I fail to see what the problem is. Would it have been better to test it on humans in some third-world shithole?
No, it would have been better to not test it on living beings at all. We already know which components of various vehicle exhausts are damaging to us, and we have a fairly good idea of how damaging they are. And we already know that we need to stop burning fossil fuels anyway if we want our species to have a future on this rock. But hey, let's gas some innocent monkeys anyway, so we can arrive at a half-assed determination of just how badly we're fucking over our fellow humans in the name of profit. If you truly "fail to see what the problem is" in that, then I pity you.
I know it's highly unlikely, but I hope their utter bankruptcy in the moral sense translates into financial bankruptcy because of their wilful cruelty, lying, and cheating. At times like this I wish I subscribed to some form of magic sky-daddyism so I could comfort myself with thoughts of those bastards rotting in hell for all eternity.
Are their troop concentrations now a matter of public knowledge as well? Do they simply not use these devices? Or do they have their own private infrastructure for this kind of thing, along with the sense not to let private companies have access to the data?
I know hindsight is 20/20, but I'm sure people in the Pentagon get paid lots to anticipate and thwart this kind of dumpster fire. This looks REALLY bad on them - kinda like strapping on a pair of cleats and stepping on your own dick.
What about the benefits of sending data back? Have you ever tried to actually deal with people, especially when money is on the line? I mean I want people to be happy with their product, and I don't enjoy angry accusatory phone calls...
People very often lie when something goes wrong, and even if telling the truth would help us both out (better, longer lasting product) AND get the problem fixed faster, but we spend so much time and effort going over false or completely made-up observations and emotionally charged statements.
So what if the data can say something (hypothetical situation)?
Customer account: "the bearing just failed, you stupid morons and your cheap bearings and your constant cheaping out, also there's a crack in your windshield, what are you cheapening out on your glass you better get those people in line, I want this replaced or I'll never buy again..."
The data says: Your drive is otherwise pretty smooth and you're otherwise treating your car well. BUT, at a regular point every day for the past 3 months, there is this large spike on the acceleration detector.
Customer: oh yeah, damn that Department of Transportation. They won't fix that damn pothole so I just run over it every day at high speed.
(okay, so if you knew we were watching for high-energy events at risk to your warranty, maybe you'd have avoided that pothole?)
((and oh, I'll save so much money not having to ream the bearing vendor and take samples, that I'll probably honor your warranty claim anyway. pfft in real cost what's a wheel bearing set replacement and tire balancing/alignment anyway?))
Okay, dear customer, please proceed to the nearest dealership for your warranty replacement, if you know which one you want I can put them on the line right now, have a nice day.
You'd have a lot more credibility if you a) hadn't posted as AC, b) could say with a straight face that any savings resulting from installing spyware in people's cars would be reflected in reduced sticker prices, and c) acknowledged that people's privacy concerns are at least as legitimate as your shareholder protectionist stance. If you're gonna shill, at least put some effort and imagination into it.
The problem is going to be finding cars with low mileage and in good condition that can continue on and be fixed up. I would buy a new car if this crap wasn't on it.
You're not the only one who's doing this, so you'd best buy your NEXT old car or two within a couple of years, mothball it, and put it on blocks. Otherwise, when the time comes, a viable older car may be unavailable. Then again, by the time your existing old cars die, it may simply be illegal to drive anything that hasn't been pre-pwned by the manufacturer and/or the gubmint.
Naw. It will end with some hackers knowing how to cut the CAN bus wire to their cellular modem, and 99% of people being sheep, which ultimately (strangely) will benefit society.
And THAT will end with cars whose capabilities are severely restricted, or which simply won't function at all, without regular 'permission packets' from the mothership. Soon an active data connection to your car's manufacturer will be a critical system without which your car won't run. 'SaaS' has already become 'HaaS' in things like fitness watches and thermostats - how long do you think it will be before cars suffer the same fate?
and self serving to boot. I don't believe Gates REALLY thinks that the people who own the AI and the automation equipment are going to share the wealth and give Joe Average Human a perpetual vacation; he's neither stupid nor naive. Where's the advantage in being wealthy if all the poor schmucks have both as much free time as you do and sufficient food and shelter to enjoy it? The wealthy want to be different, they want to be advantaged; not primarily because it's safer and more fun, but because to them it's a sign that they are superior, and perhaps even morally better. No way in hell are they giving THAT up without a fight...
then by definition you are destroying capitalism, not saving it. Not that I think that's a bad thing - it's simply important to replace capitalism with something better, not the something-worse represented by the companies in question.
I also find it interesting that Galloway decries the "new gods", yet seems totally unaware that they are the logical and inevitable outcome of capitalism. Also, the irony that he himself worships the "old god" called Capitalism seems totally lost on him.
I don't run Windows, but even if I did, this news would be meaningless to me. Now if the headline had said "Windows 10 Will Soon Let Users Track Microsoft Executives' Internet Activities", I might consider using Windows. But until somebody tells me that all this data collection is taking place bi-directionally on a truly level playing field, then any such 'concessions' are merely insulting. Microsoft and others of its ilk can go pound salt.
Why? Except for the omission of a hyphen, (it should be "silicon-germanium"), they got it right. It's been in pretty common use since the 90's. In industry publications you'll see it referred to as SiGe, and it's an alloy of the two materials.
TFA is sparse on detail. Given the rise in popularity of music streaming, Netflix, and online shopping, I would think a LOT of the time "on the internet" is what in prior decades would have been spent watching TV, listening to radio, playing albums on various media, or in the local mall. And if they're basing their figures on total backbone traffic then the numbers will be skewed even more by things like the IoT.
Of course, I can also believe that the amount of time spent watching TV and listening to music has increased as a result of the internet's reach and ubiquity. Then there's the whole social media thing - probably a WAY bigger time sink than dumb telephones ever were.
page speed "has been used in ranking for some time"
Yeah, because the speed of a page is much more important to me than its relevance to what I'm searching for or the quality of its content. No wonder it's getting harder and harder to get decent, relevant search results. But, I guess nothing succeeds like pandering to the lowest common denominator...
Wouldn't it be cool if somebody came out with an unbiased search engine that caters to those with analytical capability and the will to use it? I'd be happy to pay a subscription fee for such a thing. And I'll bet some of its most frequent users would be Google employees!
Essentially, your home's microwave is a Faraday Cage, thus placing the Echo device inside it should allay all fears.
Good advice, but incomplete. After placing the Echo in the Faraday, turn said cage on at its highest setting for 10 seconds; that way you've nuked Echo without having had to attain orbit first.
"I felt a great disturbance in the Cloud, as if millions of Alexas suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced".
That was really cool! But watching that smiling face, and hearing that bubble gum pop voice over a crunchy heavy-metal guitar - talk about cognitive dissonance! It also makes me think about how VERY different that same song would be if sung by Chrissie Hynde or Joan Jett...
Pop music being a major facet of our culture, I believe this study reflects on us as a whole, and what it indicates is that human beings are growing isolated from one another, sad, and angry. That makes me feel bad.
That's a very insightful observation. Given the bad rap Facebook and the like are getting, It would be interesting to plot the rise of social media and the dumbing-down of popular music and see if there's a strong correlation. Not that I believe there's a causal relationship; rather, I think the increasing concentration of wealth and power might be the cause of both crappy music and the increasingly-superficial interactions in our society. The ruling class has gotten much better at the whole 'bread and circuses' thing. It's kinda hard to create significant art when your whole environment has been specifically designed to make you Comfortably Numb. I wonder if we'll ever manage to Tear Down (this) Wall...
It would also be interesting to find scientific ways of evaluating the 'just isn't what it used to be' quality of various art forms through recorded history, to see if it correlates well with increased power among the leash-holders and decreased autonomy among Joe and Jane Average.
Yes, and he even agreed with google that some of the comments his discussions generated should not be tolerated.
I can't be certain, but I get the impression that you're siding with Google management rather than with Cory Altheide on this one. Does that mean you're in favour of simply not talking about valid and important concerns just because some asshole might respond in a dickish fashion? Do you really want to support that kind of censorship, even inside a private corporation?
I understand defending a company's legal right to engage in internal censorship; but as we all know, it's not always appropriate to take advantage of legal rights. If that kind of assholishness on either side of the debate is common at an influential company whose influence is pervasive and inescapable, (e.g. Google), then exposing that fact and dealing with it serves the best interests of society - a society of which shareholders are but a small part, in spite of their inappropriately disproportionate influence.
You have way too much belief and trust in the US as a "democracy" and "free society." This kind of society ended after 9/11, if it ever existed at all... You know what we should do to prevent terrorism? Stop pissing off the terrorists. That's right -- stop fighting wars in places where we don't belong. Stop playing favorites in the Middle East and Central Asia. None of the countries there are our problem.
This, exactly. In the aftermath of 9/11, I repeatedly said "By all means, hunt down and kill the bastards who did this to you. But then give your heads a shake, do some soul searching, and ask yourself what you did to them to make them so pissed off that they would sacrifice their own lives to fly planes into your buildings". Instead, government took advantage of the attacks, and the anger and fear they generated among Americans, to hugely expand and consolidate their own power base.
As for the security of the encryption provided by Apple and other corporations, and what the TLA's say publicly about that encryption, I consider it all bullshit until proven otherwise. Corporations and governments are close frenemies, and their common enemy / patsy is the public over whom they exercise their dominion. If we want to fix both both terrorism and governmental abuses, THAT is the place to start. Issues like encryption are just smokescreens.
Any touchscreen anywhere, from a gas station pump to an ATM to a plain glass door, could be outfitted with a collection device to gather all our greasy fingertip data. And with the courts assuming that you have no expectation of privacy with third party data, everywhere is open season for state actors.
On the one hand, thanks for pointing out a potential danger I hadn't thought of. On the other hand, thanks for ruining my day...:(
This is *exactly* what you should expect when you attempt to socially engineer a solution that violates the rules of business, in this case, artificially raising the cost of labor beyond the market value. One hundred percent entirely predictable, and predicted.
This is *exactly* what you should expect when you allow corporations to socially engineer a solution that puts greed above society's well-being, in this case by anthropomorphizing, hallucinating intelligence and purpose in, and then outright conferring godhood upon, "the market". One hundred percent entirely magical thinking, and getting old and stale really fucking fast.
Definitely. This might look like cryptocoin's golden hour, but the market is oversaturated. Every ordinary company is trying frame their product in cryptocoin terms, instead of just staying focused on their core product. Companies keep pulling this crap, but it's only a matter of time until they push it too far and investors see that this shit doesn't pan out they way they say it will. Once one or two fail, get ready to watch the speed at which they all shutter.
Outstanding! In one short paragraph you've packed 11 references to photography: 'golden hour', 'oversaturated', 'frame', 'focused', 'pulling', (two meanings there), 'push', 'pan', (another double entendre), 'speed', and 'shutter'. Bonus points for the references that only someone familiar with film photography and darkroom work would get. Well done!
This is just another chapter in the lately-skanky 'evolution' of computing. You know, the one that says you no longer control, (or really, even own), the device you paid for. It's all moving to 'the Cloud'; this means both that privacy is defunct, and that the proper functioning of the hardware you buy is subject to the whims of whoever is providing your 'Software As A Service'. And since so much gaming is already MMO, most gamers won't give it a second's thought beyond "Oooh! Shiny! Now I can play on cheap, small hardware!". Yet another erosion of self-determination and autonomy - hooray!
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I fail to see what the problem is. Would it have been better to test it on humans in some third-world shithole?
No, it would have been better to not test it on living beings at all. We already know which components of various vehicle exhausts are damaging to us, and we have a fairly good idea of how damaging they are. And we already know that we need to stop burning fossil fuels anyway if we want our species to have a future on this rock. But hey, let's gas some innocent monkeys anyway, so we can arrive at a half-assed determination of just how badly we're fucking over our fellow humans in the name of profit. If you truly "fail to see what the problem is" in that, then I pity you.
das Tortur.
Also, das Lügen.
I know it's highly unlikely, but I hope their utter bankruptcy in the moral sense translates into financial bankruptcy because of their wilful cruelty, lying, and cheating. At times like this I wish I subscribed to some form of magic sky-daddyism so I could comfort myself with thoughts of those bastards rotting in hell for all eternity.
Are their troop concentrations now a matter of public knowledge as well? Do they simply not use these devices? Or do they have their own private infrastructure for this kind of thing, along with the sense not to let private companies have access to the data?
I know hindsight is 20/20, but I'm sure people in the Pentagon get paid lots to anticipate and thwart this kind of dumpster fire. This looks REALLY bad on them - kinda like strapping on a pair of cleats and stepping on your own dick.
What he means is a functionality existing in KDE where you can press Alt+`click anywwhere in a window` to be able to move it around.
I use it so often that I always wonder why on earth is not a standard everywhere...
Thanks for that! I never knew - just tried it on Xubuntu and it works. And if it works here, it probably works in a lot of other WM's too.
Slashdot has become an echo chamber.
What about the benefits of sending data back? Have you ever tried to actually deal with people, especially when money is on the line? I mean I want people to be happy with their product, and I don't enjoy angry accusatory phone calls...
People very often lie when something goes wrong, and even if telling the truth would help us both out (better, longer lasting product) AND get the problem fixed faster, but we spend so much time and effort going over false or completely made-up observations and emotionally charged statements.
So what if the data can say something (hypothetical situation)?
Customer account: "the bearing just failed, you stupid morons and your cheap bearings and your constant cheaping out, also there's a crack in your windshield, what are you cheapening out on your glass you better get those people in line, I want this replaced or I'll never buy again..."
The data says: Your drive is otherwise pretty smooth and you're otherwise treating your car well. BUT, at a regular point every day for the past 3 months, there is this large spike on the acceleration detector.
Customer: oh yeah, damn that Department of Transportation. They won't fix that damn pothole so I just run over it every day at high speed.
(okay, so if you knew we were watching for high-energy events at risk to your warranty, maybe you'd have avoided that pothole?)
((and oh, I'll save so much money not having to ream the bearing vendor and take samples, that I'll probably honor your warranty claim anyway. pfft in real cost what's a wheel bearing set replacement and tire balancing/alignment anyway?))
Okay, dear customer, please proceed to the nearest dealership for your warranty replacement, if you know which one you want I can put them on the line right now, have a nice day.
You'd have a lot more credibility if you a) hadn't posted as AC, b) could say with a straight face that any savings resulting from installing spyware in people's cars would be reflected in reduced sticker prices, and c) acknowledged that people's privacy concerns are at least as legitimate as your shareholder protectionist stance. If you're gonna shill, at least put some effort and imagination into it.
The problem is going to be finding cars with low mileage and in good condition that can continue on and be fixed up. I would buy a new car if this crap wasn't on it.
You're not the only one who's doing this, so you'd best buy your NEXT old car or two within a couple of years, mothball it, and put it on blocks. Otherwise, when the time comes, a viable older car may be unavailable. Then again, by the time your existing old cars die, it may simply be illegal to drive anything that hasn't been pre-pwned by the manufacturer and/or the gubmint.
Naw. It will end with some hackers knowing how to cut the CAN bus wire to their cellular modem, and 99% of people being sheep, which ultimately (strangely) will benefit society.
And THAT will end with cars whose capabilities are severely restricted, or which simply won't function at all, without regular 'permission packets' from the mothership. Soon an active data connection to your car's manufacturer will be a critical system without which your car won't run. 'SaaS' has already become 'HaaS' in things like fitness watches and thermostats - how long do you think it will be before cars suffer the same fate?
and self serving to boot. I don't believe Gates REALLY thinks that the people who own the AI and the automation equipment are going to share the wealth and give Joe Average Human a perpetual vacation; he's neither stupid nor naive. Where's the advantage in being wealthy if all the poor schmucks have both as much free time as you do and sufficient food and shelter to enjoy it? The wealthy want to be different, they want to be advantaged; not primarily because it's safer and more fun, but because to them it's a sign that they are superior, and perhaps even morally better. No way in hell are they giving THAT up without a fight...
then by definition you are destroying capitalism, not saving it. Not that I think that's a bad thing - it's simply important to replace capitalism with something better, not the something-worse represented by the companies in question.
I also find it interesting that Galloway decries the "new gods", yet seems totally unaware that they are the logical and inevitable outcome of capitalism. Also, the irony that he himself worships the "old god" called Capitalism seems totally lost on him.
I don't run Windows, but even if I did, this news would be meaningless to me. Now if the headline had said "Windows 10 Will Soon Let Users Track Microsoft Executives' Internet Activities", I might consider using Windows. But until somebody tells me that all this data collection is taking place bi-directionally on a truly level playing field, then any such 'concessions' are merely insulting. Microsoft and others of its ilk can go pound salt.
By removing honesty and truthfulness from their mission statement, they are being honest and truthful - perhaps more so that ever!
You may as well say "made from unobtainium."
Why? Except for the omission of a hyphen, (it should be "silicon-germanium"), they got it right. It's been in pretty common use since the 90's. In industry publications you'll see it referred to as SiGe, and it's an alloy of the two materials.
... And if money becomes tight, I can switch to LibreOffice (whom I regularly donate a small penny to).
If you could use LibreOffice "if money becomes tight", why not use it now?
TFA is sparse on detail. Given the rise in popularity of music streaming, Netflix, and online shopping, I would think a LOT of the time "on the internet" is what in prior decades would have been spent watching TV, listening to radio, playing albums on various media, or in the local mall. And if they're basing their figures on total backbone traffic then the numbers will be skewed even more by things like the IoT.
Of course, I can also believe that the amount of time spent watching TV and listening to music has increased as a result of the internet's reach and ubiquity. Then there's the whole social media thing - probably a WAY bigger time sink than dumb telephones ever were.
Shouldn't that be "frick"? Nah, I guess that would be too confusing...
page speed "has been used in ranking for some time"
Yeah, because the speed of a page is much more important to me than its relevance to what I'm searching for or the quality of its content. No wonder it's getting harder and harder to get decent, relevant search results. But, I guess nothing succeeds like pandering to the lowest common denominator...
Wouldn't it be cool if somebody came out with an unbiased search engine that caters to those with analytical capability and the will to use it? I'd be happy to pay a subscription fee for such a thing. And I'll bet some of its most frequent users would be Google employees!
Essentially, your home's microwave is a Faraday Cage, thus placing the Echo device inside it should allay all fears.
Good advice, but incomplete. After placing the Echo in the Faraday, turn said cage on at its highest setting for 10 seconds; that way you've nuked Echo without having had to attain orbit first.
"I felt a great disturbance in the Cloud, as if millions of Alexas suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced".
Less dynamic: https://youtu.be/lFqNQna_-sI?t...
More dynamic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That was really cool! But watching that smiling face, and hearing that bubble gum pop voice over a crunchy heavy-metal guitar - talk about cognitive dissonance! It also makes me think about how VERY different that same song would be if sung by Chrissie Hynde or Joan Jett...
Pop music being a major facet of our culture, I believe this study reflects on us as a whole, and what it indicates is that human beings are growing isolated from one another, sad, and angry. That makes me feel bad.
That's a very insightful observation. Given the bad rap Facebook and the like are getting, It would be interesting to plot the rise of social media and the dumbing-down of popular music and see if there's a strong correlation. Not that I believe there's a causal relationship; rather, I think the increasing concentration of wealth and power might be the cause of both crappy music and the increasingly-superficial interactions in our society. The ruling class has gotten much better at the whole 'bread and circuses' thing. It's kinda hard to create significant art when your whole environment has been specifically designed to make you Comfortably Numb. I wonder if we'll ever manage to Tear Down (this) Wall...
It would also be interesting to find scientific ways of evaluating the 'just isn't what it used to be' quality of various art forms through recorded history, to see if it correlates well with increased power among the leash-holders and decreased autonomy among Joe and Jane Average.
There is a line between discussion and Trolling.
Yes, and he even agreed with google that some of the comments his discussions generated should not be tolerated.
I can't be certain, but I get the impression that you're siding with Google management rather than with Cory Altheide on this one. Does that mean you're in favour of simply not talking about valid and important concerns just because some asshole might respond in a dickish fashion? Do you really want to support that kind of censorship, even inside a private corporation?
I understand defending a company's legal right to engage in internal censorship; but as we all know, it's not always appropriate to take advantage of legal rights. If that kind of assholishness on either side of the debate is common at an influential company whose influence is pervasive and inescapable, (e.g. Google), then exposing that fact and dealing with it serves the best interests of society - a society of which shareholders are but a small part, in spite of their inappropriately disproportionate influence.
You have way too much belief and trust in the US as a "democracy" and "free society." This kind of society ended after 9/11, if it ever existed at all ... You know what we should do to prevent terrorism? Stop pissing off the terrorists. That's right -- stop fighting wars in places where we don't belong. Stop playing favorites in the Middle East and Central Asia. None of the countries there are our problem.
This, exactly. In the aftermath of 9/11, I repeatedly said "By all means, hunt down and kill the bastards who did this to you. But then give your heads a shake, do some soul searching, and ask yourself what you did to them to make them so pissed off that they would sacrifice their own lives to fly planes into your buildings". Instead, government took advantage of the attacks, and the anger and fear they generated among Americans, to hugely expand and consolidate their own power base.
As for the security of the encryption provided by Apple and other corporations, and what the TLA's say publicly about that encryption, I consider it all bullshit until proven otherwise. Corporations and governments are close frenemies, and their common enemy / patsy is the public over whom they exercise their dominion. If we want to fix both both terrorism and governmental abuses, THAT is the place to start. Issues like encryption are just smokescreens.
Any touchscreen anywhere, from a gas station pump to an ATM to a plain glass door, could be outfitted with a collection device to gather all our greasy fingertip data. And with the courts assuming that you have no expectation of privacy with third party data, everywhere is open season for state actors.
On the one hand, thanks for pointing out a potential danger I hadn't thought of. On the other hand, thanks for ruining my day... :(
This is *exactly* what you should expect when you attempt to socially engineer a solution that violates the rules of business, in this case, artificially raising the cost of labor beyond the market value. One hundred percent entirely predictable, and predicted.
This is *exactly* what you should expect when you allow corporations to socially engineer a solution that puts greed above society's well-being, in this case by anthropomorphizing, hallucinating intelligence and purpose in, and then outright conferring godhood upon, "the market". One hundred percent entirely magical thinking, and getting old and stale really fucking fast.
Definitely. This might look like cryptocoin's golden hour, but the market is oversaturated. Every ordinary company is trying frame their product in cryptocoin terms, instead of just staying focused on their core product. Companies keep pulling this crap, but it's only a matter of time until they push it too far and investors see that this shit doesn't pan out they way they say it will. Once one or two fail, get ready to watch the speed at which they all shutter.
Outstanding! In one short paragraph you've packed 11 references to photography: 'golden hour', 'oversaturated', 'frame', 'focused', 'pulling', (two meanings there), 'push', 'pan', (another double entendre), 'speed', and 'shutter'. Bonus points for the references that only someone familiar with film photography and darkroom work would get. Well done!
This is just another chapter in the lately-skanky 'evolution' of computing. You know, the one that says you no longer control, (or really, even own), the device you paid for. It's all moving to 'the Cloud'; this means both that privacy is defunct, and that the proper functioning of the hardware you buy is subject to the whims of whoever is providing your 'Software As A Service'. And since so much gaming is already MMO, most gamers won't give it a second's thought beyond "Oooh! Shiny! Now I can play on cheap, small hardware!". Yet another erosion of self-determination and autonomy - hooray!