to integrate and monetize these services without people jumping ship. Until then, they are hosting a free service that's quite a bit to fund with no obvious revenue stream in sight other than ads.
Of course, Facebook is an expert on that, so it may turn out well for them. Still, amazing returns on a 4 year old company.
Free service? It's $.99/year/user so they are currently drawing in about $450M/year and importantly, they are enrolling at a rate of 1M users/day which is adding another $1M to the net revenue, every day. By this time next year, they will have 1B users. Finally, a company charging what SMS is worth (too bad you have to bring your own data plan but I digress).
UPS/FedEx/USPS have efficient routing because your house doesn't move. They can plan the best way to get from the warehouse/depot to a set of locations throughout the day. I think this is akin to the traveling salesman problem...
Now, if you have it delivered to your car, which is mobile, how are they supposed to coordinate this? If the truck leaves the depot at 7am, and my car is detected at my house, the truck has a route optimized for delivery to my house. If I go to the grocery store at 9am, does the truck re-reroute to the grocery store and then if I go to the bank 30min later re-route again?
Doubt it.
This might work if you tell them that your car will be in a fixed location throughout the day. But I'm not sure that civilian GPS is sensitive enough to tell the driver where your car is when it's in a parking lot with 500 other cars.
Oh and, it's a version of the Travelling Salesman problem, but it's not "The" travelling salesman problem since the difference between P and NP to a delivery driver is rather hard to express. Delivery companies have no problem enumerating all routes since transistors have outnumbered roads for some time.
UPS/FedEx/USPS have efficient routing because your house doesn't move. They can plan the best way to get from the warehouse/depot to a set of locations throughout the day. I think this is akin to the traveling salesman problem...
Now, if you have it delivered to your car, which is mobile, how are they supposed to coordinate this? If the truck leaves the depot at 7am, and my car is detected at my house, the truck has a route optimized for delivery to my house. If I go to the grocery store at 9am, does the truck re-reroute to the grocery store and then if I go to the bank 30min later re-route again?
Doubt it.
This might work if you tell them that your car will be in a fixed location throughout the day. But I'm not sure that civilian GPS is sensitive enough to tell the driver where your car is when it's in a parking lot with 500 other cars.
Working backward: a modern GPS receiver in a car will get within 15', leaving a circle of maybe 10 cars. On top of that the driver no doubt has a description of the vehicle and the ability to flash/honk the vehicle.
The car delivery is likely to be practical/profitable when cars are concentrated (i.e. when you are at work) so no, someone who doesnt leave their car in the same place for 8-9 hrs/day is not likely to be a candidate for this.
Fortunately a good number of workers in the US work in high density areas, and park in surface lots with easy access. Its a lot easier than crisscrossing the suburbs, but then again until nearly every car can do it, the advantage of any major carrier picking up this technology is pretty limited.
You may want to refrain from having a 73" TV delivered to your car then.
Would it be much better being dropped off in front of your house, waiting for you to get home? Because that always works out well.
So instead of thieves pilfering porches, they will just follow the UPS/Fedex drivers around and smash/grab from cars. Welcome to the future! I might be lucky but my area of residence is littered with UPS, Fedex, and USPS pickups (all within 2mi, close to the highways) so package delivery has for some time been a non-issue, I simply pick it up from the depot on the way home from work, and that's that. Not sure why that "technology" isnt being investigated more (besides the Amazon locker idea) but oh well. PO Boxes are for homeless people, but porch deliveries are for folks who like having their electronics stolen.
....all the hatred for Kinect. People cite privacy and all that, but the hatred for Kinect goes back much farther than that. There was incredible hatred for the device at the initial release well before there were any privacy concerns. That's a shame, since it is the most innovative thing that Microsoft has ever developed.
That, and oddly enough a shitload of people bought the original Kinect, despite the hatred by the gaming elite. A ton more people bought the 360+Kinect combo. Did every one of them love the Kinect games, probably not. The kinect, to its credit, was the thing that finally gave the 360 the edge over the Wii, despite it costing a ton more to get a 360+Kinect than a Wii, people ate it up. And now we have more haters saying they dont want the Kinect with the One? Go sell it on ebay and quit whining, you are a minority and most people love the Kinect features.
Mobile phone reception is atrociously bad considering the prices mobile companies demand.
In 1960, a phone call could be placed from any point in the United States to any other point in the United States and the sound quality would be consistently good.
Now you can't make a call down the street without it sounding like the person at the other end is being beamed through an interdimensional time warp.
Your definition of "any point in the United States" leaves a lot to be desired, but yes cell phones do compromise sound quality for low power consumption and usable signal.
What does a site on the dark web that lists contraband and exchanges bitcoins (two very automatic things) do with employees in the first place? Oh that's right, get them arrested! Enjoy your complementary paycheck furlough and visit from the FBI.
I'll have to watch that later. But here's my opinion on the whole "why buying a car is awful". The reason it's awful, is that for most people, a car is the most expensive item (apart from real estate) that they will ever buy, by a huge margin. And, unlike real estate, cars depreciate at an exceptional rate. A car that costs as much as 1/4 of your yearly salary (which might even be low balling it a little, for people buying new), is going to be a huge decision. Plus people depend on their car. They need it to get back and forth to work. No car means they can't go to work, which means they won't get paid. So people are willing to spend large amounts of money to ensure they get something that will be dependable. Also, cars have become a status item. Half the reason most people buy a car, is probably just to show off to their friends which car they have.
None of those things you mentioned make the experience awful, just increasingly strenuous. The reason it's awful is (in a nutshell) face to face sales + lack of selection + lack of loan transparency = confusion from start to finish which leads to opportunity for buyers remorse.
Based on polls, Republicans are almost always the minority party, because they advocate positions that benefit the minority and harm the majority. Their electoral victories come from discouraging voting by the majority so that the committed minority can win.
Of course, because they've painted themselves into a corner and cannot imagine that their policies are the reason for their failures, they have to keep trying various tactics to "win" despite public opposition. But until they believe that they need to change, they can't change, and will keep losing.
Though if tactics such as gerrymandering and voter suppression continue to be allowed to succeed, then they'll never change.
When the eligible voter turnout ranges from 35% in off years to 60% in presidential races, no one is winning with a true majority, they are winning by convincing more supporters to turn out than the other side. Winning/losing in the margin hardly creates a mandate by the majority, but that's what has happened for several decades now. Americans just aren't interested enough in either party. The only real solution for that is mandatory voting (and moving election day to a weekend or running it for multiple days), but freedom to be a lazyass is one of our most cherished rights so we would rather not do anything about it.
In practice, it is far more secure to use a written signature than a 4-digit password that is exposed to eavesdroppers, video cameras, interception devices and a plethora of other attacks. That's secure for the person, you understand: it prevents the bank from saying "you must have lost your pin".
IF you could clearly sign all of those touch-screen signature pads, AND some system actually compared what was input to your signature on file, then maybe. But very few of those are properly positioned or are properly sensitive enough for anyone to sign more than a few squiggly lines. I used to just draw a picture of a cow on them and my signature was always accepted.
It's not about authentication, it's about nonrepudiation. Next time you are at a POS terminal with a digitizer, take a look around and count how many cameras are watching you. Then think about how you would deny it was you signing, and get away with it. Therein lies the importance of the signature. Remember, trust is required of *all* parties and the system is designed to generate it (except where it's not profitable, and then it's simply ignored).
"It's just as well," the Verizon spokesperson said, "It wasn't close to turning a profit, and that didn't even count the extra costs feeding the home info from all sensors to the NSA, whom we aren't even legally allowed to charge."
Are you kidding? The NSA (and other TLAs) get charged a *crapton* for siphoning data from private orgs: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ro...
It's only a "free" site if you consider that the time and effort that the participants put into it is valueless. And "Beta" is not a term generally used to mean "trial balloon". It usually means, Next Week In Production (unless you're Google, in which case "Next Week" can be removed).
The advertisers pay for the hosting services and infrastructure, but without content, the product is nothing. So users have a definite interest in keeping the site usable and comfortable.
I haven't actually seen the Beta yet, but if it's truly keeping with recent trends in other products towards removal of commonly-used features and insertion of empty glitz, as some anti-Beta whingers have asserted, I can see why there is cause for a major uproar.
We have a lot of self-professed Libertarians here, they chant the mantra claiming that if you don't like service pick a competitor. Consider Digg. That's basically the route that Digg went down, its users fled and Digg dug its own grave. There aren't so many competitors for Slashdot that its users want it too to be ruined, so they're trying to ensure that it doesn't go that route.
I don't often counsel this in the IT world, but if it ain't broke...
If it ain't broke, it must run at least as well as Friendster.... Right? Or maybe it runs as well as Altavista? Geocities? Need some more examples of services that failed to change at the right time? No one said "f--- this beta friendster s---, I'm going to facebook because I dont like this any more", did they? Nope, they said "well hell, 10 of my friends just joined facebook, what am I doing on friendster?" and the rest is history.
Surely that is not subjective at all.
Isn't describing your surroundings in understandable terms supposed to be subjective? If I can't stand outside and give my honest opinion about how it feels, what the fuck is the point of the word subjective?
Or did that just go whoosh?
good engineer would take this into account when designing the system.
Found yer problem!
Clipped signals (no sign that VLC does this, or is the only software capable of this, etc) can indeed ruin speakers being driven at a fraction of their rated wattage. And, presuming that whoever spec'd the speaker AND whoever spec'd the amp circuit both took this into account is pretty crazy. They said to themselves "does it meet the requirement and is it cheap enough? Great use it."
Because it would be illegal, and they would be subject to legal repercussions, unlike now. What part of this do you find confusing?
The part where Verizon is demonstrably doing something to cause this. "slow speeds to netflix" can be explained a lot of ways that don't involve content based throttling. Short of a subpoena for exactly the right router configuration (good luck, they have about 20,000) you can't.
Never mind that you're saying you nearly avoided collisions four times (got your fenders straightened out yet?), but if you've made the same (to my mind, young driver's) mistake four times in recent memory, perhaps you need to turn off the radio, put down the fast food, stop playing with your phone and pay attention to what you're doing. I'm sorry that some quantity of silicone is required to bring your driving skills up to par; how is that going to happen if you're constantly relying upon technology is beyond me - and don't insist that I use the same crutch so that your crutch will work better. I don't happen to fancy what'll happen when people start driving their cars Anonymously; talk about open sores! Never mind the Minority Report thing about having my car collect me up for the dread Secret Police, what about that guy at the end of the block who gets off watching traffic accidents which always seem to happen near that radio transponder he buried in the front yard?
Bahahahhahaaha. You almost had me. Golf clap.
Grrr...I KNEW someone was going to catch that...why can't we edit our posts here?
The plotucracy doesn't want you to have that feature.
Sincerely,
Your coroprate overlords