> The only really scary thing here is the fact that "two thirds of Americans get their news from social media". No wonder the country is so fucked up.
Because things were so much better when everyone got their news from conglomerates? Reliability of the source has been an issue for literally centuries. Back in the day, "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain" was what Hearst shoved down everyone's throats. And today Rupert Murdoch loves to tell everyone that global warming is a myth and the Muslims are gonna get us all.
That's utter crap. People have managed to cause accidents with "cruise control" for decades. Everyone remotely familiar with the term "autopilot" knows all it does is maintain altitude, heading and speed in an aircraft and there have also been many crashes with planes' autopilot active but nobody's screaming for the heads of the people who make that tech despite the irresponsible name.
> With a little luck, Tesla's idiotic hype will ensure that the failures of these systems get enough publicity to regulate them out of being
Yeah that's a great plan. Let's make sure regulation strangles the technology before it's properly born. Surely automakers will continue to dump billions into a technology they know they can't actually use and that will bring it into reality Real Soon Now.
> These belong in public transport, where you have a relatively controlled environment running down predetermined routes where outside factors can be mitigated, and where the drivers are employees who can be regularly trained and tested on their knowledge of the system's capabilities. An autopilot function makes sense in, say, a bus.
Oh yes, public transport. The shining beacon of the bleeding edge of tech. Why just think of all the innovations that have made our lives better that came from that sector. There's... bike racks on buses. And I got nothing else..
The problem is that fleshbags kill hundreds of thousands of people a year and something needs to be done. Regulation and killing the tech in its infancy is not the answer. If the regulators had gotten involved right after the Wright brothers took their first flight we'd probably still be debating if air travel was safe enough to allow civilian use of it.
The article is concerning UK officers. Not sure they really get shot all that often and their interactions with the public do seem to be more positive so I would expect more people would be interested in policing over there.
I agree with most of what you say, except instead of categorizing Spotify as being childish and looking for PR, I'd call it they're using their position to point out Apple's greedyness and trying to get changes to happen. When Taylor Swift did the same thing with Apple Music and the free trial crap, everyone was falling all over themselves to congratulate her on using her status for good. How is this any different?
Trying to wag the dog are we? Apple built a platform that depends on app makes making apps for it to boost its value. If you couldn't get apps you wanted on iPhones, almost nobody would buy them. But you're making it sound like Apple's doing everyone a favor by offering their platform? Come on...
If they're already being offshored then the jobs in question are not part of this equation as the company will still do that whether there are H1Bs or green carded grads to be had. There will be bottom of the barrel offshore locations for longer than we are both going to be alive on this planet.
It's the jobs that aren't being offshored that will have their salaries lowered as the pool of available candidates to fill them increases. Look at Uber. Massive oversupply of drivers and they make less than they would working at a 7-11. It's simple market forces: if there are more people vying for a job the employer can offer less to have it filled due to a surplus of available labor. Just like real estate, if there's a bunch of people selling but hardly anyone buying the prices will drop. You can try to spin it any way you want, it doesn't make it true.
Wrong. If there are 1000 jobs and 1010 people who can do them, wages will be high as you want to keep the people who can do those jobs in them instead of going off and building custom cars or baking $5000 cakes for the Food Network or whatever. But if there are 1000 jobs and 5000 people who can do them, and 4000 of those people came to the area specifically for those jobs, employers can now drop the salary significantly because if YOU don't want that job, there are 2999 others who do.
It's a different path, but it's still a race to the bottom.
Honestly for me it's a bit of both. I want to watch a few shows I am following, but I also have other things to do so if I can catch up with my watching and spend less time doing it, this sounds like a good thing to me.
> Essentially everybody ended up surfing facebook or youtube or something, not doing anything the teacher told them to.
I think that's more the fault of the administration than anything else. Why are the computers even able to reach Youtube or Facebook? That should be blocked by policy or firewall. Hell, when I was in school the computers weren't even networked. People were either doing the lesson plan or nothing at all.
But all that aside and to answer the original question, I do think there is a place for learning by games. If something catches a person's interest they are far more likely to learn and retain that knowledge when doing it. I've heard many people say they only know of many historical figures because of Age of Empires, for example.
It's not bad at all, it's great. My biggest peeve with my Netflix queue is not being able to watch some of the shows while commuting on the train or if I'm travelling somewhere. This will solve that nicely
Some things don't need "improvement" for improvement's sake. The fork has barely changed in hundreds of years because it is not complicated and works well. Same with the 3.5mm audio jack. Most people don't WANT 7 channel audio on their headphones or a subwoofer. And if they do want that in their headphones then they're probably spending crazy amounts of money anyway so I am sure the headphones will also have bluetooth so problem already solved.
And for your information, LOTS of home theater setups have inputs from RCA output 2 channel devices, which is why all receivers still have a huge bank of RCA ports on the back. The only time multichannel is useful is watching a movie or playing a game with positional audio. The minute you start listening to music, L and R is more than sufficient.
History of a word doesn't mean jack shit. Mortgage came from "death contract" after all, but you don't see people expecting to die signing them any more do you?
Civil unions are called marriages in MANY places, especially government.
> Songwriters and artists are behind the scenes and vastly underpaid.
I see you have ZERO understanding of how the music industry works. Behind the scenes mainly get paid a going rate as work for hire, whether the album sells 1 or 1 million copies. SONGWRITERS are the ones who make the most royalties on sales. That's why the richest artists tend to be the ones who also have songwriting credits on some or all of their songs. PERFORMERS are usually last at the royalty trough.
Are you seriously trying to equate gun ownership or having an abortion to sexual orientation? I guess people can just choose whether they own guns or not, just like they choose to be gay, right?
Spoiler alert: People don't CHOOSE to be gay, unlike your choice to buy a gun or have an abortion.
Pathetic reasoning there, pal.
> I was unaware that donating $1k to a campaign against same-sex marriage means that they believe 'not everyone is equal'
Then you must be dumber than a bag of goddamned rocks. Let me spell it out for you. I'll use easy words so you might get it:
If any two people can get married, they are all equal. If there is a law saying that some people can't marry others, the people who can't marry aren't equal to the ones who can marry. And giving money to a campaign to keep some people from marrying does in fact mean you believe that some people aren't the same - or equal. Because if you believed they were equal you wouldn't want to stand in their way.
The thinking is that private actions and motivations may color their judgment. Maybe not so far, but what happens if for example it's somehow financially advantageous for Facebook to partner with Gawker? That isn't going to happen with Thiel around.
> I didn't like the way that prior Mozilla executive was treated either. His performance at Mozilla should have been his only employment criteria.
Oh you mean the one who believes that not everyone is equal?
> What he did to be active in politics during his own time was no one else's business.
The irony burns. It was no one's business except any gays who wanted to get married. Which is interesting because I don't see how any gay people getting married impacts the former Mozilla exec's life at all, but there he was doing his damndest to make sure they couldn't.
Obviously you're not buying Fords then. 2 of mine were Fords and they were terrible. And after I bought a Hyundai a friend of mine had a 2001 Focus which seemed like an all right car. Then he drove it over to my place one day and couldn't get it started. Turned out it was this problem:
And funny you mention Canada... he had it towed to the dealer and since we're in Canada apparently Ford USA was covering those replacements under warranty, but Ford Canada was not. $1000+ later, now his car would let the key turn.
Screw. Ford.
And then there's the 2009 Chrysler Town and Country my sister and her husband eventually had to force the dealer to take back through the lemon law after replacing the nav system 3 times, having the van randomly activate the alarm for 20 minutes at a time, and fail to start a few times for good measure.
Screw. Chrysler.
Haven't had direct experience with GM, but have heard enough from friends to steer clear unless you want a truck. It's no coincidence that nobody in my immediate family owns a North American car any longer. Even my dad who had a 40+ year string of NA vehicles as company cars, first car he bought after he retired was an Acura.
> yet to date no one has successfully 'hacked' into this well-advertised feature...
Not that we know of anyway. Generally the really bad guys don't publicize what they've found, they just use it. So who knows? For all we know there might be some cool new ransomware being developed right this instant that will deploy and activate in the next 3 months that locks up most of the Intel systems on the planet.
Probably fake? I'd say 110% fake. Let's leave everything else out, how many "well known" software packages could be properly tested by an automated unit test that was written last year, let alone 6 years ago? Nobody adds features or changes UIs around?
> You have a law that prevents you from parking on the street? Don't you live in the land of the free?
No, I live in a place that has laws about how far away from the curb your car can be when it's parked on the street. You were implying that you and your neighbor would park "off the kerb a bit" - in other words enough that your cars would impede traffic. That's a ticket where I live, and probably where you live too. You should look into it. I think in most of FreedomLand it's 12 to 18 inches and your "front and back wheels must be parallel to the curb" Examples. Chicago is 12 inches, California is 18:
> Sounds quite authoritarian. Glad I don't live there.
Just because you've gotten away with what you are doing doesn't mean it's legal where you live. Better check. And of course if you really annoy someone they might just key your car or slash your tires... lack of authoritarianism and cowboy "justice" swings both ways.
We have a "loser pay" legal system here in Canada. What that means is in civil cases, the losing party pays both parties' legal fees. As a result, we generally don't have moronic lawsuits filed because if someone sues you over something that you'll be able to defend easily, you just go get an attorney who notes the merits on the consult and then takes his/her costs from the idiot once they lose.
On the other hand the disadvantage of this system is if you have a case that could go either way or looks close, that's a disincentive to go forward with a suit that might otherwise have merit.
But on the plus side we don't have people suing for $30,000 over a $40 printer,
Because if they tried that up here the defendant would just hire a very expensive lawyer and the plaintiff would be stuck with the bill after their inevitable loss.
Slashdot Mirror
> The only really scary thing here is the fact that "two thirds of Americans get their news from social media". No wonder the country is so fucked up.
Because things were so much better when everyone got their news from conglomerates? Reliability of the source has been an issue for literally centuries. Back in the day, "Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain" was what Hearst shoved down everyone's throats. And today Rupert Murdoch loves to tell everyone that global warming is a myth and the Muslims are gonna get us all.
That's utter crap. People have managed to cause accidents with "cruise control" for decades. Everyone remotely familiar with the term "autopilot" knows all it does is maintain altitude, heading and speed in an aircraft and there have also been many crashes with planes' autopilot active but nobody's screaming for the heads of the people who make that tech despite the irresponsible name.
> With a little luck, Tesla's idiotic hype will ensure that the failures of these systems get enough publicity to regulate them out of being
Yeah that's a great plan. Let's make sure regulation strangles the technology before it's properly born. Surely automakers will continue to dump billions into a technology they know they can't actually use and that will bring it into reality Real Soon Now.
> These belong in public transport, where you have a relatively controlled environment running down predetermined routes where outside factors can be mitigated, and where the drivers are employees who can be regularly trained and tested on their knowledge of the system's capabilities. An autopilot function makes sense in, say, a bus.
Oh yes, public transport. The shining beacon of the bleeding edge of tech. Why just think of all the innovations that have made our lives better that came from that sector. There's... bike racks on buses. And I got nothing else..
The problem is that fleshbags kill hundreds of thousands of people a year and something needs to be done. Regulation and killing the tech in its infancy is not the answer. If the regulators had gotten involved right after the Wright brothers took their first flight we'd probably still be debating if air travel was safe enough to allow civilian use of it.
The article is concerning UK officers. Not sure they really get shot all that often and their interactions with the public do seem to be more positive so I would expect more people would be interested in policing over there.
> he punched a co-worker. They had to fire him at that point.
Clarkson should have bit him instead, then he would have made Director General of the BBC:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/mar/24/broadcasting.bbc
I agree with most of what you say, except instead of categorizing Spotify as being childish and looking for PR, I'd call it they're using their position to point out Apple's greedyness and trying to get changes to happen. When Taylor Swift did the same thing with Apple Music and the free trial crap, everyone was falling all over themselves to congratulate her on using her status for good. How is this any different?
Trying to wag the dog are we? Apple built a platform that depends on app makes making apps for it to boost its value. If you couldn't get apps you wanted on iPhones, almost nobody would buy them. But you're making it sound like Apple's doing everyone a favor by offering their platform? Come on...
If they're already being offshored then the jobs in question are not part of this equation as the company will still do that whether there are H1Bs or green carded grads to be had. There will be bottom of the barrel offshore locations for longer than we are both going to be alive on this planet.
It's the jobs that aren't being offshored that will have their salaries lowered as the pool of available candidates to fill them increases. Look at Uber. Massive oversupply of drivers and they make less than they would working at a 7-11. It's simple market forces: if there are more people vying for a job the employer can offer less to have it filled due to a surplus of available labor. Just like real estate, if there's a bunch of people selling but hardly anyone buying the prices will drop. You can try to spin it any way you want, it doesn't make it true.
Wrong. If there are 1000 jobs and 1010 people who can do them, wages will be high as you want to keep the people who can do those jobs in them instead of going off and building custom cars or baking $5000 cakes for the Food Network or whatever. But if there are 1000 jobs and 5000 people who can do them, and 4000 of those people came to the area specifically for those jobs, employers can now drop the salary significantly because if YOU don't want that job, there are 2999 others who do.
It's a different path, but it's still a race to the bottom.
Honestly for me it's a bit of both. I want to watch a few shows I am following, but I also have other things to do so if I can catch up with my watching and spend less time doing it, this sounds like a good thing to me.
> Essentially everybody ended up surfing facebook or youtube or something, not doing anything the teacher told them to.
I think that's more the fault of the administration than anything else. Why are the computers even able to reach Youtube or Facebook? That should be blocked by policy or firewall. Hell, when I was in school the computers weren't even networked. People were either doing the lesson plan or nothing at all.
But all that aside and to answer the original question, I do think there is a place for learning by games. If something catches a person's interest they are far more likely to learn and retain that knowledge when doing it. I've heard many people say they only know of many historical figures because of Age of Empires, for example.
It's not bad at all, it's great. My biggest peeve with my Netflix queue is not being able to watch some of the shows while commuting on the train or if I'm travelling somewhere. This will solve that nicely
Some things don't need "improvement" for improvement's sake. The fork has barely changed in hundreds of years because it is not complicated and works well. Same with the 3.5mm audio jack. Most people don't WANT 7 channel audio on their headphones or a subwoofer. And if they do want that in their headphones then they're probably spending crazy amounts of money anyway so I am sure the headphones will also have bluetooth so problem already solved.
And for your information, LOTS of home theater setups have inputs from RCA output 2 channel devices, which is why all receivers still have a huge bank of RCA ports on the back. The only time multichannel is useful is watching a movie or playing a game with positional audio. The minute you start listening to music, L and R is more than sufficient.
History of a word doesn't mean jack shit. Mortgage came from "death contract" after all, but you don't see people expecting to die signing them any more do you?
Civil unions are called marriages in MANY places, especially government.
https://omac.saccounty.net/
http://www.cityclerk.nyc.gov/html/marriage/marriage_bureau.shtml
http://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/life-events/marriages
Marriage is entirely a secular thing from a legal perspective. So again, quit moving the goalposts.
> Songwriters and artists are behind the scenes and vastly underpaid.
I see you have ZERO understanding of how the music industry works. Behind the scenes mainly get paid a going rate as work for hire, whether the album sells 1 or 1 million copies. SONGWRITERS are the ones who make the most royalties on sales. That's why the richest artists tend to be the ones who also have songwriting credits on some or all of their songs. PERFORMERS are usually last at the royalty trough.
>FYI, marriage is a religious ceremony.
Really? What religion is being observed when two people go and get married at city hall, or in Vegas at the drive through?
Religion is a red herring in this and an attempt to shift the goalposts.
Are you seriously trying to equate gun ownership or having an abortion to sexual orientation? I guess people can just choose whether they own guns or not, just like they choose to be gay, right?
Spoiler alert: People don't CHOOSE to be gay, unlike your choice to buy a gun or have an abortion.
Pathetic reasoning there, pal.
> I was unaware that donating $1k to a campaign against same-sex marriage means that they believe 'not everyone is equal'
Then you must be dumber than a bag of goddamned rocks. Let me spell it out for you. I'll use easy words so you might get it:
If any two people can get married, they are all equal. If there is a law saying that some people can't marry others, the people who can't marry aren't equal to the ones who can marry. And giving money to a campaign to keep some people from marrying does in fact mean you believe that some people aren't the same - or equal. Because if you believed they were equal you wouldn't want to stand in their way.
Maybe get there to say goodbye before he dies?
The thinking is that private actions and motivations may color their judgment. Maybe not so far, but what happens if for example it's somehow financially advantageous for Facebook to partner with Gawker? That isn't going to happen with Thiel around.
> I didn't like the way that prior Mozilla executive was treated either. His performance at Mozilla should have been his only employment criteria.
Oh you mean the one who believes that not everyone is equal?
> What he did to be active in politics during his own time was no one else's business.
The irony burns. It was no one's business except any gays who wanted to get married. Which is interesting because I don't see how any gay people getting married impacts the former Mozilla exec's life at all, but there he was doing his damndest to make sure they couldn't.
Obviously you're not buying Fords then. 2 of mine were Fords and they were terrible. And after I bought a Hyundai a friend of mine had a 2001 Focus which seemed like an all right car. Then he drove it over to my place one day and couldn't get it started. Turned out it was this problem:
http://www.fordproblems.com/trends/key-stuck-ignition/
And funny you mention Canada... he had it towed to the dealer and since we're in Canada apparently Ford USA was covering those replacements under warranty, but Ford Canada was not. $1000+ later, now his car would let the key turn.
Screw. Ford.
And then there's the 2009 Chrysler Town and Country my sister and her husband eventually had to force the dealer to take back through the lemon law after replacing the nav system 3 times, having the van randomly activate the alarm for 20 minutes at a time, and fail to start a few times for good measure.
Screw. Chrysler.
Haven't had direct experience with GM, but have heard enough from friends to steer clear unless you want a truck. It's no coincidence that nobody in my immediate family owns a North American car any longer. Even my dad who had a 40+ year string of NA vehicles as company cars, first car he bought after he retired was an Acura.
> You'll look great driving around in your Chevy Dolt.
If it's like the other Chevys I've had experience with he/she will actually look great on the side of the road waiting for the tow truck.
Owning 3 American cars in my life has convinced me to never buy another.
> yet to date no one has successfully 'hacked' into this well-advertised feature...
Not that we know of anyway. Generally the really bad guys don't publicize what they've found, they just use it. So who knows? For all we know there might be some cool new ransomware being developed right this instant that will deploy and activate in the next 3 months that locks up most of the Intel systems on the planet.
Probably fake? I'd say 110% fake. Let's leave everything else out, how many "well known" software packages could be properly tested by an automated unit test that was written last year, let alone 6 years ago? Nobody adds features or changes UIs around?
> You have a law that prevents you from parking on the street? Don't you live in the land of the free?
No, I live in a place that has laws about how far away from the curb your car can be when it's parked on the street. You were implying that you and your neighbor would park "off the kerb a bit" - in other words enough that your cars would impede traffic. That's a ticket where I live, and probably where you live too. You should look into it. I think in most of FreedomLand it's 12 to 18 inches and your "front and back wheels must be parallel to the curb"
Examples. Chicago is 12 inches, California is 18:
http://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/depts/fin/supp_info/revenue/tips_for_avoidingparkingtickets.html
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/parking
> Sounds quite authoritarian. Glad I don't live there.
Just because you've gotten away with what you are doing doesn't mean it's legal where you live. Better check. And of course if you really annoy someone they might just key your car or slash your tires... lack of authoritarianism and cowboy "justice" swings both ways.
We have a "loser pay" legal system here in Canada. What that means is in civil cases, the losing party pays both parties' legal fees. As a result, we generally don't have moronic lawsuits filed because if someone sues you over something that you'll be able to defend easily, you just go get an attorney who notes the merits on the consult and then takes his/her costs from the idiot once they lose.
On the other hand the disadvantage of this system is if you have a case that could go either way or looks close, that's a disincentive to go forward with a suit that might otherwise have merit.
But on the plus side we don't have people suing for $30,000 over a $40 printer,
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/06/06/1748256/man-sued-for-30k-over-40-printer-he-sold-on-craigslist
or someone suing for $54 million over a pair of pants:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/25/AR2007062500443.html
Because if they tried that up here the defendant would just hire a very expensive lawyer and the plaintiff would be stuck with the bill after their inevitable loss.