Developing web-apps NOW compared to say, 1999 - is a completely different, and far more pleasant experience, and this is almost wholly because of MDN and Google's contributions to the open standards.
Microsoft has made huge strides here, because they were dragged kicking and screaming; BY THE COURTS (and were honestly only let-off, on a political changing of administrations, the case was dropped AFTER they were found guilty - in the PENALTY phase).
The list of things you had to keep in your brain, back then, was about 10% "how to do cool stuff" and 90% "stuff you can't do, because Microsoft says, and because everybody uses IE". Now the list of things you need to keep in your brain is about 20% "how to get awesome and cool features to work nominally or at least fail gracefully on all browsers, because not everyone does everything exactly the same way", and 80% "how to get awesome and cool features to just plain work anywhere"
That's seriously life doing front-end web now, and we unfortunately do not have a free-market to thank for that.
I assume that Google, at some point, may need to be reigned in - on the browser side. But I don't know how or why because they aren't as blatantly violating antitrust law like Microsoft was. (and was found to be violating it IN COURT).
If google had succeeded with Google+ and was dominating like FB; and using that for platform lock-in, I think it would be a different story though.
And since they got their tax cut - (and Trump's co-operation in Judicial nominees), he serves the GOP agenda well enough.
I also expect the newsmedia to blandly fall in-line behind Trump in the next year or so, and while there will be vigorous dissent among voters, that dissent will be largely invisible, to the extent it can be made so, via mass-media, and social media manipulation. Dissenters who go outside of these systems to be heard, are probably going to be dealt with, in the way they're dealt with in "other countries". You know exactly what I mean. Yeah we're fucked. It's not like we weren't warned.
This UFO/Aliens trope seems to be making the rounds now. I'm not sure why - it's been pretty much out of style for about 10-15 years. I think there was a little expectation that Trump getting elected president, that he was going to open any secret files on UFO's and hand them over to Alex Jones for immediate release to the public. For sure. Right? But that didn't happen. Now this stuff. It was kind of shocking to me to hear this story being repeated on NPR last week, but I guess that's the shitty world we're living in now.
13 year old me would have loved this stuff though.
It's about employers refusing to pay workers enough to pay the rents. Period.
I recently turned down a job at a university - their offer came in at $25,000 less than what I am currently making. Maybe a marijuana field near their HR dept caught fire and a smoke cloud drifted over? Can't think of any other explanation, but I'm wanting to save for retirement. Not sell my house and move into a trailer.
If rents or housing prices go up - income has to go up. Or your workers are leaving.
Well you're not wrong, and I wish I could find it - but there was a regulatory change in the mid 1970's regarding entertainment content and toy sales, and Star Wars was specifically designed to be the very first franchise to take advantage of this.
The concept was further weaponized in childrens' television shows shortly after Star Wars. Prior to this, in the USA kids could not buy toys that were associated with kids shows - because those shows would be considered advertisements.
We could get toys for ADULT shows in the 1970's, (shows slotted for evening hours, like "Six Million Dollar Man", etc) - we could get toys NOT associated with television shows (ie. "Barbie", etc). We could also get toys for FOREIGN produced shows on the non-mainstream (UHF) channels, stuff like "Space 1999" or "Speed Racer" (that was our Anime). But not AMERICAN shows like Scooby Doo, or The Monkees, or etc. (There were exceptions - like model kits and stuff like this - I'm talking about how these items were mass-marketed at the time).
It was right after this regulatory change went into effect, that Star Wars was allowed to market toys in commercials during kids TV shows, and then, a whole slew of new merchandising-related shows appeared on TV. What we now lovingly refer to as "our culture". I think the early shows were, Transformers, and He Man, and stuff like that.
Star Wars was really the first big-budget SciFi Adventure movie to use this model, due to the regulatory change.
If we are concerned that AI will be used to mistreat actual living human people; then maybe Government should pass laws dictating the proper treatment for actual living human people. Rather than try to make these abstract definitions about the metaphysical properties of toasters and how they must be manufactured to behave.
The fact is - we've already wrestled with this problem. Our most primitive AI; the landmine. Kills or maims people. Rather at random. We tried to ban them worldwide. That effort failed spectacularly. There are apparently higher priorities in government than making sure random farmboys don't get limbs blown off when working land that was mined in a conflict 20 years before he was born. Dumb landmines. Dumber policymakers.
Recently a former co-worker told me about how his employer had migrated to cloud-based email, and federated login (and some other services). It was true that their IT infrastructure was horribly outdated, and in serious need of a complete overhaul, in order to continue meeting contractual requirements with customers.
But the way this migration was performed, was a complete failure. Over 6 months, they met NONE of their goals. Software license costs ended up being more than double what was estimated. During the migration, the login servers were compromised by a new exploit. There were several complete re-installs, and on every re-install, they found the system was infected or compromised again within minutes. They went through two "big-bang" replacements, where all systems were shut down over an extended weekend, and physical servers were replaced with the spares. As operations were halted, this costs them a huge amount of money. And the extra hours of IT and vendor service were costly. (law enforcement was also involved, and, my former co-worker tells me, there will be a lawsuit by the employees whose personal information was exfiltrated). The only real gain here, was the IT staff got good experience at disaster recovery practice.
In the end, the company's yearly numbers were completely blown. They lost customers, their reputation was damaged. They ended up cutting staff. (some of us already had a feeling that things were heading in a bad direction years ago, and left).
I really really wish that I could name names here. Not just the company but the vendors. This migration plan was announced ahead of time, and so many people drank the marketing cool aid - people who should have known better. But privately, the criticisms were flying, and exactly everything that sound reasonably thinking people said would happen, did happen.
I could go further - to the beginning of the whole "Cloud Services" craze. We've all had our doubts, and pointed out the obvious flaws. And even where a service like Amazon's QuickStart setups can supposedly configure everything to be fully secure and compliant. . . this service is deceptively over-simplified, and there are so many details that are left unspoken. Moving your IT out of your own data center to the cloud may look cheaper on paper, but shipping it to some one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter cloud service is not the answer. You're still going to need a shit ton of very skilled expertise to architect and configure it, and then you're still at risk. Because your data is not in your building under your physical control. Which is really your last line of defense when shit gets real. If you need to, you can unplug.
What if they were exposed to a pathogen; and they (Russians?) also blasted their target with audio, in order to confuse them and dissuade investigators from taking blood samples, doing dna tests, and looking for some kind of weaponized bacteria or virus or something like that?
Are they going to be looking for an algorithm that's fair, or an algorithm that's profitable? To be sure, there is probably an algorithm that's both. Human civilization could reap a wicked ROI on this stuff, but in today's dark world, that is seen as infringing on someone's right to make a profit.
Depends. I think NATURE has already found a solution to this problem.
That which is profitable to one entity (say a corporation) will almost certainly be deleterious to other entities. And no corporation functions in an economy in complete isolation. As soon as a given algorithm becomes so successful, it "kills off all competition" - this algorithm will cease to be successful. Because by killing off other entities, there's no more transactions, and no more economy.
In nature, different species operate in homeostasis. Predator population growth will stop when prey growth stops. They collapse, and return to a lower equilibrium, and the cycle continues.
The problem here: is that in Nature, these systems were allowed to develop over millions of years of evolution. The impulses of greed (animal hunger) tend to live and die with one individual animal, so that you don't have an animal that's SO hungry, they wipe out the entire species of their own prey thus destroying their own future ability to eat. But where human systems are concerned, an AI will have no such feedback. Nor will human behavior. Human greed has been known to surpass common sense. (quite frequently does). And AI will quite happily be the tool to enable this.
We'll soon have a bunch of investment banks cycling trillions of dollars in wealth between themselves in a great big circle jerk of irrelevance while 99% of the rest of humanity starves. Oh, did I say "soon"? I meant: "for the past 2 decades".
Sounds like you're describing classic symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder; and given my (unfortunate) familiarity with several sufferers (runs in my family) - they seem to share a common trait of hypersensitive smell.
So yes: they all seem to love cats. A lot. And prefer them to humans. (because: you get pure affection, with no complicated human emotional and relational politics). But cat pee? Not the ones I'm familiar with. They absolutely don't tolerate it, and take extra measures to stay on top of pet odors. (and all odors, really). (even odors that aren't really there).
Now: that there IS a "classic crazy cat-lady" syndrome, I won't deny. I just don't think it's common to these Borderline Personality Disorder people (who are also commonly very fond of cats). Maybe some BPD ppl get t. gondii infections and get both? That would be unfortunate because BPD is bad enough. Those people struggle to lead normal lives as it is.
ALL companies are extremely vulnerable to the whims of the government. Where do you think corporate charters come from? No corporation could exist without the government. Never mind all the nice expensive public infrastructure that almost every corporation uses.
The problem with climate science is that it's so difficult.
No, it is actually VERY VERY SIMPLE. 1. To show that CO2 has an effect on heat, get two glass jars. One filled with CO2, and one filled with air. Shine an infared lamp (or even just sunlight) on both jars. You can measure that the CO2 jar absorbs more heat, because it's hotter than the air jar. This principle has been known and well-understood for over 100 years, and you can demonstrate this in an elementary-school classroom.
2. To show that human industrial activity releases a shitton (ie. enough to affect the whole world's climate) is also relatively simple. Get in a plane, and fly over the Los Angeles basin. Just look at the carpet of constantly running automobiles, as far as the eye can see across many hundreds and hundreds of square miles. Wrap your brain around this happening 24x7, week after week, month after month... for decades. Get on Google Earth, and look at the land-area we're talking about; and multiply that by all the major cities of the world. This is completely non-mathematical, but very easy for most people to visualize, if they've ever had the opportunity to fly over any urban sprawl area and just watch it happen. Maybe with a little observation of a car exhaust, and how the engine works, and what kind of volume of gasses it puts out while it's running. Also think about jet engines, and the volume of gas they put out as they're running, and think about the tens of thousands of flights happening right now, and every single day: again, 24x7. Non stop. For decades.
These two simple observations are obvious and plain enough that it affected me on a gut-level. No math required. It's plain and obvious. Not at all subtle.
Now: to observe the actual effects on the world, is not so easy. One way is to look at photos, over decades, of glaciers that have receded. If you've been alive for 30+ years (or longer), you know damn well that even though we've had a couple of harsh winters, it's certainly not like it was when we were kids. If you ask older people, they can tell you that things have definitely changed. But this effect is subtle enough that even the very old people who remember Minnesota winters 70 years ago, don't seem to be able to grasp how very different the climate there is now.
They have very convoluted and complicated arguments against Climate Change.
On the Economic side, you hear that the Carbon Tax, and funding for research into renewables (and smart grids, and mass energy storage, and electric cars, and etc); will have a net positive effect on the economy. Yet when you're talking with a denier - they're arguing that any tax is going to cause economic devastation and abridge everybody's quality of life and standard of living, and that shutting down all the fossil fuel jobs will leave millions unemployed. Nobody questions this claim (in the newsmedia), and rarely are the economic arguments compared or scrutinized. This is also an important point that needs to be made to climate change deniers. Where renewable investment has been made, where carbon taxes were enacted, positive, measurable benefits have been observed. Most mainstream economists actually agree with this, but those arguments are silenced in the mainstream newsmedia.
Another one: charging a low price for a product on Amazon, then setting an exorbitant shipping and handling fee, which nearly doubles the price.
. . ..not to mention the "protection racket" that is Amazon Prime - to get people to PAY EXTRA, just so they don't have to worry about being scammed on shipping.
I do have an ideological hatred of ads: It is a unilateral renegotiation of terms. When they want to increase the length of ads, they do it. You get no say. When they want to increase the volume, they do it, you get no say. When they increase the (fucking annoying as hell and insulting) repetition, they do it, you get no say. FUCK ALL THAT. I pay a price to see a show, you show me the fucking show at that set price and that's that. That's the deal. You don't get to alter the terms of the deal, or I fucking shut off your media. Period.
That's what I hate about ads.
There is a set-dollar-amount that any ad is worth, because an advertiser pays for that. I want my cut, and I want it to be a stated term, up front. No changing it later, after the fact. I pay my bills, those fuckers need to pay theirs.
If someone pays for a service, they will not want to see commercials.
Yeah; and any MBA stuffed suits out there who doubt this very simple fact? Please swallow a shotgun. Nobody ever wanted to pay to see ads. Nobody ever will. Just take your ads and fuck right off please.
Oh yeah - and just give me a single, simple networking indicator on the panel that says: 1) interface is on 2) getting good physical-layer signal 3) has a valid address 4) can ping it's lan gateway 5) can ping and tracert DNS servers across the net. 6) can ping and tracert major entities around the globe (google, amazon aws, microsoft). When the net's down, the first thing I want to know is where the fault is, and can I do anything about it. And it's always; "oh fuck open the terminal, now, do I ipconfig, or ifconfig, I don't remember, what net am I on? what's the gateway, can I ping that? can I see through the firewall? Is DNS fubared? . . . etc.
Yes, keyboard navigation in OS X is a total shit show. Apps behave differently to the keystrokes, and some don't respond at all (if the window is "hidden" instead of minimized - why is there a fucking difference?, and if you use a laptop from the built in screen at home, and then use multiple monitors at work, good luck getting UI's and windows to scale right. So much broken.
Also, I know homebrew is nice and all, but OS X REALLY REALLY REALLY needs a decent package manager system. AND a FUCKING UNINSTALLER FOR FUCK"S SAKE. And a central way to find all of the places every app stores startup elements, configuration items, resources . . . etc.
This is all basic "list of main things every OS should do"; and OS X does not get these. Release after release.
Well, ROI isn't really what this is about. Overpaid execs is all about The Hype Train (TM), and building investor excitement, and pumping the stock price. The Hype Train (TM) is why stock PE ratios have been insane since about 1996. The more they kick the american worker in the nuts, the more erect the investor class becomes - because they no longer need to compete with a large, empowered middle-class for access to political power. They don't have to out-bid their own workers while attempting to influence politicians. The value of the stock goes up, the low-tax income of the overpaid exec goes up, the income of the board members go up, and the value of the congressmen and senators blind-trust investments roundly go up. Win-win for the ruling-class and investing-class, lose-lose for the working class.
Just want to say, reading a lot of good points from both sides of the argument in this discussion.
1) Don't like WAZE; don't need advertisements, or gamification. I just want directions and traffic info. Google usually does that just fine. WAZE sucks my battery dry even when I'm not using it. 2) Google maps UX is pretty stupid, most of the time. Used to be pretty obvious and functional, but now, with each new "upgrade", I end up doing a fair amount of clicking around to try to figure out what widgets do, and try to locate functionality that's been (apparently) deprecated. It is very frustrating and annoying, but much less so than Apple maps. The bar is low.
3) A long time ago, I used to deliver pizza. I did that job for about 4 years. I can imagine that google maps can work far better than paper in some situations. But a paper map does something that you don't really ever get into when you're driving in an area frequently, over a period of time. Google doesn't let you LEARN the area. It keeps you on the main/shortest route, which is not always the best route. And you end up relying on Google to get you around. If your signal goes, or your battery goes, or for what other reason, it's not working, then you are fucked, because you don't remember the area. If you use a paper map to view the whole area, and find your route, then you actually begin to LEARN the layout. The layout of an area is important. You learn where there are rail lines, and creeks or rivers, or freeway underpasses, which are HUGE bottlenecks, and when you're improvising or navigating on the fly, you need to have that knowledge in your head, not on your phone. There are also tiny details that become VERY important; that don't show up on electronic maps. No-left-turn signs, center-dividers. When you're on a busy urban or suburban street, and you pull out somewhere, and find you can't go the direction you want, you can sometimes get fucked into having to travel several blocks in order to get turned around again. This can set you back 10, 15, 20 minutes, depending on the traffic and situation. Google does that to me CONSTANTLY; but when you LEARN an area, you know these details in your head, and you can avoid those situations. You'll still need your paper map from time to time, but you're not going to have to refer to it constantly, as you would with a GPS/online map. The other skill you miss out on, is self-location or orienteering. The phone does that for you. (unless there's a technical problem). But the skill for figuring that out by reckoning, visual landmark checks, etc - goes away if you do not use it. That's also very important for on-the-fly navigation. With an electronic device, you can end up with imperfect information, and lag, which will put you a few hundred feet away, which is another situation where you can miss an important turn, and end up having to backtrack or re-route (which, fortunately, google does for you).
There is NO substitute for having an intimate knowledge of an area's quirks and foibles, which are not available even at the most detailed level for electronic maps.
Based on my experience with my Samsung G2: The utility of the smartwatch comes in when you can synchronize your data on the two devices; and there are a couple of "killer apps" when it comes to smartwatches:
Phone/messaging is the obvious one, and the use-case for READING (not responding to) messages is pretty useful, especially if you're receiving a lot of status from various people. Phone-calls are also pretty useful, but a tad awkward; audio is not private (you are on "speakerphone"), and I can say that the output of the Samsung is weak-enough that it's not all that useful for phone calls.
Time is another one, and that's a no-brainer. I don't have to re-set my watch 2 times a year for daylight savings. Tracking my location and re-setting for time-zones is very handy, for people who travel a lot. Don't underestimate that one. Samsung has not yet really fucked this up, but it relies on having your phone with you, and powered-on.
Weather used to be VERY useful. I don't know what Samsung did, but they changed their phone-based Weather widget, and now it does not run at all, so it wn't send time to the watch, the watch weather client doesn't know what to do - it's sad. It has nobody to talk to. It displays the weather data from 9 months ago, when it stopped synchronizing. There are MANY online discussions where users are mentioning this problem, and Samsung has completely ignored it. Obviously, they wanted to ship a product, make their $ from the outrageous price tag, and then abandon it so that it becomes obsolete and ceases functioning after ONLY ONE YEAR.
Health is another killer app; and Samsung initially had it down pretty good. When I first got my gear, it integrated fairly well with my Samsung sHealth app on my phone. And again, Samsung updated their mediocre-but-functional s-health app, and now, it no longer uses the heartrate monitor on the watch. The app tracks your location, but only via PHONE instrumentation (ie. you need to stuff your phone into your nylon running shorts to track your runs). The phone and watch pedometers fight for dominance. Neither are accurate. Neither are consistent in their accuracy. When you track your activity with s-health, you never know if it's using the watch pedometer, or the phone pedometer, and you don't really care, because both readings are garbage. It would be nice if we still got the ongoing heartrate data from the watch. But that doesn't work anymore.
Again: many many many people have complained about the changes to the s-health software on line, and Samsung has completely abandoned all forms of support for this product. If you have an S7, I think they care. One assumes that in 6 months, if you don't have an S8, you will probably want to through your S7 into the garbage.
So why am I talking about the Samsung crappiness in an Apple thread?
Apple also has a LONG and well-deserved reputation of shipping SHITTY software updates that degrade functionality of equipment, and try to encourage you to buy new hardware, at a rapid pace, long before the hardware has ceased functioning. I don't know if this is the case for the Apple watch. I don't have one. I also don't have an iPhone, but I've seen this happen with their iPads, and with iTunes over several generations of laptops and desktops. (Does Apple even make a desktop anymore? lol - of course, I know they do - but let's face it. Not really.)
I hope I have saved at least one reader from wasting their hard-earned money on this junk.
I have not heard the same complaints from people buying health monitors and watches in the Android ecosystem. But I honestly don't know anyone who has one of those. Samsung and Apple have really sucked the chrome off the trailer hitch here.
Slashdot Mirror
You are totally correct.
Developing web-apps NOW compared to say, 1999 - is a completely different, and far more pleasant experience, and this is almost wholly because of MDN and Google's contributions to the open standards.
Microsoft has made huge strides here, because they were dragged kicking and screaming; BY THE COURTS (and were honestly only let-off, on a political changing of administrations, the case was dropped AFTER they were found guilty - in the PENALTY phase).
The list of things you had to keep in your brain, back then, was about 10% "how to do cool stuff" and 90% "stuff you can't do, because Microsoft says, and because everybody uses IE". Now the list of things you need to keep in your brain is about 20% "how to get awesome and cool features to work nominally or at least fail gracefully on all browsers, because not everyone does everything exactly the same way", and 80% "how to get awesome and cool features to just plain work anywhere"
That's seriously life doing front-end web now, and we unfortunately do not have a free-market to thank for that.
I assume that Google, at some point, may need to be reigned in - on the browser side. But I don't know how or why because they aren't as blatantly violating antitrust law like Microsoft was. (and was found to be violating it IN COURT).
If google had succeeded with Google+ and was dominating like FB; and using that for platform lock-in, I think it would be a different story though.
You're correct.
And since they got their tax cut - (and Trump's co-operation in Judicial nominees), he serves the GOP agenda well enough.
I also expect the newsmedia to blandly fall in-line behind Trump in the next year or so, and while there will be vigorous dissent among voters, that dissent will be largely invisible, to the extent it can be made so, via mass-media, and social media manipulation. Dissenters who go outside of these systems to be heard, are probably going to be dealt with, in the way they're dealt with in "other countries". You know exactly what I mean. Yeah we're fucked. It's not like we weren't warned.
This UFO/Aliens trope seems to be making the rounds now. I'm not sure why - it's been pretty much out of style for about 10-15 years. I think there was a little expectation that Trump getting elected president, that he was going to open any secret files on UFO's and hand them over to Alex Jones for immediate release to the public. For sure. Right? But that didn't happen. Now this stuff. It was kind of shocking to me to hear this story being repeated on NPR last week, but I guess that's the shitty world we're living in now.
13 year old me would have loved this stuff though.
It's not really about rents though.
It's about employers refusing to pay workers enough to pay the rents. Period.
I recently turned down a job at a university - their offer came in at $25,000 less than what I am currently making. Maybe a marijuana field near their HR dept caught fire and a smoke cloud drifted over? Can't think of any other explanation, but I'm wanting to save for retirement. Not sell my house and move into a trailer.
If rents or housing prices go up - income has to go up. Or your workers are leaving.
Well you're not wrong, and I wish I could find it - but there was a regulatory change in the mid 1970's regarding entertainment content and toy sales, and Star Wars was specifically designed to be the very first franchise to take advantage of this.
The concept was further weaponized in childrens' television shows shortly after Star Wars. Prior to this, in the USA kids could not buy toys that were associated with kids shows - because those shows would be considered advertisements.
We could get toys for ADULT shows in the 1970's, (shows slotted for evening hours, like "Six Million Dollar Man", etc) - we could get toys NOT associated with television shows (ie. "Barbie", etc). We could also get toys for FOREIGN produced shows on the non-mainstream (UHF) channels, stuff like "Space 1999" or "Speed Racer" (that was our Anime). But not AMERICAN shows like Scooby Doo, or The Monkees, or etc. (There were exceptions - like model kits and stuff like this - I'm talking about how these items were mass-marketed at the time).
It was right after this regulatory change went into effect, that Star Wars was allowed to market toys in commercials during kids TV shows, and then, a whole slew of new merchandising-related shows appeared on TV. What we now lovingly refer to as "our culture". I think the early shows were, Transformers, and He Man, and stuff like that.
Star Wars was really the first big-budget SciFi Adventure movie to use this model, due to the regulatory change.
If we are concerned that AI will be used to mistreat actual living human people; then maybe Government should pass laws dictating the proper treatment for actual living human people. Rather than try to make these abstract definitions about the metaphysical properties of toasters and how they must be manufactured to behave.
The fact is - we've already wrestled with this problem. Our most primitive AI; the landmine. Kills or maims people. Rather at random. We tried to ban them worldwide. That effort failed spectacularly. There are apparently higher priorities in government than making sure random farmboys don't get limbs blown off when working land that was mined in a conflict 20 years before he was born. Dumb landmines. Dumber policymakers.
Recently a former co-worker told me about how his employer had migrated to cloud-based email, and federated login (and some other services). It was true that their IT infrastructure was horribly outdated, and in serious need of a complete overhaul, in order to continue meeting contractual requirements with customers.
But the way this migration was performed, was a complete failure. Over 6 months, they met NONE of their goals. Software license costs ended up being more than double what was estimated. During the migration, the login servers were compromised by a new exploit. There were several complete re-installs, and on every re-install, they found the system was infected or compromised again within minutes. They went through two "big-bang" replacements, where all systems were shut down over an extended weekend, and physical servers were replaced with the spares. As operations were halted, this costs them a huge amount of money. And the extra hours of IT and vendor service were costly. (law enforcement was also involved, and, my former co-worker tells me, there will be a lawsuit by the employees whose personal information was exfiltrated). The only real gain here, was the IT staff got good experience at disaster recovery practice.
In the end, the company's yearly numbers were completely blown. They lost customers, their reputation was damaged. They ended up cutting staff. (some of us already had a feeling that things were heading in a bad direction years ago, and left).
I really really wish that I could name names here. Not just the company but the vendors. This migration plan was announced ahead of time, and so many people drank the marketing cool aid - people who should have known better. But privately, the criticisms were flying, and exactly everything that sound reasonably thinking people said would happen, did happen.
I could go further - to the beginning of the whole "Cloud Services" craze. We've all had our doubts, and pointed out the obvious flaws. And even where a service like Amazon's QuickStart setups can supposedly configure everything to be fully secure and compliant. . . this service is deceptively over-simplified, and there are so many details that are left unspoken. Moving your IT out of your own data center to the cloud may look cheaper on paper, but shipping it to some one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter cloud service is not the answer. You're still going to need a shit ton of very skilled expertise to architect and configure it, and then you're still at risk. Because your data is not in your building under your physical control. Which is really your last line of defense when shit gets real. If you need to, you can unplug.
Vint Cerf sits on the National Science Board - pretty much for free. That's a vital service he provides to our nation, and he's done it for 30+ years.
What if they were exposed to a pathogen; and they (Russians?) also blasted their target with audio, in order to confuse them and dissuade investigators from taking blood samples, doing dna tests, and looking for some kind of weaponized bacteria or virus or something like that?
Straight up you're not wrong, bra.
And I logged in with my 4 digit uid just to reinforce this point.
Suppose US was at war with Russia and Russia hired Hannity to push its propaganda
um. . .
Are they going to be looking for an algorithm that's fair, or an algorithm that's profitable? To be sure, there is probably an algorithm that's both. Human civilization could reap a wicked ROI on this stuff, but in today's dark world, that is seen as infringing on someone's right to make a profit.
Depends. I think NATURE has already found a solution to this problem.
That which is profitable to one entity (say a corporation) will almost certainly be deleterious to other entities. And no corporation functions in an economy in complete isolation. As soon as a given algorithm becomes so successful, it "kills off all competition" - this algorithm will cease to be successful. Because by killing off other entities, there's no more transactions, and no more economy.
In nature, different species operate in homeostasis. Predator population growth will stop when prey growth stops. They collapse, and return to a lower equilibrium, and the cycle continues.
The problem here: is that in Nature, these systems were allowed to develop over millions of years of evolution. The impulses of greed (animal hunger) tend to live and die with one individual animal, so that you don't have an animal that's SO hungry, they wipe out the entire species of their own prey thus destroying their own future ability to eat. But where human systems are concerned, an AI will have no such feedback. Nor will human behavior. Human greed has been known to surpass common sense. (quite frequently does). And AI will quite happily be the tool to enable this.
We'll soon have a bunch of investment banks cycling trillions of dollars in wealth between themselves in a great big circle jerk of irrelevance while 99% of the rest of humanity starves. Oh, did I say "soon"? I meant: "for the past 2 decades".
Sounds like you're describing classic symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder; and given my (unfortunate) familiarity with several sufferers (runs in my family) - they seem to share a common trait of hypersensitive smell.
So yes: they all seem to love cats. A lot. And prefer them to humans. (because: you get pure affection, with no complicated human emotional and relational politics). But cat pee? Not the ones I'm familiar with. They absolutely don't tolerate it, and take extra measures to stay on top of pet odors. (and all odors, really). (even odors that aren't really there).
Now: that there IS a "classic crazy cat-lady" syndrome, I won't deny. I just don't think it's common to these Borderline Personality Disorder people (who are also commonly very fond of cats). Maybe some BPD ppl get t. gondii infections and get both? That would be unfortunate because BPD is bad enough. Those people struggle to lead normal lives as it is.
Beats me.
Guess what?
ALL companies are extremely vulnerable to the whims of the government. Where do you think corporate charters come from? No corporation could exist without the government. Never mind all the nice expensive public infrastructure that almost every corporation uses.
The problem with climate science is that it's so difficult.
No, it is actually VERY VERY SIMPLE.
1. To show that CO2 has an effect on heat, get two glass jars. One filled with CO2, and one filled with air. Shine an infared lamp (or even just sunlight) on both jars. You can measure that the CO2 jar absorbs more heat, because it's hotter than the air jar. This principle has been known and well-understood for over 100 years, and you can demonstrate this in an elementary-school classroom.
2. To show that human industrial activity releases a shitton (ie. enough to affect the whole world's climate) is also relatively simple. Get in a plane, and fly over the Los Angeles basin. Just look at the carpet of constantly running automobiles, as far as the eye can see across many hundreds and hundreds of square miles. Wrap your brain around this happening 24x7, week after week, month after month ... for decades. Get on Google Earth, and look at the land-area we're talking about; and multiply that by all the major cities of the world. This is completely non-mathematical, but very easy for most people to visualize, if they've ever had the opportunity to fly over any urban sprawl area and just watch it happen. Maybe with a little observation of a car exhaust, and how the engine works, and what kind of volume of gasses it puts out while it's running. Also think about jet engines, and the volume of gas they put out as they're running, and think about the tens of thousands of flights happening right now, and every single day: again, 24x7. Non stop. For decades.
These two simple observations are obvious and plain enough that it affected me on a gut-level. No math required. It's plain and obvious. Not at all subtle.
Now: to observe the actual effects on the world, is not so easy. One way is to look at photos, over decades, of glaciers that have receded. If you've been alive for 30+ years (or longer), you know damn well that even though we've had a couple of harsh winters, it's certainly not like it was when we were kids. If you ask older people, they can tell you that things have definitely changed. But this effect is subtle enough that even the very old people who remember Minnesota winters 70 years ago, don't seem to be able to grasp how very different the climate there is now.
They have very convoluted and complicated arguments against Climate Change.
On the Economic side, you hear that the Carbon Tax, and funding for research into renewables (and smart grids, and mass energy storage, and electric cars, and etc); will have a net positive effect on the economy. Yet when you're talking with a denier - they're arguing that any tax is going to cause economic devastation and abridge everybody's quality of life and standard of living, and that shutting down all the fossil fuel jobs will leave millions unemployed. Nobody questions this claim (in the newsmedia), and rarely are the economic arguments compared or scrutinized. This is also an important point that needs to be made to climate change deniers. Where renewable investment has been made, where carbon taxes were enacted, positive, measurable benefits have been observed. Most mainstream economists actually agree with this, but those arguments are silenced in the mainstream newsmedia.
Another one: charging a low price for a product on Amazon, then setting an exorbitant shipping and handling fee, which nearly doubles the price.
. . . .not to mention the "protection racket" that is Amazon Prime - to get people to PAY EXTRA, just so they don't have to worry about being scammed on shipping.
I do have an ideological hatred of ads:
It is a unilateral renegotiation of terms. When they want to increase the length of ads, they do it. You get no say. When they want to increase the volume, they do it, you get no say. When they increase the (fucking annoying as hell and insulting) repetition, they do it, you get no say. FUCK ALL THAT. I pay a price to see a show, you show me the fucking show at that set price and that's that. That's the deal. You don't get to alter the terms of the deal, or I fucking shut off your media. Period.
That's what I hate about ads.
There is a set-dollar-amount that any ad is worth, because an advertiser pays for that. I want my cut, and I want it to be a stated term, up front. No changing it later, after the fact. I pay my bills, those fuckers need to pay theirs.
If someone pays for a service, they will not want to see commercials.
Yeah; and any MBA stuffed suits out there who doubt this very simple fact? Please swallow a shotgun. Nobody ever wanted to pay to see ads. Nobody ever will. Just take your ads and fuck right off please.
Oh yeah - and just give me a single, simple networking indicator on the panel that says: 1) interface is on 2) getting good physical-layer signal 3) has a valid address 4) can ping it's lan gateway 5) can ping and tracert DNS servers across the net. 6) can ping and tracert major entities around the globe (google, amazon aws, microsoft). When the net's down, the first thing I want to know is where the fault is, and can I do anything about it. And it's always; "oh fuck open the terminal, now, do I ipconfig, or ifconfig, I don't remember, what net am I on? what's the gateway, can I ping that? can I see through the firewall? Is DNS fubared? . . . etc.
Yes, keyboard navigation in OS X is a total shit show. Apps behave differently to the keystrokes, and some don't respond at all (if the window is "hidden" instead of minimized - why is there a fucking difference?, and if you use a laptop from the built in screen at home, and then use multiple monitors at work, good luck getting UI's and windows to scale right. So much broken.
Also, I know homebrew is nice and all, but OS X REALLY REALLY REALLY needs a decent package manager system. AND a FUCKING UNINSTALLER FOR FUCK"S SAKE. And a central way to find all of the places every app stores startup elements, configuration items, resources . . . etc.
This is all basic "list of main things every OS should do"; and OS X does not get these. Release after release.
Well, ROI isn't really what this is about. Overpaid execs is all about The Hype Train (TM), and building investor excitement, and pumping the stock price. The Hype Train (TM) is why stock PE ratios have been insane since about 1996. The more they kick the american worker in the nuts, the more erect the investor class becomes - because they no longer need to compete with a large, empowered middle-class for access to political power. They don't have to out-bid their own workers while attempting to influence politicians. The value of the stock goes up, the low-tax income of the overpaid exec goes up, the income of the board members go up, and the value of the congressmen and senators blind-trust investments roundly go up. Win-win for the ruling-class and investing-class, lose-lose for the working class.
Just want to say, reading a lot of good points from both sides of the argument in this discussion.
1) Don't like WAZE; don't need advertisements, or gamification. I just want directions and traffic info. Google usually does that just fine. WAZE sucks my battery dry even when I'm not using it.
2) Google maps UX is pretty stupid, most of the time. Used to be pretty obvious and functional, but now, with each new "upgrade", I end up doing a fair amount of clicking around to try to figure out what widgets do, and try to locate functionality that's been (apparently) deprecated. It is very frustrating and annoying, but much less so than Apple maps. The bar is low.
3) A long time ago, I used to deliver pizza. I did that job for about 4 years. I can imagine that google maps can work far better than paper in some situations. But a paper map does something that you don't really ever get into when you're driving in an area frequently, over a period of time. Google doesn't let you LEARN the area. It keeps you on the main/shortest route, which is not always the best route. And you end up relying on Google to get you around. If your signal goes, or your battery goes, or for what other reason, it's not working, then you are fucked, because you don't remember the area. If you use a paper map to view the whole area, and find your route, then you actually begin to LEARN the layout. The layout of an area is important. You learn where there are rail lines, and creeks or rivers, or freeway underpasses, which are HUGE bottlenecks, and when you're improvising or navigating on the fly, you need to have that knowledge in your head, not on your phone. There are also tiny details that become VERY important; that don't show up on electronic maps. No-left-turn signs, center-dividers. When you're on a busy urban or suburban street, and you pull out somewhere, and find you can't go the direction you want, you can sometimes get fucked into having to travel several blocks in order to get turned around again. This can set you back 10, 15, 20 minutes, depending on the traffic and situation. Google does that to me CONSTANTLY; but when you LEARN an area, you know these details in your head, and you can avoid those situations. You'll still need your paper map from time to time, but you're not going to have to refer to it constantly, as you would with a GPS/online map. The other skill you miss out on, is self-location or orienteering. The phone does that for you. (unless there's a technical problem). But the skill for figuring that out by reckoning, visual landmark checks, etc - goes away if you do not use it. That's also very important for on-the-fly navigation. With an electronic device, you can end up with imperfect information, and lag, which will put you a few hundred feet away, which is another situation where you can miss an important turn, and end up having to backtrack or re-route (which, fortunately, google does for you).
There is NO substitute for having an intimate knowledge of an area's quirks and foibles, which are not available even at the most detailed level for electronic maps.
Based on my experience with my Samsung G2:
The utility of the smartwatch comes in when you can synchronize your data on the two devices; and there are a couple of "killer apps" when it comes to smartwatches:
Phone/messaging is the obvious one, and the use-case for READING (not responding to) messages is pretty useful, especially if you're receiving a lot of status from various people. Phone-calls are also pretty useful, but a tad awkward; audio is not private (you are on "speakerphone"), and I can say that the output of the Samsung is weak-enough that it's not all that useful for phone calls.
Time is another one, and that's a no-brainer. I don't have to re-set my watch 2 times a year for daylight savings. Tracking my location and re-setting for time-zones is very handy, for people who travel a lot. Don't underestimate that one. Samsung has not yet really fucked this up, but it relies on having your phone with you, and powered-on.
Weather used to be VERY useful. I don't know what Samsung did, but they changed their phone-based Weather widget, and now it does not run at all, so it wn't send time to the watch, the watch weather client doesn't know what to do - it's sad. It has nobody to talk to. It displays the weather data from 9 months ago, when it stopped synchronizing. There are MANY online discussions where users are mentioning this problem, and Samsung has completely ignored it. Obviously, they wanted to ship a product, make their $ from the outrageous price tag, and then abandon it so that it becomes obsolete and ceases functioning after ONLY ONE YEAR.
Health is another killer app; and Samsung initially had it down pretty good. When I first got my gear, it integrated fairly well with my Samsung sHealth app on my phone. And again, Samsung updated their mediocre-but-functional s-health app, and now, it no longer uses the heartrate monitor on the watch. The app tracks your location, but only via PHONE instrumentation (ie. you need to stuff your phone into your nylon running shorts to track your runs). The phone and watch pedometers fight for dominance. Neither are accurate. Neither are consistent in their accuracy. When you track your activity with s-health, you never know if it's using the watch pedometer, or the phone pedometer, and you don't really care, because both readings are garbage. It would be nice if we still got the ongoing heartrate data from the watch. But that doesn't work anymore.
Again: many many many people have complained about the changes to the s-health software on line, and Samsung has completely abandoned all forms of support for this product. If you have an S7, I think they care. One assumes that in 6 months, if you don't have an S8, you will probably want to through your S7 into the garbage.
So why am I talking about the Samsung crappiness in an Apple thread?
Apple also has a LONG and well-deserved reputation of shipping SHITTY software updates that degrade functionality of equipment, and try to encourage you to buy new hardware, at a rapid pace, long before the hardware has ceased functioning. I don't know if this is the case for the Apple watch. I don't have one. I also don't have an iPhone, but I've seen this happen with their iPads, and with iTunes over several generations of laptops and desktops. (Does Apple even make a desktop anymore? lol - of course, I know they do - but let's face it. Not really.)
I hope I have saved at least one reader from wasting their hard-earned money on this junk.
I have not heard the same complaints from people buying health monitors and watches in the Android ecosystem. But I honestly don't know anyone who has one of those. Samsung and Apple have really sucked the chrome off the trailer hitch here.