Climate change is an issue, the fix does not involve making things cost more especially food and energy those pretty much not optional spending. Much like fixing spam if the solution costs more it's not a solution. If this stuff is so much less taxing on the environment it should be much cheaper to produce.
I've no idea where you get that connection between environmentalism and cost from. Take something like a refrigerator, we want to keep something much cooler than environment. That's an uphill battle with thermodynamics, the less power we we want to use the more complex and exotic does the cooling solution have to be. Same with nearly everything else, cavemen with fire could make light, that is easy. Making LED lights where almost all the energy is converted to light, that is hard. A high efficiency engine is more difficult to make than a low efficiency engine. Energy use goes down means efficiency must go up and that usually means the costs rise exponentially.
I think you hit the nail on the head about the issue but didn't acknowledge it. What happens when there are a decreasing amount of POTS subscribers and an increasing number of cellular subscribers? The total revenue going towards the cost of maintenance of the POTS equipment and the employees starts shrinking. Eventually it gets to a point where there is risk associated with the "subscription fees" not being able to cover the total cost. At that point, there are two choices 1) Admit that your old product is done and retire it or 2) Start charging your shrinking subscriber base more money to be able to cover the costs.
More like 1) Announce it and watch people go batshit crazy over all the things and places that *need* landlines and back down. That's what happened here in Norway. On its high note in the late 90s the copper that 2.6 million subscribers. Now there's ~475k subscribers left (last official stats is 527k, but it drops 15%/year), that's 80%+ of your subscribers gone. Most of the remaining subscribers are elderly rather than heavy users and average call per subscription has gone from 3600 minutes to 1400 minutes per subscriber per year. And you get 1400/12 = 120 call minutes a month from a cell phone for nothing or next to nothing with your subscription and they don't want to reverse it so talking on the landline is more expensive per minute than the cell phone because that'd just accelerate it further, so the only thing they really have to bill you for is for having the line. They're scavenging parts now as the network shrinks but the future is fiber + mobile and it's just a matter of time before they end-of-life it for real.
So it's autonomous except when it isn't. Wake me when we have a car that's full-time Level 5.
Level 3: Within known, limited environments (such as freeways), the driver can safely turn their attention away from driving tasks, but must still be prepared to take control when needed.
When a level 3 car is driving, you're not. You will not be required to jump in and intercept or overrule the car. But it will be normal for the car to say "Your exit is coming up, please take over" or "The road markings are too unclear, please take over" or "There's road construction ahead, please take over" or "There's emergency services with sirens nearby, please take over" and so on and if you don't it'll pull over and refuse to drive. Unless you want clogged roads with pulled over SDCs, the driver has to be ready to take control within a reasonably short time. This is basically "I'll handle the best conditions", level 4 is "I'll handle all normal conditions" and level 5 "I'll handle all conditions". But they're all genuinely self-driving within those confines.
That means that American robots can take over Switzerland's most valuable export: neutrality. Pretty easy for bots to best humans there.
More like sociopath CEOs will get the sociopath "employees" they always wanted and that'll take any kind of abuse unfazed. The future is like Uber, click here to install this mandatory update and accept new and worse terms. Cue Darth Vader. And you don't get fired, your account is "suspended" and you're out. If you thought employers were dicks before, wait until they can do it remotely and facelessly so they can pretend not to see you get kicked in the balls.
is there something "special" about 12.04? With 16.04 ubuntu got systemd-infested, but was there something after 12.04 that customers don't like? Or simply "we don't upgrade, period"?
Probably just the inherent risk and potential cost of changing anything you know works. Had that at work today, we'd stopped updating data on a legacy format that had been properly notified in all the right places that was going to be shut down and that it had been shut down, both the ones formally in charge and the key consumers directly. It was left accessible for legacy data. And then there's one little rarely run side process that ends up with stale data for the last part of the year and the data gets odd enough it's reported as a bug and we trace the dependency chain to finally say yeah, that's because you're have bad data.
We struggle enough to have decent test coverage on code and that's with tons of automated checks. Business processes always have terrible, terrible test coverage. You make a change to something like say a dialog or take away a checkbox wait for someone to scream bloody murder. Or data in a database, I develop a system that keeps track of what is used for what. But it's constantly sabotaged by side processes that slurp up data because they don't have time to learn to notify anyone what they actually use. Then nobody can delete shit because nobody can keep track over whether or not some process somewhere has grabbed this data and we need to reproduce it.
And making things better usually involves finding out that what was there was broken in so many ways. Like I'm working now on a system that once was fed by one package that did thing "right", so let's not make fields compulsory or use foreign keys or any of that. Then over time things have been tweaked and use expanded and five different packages and various SQL scripts manipulate it. Then I start finding data that has no history, no user track, is duplicated or inconsistent and... bah. It could easily be the same with OS fixes, you weren't supposed to be able to do that but you did and now that we've fixed the OS your shoddy code will crash and burn./rant
In Japan, U.K., Germany, Italy, France and Spain (regions I have shipped games in) these games are 'rated' by an organization controlled by the government. They can be and often are subjected to the political forces of the week. What is and is not allowed is often arbitrary, obtuse, and games are regularly given harsher ratings for espousing political or social beliefs that the government of the year doesn't like. (Not to mention governments of the past, which may have encoded banned images/thoughts into law)
I'm sure that from a publisher's commercial perspective hitting your desired age rating is important. Short of porn there's not much that restricts parents from doing whatever they want with TV shows and computer games and if it's for adults you can always release it unrated for 18yo+ so the freedom of speech angle is a bit far fetched. Here in Norway it's 6/9/12/15/18 and except for 18+ you can see movies one rating higher accompanied by an adult. So:
Frozen 6yo -> 0yo with adult. Beauty and the Beast 9yo -> 6yo with adult. Rogue One 12yo -> 9yo with adult. Logan 15yo -> 12yo with adult.
Heck, even Fifty Shades Darker is 15yo so you can bring a 12yo if you want, that would be awkward. And you can always let your toddler watch nightmare on elm street at home. Games usually follow PEGI, but I think there's more teens playing GTA V than drinking so yeah... not exactly an ironclad barrier. Yes, what's considered "child safe" themes varies a lot but I don't it has anything in particular to do with the government, more that countries are very different. Malaysia and Russia are considering if the latest Disney(!) movie can pass the anti-gay censorship, they don't freak over nudity here the way Americans do and so on. And people are always rewriting the book on what the "right" way to raise a child is...
In my mind, industrial robot are still the most dangerous piece of hardware you'll ever work with, period. And that's why there's a shit ton of safety measure for them. Yeah gears are dangerous and could tear off your finger, but you indistinctly know that as long as you don't put your finger close to them, they won't bite you. It's not the case with robot. Back to the Volkswagen case, the worker didn't respect the safety procedure. The robot are connected to a safety gate that "must" be open when there's a worker inside the cell. You enter the cell, you put your lock in the gate to deactivate everything dangerous inside of it. But, from what I've understand, those worker wanted to work fast and took a "shortcut" while testing their equipment and decided to close the gate while a worker was inside.
Somehow I don't find robots in a safety cage that aren't supposed to be turned on with humans inside particularly scary. Getting killed by that is like being killed by a car sliding off the jack and crushing you, if you'd just bother to secure it properly before you crawled under it'd be completely harmless. I bet more people have died from the GPS giving faulty directions than industrial robots, much less faulty brakes, defective medical equipment and such that could quite easily kill people by simply not working. Of course if you don't respect why the safety cage is there it can kill you, but I'm not scared by idiots trying to become Darwin awards. I'd be much more scared working as a lion tamer or with psychotic mental patients because you have no idea when they will snap. Though I suppose if you're an electrician you can never be sure when some moron will flip the safety on the circuit you're working on. I'd probably like my personal lock-out switch that I secure with a key, which I keep when I go inside. And I'd use it religiously.
Why should someone stay for team-building exercises after hours? If the company thinks it can benefit from it, then let the company pay for the time.
Usually because it's some form of semi-sponsored event, at least the places I've worked here in Norway. Some made it a weekend trip, some made it a two-day gathering where you socialize and have people stay the night, occasionally there was some entertainment or excursion too. Even if it was just an evening it was at minimum a free dinner that night. For after hour voluntary training classes I've had "just" free pizza, I think for team building never less than a restaurant meal.
Besides, some of us like to socialize with each other. We've had poker nights, beer nights and a bunch rented a mountain cabin and went skiing on our own without any company involvement. I know at my current workplace there's a theater group, it's not my thing but hey... I know of two couples that met in the workplace, it doesn't have to be online dating. But if you don't want to hang out with your cow-orkers or other people at all, nobody's forcing you. I worked with someone I think I saw once a year on the Christmas dinner, otherwise always absent. Not a big deal.
And the single biggest factor in this is no one else but the average person. The average person doesn't *care* that their personal data is being hoarded. They don't *care* that their privacy is being obliterated.
I care. I still carry a cell phone around pretty much 24x7. I still love e-tail over retail, despite there'll be a record with my name and address on it. If I pay by card my online bank gives me a good breakdown of my expenses for free, much easier than receipts and spreadsheets. If it was only people, awareness would help. But I feel it's an uphill battle against technology, even though I don't want my life broadcast on Facebook they keep coming up with smart conveniences that makes me want to sacrifice a little more.
For example take one little nerd project, the self driving car. Does anyone seriously think it'll drive all by itself or will it constantly ask online for map updates, traffic updates, weather warnings and give feedback on low confidence situations, accidents and near accidents, driving conditions, missing road markings and road signs and so on and so forth. Even GPS today keeps track of your previous and favorite destinations unless you disable it. I'd still buy one though even though turning the cell phone off wouldn't help anymore. And automated license plate readers for toll roads will give point data anyway.
Fortunately I'm not very famous but I read recently that Emma Watson would refuse to take selfies with fans, because it'd go straight to social media and like the whole world would know exactly where she was, who she's with, what's doing, what's she's wearing and so on. That must be crazy, it's like the whole world is stalking you. Sure you'd have paparazzis and you'd be front page news in tomorrow's tabloid before, but now it's live and everyone's in on it. People always loved gossip, but technology has short circuited the process.
I didn't use to have a cell phone when I was a kid, we were out playing and maybe you'd find us if you went looking but mostly we were off the grid and often for many hours unsupervised. Today I think that would be considered child neglect or something. Technology has changed perceptions so much that I don't think we could go back, not without people starting to question if you'll join the Amish next. And I know technology has also given us some privacy benefits like encryption, but when you consider what it's given everyone else in terms of electronic tracks and analysis capability we're still on the very short end of that stick.
Actually having the files and not having to pay someone constantly for something you will never own and can be cut off at a moments notice.
Half of me agrees. The other half wants to slap you and say it's mass produced temporary entertainment, like if you go to the cinema or to the theater or to a concert does it matter that you can't put it in a box and take it home with you? I like convenience and hate DRM, but the whole "jukebox in the cloud" service can be pretty convenient too. I just get a bit tired of people that act like their copy is the last copy of the missing Doctor Who episodes and if it were lost it would be like the family album became ash. Which of course doesn't make it okay if they do bait and switch or mislead you about the terms, but it's no greater crime to rent a music collection than to lease a car. It's not like the world will run out of cars unless you buy and keep it for the rest of your life.
I'd start off with a $10M asking. I'd settle for about half of that.
People who end up on disability for life don't get those kinds of amounts here in Europe, they'd just laugh at you. Unless something is done with malice you'll recoup little more than actual financial losses (now or in the future), like if I hit you with my car and broke your leg you'd be compensated for time on sick leave. But the pain and suffering, walking around with a cast and the inability to participate in dancing or running or swimming will net you almost nothing. Even if it is done with malice I'd say it errs heavily on the side of awarding you so little that it won't encourage you to taunt or provoke an illegal action or put yourself in harm's way. We've had a few Americans come here, have minor accidents and try to sue for crazy amounts thinking they've struck gold. They end up very disappointed.
Because some ransomware has been cracked so that you can recover the data without paying. They might want to discourage further attempts.
It hardly matters, all ransomware use a countdown so in 24-96 hours everyone who can't afford to lose their data have paid. It could be a "lucky save" for people who refused to pay and have kept a copy of the encrypted files, but it doesn't matter one bit to the blackmailers. Besides that was only because some of the early ransomware was flawed, if the encryption key has been transferred off your computer and the local copy properly cleared there's nothing to find. Same goes for the key server, now the keys expire there as well so there'll be no mass decryption in the future. At best you can get the keys for those being blackmailed right now and that's it, lost keys are lost and you're not going to break AES so they can study it all they want but it won't help.
I never understood why they were gone in the first place. I have no idea why you would use a tablet. I tried one, and it's awkward to use it for anything else than browsing the Web
Unlike netbooks, which were awkward to use for anything including browsing the web. It was codeword for a really cheap, really crappy laptop with a tiny and poor screen, an anemic Atom processor, too little RAM and the slowest HDD you could find. No laptop user would choose it unless they very literally can't afford anything better, I had one because I normally use a desktop and just needed a cheap piece of shit I wouldn't spend much on and could afford to lose/damage. My use case is now fully replaced by a smartphone, I don't even need a tablet/phablet. Besides, aren't Chromebooks the current day netbooks? Or if you really want they have netbooks with Win10. Not that I'd touch that with a ten foot pole.
I think all of us have something we'd like someone else to do if only we had enough money. Do we really think the people with lots of money will run out of reasons to hire people with hardly any money? That's how you see it work in shitty corrupt countries with a few rich people at the top, they buy expensive services from the semi-rich, the semi-rich buy from the working class, the working class buy from the poor and there's always work for the poorest no matter how much shitty work gets automated away. If the people at the top get more purchasing power compared to the bottom shit flows downhill. And if it's not shit in that sense it's creating some kind of pointless luxury where you're maintaining a huge mansion or designing a private jet or finding the right champagne to go with the caviar or whatever. That employes people, who need food and clothes and whatnot that employs yet other people and so on.
I'm not advocating that trickle-down economics work well. But it's hard to imagine them not working at all where rich people don't see any value in paying poor people for anything. The cheaper it gets, the less you care. If you have a million dollars, spending a grand on something is not a big deal. If you have a billion dollars, spending a million on something is not a big deal. I'm not saying it'll be pretty on the bottom where you're not Bill Gates' towel boy. You're the towel boy of the towel boy of Bill Gates' towel boy. But there'll probably be shitty paid work in your future, not any UBI leisure cruise. Because the other side of automation is also savings, what other people save by replacing you with a robot they'll probably spend on having you do a different shitty job. It's far more likely the people at the top will use their savings on more leisure time than give it to the people at the bottom.
I'm actually a little surprised that ransomware hasn't started dumping illegal images in victim's hard drives, just to discourage them from taking the machine to be fixed.
Why? The computer tech will tell them that the machine can't be "fixed", all the important data is encrypted. And I would think most users understand that if you do pay the ransom the data has to be rescued and the computer fixed so it doesn't happen again which many people will need help to. The ransomware only wins if you pay the ransom, if it's threatening to destroy your life many people will take a hammer to it and put it in the nearest dumpster, regardless of the lost data. And if you do pay the ransom but can't take your machine to the shop because you fear the kiddie porn is still there you'll need a new machine to transfer the data to instead of a data backup / wipe / reinstall / data restore, which will discourage many to no benefit for the ransomware author.
Let's try a delta analysis, forget all those who'd always pay or never pay anyway. The only situation where the ransomware maker is better off is if you wouldn't pay the ransom if you could take it to the shop for a wipe/reinstall, which is the only thing they could do - but you would pay the ransom to rescue the data yourself. But if you're capable of doing that, why would you take it to the shop in the first place? It means you're more than capable of doing a wipe/reinstall yourself. So my business analysis is that this would bring in exactly zero new business and cause them to lose a lot of the business they have. They could of course do it to be bigger asshats and cause people to lose more data, money or end up in jail but it wouldn't make any business sense at all.
A training program is generally not enough, teaching say school staff to recognize signs of say child abuse or drug use doesn't make them agents. I don't think a general rewards program does either. These two though seem dubious:
shared lists of targeted citizens and (...) encouraged searches of computers even when unrelated to a customer's request for repairs
There's a long deliberation here, but I think instigating a search of particular targets and encouraging activity that doesn't have any other function than to help the police crosses the line. A private citizen might "snoop" but if the police tell you on who and where to snoop it's a police search.
What insurance companies do is statistical analysis. If they look at say car accidents they don't care what it is about being 18, male and driving a sports car that makes you more accident prone than 35, female and driving a soccer mom car. They just want to measure how much and charge you a premium. If you're genetically pre-disposed for a lot of costly illnesses it's the same thing, it's not "bullshit" it's 100% real.
Of course there's almost nothing you can do about it, we all have DNA and there's very few genetic dispositions that can be helped by diet, drugs and such. Mostly it's so we can screen it early and treat it better which usually means you live longer at a higher cost, it's not like going to the dentist and fix the beginning cavity early. Insurance pools that happen "after the fact" is shit, those with good genes will flock together and those with bad genes are screwed. The risk pool should be before we're born and everyone's in it.
That's essentially what universal health care is. Most of us are mostly healthy and for the most part we want to be, it's rare that anyone clogs up the hospitals by choice. Truth is, healthcare costs are extremely variable no matter what pool you're in, Sometimes we arrive early through lifestyle diseases but the 50yo obese man with heart trouble doesn't have to cost more than the 90yo woman who's in and out of hospital but never gives up the ghost. Other people go to bed one night and don't wake up, only cost is to issue the death certificate.
I'm so glad my health insurance is not tied to my job, if you have income you pay into it through taxes so it's absolutely not "free" in that sense. But it's not like you lose the system if you change jobs or get fired and happen to be unemployed exactly when disaster strikes. It might not always be that great, but at least it's because of shortage of funding and medical priorities, not full of lawyers and what insurance will cover what and hospitals trying to charge as much as possible.
In the GPU arena, AMD has been pretty active in contributing the the GPU drivers, to the point newer cards can game nicely Linux systems with the in-kernel drivers. Perhaps a similar thought-pattern will apply to other products.
If I remember correctly even there they have some firmware that runs on the GPU that is closed source. It could have been on a ROM/EPROM, but it's loaded by the driver. Truth is, if you don't trust the hardware it doesn't matter. You could have a magic number trigger like
And that would brick it or enable a secret spy mode. The only way you could validate that the CPU only does exactly what it's advertised to do would be to put it under an electron microscope and validate the transistor design. Of course open source is better than closed source, it's harder to hide this shit in hardware. But if you want to put on the tin foil hat there's no reason to trust it either way.
I think the 10xx series still caught a few people off guard though because 28nm to 16nm gave it a huge boost causing a lot bigger performance difference and caused more impatience than usual. I doubt they'll skip a node like that again and I think the 1080 Ti is tactically priced to make 1080 owners want to sell & upgrade squishing the $500 market they expect Vega will launch in. I mean 30-35% performance increase for 40% higher MSRP is as close to linear as you're likely to get.
If streaming is going to work, this is how it will have to work, like someone's personal movie collection, with everything possible available all of the time, ad infinitum. Forever.
That's what the people on/. said about MP3s too but I'd say Spotify and friends have proven that's not really the problem. The problem is that we want specific content and you'll never be able to say a video is a video in the same way that music streaming services say a song is a song. HBO will want to charge you for Game of Thrones, BBC for Doctor Who, George Lucas for Star Wars, NFL for football, Brazzers for pr0n and so on. And that's okay, but there's no federated access. I'd like to add sources to one media player the way you add third party repositories to the package manager in Linux. You've bought something? It's there. You have a subscription? It's there. You have a local copy of whatever? It's there. But that doesn't exist while piracy is a one-stop shop for everything.
in 2013 geologists said the thing probably had decades left, but when a geologist says something will happen to a rock formation in timeframe that is anything less than thousand years...well that's the same as saying "very soon and any time now"
Or maybe something improbable happened. People that don't understand statistics frustrate me, just because the probability of winning the lottery is really, really low doesn't mean nobody wins the lottery. Maybe it could have weathered a lot of other storms but this particular combination of amplitude and direction of wind, rising or ebbing tide resulted in waves that found a resonance and and started nudging something like a loose tooth or it had some unknown foundation issues or whatever. Obligatory XKCD
Norway's got one of the highest car taxes in the world, particularly on heavy, polluting, big engine cars. A base model Ford Mustang will cost you $83k. Make that $136k if you want the V8. When you can buy a Tesla at same price as in the US with no VAT, no car taxes it'll be popular. And hybrids get enough tax breaks to offset most the cost difference, basically you can get one you can plug in and charge for near free at roughly the same price as the gas guzzler only version but with reduced luggage space. And we're not doing it to bring in taxes, we have oil and are rich. We have some kind of eco-Messiah complex thinking what the five million people in Norway do will save the world. I swear, living here sometimes feels like a TV show and you're just waiting for someone to jump out and say you're on hidden camera. Except you're not and we keep coming back for more.
I think it's flawed logic to assume that the lowest energy state in a universes so fluid and in motion would be absolute stillness. Perhaps it's oscillations due to the quantum foam, or space/time itself moves, and thus a lower energy particle would vibrate at some frequency rather than not.
There's only one thing that's certain about quantum mechanics, when you finally think you've wrapped your brain around the concept you discover there's a whole new layer of weird. If it's really created by God this was his acid trip.
Slashdot Mirror
Climate change is an issue, the fix does not involve making things cost more especially food and energy those pretty much not optional spending. Much like fixing spam if the solution costs more it's not a solution. If this stuff is so much less taxing on the environment it should be much cheaper to produce.
I've no idea where you get that connection between environmentalism and cost from. Take something like a refrigerator, we want to keep something much cooler than environment. That's an uphill battle with thermodynamics, the less power we we want to use the more complex and exotic does the cooling solution have to be. Same with nearly everything else, cavemen with fire could make light, that is easy. Making LED lights where almost all the energy is converted to light, that is hard. A high efficiency engine is more difficult to make than a low efficiency engine. Energy use goes down means efficiency must go up and that usually means the costs rise exponentially.
I think you hit the nail on the head about the issue but didn't acknowledge it. What happens when there are a decreasing amount of POTS subscribers and an increasing number of cellular subscribers? The total revenue going towards the cost of maintenance of the POTS equipment and the employees starts shrinking. Eventually it gets to a point where there is risk associated with the "subscription fees" not being able to cover the total cost. At that point, there are two choices 1) Admit that your old product is done and retire it or 2) Start charging your shrinking subscriber base more money to be able to cover the costs.
More like 1) Announce it and watch people go batshit crazy over all the things and places that *need* landlines and back down. That's what happened here in Norway. On its high note in the late 90s the copper that 2.6 million subscribers. Now there's ~475k subscribers left (last official stats is 527k, but it drops 15%/year), that's 80%+ of your subscribers gone. Most of the remaining subscribers are elderly rather than heavy users and average call per subscription has gone from 3600 minutes to 1400 minutes per subscriber per year. And you get 1400/12 = 120 call minutes a month from a cell phone for nothing or next to nothing with your subscription and they don't want to reverse it so talking on the landline is more expensive per minute than the cell phone because that'd just accelerate it further, so the only thing they really have to bill you for is for having the line. They're scavenging parts now as the network shrinks but the future is fiber + mobile and it's just a matter of time before they end-of-life it for real.
Pssst....WSUS Offline or Autopatcher and Bob's your uncle, no need to do any hacking...oh and you're welcome ;-)
For now... how long until they start putting it in the actual installer? The frog is on half boil, only a matter of time if you ask me...
So it's autonomous except when it isn't. Wake me when we have a car that's full-time Level 5.
Level 3: Within known, limited environments (such as freeways), the driver can safely turn their attention away from driving tasks, but must still be prepared to take control when needed.
When a level 3 car is driving, you're not. You will not be required to jump in and intercept or overrule the car. But it will be normal for the car to say "Your exit is coming up, please take over" or "The road markings are too unclear, please take over" or "There's road construction ahead, please take over" or "There's emergency services with sirens nearby, please take over" and so on and if you don't it'll pull over and refuse to drive. Unless you want clogged roads with pulled over SDCs, the driver has to be ready to take control within a reasonably short time. This is basically "I'll handle the best conditions", level 4 is "I'll handle all normal conditions" and level 5 "I'll handle all conditions". But they're all genuinely self-driving within those confines.
-Linux compatibility improvements, allowing, e.g., the use of Adobe Flash Player 24.
No, but they ported the good parts. If you're into BSD(m) you must enjoy the pain.
That means that American robots can take over Switzerland's most valuable export: neutrality. Pretty easy for bots to best humans there.
More like sociopath CEOs will get the sociopath "employees" they always wanted and that'll take any kind of abuse unfazed. The future is like Uber, click here to install this mandatory update and accept new and worse terms. Cue Darth Vader. And you don't get fired, your account is "suspended" and you're out. If you thought employers were dicks before, wait until they can do it remotely and facelessly so they can pretend not to see you get kicked in the balls.
is there something "special" about 12.04? With 16.04 ubuntu got systemd-infested, but was there something after 12.04 that customers don't like? Or simply "we don't upgrade, period"?
Probably just the inherent risk and potential cost of changing anything you know works. Had that at work today, we'd stopped updating data on a legacy format that had been properly notified in all the right places that was going to be shut down and that it had been shut down, both the ones formally in charge and the key consumers directly. It was left accessible for legacy data. And then there's one little rarely run side process that ends up with stale data for the last part of the year and the data gets odd enough it's reported as a bug and we trace the dependency chain to finally say yeah, that's because you're have bad data.
We struggle enough to have decent test coverage on code and that's with tons of automated checks. Business processes always have terrible, terrible test coverage. You make a change to something like say a dialog or take away a checkbox wait for someone to scream bloody murder. Or data in a database, I develop a system that keeps track of what is used for what. But it's constantly sabotaged by side processes that slurp up data because they don't have time to learn to notify anyone what they actually use. Then nobody can delete shit because nobody can keep track over whether or not some process somewhere has grabbed this data and we need to reproduce it.
And making things better usually involves finding out that what was there was broken in so many ways. Like I'm working now on a system that once was fed by one package that did thing "right", so let's not make fields compulsory or use foreign keys or any of that. Then over time things have been tweaked and use expanded and five different packages and various SQL scripts manipulate it. Then I start finding data that has no history, no user track, is duplicated or inconsistent and... bah. It could easily be the same with OS fixes, you weren't supposed to be able to do that but you did and now that we've fixed the OS your shoddy code will crash and burn. /rant
In Japan, U.K., Germany, Italy, France and Spain (regions I have shipped games in) these games are 'rated' by an organization controlled by the government. They can be and often are subjected to the political forces of the week. What is and is not allowed is often arbitrary, obtuse, and games are regularly given harsher ratings for espousing political or social beliefs that the government of the year doesn't like. (Not to mention governments of the past, which may have encoded banned images/thoughts into law)
I'm sure that from a publisher's commercial perspective hitting your desired age rating is important. Short of porn there's not much that restricts parents from doing whatever they want with TV shows and computer games and if it's for adults you can always release it unrated for 18yo+ so the freedom of speech angle is a bit far fetched. Here in Norway it's 6/9/12/15/18 and except for 18+ you can see movies one rating higher accompanied by an adult. So:
Frozen 6yo -> 0yo with adult.
Beauty and the Beast 9yo -> 6yo with adult.
Rogue One 12yo -> 9yo with adult.
Logan 15yo -> 12yo with adult.
Heck, even Fifty Shades Darker is 15yo so you can bring a 12yo if you want, that would be awkward. And you can always let your toddler watch nightmare on elm street at home. Games usually follow PEGI, but I think there's more teens playing GTA V than drinking so yeah... not exactly an ironclad barrier. Yes, what's considered "child safe" themes varies a lot but I don't it has anything in particular to do with the government, more that countries are very different. Malaysia and Russia are considering if the latest Disney(!) movie can pass the anti-gay censorship, they don't freak over nudity here the way Americans do and so on. And people are always rewriting the book on what the "right" way to raise a child is...
In my mind, industrial robot are still the most dangerous piece of hardware you'll ever work with, period. And that's why there's a shit ton of safety measure for them. Yeah gears are dangerous and could tear off your finger, but you indistinctly know that as long as you don't put your finger close to them, they won't bite you. It's not the case with robot. Back to the Volkswagen case, the worker didn't respect the safety procedure. The robot are connected to a safety gate that "must" be open when there's a worker inside the cell. You enter the cell, you put your lock in the gate to deactivate everything dangerous inside of it. But, from what I've understand, those worker wanted to work fast and took a "shortcut" while testing their equipment and decided to close the gate while a worker was inside.
Somehow I don't find robots in a safety cage that aren't supposed to be turned on with humans inside particularly scary. Getting killed by that is like being killed by a car sliding off the jack and crushing you, if you'd just bother to secure it properly before you crawled under it'd be completely harmless. I bet more people have died from the GPS giving faulty directions than industrial robots, much less faulty brakes, defective medical equipment and such that could quite easily kill people by simply not working. Of course if you don't respect why the safety cage is there it can kill you, but I'm not scared by idiots trying to become Darwin awards. I'd be much more scared working as a lion tamer or with psychotic mental patients because you have no idea when they will snap. Though I suppose if you're an electrician you can never be sure when some moron will flip the safety on the circuit you're working on. I'd probably like my personal lock-out switch that I secure with a key, which I keep when I go inside. And I'd use it religiously.
Why should someone stay for team-building exercises after hours? If the company thinks it can benefit from it, then let the company pay for the time.
Usually because it's some form of semi-sponsored event, at least the places I've worked here in Norway. Some made it a weekend trip, some made it a two-day gathering where you socialize and have people stay the night, occasionally there was some entertainment or excursion too. Even if it was just an evening it was at minimum a free dinner that night. For after hour voluntary training classes I've had "just" free pizza, I think for team building never less than a restaurant meal.
Besides, some of us like to socialize with each other. We've had poker nights, beer nights and a bunch rented a mountain cabin and went skiing on our own without any company involvement. I know at my current workplace there's a theater group, it's not my thing but hey... I know of two couples that met in the workplace, it doesn't have to be online dating. But if you don't want to hang out with your cow-orkers or other people at all, nobody's forcing you. I worked with someone I think I saw once a year on the Christmas dinner, otherwise always absent. Not a big deal.
And the single biggest factor in this is no one else but the average person. The average person doesn't *care* that their personal data is being hoarded. They don't *care* that their privacy is being obliterated.
I care. I still carry a cell phone around pretty much 24x7. I still love e-tail over retail, despite there'll be a record with my name and address on it. If I pay by card my online bank gives me a good breakdown of my expenses for free, much easier than receipts and spreadsheets. If it was only people, awareness would help. But I feel it's an uphill battle against technology, even though I don't want my life broadcast on Facebook they keep coming up with smart conveniences that makes me want to sacrifice a little more.
For example take one little nerd project, the self driving car. Does anyone seriously think it'll drive all by itself or will it constantly ask online for map updates, traffic updates, weather warnings and give feedback on low confidence situations, accidents and near accidents, driving conditions, missing road markings and road signs and so on and so forth. Even GPS today keeps track of your previous and favorite destinations unless you disable it. I'd still buy one though even though turning the cell phone off wouldn't help anymore. And automated license plate readers for toll roads will give point data anyway.
Fortunately I'm not very famous but I read recently that Emma Watson would refuse to take selfies with fans, because it'd go straight to social media and like the whole world would know exactly where she was, who she's with, what's doing, what's she's wearing and so on. That must be crazy, it's like the whole world is stalking you. Sure you'd have paparazzis and you'd be front page news in tomorrow's tabloid before, but now it's live and everyone's in on it. People always loved gossip, but technology has short circuited the process.
I didn't use to have a cell phone when I was a kid, we were out playing and maybe you'd find us if you went looking but mostly we were off the grid and often for many hours unsupervised. Today I think that would be considered child neglect or something. Technology has changed perceptions so much that I don't think we could go back, not without people starting to question if you'll join the Amish next. And I know technology has also given us some privacy benefits like encryption, but when you consider what it's given everyone else in terms of electronic tracks and analysis capability we're still on the very short end of that stick.
Actually having the files and not having to pay someone constantly for something you will never own and can be cut off at a moments notice.
Half of me agrees. The other half wants to slap you and say it's mass produced temporary entertainment, like if you go to the cinema or to the theater or to a concert does it matter that you can't put it in a box and take it home with you? I like convenience and hate DRM, but the whole "jukebox in the cloud" service can be pretty convenient too. I just get a bit tired of people that act like their copy is the last copy of the missing Doctor Who episodes and if it were lost it would be like the family album became ash. Which of course doesn't make it okay if they do bait and switch or mislead you about the terms, but it's no greater crime to rent a music collection than to lease a car. It's not like the world will run out of cars unless you buy and keep it for the rest of your life.
I'd start off with a $10M asking. I'd settle for about half of that.
People who end up on disability for life don't get those kinds of amounts here in Europe, they'd just laugh at you. Unless something is done with malice you'll recoup little more than actual financial losses (now or in the future), like if I hit you with my car and broke your leg you'd be compensated for time on sick leave. But the pain and suffering, walking around with a cast and the inability to participate in dancing or running or swimming will net you almost nothing. Even if it is done with malice I'd say it errs heavily on the side of awarding you so little that it won't encourage you to taunt or provoke an illegal action or put yourself in harm's way. We've had a few Americans come here, have minor accidents and try to sue for crazy amounts thinking they've struck gold. They end up very disappointed.
Because some ransomware has been cracked so that you can recover the data without paying. They might want to discourage further attempts.
It hardly matters, all ransomware use a countdown so in 24-96 hours everyone who can't afford to lose their data have paid. It could be a "lucky save" for people who refused to pay and have kept a copy of the encrypted files, but it doesn't matter one bit to the blackmailers. Besides that was only because some of the early ransomware was flawed, if the encryption key has been transferred off your computer and the local copy properly cleared there's nothing to find. Same goes for the key server, now the keys expire there as well so there'll be no mass decryption in the future. At best you can get the keys for those being blackmailed right now and that's it, lost keys are lost and you're not going to break AES so they can study it all they want but it won't help.
I never understood why they were gone in the first place. I have no idea why you would use a tablet. I tried one, and it's awkward to use it for anything else than browsing the Web
Unlike netbooks, which were awkward to use for anything including browsing the web. It was codeword for a really cheap, really crappy laptop with a tiny and poor screen, an anemic Atom processor, too little RAM and the slowest HDD you could find. No laptop user would choose it unless they very literally can't afford anything better, I had one because I normally use a desktop and just needed a cheap piece of shit I wouldn't spend much on and could afford to lose/damage. My use case is now fully replaced by a smartphone, I don't even need a tablet/phablet. Besides, aren't Chromebooks the current day netbooks? Or if you really want they have netbooks with Win10. Not that I'd touch that with a ten foot pole.
I think all of us have something we'd like someone else to do if only we had enough money. Do we really think the people with lots of money will run out of reasons to hire people with hardly any money? That's how you see it work in shitty corrupt countries with a few rich people at the top, they buy expensive services from the semi-rich, the semi-rich buy from the working class, the working class buy from the poor and there's always work for the poorest no matter how much shitty work gets automated away. If the people at the top get more purchasing power compared to the bottom shit flows downhill. And if it's not shit in that sense it's creating some kind of pointless luxury where you're maintaining a huge mansion or designing a private jet or finding the right champagne to go with the caviar or whatever. That employes people, who need food and clothes and whatnot that employs yet other people and so on.
I'm not advocating that trickle-down economics work well. But it's hard to imagine them not working at all where rich people don't see any value in paying poor people for anything. The cheaper it gets, the less you care. If you have a million dollars, spending a grand on something is not a big deal. If you have a billion dollars, spending a million on something is not a big deal. I'm not saying it'll be pretty on the bottom where you're not Bill Gates' towel boy. You're the towel boy of the towel boy of Bill Gates' towel boy. But there'll probably be shitty paid work in your future, not any UBI leisure cruise. Because the other side of automation is also savings, what other people save by replacing you with a robot they'll probably spend on having you do a different shitty job. It's far more likely the people at the top will use their savings on more leisure time than give it to the people at the bottom.
I'm actually a little surprised that ransomware hasn't started dumping illegal images in victim's hard drives, just to discourage them from taking the machine to be fixed.
Why? The computer tech will tell them that the machine can't be "fixed", all the important data is encrypted. And I would think most users understand that if you do pay the ransom the data has to be rescued and the computer fixed so it doesn't happen again which many people will need help to. The ransomware only wins if you pay the ransom, if it's threatening to destroy your life many people will take a hammer to it and put it in the nearest dumpster, regardless of the lost data. And if you do pay the ransom but can't take your machine to the shop because you fear the kiddie porn is still there you'll need a new machine to transfer the data to instead of a data backup / wipe / reinstall / data restore, which will discourage many to no benefit for the ransomware author.
Let's try a delta analysis, forget all those who'd always pay or never pay anyway. The only situation where the ransomware maker is better off is if you wouldn't pay the ransom if you could take it to the shop for a wipe/reinstall, which is the only thing they could do - but you would pay the ransom to rescue the data yourself. But if you're capable of doing that, why would you take it to the shop in the first place? It means you're more than capable of doing a wipe/reinstall yourself. So my business analysis is that this would bring in exactly zero new business and cause them to lose a lot of the business they have. They could of course do it to be bigger asshats and cause people to lose more data, money or end up in jail but it wouldn't make any business sense at all.
A training program is generally not enough, teaching say school staff to recognize signs of say child abuse or drug use doesn't make them agents. I don't think a general rewards program does either. These two though seem dubious:
shared lists of targeted citizens and (...) encouraged searches of computers even when unrelated to a customer's request for repairs
There's a long deliberation here, but I think instigating a search of particular targets and encouraging activity that doesn't have any other function than to help the police crosses the line. A private citizen might "snoop" but if the police tell you on who and where to snoop it's a police search.
What insurance companies do is statistical analysis. If they look at say car accidents they don't care what it is about being 18, male and driving a sports car that makes you more accident prone than 35, female and driving a soccer mom car. They just want to measure how much and charge you a premium. If you're genetically pre-disposed for a lot of costly illnesses it's the same thing, it's not "bullshit" it's 100% real.
Of course there's almost nothing you can do about it, we all have DNA and there's very few genetic dispositions that can be helped by diet, drugs and such. Mostly it's so we can screen it early and treat it better which usually means you live longer at a higher cost, it's not like going to the dentist and fix the beginning cavity early. Insurance pools that happen "after the fact" is shit, those with good genes will flock together and those with bad genes are screwed. The risk pool should be before we're born and everyone's in it.
That's essentially what universal health care is. Most of us are mostly healthy and for the most part we want to be, it's rare that anyone clogs up the hospitals by choice. Truth is, healthcare costs are extremely variable no matter what pool you're in, Sometimes we arrive early through lifestyle diseases but the 50yo obese man with heart trouble doesn't have to cost more than the 90yo woman who's in and out of hospital but never gives up the ghost. Other people go to bed one night and don't wake up, only cost is to issue the death certificate.
I'm so glad my health insurance is not tied to my job, if you have income you pay into it through taxes so it's absolutely not "free" in that sense. But it's not like you lose the system if you change jobs or get fired and happen to be unemployed exactly when disaster strikes. It might not always be that great, but at least it's because of shortage of funding and medical priorities, not full of lawyers and what insurance will cover what and hospitals trying to charge as much as possible.
In the GPU arena, AMD has been pretty active in contributing the the GPU drivers, to the point newer cards can game nicely Linux systems with the in-kernel drivers. Perhaps a similar thought-pattern will apply to other products.
If I remember correctly even there they have some firmware that runs on the GPU that is closed source. It could have been on a ROM/EPROM, but it's loaded by the driver. Truth is, if you don't trust the hardware it doesn't matter. You could have a magic number trigger like
mov ax, 0xDEADBEEF
mov bx, 0xABCD1234
mov cx, 0xC1AC0D35
mov dx, 0xN5AC0D3S
nop
And that would brick it or enable a secret spy mode. The only way you could validate that the CPU only does exactly what it's advertised to do would be to put it under an electron microscope and validate the transistor design. Of course open source is better than closed source, it's harder to hide this shit in hardware. But if you want to put on the tin foil hat there's no reason to trust it either way.
I think the 10xx series still caught a few people off guard though because 28nm to 16nm gave it a huge boost causing a lot bigger performance difference and caused more impatience than usual. I doubt they'll skip a node like that again and I think the 1080 Ti is tactically priced to make 1080 owners want to sell & upgrade squishing the $500 market they expect Vega will launch in. I mean 30-35% performance increase for 40% higher MSRP is as close to linear as you're likely to get.
If streaming is going to work, this is how it will have to work, like someone's personal movie collection, with everything possible available all of the time, ad infinitum. Forever.
That's what the people on /. said about MP3s too but I'd say Spotify and friends have proven that's not really the problem. The problem is that we want specific content and you'll never be able to say a video is a video in the same way that music streaming services say a song is a song. HBO will want to charge you for Game of Thrones, BBC for Doctor Who, George Lucas for Star Wars, NFL for football, Brazzers for pr0n and so on. And that's okay, but there's no federated access. I'd like to add sources to one media player the way you add third party repositories to the package manager in Linux. You've bought something? It's there. You have a subscription? It's there. You have a local copy of whatever? It's there. But that doesn't exist while piracy is a one-stop shop for everything.
in 2013 geologists said the thing probably had decades left, but when a geologist says something will happen to a rock formation in timeframe that is anything less than thousand years...well that's the same as saying "very soon and any time now"
Or maybe something improbable happened. People that don't understand statistics frustrate me, just because the probability of winning the lottery is really, really low doesn't mean nobody wins the lottery. Maybe it could have weathered a lot of other storms but this particular combination of amplitude and direction of wind, rising or ebbing tide resulted in waves that found a resonance and and started nudging something like a loose tooth or it had some unknown foundation issues or whatever. Obligatory XKCD
Norway's got one of the highest car taxes in the world, particularly on heavy, polluting, big engine cars. A base model Ford Mustang will cost you $83k. Make that $136k if you want the V8. When you can buy a Tesla at same price as in the US with no VAT, no car taxes it'll be popular. And hybrids get enough tax breaks to offset most the cost difference, basically you can get one you can plug in and charge for near free at roughly the same price as the gas guzzler only version but with reduced luggage space. And we're not doing it to bring in taxes, we have oil and are rich. We have some kind of eco-Messiah complex thinking what the five million people in Norway do will save the world. I swear, living here sometimes feels like a TV show and you're just waiting for someone to jump out and say you're on hidden camera. Except you're not and we keep coming back for more.
I think it's flawed logic to assume that the lowest energy state in a universes so fluid and in motion would be absolute stillness. Perhaps it's oscillations due to the quantum foam, or space/time itself moves, and thus a lower energy particle would vibrate at some frequency rather than not.
There's only one thing that's certain about quantum mechanics, when you finally think you've wrapped your brain around the concept you discover there's a whole new layer of weird. If it's really created by God this was his acid trip.