they should keep a close eye on all the extensions and plugins and themes and whatever else third party things go in to not only chrome, but also google play store, they should all be audited as they are upload and before allowed downloading by the general public, things like this malicious extension is a BIG BLACK EYE for google
You think Google has time to audit every line of source code for an application that goes into the app store, even if they could? They have a policy, they look out for gross violations but trojans hide their shit and try not to trigger flags in review processes, to anti-virus, when running in sandboxes etc. so of course crap will get through. I think you have an unrealistic standard that an app store will insulate you from all outside malice. Heck, even in open source somebody can manage to slip in some underhanded bugs if they're subtle enough.
3 Weeks vac, does that mean 15 work days or 21? (A week has 7 days, if you only get the 15 work days between weekends as vacation, you are a poor sod.)
I've never heard anyone count their weeks of vacation different from their work week, besides who has four work weeks and a day of vacation? Here in Norway it's a 25 day minimum, it's a lot but I would imagine it's reflected in the pay and the practical effect is that most people take July off. It's one of very few decent summer months here anyway and people really do need to recharge for the cold and dark winter.
People are not working for free to sustain people that don't.
I think that depends on why they're not working and what they're asking for. If we are talking rice and blankets so they don't literally starve or freeze to death then I'd go pretty far. I also have a lot of compassion for the mentally and physically handicapped who are unable to work. But healthy people who just want to be a beach bum or WoW addict yeah not much sympathy there. Or when you're past the level of real need and just want nicer things. You want more fancy clothes? More cafe and restaurant visits? Bigger house? Bigger TV? Nicer car? Nicer vacations? That you can work for. Yeah socially it sucks balls but if you compare that to some war zone refugee camp you don't have real problems.
I know that is the SOLE reason I work. I would posit that it is that way for the majority of people. If I won the lottery tomorrow with enough money to never have to work again....frankly, I don't know if I'd even bother calling into work to let them know I wasn't coming back. If I didn't have to work, I have a TON of other interesting things I'd rather be doing for fun. I know there are some few people out there, that do define themselves by their work, but I think that is a very small number, IMHO.
Well, I think that depends on what work is. There's quite a lot of business owners, sports stars and movie stars etc. who's got millions of dollars in the bank but still want millions more. But they can quit whenever they want. They can delegate. They can pick and choose what to do in the first place. I don't see a whole lot of burger flippers or toilet scrubbers keeping the job if they won enough to never work another day.
Well it's better that we reach a sustainable demographic rather than depending on an ever increasing pyramid of young outnumbering the old because eventually you run out of expansion room as these people need land to grow food, sources of water, use non-renewable fuel and minerals, create trash and pollution and so on. And they grow old too, leading to an exponential need for more young. Sure, it could be nice for our generation if they kept building that bridge to nowhere until we're dead and buried, but it wouldn't get easier with twenty or thirty billion people instead of ten.
I mean the Chicken Littles are saying the sky is falling because the robots will take the jobs so there'll be no work. The other Chicken Littles are saying the sky is falling because the wave of elderly will overwhelm the working class. But there can't both be too much work and too little work at the same time. You could argue the economy wouldn't support it, but the 1%'er really got nothing to gain by setting off a re-surge of socialist ideas. With automated tractors, trucks, factories and stores the cost of keeping a couch potato fed and clothed is not that big a deal and in modern countries they only get 1.x kids.
On a global level most people are still better off, extreme poverty is on the way down, literacy is on the way up. Access to electricity, cell phones, the Internet etc. is on the way up. Both China and India are well past the hump where they'll modernize the rest of the country. It's mostly Africa and the Middle East that remain fucked up, but there's 5+ billion people not living there while the "first world" used to be half of Europe, the US, Canada and Australia so like a billion tops. The bulk of humanity has seen a huge improvement in their standard of living, even if that slows the world won't collapse.
Sure, but "most people don't care" isn't always a reason in favor of, or against, a particular policy desire. That's [tyranny] of the majority.
But that's usually meant to imply the majority decides for everyone, like how much taxes you pay or where the roads are built or whatever. You can hardly call peer pressure being forced to use Facebook. Maybe if it eventually goes all Chinese-like with a social credit system where you have to praise the government to get anywhere in life, but right now I'd say using it pretty damn voluntary. If you wanted to stop every harmful things people do to themselves you'd shut down McDonald's before you shut down Facebook.
No matter how good it gets, someone will always sue, claiming it isn't perfect. The law needs to be adjusted to accept the reality that nothing is perfect
Adjusted how? Self-driving cars already killed their first pedestrian, I don't see any manslaughter charges filed. Liability for damages could be, but you don't get infinite damages for a wrongful death even if it's due to faulty products or recklessness. Here for example $750000 for a life. Here's $2.2 million. Here's $2 million. Here's a $950000. Probably the most expensive one I saw that's actually settled is $9.5 millions, not juries making crazy judgement that'll go on appeal. This review (pdf) across 100+ cases say the same thing $1-2M on average. That's maybe not the value of a life, but it's the value of a life in court.
That's the missing number you can plug into your equation. Well that and the cost of maiming a person for life and property damage. It may be cruel to put it this way, but it all has a price tag. Even if some super-bug made the car run a red light and mow down pedestrians, it's not necessarily the end of the company. There are many companies with more blood on their hands, if you add up all their faulty products...
Then you're basically arguing for the _owner_ being responsible... and not the manufacturer. I think the businesses selling these things would be just fine with that.
Initially, yes. You don't sue the tobacco company because you started a fire smoking in bed. But if your Galaxy Note 7 spontaneously catches fire then suing Samsung is fine. People will abuse things in the strangest ways and cause damage, for the manufacturer to be liable there has to be a product defect to pass the blame otherwise the buck stops at you.
Such a status could allow robots to be insured individually and be held liable for damages if they go rogue and start hurting people or damaging property.
Uh, shouldn't this be exactly like car insurance? If you own a dangerous piece of machinery you can be held liable so you insure against that, it doesn't need personhood for that. Companies are different because we've intentionally insulated the stock owners from being personally liable for everything the company does. A robot doesn't have any assets, a broken robot is worth almost nothing so this sounds like some sort of scam to let the victim get stuck with nothing.
With the true value of anything being the amount, people are willing to pay for it, if you apply the Quakers' approach to pricing, you would not know (or not as well), if the customers want this kind of chair or that, or none at all.
No it'd be easier as the customers would order/pick what would have the most value because they'd get the extra surplus. Trade happens when there's a positive trade value but doesn't say how it's distributed, modern supply and demand theory says this is an adversarial system where the seller tries to gouge the buyer while the buyer tries to get it cheaper through competition. Basically you want the deal to be just barely good enough, so you pocket the most money.
The Quaker philosophy is essentially a honest cost-plus system, I will charge you what it cost me plus a reasonable wage for my time and that's it. There's no incentive to do price discrimination or cut corners or up-sell the customer to a product he doesn't need or any other profit-maximizing trick. If the customer wants a different chair that's better for him but it's the same work for you then it's the same price, there's no incentive to goad the customer into a deal that's better for you and worse for him.
I would assume that fair here is from the seller's perspective, what's fair for an apprentice is not the same as what's fair for a master. If you have to work all night it's fair to ask more than a regular day. But you're doing it from a sense of what's fair compensation for you, not whether the customer has deep pockets or not. It's basically every salary negotiation in any reasonably sized company, is this a fair wage for my skill. Whether the company is making or losing money is not that relevant.
Everything else I do online is either anonymous or under a pseudonym I keep for that specific purpose. People only know me by the handles I choose, and only people I've met get to know my real name.
Don't underestimate the ability to link tracking cookies, like if you order something from an e-tailer under your real name because they need your shipping address and post to/. under your alias at the same time the IP address will be the same. Even pseudonyms are dangerous if they can be linked to other pseudonyms that aren't anonymous because most of us are too lazy to fully compartmentalize. For example my best friend has a fairly unique online nick that is also publicly linked to his real world identity. If you can link my nick to his nick like say on a gaming clan or something, you can identify him. If you identify him, you can find me in his friends list and real world events we've been to. It's all a question of access, smartness of algorithms and effort that are all out of my hands.
Truth is most people can't manage to maintain completely separate identities, even when they're trying quite hard. We've had those stories on/. on prostitutes start seeing Facebook friend requests from customers, attorneys with clients, unfaithful with mistresses where they have made more than a casual effort to keep it a secret. And it's only going to get worse as more and more things get "smart" in various ways. On a random note, my dad needs hearing aids and last now he was on a check-up the doctor told him she could see from the statistics how many hours a day he's used them on average. I had no idea it did that, it's not exactly a huge infringement of privacy but it got me thinking how privacy is dying through a thousand needle pricks.
I have seen weeks where the entire 40 hours were all Agile/Scrum related meetings. This meant that there was no significant coding done whatsoever. In all of my IT work, I have never understood why some managers think that calling meetings will enhance productivity, and if that doesn't work, call more meetings. I don't know if this is incompetence, or an issue with ego. Either way, it hamstrings actual productivity.
Trust me, you can do that without being "Agile", where the team is constantly micromanaged and have tasks piled on by tons of different people. The former has a lot to do with the latter because priority is given to those who keep nagging the developers to do something. Which is often not the big boss who really should set the priorities, because he's too busy for that. Calling in more meetings is trying to "up the volume" of their issue, like it steals a bit of time but hopefully they get a bigger piece of the cake. The problem is that it usually turns into a shouting match until you're back to square one only with more time wasted on meetings.
I recently took over as a Scrum Master and my first order of business was to say you don't get to fiddle with the priorities every few days, we're now time boxing two week sprints and the sprint planning is the one place you get priority for anything but hair-on-fire emergencies. I don't have a single product owner but I have a big pre-planning meeting where they have to agree on some joint priority for the next two weeks. That also includes "non-executing time" like workshops and other long sessions you want my team to spend time on. And I'll try very hard to avoid that people steal time through side channels, that's what breaks the respect for the system.
Daily Scrum is primarily for the team and unless they indicate they need some kind of assistance it's over. I do the basic questions and really the only thing I'm looking for is if what they said they got done yesterday matches what they said what they would do in yesterday's stand-up. If someone indicates an issue, that's its own meeting with those that developer says he needs input from whether it's part of or the whole team, the product owner, those who requested the work or whatever. The rest I leave for the sprint review and retrospective, the review is the external focus on deliveries/progress and the retrospective is the internal one on the process/teamwork. So there can be whining but it's once every two weeks.
I've tried very hard to "narrow down" the scope of Agile to say it's a working method. Break things into "Tasks", get them "Ready" and get them "Done". The big processes outside the two weeks you can use whatever other method you want. And we're not doing both in the same sprint, if you need us for design work or a workshop or whatever that's cool but if so what you get is time not deliverables. Time what will hopefully crystallize into tasks that are "Ready" for the next sprint. Oh and they prioritize, but we estimate and say what we think is realistic in the next sprint.
If you want to make plans the team thinks is impossible you've already lost. I'm trying to keep this as fact-based and rational as possible, like do you dispute that we have X hours available? Do you as a manager/product owner think you know better than the team if we say this a 10 hour job? Do you dispute that 10+20+5... > X? I know you have a deadline looming, but something has to give here. Because we can go back the bullshit method we had before, where everything was allegedly "in progress" when you've touched it and "almost done" for months. That's just goading you along until somebody has to break the news that this shit is nowhere near finished.
The Communist Party is scared shitless of the people. If the people knew what had been done in their name, they would rise up overnight and kick the bastards out. There are tons of restrictions on public gatherings, surveillance everywhere, and no free speech. These are enormous problems that can never be solved, not without destroying the Party's rule.
Well there's two ways of interpreting that, one is what you say. The other alternative is that the Communist Party got the people wrapped around their little finger and in fact feel very confident they can suppress any dissidents, malcontents and anyone else negative of their agenda.
Well I'd argue the opposite is true - the probability that someone will allege or deny something happened is inverse to the probability that the information was stored permanently. If I got a self-deleting email claiming it'd be gone soon the first thing I'd do is pick up my cell phone and make a picture. Why? I don't know why, but it'd be freaky. And you know it would be abused to say send dick pics to women (or girls?) and then denying it ever happened. Apart from not working, making messages ephemeral is not really a good thing. Sometimes logs are bad. Sometimes logs are good.
Another thing to consider is that not all spare parts are created equal. Neither neither Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, HTC or any other device manufacturer is under any kind of obligation to test their software updates with every single kind of 3rd party spares on the market you might decide to use to repair your phone with.
The flip side of this is a device manufacturer trying to arbitrarily break some functionality simply because it's not an original part. Sure, repair shops using sub-standard parts is a problem. But in the digital world it's often not that it couldn't work, it's that it refuses to work.
Why does every music player need to have a remote control HTTP server inside of it? Why do TORRENT CLIENTS have remote control HTTP servers in them?!
Yeah, next thing you know some crazy fucker will want to do everything by remote, like a secure shell or something... madness. A lot of the other things I could agree with, but remote administration is a good thing.
AV1 is late to the party compared to x264. Both produced similar gains over the other. Both had similar level of importance for bandwidth at their times (god I don't miss my internet speeds from back then)
There's a few billion people who still have bandwidth issues streaming a single 4K Netflix video. And then there's mobile that has both bandwidth limitations and traffic caps. There's absolutely still a market for a better video codec and the lack of royalty fees is just the icing on the cake. But yeah, there's plenty markets where H.264/x264 is "good enough" and already established.
Time has shown that that for the most part "royalty free" doesn't mean a whole lot (ie, while Ogg and Matroska are perfectly functional, they never became the dominant forms used in their sectors).
Well Ogg and Matroska are container formats, if you mean Vorbis (2000) it was extremely late to the party compared to MP3 (1993) and missed the whole revolution. You can use Matroska with H.264/HEVC, if you mean Theora, the VPx codecs, Dirac and the other alternative codecs I'll agree they lost badly to H.264 and I think it's mostly because they never moved out of the software research stage and into accelerated hardware. After Google bought On2 then VP9 became something of a trial balloon for that through Android, now it looks like a broad alliance is ready to kick MPEG to the curb. I wouldn't bet on history repeating itself this time.
Unlike Europe, people being on the road 5-6hrs for a commute is common all across north america. An example: A person living in London, Ontario would spend 2.5-3hr/one way to commute to Toronto.
If that's common I'd say insanity is common in North America, in Europe you'd rather rent a broom closet than spend six hours a day driving. I know all of three people that have had a commute close to that and it was a highly temporary thing being stretched between needing a new job and family commitments.
These ideas are good in high-dense urban areas, anywhere else they fall flat on the realities of the world.
You make it sound like living in a city is the exception and not the norm. I live in Norway (215th in population density), even less sparsely populated than the US (188th in population density) but people lump together and the trend is cities and towns grow, rural areas are barely holding or depopulating. About 80% of the population live in communities that take up 0.62% of the area.
Rural communities: 19% Communities of 200-1000 people: 6% Communities of 1000-10k people: 18% Communities of 10k-100k people: 22% Communities of >100k people: 36%
I don't have good data on how that maps to commutes, but I think pretty much all who live in a >10k town either work in that town or it's a suburb and they work in the nearby big city. And that's over half the population, it doesn't have to be a solution for 99%.
SpaceX made it clear on day one that their vehicle performed "nominally"
There's a few essential rules to damage control, don't make statements you'll have to backtrack on, get favorable facts out there as quick as possible and if you got a lightning rod to redirect the attention do it. The funny thing is that those often tell you the rest of the picture of what's not being said. If SpaceX didn't know the reason and there was any chance they were implicated they'd say they were investigating. Saying they performed nominally = we know exactly who and what screwed up and it wasn't us. For example, if a self driving car crashed in manual mode they'd rush to tell you it was in manual mode. If they're not saying anything, it was probably in self driving mode.
For example, when Uber released the dash cam footage of their safety driver did they really need to do that? It was pretty much throwing her under the bus in public media. But hey, she wasn't paying very well attention so let people rant about that - because sloppy employees are everywhere - and take attention away from the fact that without it the video would end on the inside view of mowing down a pedestrian without even trying to brake. Damage control is the art of misdirection, you can't stop people from raging but the mob is rather fickle and it only takes a nudge or two to change the focus and narrative.
What's the business case for making Windows Mail better? It's not going to sell Windows 10. It doesn't make any money on its own. It's the email analogy to Solitaire and MS Paint. It's probably just there to make sure it doesn't become an anti-trust issue if they integrate it, like Windows has always come with a (crappy useless) email client. And as such they've probably outsourced it to some shit tier support and what you're seeing is code monkeys creating a train wreck. But they don't care because everyone (except you, apparently) will either go webmail, Office 365 or use a third party client.
All sorts of official activity here in Norway is linked to my "fødselsnummer", essentially my DOB + a 5-digit code to make it unique assigned at birth. Immigrants and others with business in Norway get a D-number which is the same only in a different number series. Can't open a bank account, can't pay taxes, can't own property, can't really do anything official without it. That was all well and good, but then the US started pushing for biometric passports and around here a country is the size of a US state so practically everybody has to have a passport. So since 2010 that all goes into a big database and since you have to renew them every ten years it's now pretty much the entire population. The only thing that prevent them from using it like in India is the law, all the data is already connected and linked.
To the average person, the only reason IT people exist is to make sure they can check in on Facebook every 30 seconds while at work and replace their keyboard when they spill coffee or soda on it. Aside from that, IT has no useful purpose and thus is seen as a debilitating cost. Why spend money on something which provides no value?
That was a common sentiment back in the days where the PC was the individual's tool and IT the support monkeys trying to keep it running. These days though many employees can't get any work done if you pull the network cable, most businesses depend on core IT systems being up and running so honestly I can't say I've heard that attitude in a long time. Heck, in many cases your customers are directly the victim because your self-service systems don't work. My impression is that there's absolutely money there for server operation and high uptime systems. The problem is more how do you measure security in development or an SLA.
A coworker was telling me a story about that Friday from a former employee, it was about a security practice they had which nobody really could point out the source to or exact reason for but like everybody assumed it was good for something. And then they hired in some really high end black hat turned white hat hackers and it was like WTF why would you do that, how's that going to help you and there's a round of "uhm..." around the table. It's not security theater, because that would imply you know it's for show with little practical effect. It's that there's very few with the operational experience to say what really works and fewer still who can tell if it's comprehensive or if you got a double bolted steel door and an open window.
We've seen what kind of dashcam footage self-driving car companies use. The kind that is doctored to try to show no culpability on the part of their vehicle.
Which they can use in the court of public opinion. If they're trying to fight a ticket or manslaughter charge in an actual court they'd better hand over the complete raw, unedited camera and sensor data for analysis. And that's the question here, they say the car did nothing wrong so are they going to challenge the ticket in court? My guess is they won't do it, they'll just pay off the driver who got the ticket and chalk it up as development costs. But it would have been interesting to see...
Slashdot Mirror
they should keep a close eye on all the extensions and plugins and themes and whatever else third party things go in to not only chrome, but also google play store, they should all be audited as they are upload and before allowed downloading by the general public, things like this malicious extension is a BIG BLACK EYE for google
You think Google has time to audit every line of source code for an application that goes into the app store, even if they could? They have a policy, they look out for gross violations but trojans hide their shit and try not to trigger flags in review processes, to anti-virus, when running in sandboxes etc. so of course crap will get through. I think you have an unrealistic standard that an app store will insulate you from all outside malice. Heck, even in open source somebody can manage to slip in some underhanded bugs if they're subtle enough.
3 Weeks vac, does that mean 15 work days or 21? (A week has 7 days, if you only get the 15 work days between weekends as vacation, you are a poor sod.)
I've never heard anyone count their weeks of vacation different from their work week, besides who has four work weeks and a day of vacation? Here in Norway it's a 25 day minimum, it's a lot but I would imagine it's reflected in the pay and the practical effect is that most people take July off. It's one of very few decent summer months here anyway and people really do need to recharge for the cold and dark winter.
People are not working for free to sustain people that don't.
I think that depends on why they're not working and what they're asking for. If we are talking rice and blankets so they don't literally starve or freeze to death then I'd go pretty far. I also have a lot of compassion for the mentally and physically handicapped who are unable to work. But healthy people who just want to be a beach bum or WoW addict yeah not much sympathy there. Or when you're past the level of real need and just want nicer things. You want more fancy clothes? More cafe and restaurant visits? Bigger house? Bigger TV? Nicer car? Nicer vacations? That you can work for. Yeah socially it sucks balls but if you compare that to some war zone refugee camp you don't have real problems.
I know that is the SOLE reason I work. I would posit that it is that way for the majority of people. If I won the lottery tomorrow with enough money to never have to work again....frankly, I don't know if I'd even bother calling into work to let them know I wasn't coming back. If I didn't have to work, I have a TON of other interesting things I'd rather be doing for fun. I know there are some few people out there, that do define themselves by their work, but I think that is a very small number, IMHO.
Well, I think that depends on what work is. There's quite a lot of business owners, sports stars and movie stars etc. who's got millions of dollars in the bank but still want millions more. But they can quit whenever they want. They can delegate. They can pick and choose what to do in the first place. I don't see a whole lot of burger flippers or toilet scrubbers keeping the job if they won enough to never work another day.
Well it's better that we reach a sustainable demographic rather than depending on an ever increasing pyramid of young outnumbering the old because eventually you run out of expansion room as these people need land to grow food, sources of water, use non-renewable fuel and minerals, create trash and pollution and so on. And they grow old too, leading to an exponential need for more young. Sure, it could be nice for our generation if they kept building that bridge to nowhere until we're dead and buried, but it wouldn't get easier with twenty or thirty billion people instead of ten.
I mean the Chicken Littles are saying the sky is falling because the robots will take the jobs so there'll be no work. The other Chicken Littles are saying the sky is falling because the wave of elderly will overwhelm the working class. But there can't both be too much work and too little work at the same time. You could argue the economy wouldn't support it, but the 1%'er really got nothing to gain by setting off a re-surge of socialist ideas. With automated tractors, trucks, factories and stores the cost of keeping a couch potato fed and clothed is not that big a deal and in modern countries they only get 1.x kids.
On a global level most people are still better off, extreme poverty is on the way down, literacy is on the way up. Access to electricity, cell phones, the Internet etc. is on the way up. Both China and India are well past the hump where they'll modernize the rest of the country. It's mostly Africa and the Middle East that remain fucked up, but there's 5+ billion people not living there while the "first world" used to be half of Europe, the US, Canada and Australia so like a billion tops. The bulk of humanity has seen a huge improvement in their standard of living, even if that slows the world won't collapse.
Sure, but "most people don't care" isn't always a reason in favor of, or against, a particular policy desire. That's [tyranny] of the majority.
But that's usually meant to imply the majority decides for everyone, like how much taxes you pay or where the roads are built or whatever. You can hardly call peer pressure being forced to use Facebook. Maybe if it eventually goes all Chinese-like with a social credit system where you have to praise the government to get anywhere in life, but right now I'd say using it pretty damn voluntary. If you wanted to stop every harmful things people do to themselves you'd shut down McDonald's before you shut down Facebook.
No matter how good it gets, someone will always sue, claiming it isn't perfect. The law needs to be adjusted to accept the reality that nothing is perfect
Adjusted how? Self-driving cars already killed their first pedestrian, I don't see any manslaughter charges filed. Liability for damages could be, but you don't get infinite damages for a wrongful death even if it's due to faulty products or recklessness. Here for example $750000 for a life. Here's $2.2 million. Here's $2 million. Here's a $950000. Probably the most expensive one I saw that's actually settled is $9.5 millions, not juries making crazy judgement that'll go on appeal. This review (pdf) across 100+ cases say the same thing $1-2M on average. That's maybe not the value of a life, but it's the value of a life in court.
That's the missing number you can plug into your equation. Well that and the cost of maiming a person for life and property damage. It may be cruel to put it this way, but it all has a price tag. Even if some super-bug made the car run a red light and mow down pedestrians, it's not necessarily the end of the company. There are many companies with more blood on their hands, if you add up all their faulty products...
Then you're basically arguing for the _owner_ being responsible... and not the manufacturer. I think the businesses selling these things would be just fine with that.
Initially, yes. You don't sue the tobacco company because you started a fire smoking in bed. But if your Galaxy Note 7 spontaneously catches fire then suing Samsung is fine. People will abuse things in the strangest ways and cause damage, for the manufacturer to be liable there has to be a product defect to pass the blame otherwise the buck stops at you.
Such a status could allow robots to be insured individually and be held liable for damages if they go rogue and start hurting people or damaging property.
Uh, shouldn't this be exactly like car insurance? If you own a dangerous piece of machinery you can be held liable so you insure against that, it doesn't need personhood for that. Companies are different because we've intentionally insulated the stock owners from being personally liable for everything the company does. A robot doesn't have any assets, a broken robot is worth almost nothing so this sounds like some sort of scam to let the victim get stuck with nothing.
With the true value of anything being the amount, people are willing to pay for it, if you apply the Quakers' approach to pricing, you would not know (or not as well), if the customers want this kind of chair or that, or none at all.
No it'd be easier as the customers would order/pick what would have the most value because they'd get the extra surplus. Trade happens when there's a positive trade value but doesn't say how it's distributed, modern supply and demand theory says this is an adversarial system where the seller tries to gouge the buyer while the buyer tries to get it cheaper through competition. Basically you want the deal to be just barely good enough, so you pocket the most money.
The Quaker philosophy is essentially a honest cost-plus system, I will charge you what it cost me plus a reasonable wage for my time and that's it. There's no incentive to do price discrimination or cut corners or up-sell the customer to a product he doesn't need or any other profit-maximizing trick. If the customer wants a different chair that's better for him but it's the same work for you then it's the same price, there's no incentive to goad the customer into a deal that's better for you and worse for him.
I would assume that fair here is from the seller's perspective, what's fair for an apprentice is not the same as what's fair for a master. If you have to work all night it's fair to ask more than a regular day. But you're doing it from a sense of what's fair compensation for you, not whether the customer has deep pockets or not. It's basically every salary negotiation in any reasonably sized company, is this a fair wage for my skill. Whether the company is making or losing money is not that relevant.
Everything else I do online is either anonymous or under a pseudonym I keep for that specific purpose. People only know me by the handles I choose, and only people I've met get to know my real name.
Don't underestimate the ability to link tracking cookies, like if you order something from an e-tailer under your real name because they need your shipping address and post to /. under your alias at the same time the IP address will be the same. Even pseudonyms are dangerous if they can be linked to other pseudonyms that aren't anonymous because most of us are too lazy to fully compartmentalize. For example my best friend has a fairly unique online nick that is also publicly linked to his real world identity. If you can link my nick to his nick like say on a gaming clan or something, you can identify him. If you identify him, you can find me in his friends list and real world events we've been to. It's all a question of access, smartness of algorithms and effort that are all out of my hands.
Truth is most people can't manage to maintain completely separate identities, even when they're trying quite hard. We've had those stories on /. on prostitutes start seeing Facebook friend requests from customers, attorneys with clients, unfaithful with mistresses where they have made more than a casual effort to keep it a secret. And it's only going to get worse as more and more things get "smart" in various ways. On a random note, my dad needs hearing aids and last now he was on a check-up the doctor told him she could see from the statistics how many hours a day he's used them on average. I had no idea it did that, it's not exactly a huge infringement of privacy but it got me thinking how privacy is dying through a thousand needle pricks.
I have seen weeks where the entire 40 hours were all Agile/Scrum related meetings. This meant that there was no significant coding done whatsoever. In all of my IT work, I have never understood why some managers think that calling meetings will enhance productivity, and if that doesn't work, call more meetings. I don't know if this is incompetence, or an issue with ego. Either way, it hamstrings actual productivity.
Trust me, you can do that without being "Agile", where the team is constantly micromanaged and have tasks piled on by tons of different people. The former has a lot to do with the latter because priority is given to those who keep nagging the developers to do something. Which is often not the big boss who really should set the priorities, because he's too busy for that. Calling in more meetings is trying to "up the volume" of their issue, like it steals a bit of time but hopefully they get a bigger piece of the cake. The problem is that it usually turns into a shouting match until you're back to square one only with more time wasted on meetings.
I recently took over as a Scrum Master and my first order of business was to say you don't get to fiddle with the priorities every few days, we're now time boxing two week sprints and the sprint planning is the one place you get priority for anything but hair-on-fire emergencies. I don't have a single product owner but I have a big pre-planning meeting where they have to agree on some joint priority for the next two weeks. That also includes "non-executing time" like workshops and other long sessions you want my team to spend time on. And I'll try very hard to avoid that people steal time through side channels, that's what breaks the respect for the system.
Daily Scrum is primarily for the team and unless they indicate they need some kind of assistance it's over. I do the basic questions and really the only thing I'm looking for is if what they said they got done yesterday matches what they said what they would do in yesterday's stand-up. If someone indicates an issue, that's its own meeting with those that developer says he needs input from whether it's part of or the whole team, the product owner, those who requested the work or whatever. The rest I leave for the sprint review and retrospective, the review is the external focus on deliveries/progress and the retrospective is the internal one on the process/teamwork. So there can be whining but it's once every two weeks.
I've tried very hard to "narrow down" the scope of Agile to say it's a working method. Break things into "Tasks", get them "Ready" and get them "Done". The big processes outside the two weeks you can use whatever other method you want. And we're not doing both in the same sprint, if you need us for design work or a workshop or whatever that's cool but if so what you get is time not deliverables. Time what will hopefully crystallize into tasks that are "Ready" for the next sprint. Oh and they prioritize, but we estimate and say what we think is realistic in the next sprint.
If you want to make plans the team thinks is impossible you've already lost. I'm trying to keep this as fact-based and rational as possible, like do you dispute that we have X hours available? Do you as a manager/product owner think you know better than the team if we say this a 10 hour job? Do you dispute that 10+20+5... > X? I know you have a deadline looming, but something has to give here. Because we can go back the bullshit method we had before, where everything was allegedly "in progress" when you've touched it and "almost done" for months. That's just goading you along until somebody has to break the news that this shit is nowhere near finished.
No offence, but with money you can have the equivalent of a vanity press. Like you'll have people writing code for you but nobody gives a shit.
The Communist Party is scared shitless of the people. If the people knew what had been done in their name, they would rise up overnight and kick the bastards out. There are tons of restrictions on public gatherings, surveillance everywhere, and no free speech. These are enormous problems that can never be solved, not without destroying the Party's rule.
Well there's two ways of interpreting that, one is what you say. The other alternative is that the Communist Party got the people wrapped around their little finger and in fact feel very confident they can suppress any dissidents, malcontents and anyone else negative of their agenda.
Well I'd argue the opposite is true - the probability that someone will allege or deny something happened is inverse to the probability that the information was stored permanently. If I got a self-deleting email claiming it'd be gone soon the first thing I'd do is pick up my cell phone and make a picture. Why? I don't know why, but it'd be freaky. And you know it would be abused to say send dick pics to women (or girls?) and then denying it ever happened. Apart from not working, making messages ephemeral is not really a good thing. Sometimes logs are bad. Sometimes logs are good.
Another thing to consider is that not all spare parts are created equal. Neither neither Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, HTC or any other device manufacturer is under any kind of obligation to test their software updates with every single kind of 3rd party spares on the market you might decide to use to repair your phone with.
The flip side of this is a device manufacturer trying to arbitrarily break some functionality simply because it's not an original part. Sure, repair shops using sub-standard parts is a problem. But in the digital world it's often not that it couldn't work, it's that it refuses to work.
Why does every music player need to have a remote control HTTP server inside of it? Why do TORRENT CLIENTS have remote control HTTP servers in them?!
Yeah, next thing you know some crazy fucker will want to do everything by remote, like a secure shell or something... madness. A lot of the other things I could agree with, but remote administration is a good thing.
AV1 is late to the party compared to x264. Both produced similar gains over the other. Both had similar level of importance for bandwidth at their times (god I don't miss my internet speeds from back then)
There's a few billion people who still have bandwidth issues streaming a single 4K Netflix video. And then there's mobile that has both bandwidth limitations and traffic caps. There's absolutely still a market for a better video codec and the lack of royalty fees is just the icing on the cake. But yeah, there's plenty markets where H.264/x264 is "good enough" and already established.
Time has shown that that for the most part "royalty free" doesn't mean a whole lot (ie, while Ogg and Matroska are perfectly functional, they never became the dominant forms used in their sectors).
Well Ogg and Matroska are container formats, if you mean Vorbis (2000) it was extremely late to the party compared to MP3 (1993) and missed the whole revolution. You can use Matroska with H.264/HEVC, if you mean Theora, the VPx codecs, Dirac and the other alternative codecs I'll agree they lost badly to H.264 and I think it's mostly because they never moved out of the software research stage and into accelerated hardware. After Google bought On2 then VP9 became something of a trial balloon for that through Android, now it looks like a broad alliance is ready to kick MPEG to the curb. I wouldn't bet on history repeating itself this time.
Unlike Europe, people being on the road 5-6hrs for a commute is common all across north america. An example: A person living in London, Ontario would spend 2.5-3hr/one way to commute to Toronto.
If that's common I'd say insanity is common in North America, in Europe you'd rather rent a broom closet than spend six hours a day driving. I know all of three people that have had a commute close to that and it was a highly temporary thing being stretched between needing a new job and family commitments.
These ideas are good in high-dense urban areas, anywhere else they fall flat on the realities of the world.
You make it sound like living in a city is the exception and not the norm. I live in Norway (215th in population density), even less sparsely populated than the US (188th in population density) but people lump together and the trend is cities and towns grow, rural areas are barely holding or depopulating. About 80% of the population live in communities that take up 0.62% of the area.
Rural communities: 19%
Communities of 200-1000 people: 6%
Communities of 1000-10k people: 18%
Communities of 10k-100k people: 22%
Communities of >100k people: 36%
I don't have good data on how that maps to commutes, but I think pretty much all who live in a >10k town either work in that town or it's a suburb and they work in the nearby big city. And that's over half the population, it doesn't have to be a solution for 99%.
SpaceX made it clear on day one that their vehicle performed "nominally"
There's a few essential rules to damage control, don't make statements you'll have to backtrack on, get favorable facts out there as quick as possible and if you got a lightning rod to redirect the attention do it. The funny thing is that those often tell you the rest of the picture of what's not being said. If SpaceX didn't know the reason and there was any chance they were implicated they'd say they were investigating. Saying they performed nominally = we know exactly who and what screwed up and it wasn't us. For example, if a self driving car crashed in manual mode they'd rush to tell you it was in manual mode. If they're not saying anything, it was probably in self driving mode.
For example, when Uber released the dash cam footage of their safety driver did they really need to do that? It was pretty much throwing her under the bus in public media. But hey, she wasn't paying very well attention so let people rant about that - because sloppy employees are everywhere - and take attention away from the fact that without it the video would end on the inside view of mowing down a pedestrian without even trying to brake. Damage control is the art of misdirection, you can't stop people from raging but the mob is rather fickle and it only takes a nudge or two to change the focus and narrative.
What's the business case for making Windows Mail better? It's not going to sell Windows 10. It doesn't make any money on its own. It's the email analogy to Solitaire and MS Paint. It's probably just there to make sure it doesn't become an anti-trust issue if they integrate it, like Windows has always come with a (crappy useless) email client. And as such they've probably outsourced it to some shit tier support and what you're seeing is code monkeys creating a train wreck. But they don't care because everyone (except you, apparently) will either go webmail, Office 365 or use a third party client.
All sorts of official activity here in Norway is linked to my "fødselsnummer", essentially my DOB + a 5-digit code to make it unique assigned at birth. Immigrants and others with business in Norway get a D-number which is the same only in a different number series. Can't open a bank account, can't pay taxes, can't own property, can't really do anything official without it. That was all well and good, but then the US started pushing for biometric passports and around here a country is the size of a US state so practically everybody has to have a passport. So since 2010 that all goes into a big database and since you have to renew them every ten years it's now pretty much the entire population. The only thing that prevent them from using it like in India is the law, all the data is already connected and linked.
To the average person, the only reason IT people exist is to make sure they can check in on Facebook every 30 seconds while at work and replace their keyboard when they spill coffee or soda on it. Aside from that, IT has no useful purpose and thus is seen as a debilitating cost. Why spend money on something which provides no value?
That was a common sentiment back in the days where the PC was the individual's tool and IT the support monkeys trying to keep it running. These days though many employees can't get any work done if you pull the network cable, most businesses depend on core IT systems being up and running so honestly I can't say I've heard that attitude in a long time. Heck, in many cases your customers are directly the victim because your self-service systems don't work. My impression is that there's absolutely money there for server operation and high uptime systems. The problem is more how do you measure security in development or an SLA.
A coworker was telling me a story about that Friday from a former employee, it was about a security practice they had which nobody really could point out the source to or exact reason for but like everybody assumed it was good for something. And then they hired in some really high end black hat turned white hat hackers and it was like WTF why would you do that, how's that going to help you and there's a round of "uhm..." around the table. It's not security theater, because that would imply you know it's for show with little practical effect. It's that there's very few with the operational experience to say what really works and fewer still who can tell if it's comprehensive or if you got a double bolted steel door and an open window.
We've seen what kind of dashcam footage self-driving car companies use. The kind that is doctored to try to show no culpability on the part of their vehicle.
Which they can use in the court of public opinion. If they're trying to fight a ticket or manslaughter charge in an actual court they'd better hand over the complete raw, unedited camera and sensor data for analysis. And that's the question here, they say the car did nothing wrong so are they going to challenge the ticket in court? My guess is they won't do it, they'll just pay off the driver who got the ticket and chalk it up as development costs. But it would have been interesting to see...