This who brouhaha over smart meters seems absurd to me.
This is the power company wanting to know how much power you're taking form them, and at what time; getting angry about this is like getting angry that the local grocery store knows what time you come in every week to buy 5 bags of Doritos and a 24-pack of Mountain Dew (WalMart already knows when your have sex, when your period is, etc.). It's a transaction between two parties, there's no expectation that one of the parties not know when and how much he's selling his product!
Now, while I think it's perfectly legitimate for a business to track its sales, I do think the information encoded in those transactions should not go beyond the parties initially involved; junk mail advertisers have no business knowing your interactions with Wal-Mart since they were not part of the transaction. What we need are strong laws preventing the sale of customer information to third parties.
They may need to be dragged out over how easy it is to opt-in
And how hard it is to opt back out. Unless they've fixed it recently, if you tap on the "Check-in" button in the iPhone app just out of curiosity to see what it is and how it works, from then on, Facebook asks for permission to use your location every time you run the d**n app, whether you use the check-in feature or not. Can you say obnoxious? The only way I've found to fix it is to delete the Facebook app entirely and reinstall it.
I know it can be hard to find, here's a tip: Settings -> Location Services
Last time I compared the 11" Air to Dell's popular 10" netbooks (a few months ago), it was actually lighter and smaller in most dimensions (just a bit wider, significantly thinner, and a bit less deep), plus it was more powerful, had better battery life, a full-size keyboard, and a larger screen. Yes, the Air cost 2.5x as much, but you do get a lot out of it, including the same small size and ultraportability of a netbook (at least compared to the 10" variety that seem most popular now).
He's not wrong (about the US losing jobs part). Using the magic of economies of scale and increased efficiency, big internet companies are gobbling up the chain stores in almost the exact same way the chain stores gobbled up the truly local competition. I can't say I feel bad for the chain stores, but JJJr is right in that it will present a difficult challenge to the country once tens of millions of local "middleman" (sales) jobs and businesses are consolidated down to a few thousand each in two or three 50-square-mile warehouses in the desert somewhere.
What are you smoking? "HTTP" has zero "buzzword-factor," and the average Internet user (clueless executive or otherwise) doesn't connect it with anything, beyond (maybe, if they're paying the slightest bit of attention) "those pointless extra letters in the address bar."
Just as outdated? Nope. On to the obligatory car analogy!
In the early 80's I drove a car* from the 60's. No air bags, no seat belts, no crumple zones - a total death trap in a crash. Now I drive a car from the 80's - it has crumple zones, seatbelts with crash-activated pretensioners, and driver and passenger airbags. At this point, it's about as old as my 60's car was in the 80's. Is it as outdated? Not a chance.
Just because at one point each were considered "modern" and later each were considered "old" does not make them equivalent at any time - or what would be the purpose of progress? There was a huge jump in safety technology between the 60's and late 80's, but once most of the important issues were covered there wasn't as much to fix. Now we have side-impact airbags in addition to the front ones, and some cars have automatic braking to stop you from rear-ending things, but my old 80's car isn't nearly as outdated now as my old 60's car was in the 80's.
* Disclaimer: For analogical purposes only. I was in diapers at the time and did not actually drive.
you have GOT to have a better way of doing things than walking around with a future-pistol. I mean the energy and technology that's got to be available....
Somewhere on this planet is there's a naked kid scrounging through the mud for some fish to eat. His mom works for $0.25 an hour on an assembly line painting details onto plastic gewgaws that'll sell for fifty times that to some (relatively) astronomically rich Florida tourist on some other part of the planet she can't even dream of seeing for herself. His dad was hacked to death by angry guys with machetes and a different political opinion. When he goes home, he might wash himself off with dirty water heated up on a beat-up pot over an open flame.
But that can't be. There have GOT to be better ways of living than that. I mean seriously, we have nuclear reactors, hot and cold running water, machine guns and ICBMs, and specialized advanced fishing equipment with built-in radars and GPS....
Apple is neither trying to trademark "App," nor are they claiming "App" is short for "Apple." I still don't get why Slashdot doesn't have a "False" mod...
Apparently you've never used an iOS device. I don't know if it works the same way on Androis devices (but I'd bet it does), but on an iPhone or iPad the first tap on an element with the:hover pseudoclass activates the hover. Navigating dropdown menus and the like are no problem whatsoever. You shouldn't make adamant statements of fact when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
This logic would have them now allowing iTunes to rip CDs either, which if clearly not the case. Perhaps the reason Apple hasn't built in the ability to rip DVDs (which would only help sell their ecosystem) is because it is illegal under the DMCA?
Did you miss the part of TFA where the whole thing got found out after some stray materials in the back yard blew up and seriously injured his gardener? This guy was sure taking great care with his explosives...
It is the Californian who would be paying those sales taxes, not the business (for in-state transactions businesses are simply required to collect the taxes). Right now, if a Californian buys something from a retailer in Connecticut they are still required to pay those sales taxes; since the business didn't collect them and turn them over to the government on the Californian's behalf, s/he has to personally pay it on tax day along with everything else. Of course, almost nobody does that...
No, the proper way to do this is use NSFileManager's –URLsForDirectory:inDomains: method, and
request the NSMusicDirectory in the NSUserDomain (or the related Foundation function on pre-10.6 systems). You cannot be certain that the user's Music directory won't have a localized name, or won't get moved to some other location in the future.
Suddenly the user has to click through confirmation dialogs every time they click a mailto: link, or click a link to a stream that would open in VLC, or any number of other things that are completely innocuous. This issue with Skype is that it initiates the call immediately without user interaction - that's like if you clicked a mailto: link and your mail client just went ahead and sent the email immediately. It's pretty clearly a problem with the app.
And when boulders fall on their car, you can be sure some American will "hold liable" the mountain, its owner or as a last resort God.
Just think of the horror of something happening and there's nobody to blame!
That might mean bad things could happen to someone just like that! The horror!
An "act of God" is an actual legal term for that situation, yes.
This isn't about "blame," it's about responsibility. If a boulder hurts you and costs you $10,000 in medical bills you're SOL because the boulder can't make restitution. If a person hurts you and costs you $10,000 in medical bills, why should you pay for it rather than the person who hurt you? Sure, maybe they did it accidentally; that's a reason not to be angry, personally offended, or vindictive about it, but it doesn't mean you should be the one paying those bills. The person who hurt you should be paying those bills.
Except someone must be responsible for the damages. In an actual "act of god" there's literally nobody but the victim in the situation, so that has to be chalked up to bad luck and it becomes their responsibility to pay for it. That's not the case here though; what you're saying is that the victim is still responsible for paying those damages. How does that make sense?
Let's try a simpler analogy: You're in your neighbor's kitchen with your 5 year old and they drop a bottle of milk, creating a huge puddle on the floor. As a parent, you've made a perfectly reasonable effort to raise your kid properly; it just happens that kids are naturally uncoordinated, and this was just a completely unintentional accident on your kid's part. By your logic, neither of you has any responsibility to clean up the mess - it's your neighbor's problem. Do you see now how absurd that is? Parental responsibility doesn't only appear with negligence of duty, it's there all the time.
So rather than parents having to pay for damage their children do, it's all left to the victim to pay? To use an example from elsewhere in the thread, if a 6 year old throws a rock though your window it is going to cost $100 to fix it; it might seem unfair to tell the kid's parents they have to pay up for something they didn't do directly, but the alternative is even less fair - YOU end up having to pay. Part of bringing a child into the world is teaching them to act responsibly, and cleaning up after them when they don't.
The difference is a person has the capacity to pay for the damage they cause. If you end up with $100,000 in medical bills due to a lightning strike you're simply SOL. If you end up with $100,000 in medical bills due to the actions of another person, that other person is available to pay the bills for the damage they caused. (Like I said earlier I think parents should shoulder this responsibility for young children, but I don't write the law.)
Sure someone has to pay - you do. What a stupid system. Parents should be responsible for their kids' actions until they're old enough to be responsible for themselves (which should be much later than the age of 4, so the US's system is pretty stupid too).
Slashdot Mirror
This who brouhaha over smart meters seems absurd to me.
This is the power company wanting to know how much power you're taking form them, and at what time; getting angry about this is like getting angry that the local grocery store knows what time you come in every week to buy 5 bags of Doritos and a 24-pack of Mountain Dew (WalMart already knows when your have sex, when your period is, etc.). It's a transaction between two parties, there's no expectation that one of the parties not know when and how much he's selling his product!
Now, while I think it's perfectly legitimate for a business to track its sales, I do think the information encoded in those transactions should not go beyond the parties initially involved; junk mail advertisers have no business knowing your interactions with Wal-Mart since they were not part of the transaction. What we need are strong laws preventing the sale of customer information to third parties.
And how hard it is to opt back out. Unless they've fixed it recently, if you tap on the "Check-in" button in the iPhone app just out of curiosity to see what it is and how it works, from then on, Facebook asks for permission to use your location every time you run the d**n app, whether you use the check-in feature or not. Can you say obnoxious? The only way I've found to fix it is to delete the Facebook app entirely and reinstall it.
I know it can be hard to find, here's a tip: Settings -> Location Services
Last time I compared the 11" Air to Dell's popular 10" netbooks (a few months ago), it was actually lighter and smaller in most dimensions (just a bit wider, significantly thinner, and a bit less deep), plus it was more powerful, had better battery life, a full-size keyboard, and a larger screen. Yes, the Air cost 2.5x as much, but you do get a lot out of it, including the same small size and ultraportability of a netbook (at least compared to the 10" variety that seem most popular now).
He's not wrong (about the US losing jobs part). Using the magic of economies of scale and increased efficiency, big internet companies are gobbling up the chain stores in almost the exact same way the chain stores gobbled up the truly local competition. I can't say I feel bad for the chain stores, but JJJr is right in that it will present a difficult challenge to the country once tens of millions of local "middleman" (sales) jobs and businesses are consolidated down to a few thousand each in two or three 50-square-mile warehouses in the desert somewhere.
What are you smoking? "HTTP" has zero "buzzword-factor," and the average Internet user (clueless executive or otherwise) doesn't connect it with anything, beyond (maybe, if they're paying the slightest bit of attention) "those pointless extra letters in the address bar."
Just as outdated? Nope. On to the obligatory car analogy!
In the early 80's I drove a car* from the 60's. No air bags, no seat belts, no crumple zones - a total death trap in a crash. Now I drive a car from the 80's - it has crumple zones, seatbelts with crash-activated pretensioners, and driver and passenger airbags. At this point, it's about as old as my 60's car was in the 80's. Is it as outdated? Not a chance.
Just because at one point each were considered "modern" and later each were considered "old" does not make them equivalent at any time - or what would be the purpose of progress? There was a huge jump in safety technology between the 60's and late 80's, but once most of the important issues were covered there wasn't as much to fix. Now we have side-impact airbags in addition to the front ones, and some cars have automatic braking to stop you from rear-ending things, but my old 80's car isn't nearly as outdated now as my old 60's car was in the 80's.
* Disclaimer: For analogical purposes only. I was in diapers at the time and did not actually drive.
Given its toxicity to humans, I recommend avoiding drinking from the holly grail altogether.
you have GOT to have a better way of doing things than walking around with a future-pistol. I mean the energy and technology that's got to be available....
Somewhere on this planet is there's a naked kid scrounging through the mud for some fish to eat. His mom works for $0.25 an hour on an assembly line painting details onto plastic gewgaws that'll sell for fifty times that to some (relatively) astronomically rich Florida tourist on some other part of the planet she can't even dream of seeing for herself. His dad was hacked to death by angry guys with machetes and a different political opinion. When he goes home, he might wash himself off with dirty water heated up on a beat-up pot over an open flame.
But that can't be. There have GOT to be better ways of living than that. I mean seriously, we have nuclear reactors, hot and cold running water, machine guns and ICBMs, and specialized advanced fishing equipment with built-in radars and GPS....
That is accurate. Thank you for the correction to your earlier statements.
Apple is neither trying to trademark "App," nor are they claiming "App" is short for "Apple." I still don't get why Slashdot doesn't have a "False" mod...
Apparently you've never used an iOS device. I don't know if it works the same way on Androis devices (but I'd bet it does), but on an iPhone or iPad the first tap on an element with the :hover pseudoclass activates the hover. Navigating dropdown menus and the like are no problem whatsoever. You shouldn't make adamant statements of fact when you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
Anything capable of making the doors come off an '80's Mercedes will have destroyed the rest of the car.
This logic would have them now allowing iTunes to rip CDs either, which if clearly not the case. Perhaps the reason Apple hasn't built in the ability to rip DVDs (which would only help sell their ecosystem) is because it is illegal under the DMCA?
Did you miss the part of TFA where the whole thing got found out after some stray materials in the back yard blew up and seriously injured his gardener? This guy was sure taking great care with his explosives...
or make more than what I'm sure are a specified number of surprise visits.
Zero.
It is the Californian who would be paying those sales taxes, not the business (for in-state transactions businesses are simply required to collect the taxes). Right now, if a Californian buys something from a retailer in Connecticut they are still required to pay those sales taxes; since the business didn't collect them and turn them over to the government on the Californian's behalf, s/he has to personally pay it on tax day along with everything else. Of course, almost nobody does that...
No, the proper way to do this is use NSFileManager's –URLsForDirectory:inDomains: method, and request the NSMusicDirectory in the NSUserDomain (or the related Foundation function on pre-10.6 systems). You cannot be certain that the user's Music directory won't have a localized name, or won't get moved to some other location in the future.
Suddenly the user has to click through confirmation dialogs every time they click a mailto: link, or click a link to a stream that would open in VLC, or any number of other things that are completely innocuous. This issue with Skype is that it initiates the call immediately without user interaction - that's like if you clicked a mailto: link and your mail client just went ahead and sent the email immediately. It's pretty clearly a problem with the app.
And when boulders fall on their car, you can be sure some American will "hold liable" the mountain, its owner or as a last resort God. Just think of the horror of something happening and there's nobody to blame! That might mean bad things could happen to someone just like that! The horror!
An "act of God" is an actual legal term for that situation, yes.
This isn't about "blame," it's about responsibility. If a boulder hurts you and costs you $10,000 in medical bills you're SOL because the boulder can't make restitution. If a person hurts you and costs you $10,000 in medical bills, why should you pay for it rather than the person who hurt you? Sure, maybe they did it accidentally; that's a reason not to be angry, personally offended, or vindictive about it, but it doesn't mean you should be the one paying those bills. The person who hurt you should be paying those bills.
Troll? Really? Whoever modded that needs to grow some nuts and rebut my actual argument.
Except someone must be responsible for the damages. In an actual "act of god" there's literally nobody but the victim in the situation, so that has to be chalked up to bad luck and it becomes their responsibility to pay for it. That's not the case here though; what you're saying is that the victim is still responsible for paying those damages. How does that make sense?
Let's try a simpler analogy: You're in your neighbor's kitchen with your 5 year old and they drop a bottle of milk, creating a huge puddle on the floor. As a parent, you've made a perfectly reasonable effort to raise your kid properly; it just happens that kids are naturally uncoordinated, and this was just a completely unintentional accident on your kid's part. By your logic, neither of you has any responsibility to clean up the mess - it's your neighbor's problem. Do you see now how absurd that is? Parental responsibility doesn't only appear with negligence of duty, it's there all the time.
So rather than parents having to pay for damage their children do, it's all left to the victim to pay? To use an example from elsewhere in the thread, if a 6 year old throws a rock though your window it is going to cost $100 to fix it; it might seem unfair to tell the kid's parents they have to pay up for something they didn't do directly, but the alternative is even less fair - YOU end up having to pay. Part of bringing a child into the world is teaching them to act responsibly, and cleaning up after them when they don't.
The difference is a person has the capacity to pay for the damage they cause. If you end up with $100,000 in medical bills due to a lightning strike you're simply SOL. If you end up with $100,000 in medical bills due to the actions of another person, that other person is available to pay the bills for the damage they caused. (Like I said earlier I think parents should shoulder this responsibility for young children, but I don't write the law.)
That is an act of god, not an accident.
Sure someone has to pay - you do. What a stupid system. Parents should be responsible for their kids' actions until they're old enough to be responsible for themselves (which should be much later than the age of 4, so the US's system is pretty stupid too).