Honestly, I wish I dunked my Z2 the day it came in the mail. This way, if there was a problem, I could just chargeback. (I bought it straight from Sony.) Otherwise, the wettest I've gotten it is to dip a corner.
A chargeback doesn't get you off the hook from paying - it only returns the money to your credit card if the credit card company decides in your favor (they usually do, because why not? They just take the money from the merchant's holdback, and it's not like the merchant can go elsewhere, he has to accept major credit cards).
However, the merchant is free to pursue you through legal means to collect the debt.
Look, we all know that marketing materials are fluff, and should not be relied upon when buying or using a piece of equipment. It seems fairly obvious to me that by "water proof" they mean "water resistant" and they make it clear that it is not designed for dedicated underwater use such as a GoPro-like device. But you can probably still drop it in your toilet and it will work after being fished out.
They make it clear that the phone can be taken underwater up to 1.5m deep and up to 30 minutes. Why would someone read this and assume that the phone is only waterproof enough for use in the rain?
The Xperia Z3 is waterproof and protected against dust as long as you follow a few simple instructions: all ports and attached covers are firmly closed; you can’t take the phone deeper than 1.5 m of water and for longer than 30 minutes; and the water should be fresh water. Casual use in chlorinated pools is permitted provided the phone is rinsed in fresh water afterwards. No seawater and no salt water pools.
In unrelated news, after a visit by DHS, Home Depot decided to voluntarily stop carrying crowbars, bolt cutters, saws, boxcutters and hand tools of all kinds after learning that these tools can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors. The use of a crowbar is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use. When asked for comment, a Home Depot manager said that when she learned about the illicit uses for tools at the meeting with the police and general contractors, she was concerned about the company's association with criminal activities such as burglary and even murder.
Local grocery chains are already better positioned to offer this kind of service; their stores themselves can act as the supply house from which the order is pulled, assembled, and delivered from. Even if a particular chain decides to select only specific stores to do it, those can be the best equipped stores with the most merchandise variety to source from.
But only if they have accurate real time inventory, otherwise they can't complete with a company with good enough logistics to tell you when the item you're ordering is out of stock. I've ordered from Instacart a few times (Safeway and Whole Foods), and though their service is very convenient, they are regularly out of stock of 10 - 20% of the items I ordered. I realize that the same item is out of stock at the store, but at least when I'm shopping at the store I can look around for a suitable substitute even if it's not in the same class of item that I ordered ("Oh crap, they are out of sandwich meat, I guess I'll get a frozen pizza instead"). It got to the point where i'd have to go shopping after they delivered the order so I could pick up the things that I really needed, and if I have to go to the store anyway, I might as well pick up *everything* I need.
You could always read the article if you want to know more about what the summary is about:
Google Inc. will start testing a delivery service for fresh food and groceries in two U.S. cities later this year, stepping up competition with online retailer Amazon.com Inc. and startup Instacart Inc. The trial will begin in San Francisco and another city, said Brian Elliott, general manager of Google Express, which already delivers merchandise, including dry foods, to customers. Whole Foods Market Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. will be among Google’s partners for the new service, he said.
Clever people have used scanners to take a picture of a phonograph record and then play the image of the grooves.
They have smart phones that can fake swiping a mag stripe card, just by holding it up near the reader.
What smart phone can do that? (unless you mean contactless payment, but that has nothing to do with magstripe cards
I wouldn't be surprised if some clever person could figure out a way of playing the sound recorded on the tape without actually having to unwind the tape.
I'd be *very* surprised, since layer upon layer of magnetic tape is going to appear as noise to any technology that tries to read it without unwinding the tape.
Anyway you've got rich people in OK Shape buying ridiculously fast bikes. I see them all the time at the little charity runs I like to do. If you're smart you steer as clear as you can. They don't have the riding chops to handle the bike they just bought but they're usually in OK enough shape to be dangerous (the fat ones end up on cruisers:P ).
If only it were true that the amount of money spent on a bike correlates to the speed of the bike, but the average rider is going to be just as fast on a $1,000 bike (or similar type, i.e. don't compare a mountain bike and a road bike) as he is on a $5,000 bike. A few pounds of weight saved doesn't mean much when the rider is 30+ lbs overweight.
"'Sexting' may seem like a harmless or normal activity but there are many risks involved. Once circulated, the sender loses all control of that image and can cause significant distress when it gets into wider hands. It is essential that we work, alone and alongside partners such as schools and families, to intervene early and prevent young people from becoming both the victims and perpetrators of crime."
How nice of the police to recognize that sexting has risks, and then they demonstrate that the police response is the biggest risk by filing a police report that will follow him for the next 10 years.
As you’ll see, we’ve taken the Google logo and branding, which were originally built for a single desktop browser page, and updated them for a world of seamless computing across an endless number of devices and different kinds of inputs (such as tap, type and talk).
Since people already were using Google across an endless number of devices with the old logo, why was this new logo needed? I could see the old logo just fine, why is this new logo needed?
I get that they wanted to refresh the look of the logo, but their claim that it's because users use Google on mobile devices seems specious.
As an aside, why has the Slashdor "quote bar" that delineates quoted text faded away to such a light grey that it's barely visible against the white background? Maybe it's just my browser.
There must only be a handful of people that could match such a specific description: listens to AC/DC, uses twitter, and denies any culpability. AC/DC has only sold around 200 million albums, so that alone dramatically restricts the possible culprits. The intersection between AC/DC aficionados and Twittter's 300M active users must be minuscule, maybe only one or two possible people.
Since most of my queries regarding coding are Perl or Bash related. Sorry, Google, I'm old school. Perl and Bash are still my bread and butter, and Perl developers are still getting heaps of job offers. Some amazing stuff is being done with Perl (Fastmail and others), but it's no longer the flavour of the month for the kids, so it gets ignored. Perl, though, does not suffer the internal split that Python has with 2.x vs 3.x development. Python devs still overwhelmingly use 2.x. Perl just works.
Perl would suffer the same split problem if Perl6 were ever released. 15 years in the making and it might (finally) be released by the end of this year.
If there's anything that starving, homeless people need in a disaster, it's someone to listen in on their phone calls...which they can't make because they have no way to charge phones and no working cell towers to connect to.
Katrina was August 2005. This purchase request was made in July 2006. I'm pretty sure people found a way to charge their phones in 11 months.
Since they didn't include a time travel device in their request, I'm pretty sure that the FBI used their experience at Katrina to justify purchases for the *next* large scale Katrina-like disaster.... which will suffer from similar problems, including lack of coordinated response from the government since there are too many levels of government involved in disaster relief.
If there's anything that starving, homeless people need in a disaster, it's someone to listen in on their phone calls...which they can't make because they have no way to charge phones and no working cell towers to connect to.
The FBI would be better off buying banks of phones with a built-in recording device connected to a wireless tower. At least that way they could help people while conducting their surveillance.
I don't want my employer to know that I usually vote for Democrats.
Don't the audit tapes just have anonymous ballot numbers? if you don't share your ballot receipt with your employer, you should be safe, especially if your employer is not the researching seeking the tapes since he, presumably, is doing statistical analysis and is not posting them online.
Though if your employer cares enough about how you vote that it actually worries you if they found out, perhaps you ought to get a new job
Who wants a check from Ashely Madison sent to their home or work?
Before this hack, I had never heard of Ashely Madison, and I suspect that many people hadn't heard of it either. Especially when the hack was first made public all of the news sites described what Ashely Madison was. So I would be surprised if that was discouragement.
If your spouse received a $200+ check from Ashley Madison, wouldn't you be a little curious about where it came from? Especially when you likely are already having marital problems since he posted a profile there. It's not like it'd be hard to research.
That doesn't sound right. I expect that the men completely outnumber the women, and that the 'women' are largely fake, but only 12,000?
With all the advertising that AM has done, and with the huge number of women online (consider pinterest for heavens sake), and the huge number of women that have affairs, it seems unlikely to me that only 12,000 actual women signed up.
Even if there are huge numbers of women interested in having affairs, that doesn't mean that they want to have random internet hookups from a cheating website. All online dating sites are the same -- the men far outnumber the women.
Simply put: you could get your subscription fee back in some circumstances, but you never got refunds on the money you had to spend to message people, to buy virtual gifts, chat sessions etc.
I think this is what keeps most people from applying for a refund:
if it is determined that you have complied with the above requirements, we will mail you a REFUND CHECK for the original purchase (plus any applicable taxes) within 6-8 weeks of receiving your application. Please note that your refund check will state that it is from "Ashley Madison."
Who wants a check from Ashely Madison sent to their home or work?
" That means for every 7750 men, there were 3 women"
So does that mean there were 2583 men for every woman?
Can someone put this into football fields for me?
Be happy to. Imagine that a woman is a regulation sized 11" long football. And imagine that a men are 100 yard long football fields. There would be one football for every 8 football fields. That football is going to have an awfully rough time trying to service all of those football fields.
So you're saying that government is the major impediment to progress? I agree!
No, its the under educated voters that vote on emotion and sound bites rather than issues. Oh yeah I guess the people and the government are one and the same.
> can't fill positions...everyone is encouraged to use vacation,
How in the heck does that work? You don't have enough people and still allow vacation time? That doesn't sound likely. I'm a developer in my early forties and nearly all of my friends are developers, but I can't remember any of us ever taking an entire week off. If you can't fill positions as you claim (and I believe that part), how can people take time off?
The feature backlog gets longer and estimates for new features get longer... as we add people, then we can finish features faster. Isn't that how most sane companies do it? I don't see how putting a moratorium on vacations is sustainable in the long run -- each week of vacation is 2% of a FTE, if that 2% is all that's keeping your company from failing, then you should start looking for a new job now.
Also, you don't sound very important if you can take three weeks off.
Your company is in a precarious position if no one can take time off -- there should be enough people cross trained that you can take off work without having work come to a screeching halt because you're not there. Making everyone a critical resource that can't be replaced is a terrible way to build a company and will lead to huge problems when a team member quits (or is sick) and suddenly no one can fill in.
Everyone on our team works hard to make sure that none of us are "very important", so yes, I am proud to say that I am "not very important" -- there's no excuse for having a single point of failure on a team, no one team member should be indispensable, and if he is, then he's not doing his job by cross training and writing documentation. Vacation is a good way to test this out -- it's better to find out sooner rather than later where the coverage gaps are.
I've had to cancel at least six vacations that I can remember since I graduated college. I have always been paid back the deposits I lost and have always gotten good bonuses in exchange, but if you don't have enough people, it isn't logical that you let people just not work.
We don't let people "just not work", we let people take time off for vacation, it's not like they are paid to sit around in the break room in a corner all glassy eyed.
I'd never think that a bonus was fair compensation for canceling a vacation, perhaps that's why I can take a vacation and you can't -- you're happy working at a job where you'll accept payment to cancel a vacation, and I'm willing to work for less money but have a more sane working environment.
By 2040 we should have all that crap sorted out. If there are any shortages, it's because some corrupt bastard is mucking up the works. There is absolutely no longer any technical reason to suffer shortages of any kind anywhere.
It can take a decade or longer to do an environmental review, get permits, and build a large desalination plant (and decades more to build a nuclear plant to power it). Building a dam or large reservoir can take even longer (and still needs time to fill).
While some progress will be made, don't count on the problem being solved in 25 years.
I love how Alaska gets included with the rest of the nation even though we have nothing close to a water shortage with all the glaciers up here. We should have been grouped with Canada.
Did you read the headline? The Nations That Will Be Hardest Hit By Water Shortages By 2040. Unless Alaska has somehow seceded from the union, I don't see how they could group Alaska with Canada.
There are plenty of other US state drought maps that you can use if you really care about a single state's water, but don't complain that a global representation of drought was not local enough for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, I wish I dunked my Z2 the day it came in the mail. This way, if there was a problem, I could just chargeback. (I bought it straight from Sony.) Otherwise, the wettest I've gotten it is to dip a corner.
A chargeback doesn't get you off the hook from paying - it only returns the money to your credit card if the credit card company decides in your favor (they usually do, because why not? They just take the money from the merchant's holdback, and it's not like the merchant can go elsewhere, he has to accept major credit cards).
However, the merchant is free to pursue you through legal means to collect the debt.
Look, we all know that marketing materials are fluff, and should not be relied upon when buying or using a piece of equipment. It seems fairly obvious to me that by "water proof" they mean "water resistant" and they make it clear that it is not designed for dedicated underwater use such as a GoPro-like device. But you can probably still drop it in your toilet and it will work after being fished out.
They make it clear that the phone can be taken underwater up to 1.5m deep and up to 30 minutes. Why would someone read this and assume that the phone is only waterproof enough for use in the rain?
http://www.sonymobile.com/in/p...
The Xperia Z3 is waterproof and protected against dust as long as you follow a few simple instructions: all ports and attached covers are firmly closed; you can’t take the phone deeper than 1.5 m of water and for longer than 30 minutes; and the water should be fresh water. Casual use in chlorinated pools is permitted provided the phone is rinsed in fresh water afterwards. No seawater and no salt water pools.
In unrelated news, after a visit by DHS, Home Depot decided to voluntarily stop carrying crowbars, bolt cutters, saws, boxcutters and hand tools of all kinds after learning that these tools can be attractive to criminal enterprises or actors. The use of a crowbar is not, in [or] of itself, illegal and there are legitimate purposes for its use. When asked for comment, a Home Depot manager said that when she learned about the illicit uses for tools at the meeting with the police and general contractors, she was concerned about the company's association with criminal activities such as burglary and even murder.
Local grocery chains are already better positioned to offer this kind of service; their stores themselves can act as the supply house from which the order is pulled, assembled, and delivered from. Even if a particular chain decides to select only specific stores to do it, those can be the best equipped stores with the most merchandise variety to source from.
But only if they have accurate real time inventory, otherwise they can't complete with a company with good enough logistics to tell you when the item you're ordering is out of stock. I've ordered from Instacart a few times (Safeway and Whole Foods), and though their service is very convenient, they are regularly out of stock of 10 - 20% of the items I ordered. I realize that the same item is out of stock at the store, but at least when I'm shopping at the store I can look around for a suitable substitute even if it's not in the same class of item that I ordered ("Oh crap, they are out of sandwich meat, I guess I'll get a frozen pizza instead"). It got to the point where i'd have to go shopping after they delivered the order so I could pick up the things that I really needed, and if I have to go to the store anyway, I might as well pick up *everything* I need.
Um i have seen Google Express cars around here for years now, presumably doing mostly grocery deliveries. Not sure what we are talking about ?
https://www.google.com/express...
You could always read the article if you want to know more about what the summary is about:
Google Inc. will start testing a delivery service for fresh food and groceries in two U.S. cities later this year, stepping up competition with online retailer Amazon.com Inc. and startup Instacart Inc.
The trial will begin in San Francisco and another city, said Brian Elliott, general manager of Google Express, which already delivers merchandise, including dry foods, to customers. Whole Foods Market Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. will be among Google’s partners for the new service, he said.
(emphasis mine)
Clever people have used scanners to take a picture of a phonograph record and then play the image of the grooves.
They have smart phones that can fake swiping a mag stripe card, just by holding it up near the reader.
What smart phone can do that? (unless you mean contactless payment, but that has nothing to do with magstripe cards
I wouldn't be surprised if some clever person could figure out a way of playing the sound recorded on the tape without actually having to unwind the tape.
I'd be *very* surprised, since layer upon layer of magnetic tape is going to appear as noise to any technology that tries to read it without unwinding the tape.
Anyway you've got rich people in OK Shape buying ridiculously fast bikes. I see them all the time at the little charity runs I like to do. If you're smart you steer as clear as you can. They don't have the riding chops to handle the bike they just bought but they're usually in OK enough shape to be dangerous (the fat ones end up on cruisers :P ).
If only it were true that the amount of money spent on a bike correlates to the speed of the bike, but the average rider is going to be just as fast on a $1,000 bike (or similar type, i.e. don't compare a mountain bike and a road bike) as he is on a $5,000 bike. A few pounds of weight saved doesn't mean much when the rider is 30+ lbs overweight.
It's nice that the police said:
"'Sexting' may seem like a harmless or normal activity but there are many risks involved. Once circulated, the sender loses all control of that image and can cause significant distress when it gets into wider hands. It is essential that we work, alone and alongside partners such as schools and families, to intervene early and prevent young people from becoming both the victims and perpetrators of crime."
How nice of the police to recognize that sexting has risks, and then they demonstrate that the police response is the biggest risk by filing a police report that will follow him for the next 10 years.
Sounds like it's time to bring back the 1940's era TV screen magnifiers so users can take advantage of all of those pixels.
As you’ll see, we’ve taken the Google logo and branding, which were originally built for a single desktop browser page, and updated them for a world of seamless computing across an endless number of devices and different kinds of inputs (such as tap, type and talk).
Since people already were using Google across an endless number of devices with the old logo, why was this new logo needed? I could see the old logo just fine, why is this new logo needed?
I get that they wanted to refresh the look of the logo, but their claim that it's because users use Google on mobile devices seems specious.
As an aside, why has the Slashdor "quote bar" that delineates quoted text faded away to such a light grey that it's barely visible against the white background? Maybe it's just my browser.
There must only be a handful of people that could match such a specific description: listens to AC/DC, uses twitter, and denies any culpability. AC/DC has only sold around 200 million albums, so that alone dramatically restricts the possible culprits. The intersection between AC/DC aficionados and Twittter's 300M active users must be minuscule, maybe only one or two possible people.
The same as MS Windows. It is just the one people know. That does not make it a good choice for the cloud, just a familiar one.
Uh, I would assume that cloud servers are running Ubuntu Server. You know, the one which isn't a desktop OS.
And I'd bet that most windows cloud servers are running some Windows Server variant, which also is a Server OS.
Since most of my queries regarding coding are Perl or Bash related. Sorry, Google, I'm old school. Perl and Bash are still my bread and butter, and Perl developers are still getting heaps of job offers. Some amazing stuff is being done with Perl (Fastmail and others), but it's no longer the flavour of the month for the kids, so it gets ignored. Perl, though, does not suffer the internal split that Python has with 2.x vs 3.x development. Python devs still overwhelmingly use 2.x. Perl just works.
Perl would suffer the same split problem if Perl6 were ever released. 15 years in the making and it might (finally) be released by the end of this year.
I searched for "How can I do evil after claiming that I will do no evil", and the search result was a job offer letter from Google.
If there's anything that starving, homeless people need in a disaster, it's someone to listen in on their phone calls...which they can't make because they have no way to charge phones and no working cell towers to connect to.
Katrina was August 2005. This purchase request was made in July 2006. I'm pretty sure people found a way to charge their phones in 11 months.
Since they didn't include a time travel device in their request, I'm pretty sure that the FBI used their experience at Katrina to justify purchases for the *next* large scale Katrina-like disaster.... which will suffer from similar problems, including lack of coordinated response from the government since there are too many levels of government involved in disaster relief.
If there's anything that starving, homeless people need in a disaster, it's someone to listen in on their phone calls...which they can't make because they have no way to charge phones and no working cell towers to connect to.
The FBI would be better off buying banks of phones with a built-in recording device connected to a wireless tower. At least that way they could help people while conducting their surveillance.
I don't want my employer to know that I usually vote for Democrats.
Don't the audit tapes just have anonymous ballot numbers? if you don't share your ballot receipt with your employer, you should be safe, especially if your employer is not the researching seeking the tapes since he, presumably, is doing statistical analysis and is not posting them online.
Though if your employer cares enough about how you vote that it actually worries you if they found out, perhaps you ought to get a new job
Who wants a check from Ashely Madison sent to their home or work?
Before this hack, I had never heard of Ashely Madison, and I suspect that many people hadn't heard of it either. Especially when the hack was first made public all of the news sites described what Ashely Madison was. So I would be surprised if that was discouragement.
If your spouse received a $200+ check from Ashley Madison, wouldn't you be a little curious about where it came from? Especially when you likely are already having marital problems since he posted a profile there. It's not like it'd be hard to research.
That doesn't sound right. I expect that the men completely outnumber the women, and that the 'women' are largely fake, but only 12,000?
With all the advertising that AM has done, and with the huge number of women online (consider pinterest for heavens sake), and the huge number of women that have affairs, it seems unlikely to me that only 12,000 actual women signed up.
Even if there are huge numbers of women interested in having affairs, that doesn't mean that they want to have random internet hookups from a cheating website. All online dating sites are the same -- the men far outnumber the women.
Simply put: you could get your subscription fee back in some circumstances, but you never got refunds on the money you had to spend to message people, to buy virtual gifts, chat sessions etc.
I think this is what keeps most people from applying for a refund:
https://www.ashleymadison.com/...
if it is determined that you have complied with the above requirements, we will mail you a REFUND CHECK for the original purchase (plus any applicable taxes) within 6-8 weeks of receiving your application. Please note that your refund check will state that it is from "Ashley Madison."
Who wants a check from Ashely Madison sent to their home or work?
" That means for every 7750 men, there were 3 women"
So does that mean there were 2583 men for every woman?
Can someone put this into football fields for me?
Be happy to. Imagine that a woman is a regulation sized 11" long football. And imagine that a men are 100 yard long football fields. There would be one football for every 8 football fields. That football is going to have an awfully rough time trying to service all of those football fields.
So you're saying that government is the major impediment to progress? I agree!
No, its the under educated voters that vote on emotion and sound bites rather than issues. Oh yeah I guess the people and the government are one and the same.
> can't fill positions...everyone is encouraged to use vacation,
How in the heck does that work? You don't have enough people and still allow vacation time? That doesn't sound likely. I'm a developer in my early forties and nearly all of my friends are developers, but I can't remember any of us ever taking an entire week off. If you can't fill positions as you claim (and I believe that part), how can people take time off?
The feature backlog gets longer and estimates for new features get longer... as we add people, then we can finish features faster. Isn't that how most sane companies do it? I don't see how putting a moratorium on vacations is sustainable in the long run -- each week of vacation is 2% of a FTE, if that 2% is all that's keeping your company from failing, then you should start looking for a new job now.
Also, you don't sound very important if you can take three weeks off.
Your company is in a precarious position if no one can take time off -- there should be enough people cross trained that you can take off work without having work come to a screeching halt because you're not there. Making everyone a critical resource that can't be replaced is a terrible way to build a company and will lead to huge problems when a team member quits (or is sick) and suddenly no one can fill in.
Everyone on our team works hard to make sure that none of us are "very important", so yes, I am proud to say that I am "not very important" -- there's no excuse for having a single point of failure on a team, no one team member should be indispensable, and if he is, then he's not doing his job by cross training and writing documentation. Vacation is a good way to test this out -- it's better to find out sooner rather than later where the coverage gaps are.
I've had to cancel at least six vacations that I can remember since I graduated college. I have always been paid back the deposits I lost and have always gotten good bonuses in exchange, but if you don't have enough people, it isn't logical that you let people just not work.
We don't let people "just not work", we let people take time off for vacation, it's not like they are paid to sit around in the break room in a corner all glassy eyed.
I'd never think that a bonus was fair compensation for canceling a vacation, perhaps that's why I can take a vacation and you can't -- you're happy working at a job where you'll accept payment to cancel a vacation, and I'm willing to work for less money but have a more sane working environment.
By 2040 we should have all that crap sorted out. If there are any shortages, it's because some corrupt bastard is mucking up the works. There is absolutely no longer any technical reason to suffer shortages of any kind anywhere.
It can take a decade or longer to do an environmental review, get permits, and build a large desalination plant (and decades more to build a nuclear plant to power it). Building a dam or large reservoir can take even longer (and still needs time to fill).
While some progress will be made, don't count on the problem being solved in 25 years.
I love how Alaska gets included with the rest of the nation even though we have nothing close to a water shortage with all the glaciers up here. We should have been grouped with Canada.
Did you read the headline? The Nations That Will Be Hardest Hit By Water Shortages By 2040. Unless Alaska has somehow seceded from the union, I don't see how they could group Alaska with Canada.
There are plenty of other US state drought maps that you can use if you really care about a single state's water, but don't complain that a global representation of drought was not local enough for you.