to have as a policy and requirement, that adverts only come as still images, or movie sequences? Why the f*ck would you allow actual 3rd party code to run inside your own software, to display an advert?
This is often quite surprising to those who don't know how modern Internet advertising works, but that is what people do. To have advertising on your site, you load a JS library from the advertising network and call into it to display the advertisement, and it does what it wants to show an advert. You're trusting them not to do anything evil - and the advertising network maybe trusting the advertiser not to do anything malicious, but you are certainly trusting the advertising network to screen for bad content.
You can have the above policy, but who will enforce it? You cannot, only the advertising network can, as they provide the content how they will. If a malicious advertiser can manage to sneak something in that passes whatever automated testing the advertising network uses, or exploits a bug in the browser, then the website operator can't do much about it.
This is the Web (and apps) of today - this is the exchange you have all made for the "free" websites you like. All the users of websites, all the ones who don't want to pay, have made this advertising software backdoor surveillance monstrosity that is the WWW today.
In the last 2 weeks I have taken licensed taxis in the Netherlands, UK, and USA. In all cases the drivers were reasonably competent, at least as well groomed as me, and either quiet and polite or jovial and talkative.
In the USA, the main problem with taxis is in the places with a limited number of licenses for taxis, possessed by rentiers who have no incentive to improve service and whose employee drivers have no autonomy and earn very little. Un-limit the taxi number and give them autonomy and quality would greatly improve.
The way Uber gets away with this is by being faster and more widespread than regulators. This doesn't happen in countries where the regulator covers the whole economy, like in most European countries. US-wide companies against individual State regulators means the regulators are rarely effective and can rarely keep up.
Yet Americans widely oppose "The Feds" regulating anything - so they get the companies they want, because they oppose regulation of them. They get the country they want.
So Lyft (and Uber) are good for the drivers, eh? All the claims of offering people flexible work, improving earning chances of people without firm employment, etc, turn out to be complete rubbish.
Lyft and Uber are after the money, not helping anyone, not creating jobs, just the money. I feel sorry for anyone tricked into expecting Uber (especially) would be a long lasting way to work for money; they were just a disposable tool on the way to more money for the investors and executives of Lyft and Uber.
More technology designed for use in a temperate location - more Californian technology for Californians.
Outside the bubble of perfect dry weather that California tech companies live in, it rains, it's cold and you have to wear gloves, sometimes it snows and is frosty.
iPhones you can't use with gloves or in rain, Tesla "autopilots" that can't handle snow and rain, Google self-driving cars that only work well on quiet, dry, well-marked roads, and so on and so on.
iPads you not only can't use with gloves, but which you can't use easily with lights behind you, sun at a low angle, or so on - only suitable for rooms with subdued lighting.
Services that assume you have a mobile data connection at all times.
From the rest of the world to California: Get out of your state more and make us things we can use where we live.
Youtube never liked G+. They didn't like the integration removing their independence and they only gave in and G-plussed themselves when Vic Gundotra put on his "I AM THE VOICE OF LARRY" [1] act and ordered them to do so. I am sure they didn't like G+ then either and were happy it failed.
This is Youtube taking control of their community services and features instead of letting the G+ guys do it, and providing better community features than Youtube had before it got G-plussed. Youtube always felt it had a separate brand image and separate community of users, and they do - that's why it's still called "Youtube" instead of "Google Video".
Of course the Youtube "community" is a sewer of rancid toxics that makes the Twitter trolls and the racist parts of Reddit look quite reasonable, so they're not improving the Internet in general by fostering it. Youtube: NEVER READ THE COMMENTS.
But they are taking more control of their own destiny and seeking more autonomy in how they interact with their users.
[1] Imagine a bad version of Alan Rickman as the Metatron in "Dogma".
The Model S is quite heavy. Bear in mind the Model S has the interior space of a Mercedes C-Class or BMW 3-series.
Comparing the curbside weights of the high-performance versions of saloon (American: sedan), as the Tesla markets itself as a high-performance car.
Tesla Model S 85D: 2188kg Mercedes AMG C63: 1785kg BMW M3: 1646kg Audi A4 3.0V6 TDI: 1540kg
The Tesla is over 400kg heavier than a comparable internal combustion car.
Considering larger cars, the Mercedes AMG E63 estate (American: wagon), a significantly larger car with significantly more space inside, weighs 1945kg. The Lexus LS, also a larger car weighs 1965kg. The Tesla still weighs over 200kg more.
The Tesla is heavy. Significantly heavier than its direct internal combustion equivalents.
"Free speech" doesn't mean anyone has to listen to you. Unfortunately the Twitter staff act like it does.
Twitter lacks effective ways for people not to listen to things. Users lack ways to filter the content they see, filter who can send to them, filter seeing third party mentions of them, and so on.
The asshole problem on twitter is that they can be effective assholes: twitter makes it hard, or impossible, for the targets of attack to block or filter out the messages, so the targets of abuse receive the messages, so the assholes succeed in abuse. "Not using twitter" is not a realistic option for many people who work in media, PR, or whose jobs and lives are about communication - so they end up in a situation where they are the targets of the assholes and cannot do much about it.
Twitter should care more about the recipient users, not the sender users - and they can do that without compromsing anyone's ability to speak.
Look at the way the trailer took the top of the car off while barely slowing it down. This shows how trailer under-run bars would have prevented this death. In Europe they are required, and we basically don't have this sort of side collision decapitation horror accident.
Higher property values, that is also higher property cost, benefits only a few: those who own a lot of property to sell. It does not benefit most people, who only buy the property they have for its utility - their house, their company office, etc. They just have to spend more of their money on something they need anyway.
You should not seek to "increase property values" and "increased property values" as a reason to do something is "to make a few people richer".
The planet really is getting warmer. Trickle-down economics really doesn't work. Socailised, single-payer, single-risk-pool healthcare really is cheaper and more effective for the whole population, vaccination does prevent spread of infectious diseases, homosexuality is normal and harmless, and so on.
It is a fundamentally different way of thinking: Conservative, reactionary people think that you can decide how things are and will be. Progressive, liberal people think that you discover how things are by experience, by the scientific method, and by other means. So when things turn out not to be as the Conservative, reactionary people think they are, it must be a conspiracy and a bias against them - they can't be wrong, because in their world they can't be wrong, they decide how things are.
What could possibly go wrong when amateur sleuths with spare time decided to look for incriminating evidence in everyday speech and activities?
I'm sure they'll find lots of things to report to the police which the police will take seriously and investigate - completely screwing up children's lives by criminalising them.
I just hope the children don't slip up on Facebook privacy settings so the school can't see what they're posting.
This is, of course, teaching the children to be fearful and to hide from arbitrary, vengeful authority. Bad for their mental health - but realistic training for life in the USA today.
This sort of authentication is very common in China, where your phone number is your identity for many purposes. With WeChat payments, your payment identity is even your phone number.
People who arrive at online connectivity via smartphones and messaging software don't have an email address and don't want one; their identity is their phone number. With all the problems that has, but those aren't problems they see at first (email also is not lacking in problems).
So this is Facebook aiming at being the auth service, and entry point to the Internet, for people who are newly connected to the Internet via smartphones. The next billion to be networked.
This is not aimed at anyone who uses slashdot - if you read this, you're just not one of the people described above.
The design is a nice picture, but the reality of tall datacentre is much closer to 33 Thomas Street.
Also who wants their servers moved around for you to go near them? Only people working at Google-scale, where you take a whole pod offline every so often and fix all the broken bits, can do that.
I've been the person "quoted" as saying something like that. Anyone with integrity will not have anything attributed to them that they wouldn't want to have said. But what you say for the record is not usually the first thing that comes out of your mouth. Anyone making a speech or an announcement will run through some phrasing, practice it on others, etc.
"Yeah, it's gonna let you have the local regulation laws, more people can run their stuff with lower latency, some of them care a lot about that, uh, even though we know it barely matters, and we'll be cheaper than the other guys, mostly." - becomes the quote you read.
I've given my colleagues good phrases to use and they use them, or they've asked me how something sounds and that's co-created.
Lawyers are scared of anything that reduced billable hours because they have built an entire business model of paying for time spent, for effort, not for results.
Lawyering should be an intellectual task with a defined outcome, not a repetitive task. Lawyers should be paid for the benefit they bring, not how hard it was. Remember the old consultancy joke:
A client has a very complex machine that does not work. A consultant is called in, and he looks at the machine for a few minutes, and draws a cross on it in chalk, saying "Hit it here with a sledgehammer". A worker hits the machine with a sledgehammer and it functions perfectly thereafter. The consultant sends his bill to the client: "Consultancy on machine repair: $50000". The client angrily rejects this, demanding a breakdown of the work done to justify the preposterous consultancy fee. The consultant responds with "Placing chalk cross on machine: $5 Knowing where to place the cross: $49995".
Lawyers are trying to provide a justification for their fees that is not "Because I am smart and know the law" when that is why you are hiring them. You should not be paying extra for people to do mechanical tasks.
Good lawyers should come out well. Legal assistance, paralegals, secretaries, etc will come out badly. Re-think taking that "paralegal training degree" at degree mills like the University of Phoenix - it will be even more useless in future than it is now.
Slashdot Mirror
to have as a policy and requirement, that adverts only come as still images, or movie sequences? Why the f*ck would you allow actual 3rd party code to run inside your own software, to display an advert?
This is often quite surprising to those who don't know how modern Internet advertising works, but that is what people do. To have advertising on your site, you load a JS library from the advertising network and call into it to display the advertisement, and it does what it wants to show an advert. You're trusting them not to do anything evil - and the advertising network maybe trusting the advertiser not to do anything malicious, but you are certainly trusting the advertising network to screen for bad content.
You can have the above policy, but who will enforce it? You cannot, only the advertising network can, as they provide the content how they will. If a malicious advertiser can manage to sneak something in that passes whatever automated testing the advertising network uses, or exploits a bug in the browser, then the website operator can't do much about it.
This is the Web (and apps) of today - this is the exchange you have all made for the "free" websites you like. All the users of websites, all the ones who don't want to pay, have made this advertising software backdoor surveillance monstrosity that is the WWW today.
WARNING: Laws of the State of California may cause irrationality, defective reasoning, and ridicule or other reputational harm.
In the last 2 weeks I have taken licensed taxis in the Netherlands, UK, and USA. In all cases the drivers were reasonably competent, at least as well groomed as me, and either quiet and polite or jovial and talkative.
In the USA, the main problem with taxis is in the places with a limited number of licenses for taxis, possessed by rentiers who have no incentive to improve service and whose employee drivers have no autonomy and earn very little. Un-limit the taxi number and give them autonomy and quality would greatly improve.
The way Uber gets away with this is by being faster and more widespread than regulators. This doesn't happen in countries where the regulator covers the whole economy, like in most European countries. US-wide companies against individual State regulators means the regulators are rarely effective and can rarely keep up.
Yet Americans widely oppose "The Feds" regulating anything - so they get the companies they want, because they oppose regulation of them. They get the country they want.
So Lyft (and Uber) are good for the drivers, eh? All the claims of offering people flexible work, improving earning chances of people without firm employment, etc, turn out to be complete rubbish.
Lyft and Uber are after the money, not helping anyone, not creating jobs, just the money. I feel sorry for anyone tricked into expecting Uber (especially) would be a long lasting way to work for money; they were just a disposable tool on the way to more money for the investors and executives of Lyft and Uber.
More technology designed for use in a temperate location - more Californian technology for Californians.
Outside the bubble of perfect dry weather that California tech companies live in, it rains, it's cold and you have to wear gloves, sometimes it snows and is frosty.
iPhones you can't use with gloves or in rain, Tesla "autopilots" that can't handle snow and rain, Google self-driving cars that only work well on quiet, dry, well-marked roads, and so on and so on.
iPads you not only can't use with gloves, but which you can't use easily with lights behind you, sun at a low angle, or so on - only suitable for rooms with subdued lighting.
Services that assume you have a mobile data connection at all times.
From the rest of the world to California: Get out of your state more and make us things we can use where we live.
Youtube never liked G+. They didn't like the integration removing their independence and they only gave in and G-plussed themselves when Vic Gundotra put on his "I AM THE VOICE OF LARRY" [1] act and ordered them to do so. I am sure they didn't like G+ then either and were happy it failed.
This is Youtube taking control of their community services and features instead of letting the G+ guys do it, and providing better community features than Youtube had before it got G-plussed. Youtube always felt it had a separate brand image and separate community of users, and they do - that's why it's still called "Youtube" instead of "Google Video".
Of course the Youtube "community" is a sewer of rancid toxics that makes the Twitter trolls and the racist parts of Reddit look quite reasonable, so they're not improving the Internet in general by fostering it. Youtube: NEVER READ THE COMMENTS.
But they are taking more control of their own destiny and seeking more autonomy in how they interact with their users.
[1] Imagine a bad version of Alan Rickman as the Metatron in "Dogma".
We'll be OK as long as Professor Gros doesn't use unstable protomatter in his Genesis Device.
The Model S is quite heavy. Bear in mind the Model S has the interior space of a Mercedes C-Class or BMW 3-series.
Comparing the curbside weights of the high-performance versions of saloon (American: sedan), as the Tesla markets itself as a high-performance car.
Tesla Model S 85D: 2188kg
Mercedes AMG C63: 1785kg
BMW M3: 1646kg
Audi A4 3.0V6 TDI: 1540kg
The Tesla is over 400kg heavier than a comparable internal combustion car.
Considering larger cars, the Mercedes AMG E63 estate (American: wagon), a significantly larger car with significantly more space inside, weighs 1945kg. The Lexus LS, also a larger car weighs 1965kg. The Tesla still weighs over 200kg more.
The Tesla is heavy. Significantly heavier than its direct internal combustion equivalents.
"Free speech" doesn't mean anyone has to listen to you. Unfortunately the Twitter staff act like it does.
Twitter lacks effective ways for people not to listen to things. Users lack ways to filter the content they see, filter who can send to them, filter seeing third party mentions of them, and so on.
The asshole problem on twitter is that they can be effective assholes: twitter makes it hard, or impossible, for the targets of attack to block or filter out the messages, so the targets of abuse receive the messages, so the assholes succeed in abuse. "Not using twitter" is not a realistic option for many people who work in media, PR, or whose jobs and lives are about communication - so they end up in a situation where they are the targets of the assholes and cannot do much about it.
Twitter should care more about the recipient users, not the sender users - and they can do that without compromsing anyone's ability to speak.
The accident was not likely to be survivable at 65mph. I expect that speed will be shown not to be a factor in this accident.
Look at the way the trailer took the top of the car off while barely slowing it down. This shows how trailer under-run bars would have prevented this death. In Europe they are required, and we basically don't have this sort of side collision decapitation horror accident.
I thought the whole premise of Brexit is that it would allow the UK to become more attractive to business.
The Government are going about this in a curious way.
Higher property values, that is also higher property cost, benefits only a few: those who own a lot of property to sell. It does not benefit most people, who only buy the property they have for its utility - their house, their company office, etc. They just have to spend more of their money on something they need anyway.
You should not seek to "increase property values" and "increased property values" as a reason to do something is "to make a few people richer".
Their problem is that reality has a liberal bias:
The planet really is getting warmer. Trickle-down economics really doesn't work. Socailised, single-payer, single-risk-pool healthcare really is cheaper and more effective for the whole population, vaccination does prevent spread of infectious diseases, homosexuality is normal and harmless, and so on.
It is a fundamentally different way of thinking: Conservative, reactionary people think that you can decide how things are and will be. Progressive, liberal people think that you discover how things are by experience, by the scientific method, and by other means. So when things turn out not to be as the Conservative, reactionary people think they are, it must be a conspiracy and a bias against them - they can't be wrong, because in their world they can't be wrong, they decide how things are.
"Employees are training their replacements", I hear that often.
I hope they're spending all their hours at work prioritising job hunting and not training the replacements. Loyalty is two way.
What could possibly go wrong when amateur sleuths with spare time decided to look for incriminating evidence in everyday speech and activities?
I'm sure they'll find lots of things to report to the police which the police will take seriously and investigate - completely screwing up children's lives by criminalising them.
I just hope the children don't slip up on Facebook privacy settings so the school can't see what they're posting.
This is, of course, teaching the children to be fearful and to hide from arbitrary, vengeful authority. Bad for their mental health - but realistic training for life in the USA today.
So Venmo thinks it is acceptable to take someone's money away on arbitrary suspicion of wrongdoing without explanation?
No. They can see Figure 1.
Concorde "roar" was the takeoff power with reheat. The sonic boom is not a roar, it is a short bang
No-one near land heard Concorde's sonic boom. They all heard the engines, which were louder than a modern high-bypass turbofan.
This sort of authentication is very common in China, where your phone number is your identity for many purposes. With WeChat payments, your payment identity is even your phone number.
People who arrive at online connectivity via smartphones and messaging software don't have an email address and don't want one; their identity is their phone number. With all the problems that has, but those aren't problems they see at first (email also is not lacking in problems).
So this is Facebook aiming at being the auth service, and entry point to the Internet, for people who are newly connected to the Internet via smartphones. The next billion to be networked.
This is not aimed at anyone who uses slashdot - if you read this, you're just not one of the people described above.
On the US west coast there is One Wilshire, now 30 floors entirely full of datacentre and telco.
The design is a nice picture, but the reality of tall datacentre is much closer to 33 Thomas Street.
Also who wants their servers moved around for you to go near them? Only people working at Google-scale, where you take a whole pod offline every so often and fix all the broken bits, can do that.
I've been the person "quoted" as saying something like that. Anyone with integrity will not have anything attributed to them that they wouldn't want to have said. But what you say for the record is not usually the first thing that comes out of your mouth. Anyone making a speech or an announcement will run through some phrasing, practice it on others, etc.
"Yeah, it's gonna let you have the local regulation laws, more people can run their stuff with lower latency, some of them care a lot about that, uh, even though we know it barely matters, and we'll be cheaper than the other guys, mostly." - becomes the quote you read.
I've given my colleagues good phrases to use and they use them, or they've asked me how something sounds and that's co-created.
Since I recently lost my iPad, I could do with a replacement iOS device.
iOS isn't the greatest, but it is the most popular among app developers so I need to have an iOS device for professional reasons.
I don't like iPhone, so iPad it is.
Lawyers are scared of anything that reduced billable hours because they have built an entire business model of paying for time spent, for effort, not for results.
Lawyering should be an intellectual task with a defined outcome, not a repetitive task. Lawyers should be paid for the benefit they bring, not how hard it was. Remember the old consultancy joke:
A client has a very complex machine that does not work. A consultant is called in, and he looks at the machine for a few minutes, and draws a cross on it in chalk, saying "Hit it here with a sledgehammer". A worker hits the machine with a sledgehammer and it functions perfectly thereafter.
The consultant sends his bill to the client: "Consultancy on machine repair: $50000".
The client angrily rejects this, demanding a breakdown of the work done to justify the preposterous consultancy fee.
The consultant responds with "Placing chalk cross on machine: $5 Knowing where to place the cross: $49995".
Lawyers are trying to provide a justification for their fees that is not "Because I am smart and know the law" when that is why you are hiring them. You should not be paying extra for people to do mechanical tasks.
Good lawyers should come out well. Legal assistance, paralegals, secretaries, etc will come out badly. Re-think taking that "paralegal training degree" at degree mills like the University of Phoenix - it will be even more useless in future than it is now.