Google Maps is the prototype example. In the first or second iterations some years ago, Google Maps was very nice. Menus and functions used to be obvious and intuitive. They've hidden more and more things behind cryptic icons or that only show up on mouseover. I'm sure I could read up on it and figure it all out, but I use it so rarely that it's not worth my effort. Alternatives such as Mapquest are easier to use, and for occasional things like printing directions they're adequate (although Mapquest is also moving in the Google direction).
Just 2 days ago I needed some custom directions, because a road where I wanted to go was closed by construction making the GPS useless. I tried to use Google maps and futzed around until I sort of had the route I wanted on the screen, but when I tried to print only a small portion was shown and the rest chopped off. By trial and error, I kept zooming out until it fit the printer page, but then the street names became suppressed because I zoomed out too far. After about 10 minutes I gave up and used Mapquest.
(I now remember that the previous time I used Google Maps a few months ago I also gave up on printing directly and instead captured a screen shot and printed that! I forgot about that trick 2 days ago.)
And while I'm on a Google rant, they used to have links to to translate, books, etc. on the main page, and now there's nothing. I have no idea how people find these anymore (I have bookmarks for them). Well, I guess they can Google for "Google translate", but you have to know that it even exists before you can do that.
I have Raynaud syndrome and cannot even take food out of the freezer without gloves - my fingers, even ones I didn't touch anything with, turn ghostly white, then purple, then start hurting. Outside in the winter, even a brief exposure without gloves results in chilblain (mild frostbite) ulcers that take weeks to heal. Diltiazem helps a little, but I have still gotten chilblains while on it.
In my case, an iPhone or any touchscreen at all is out of the question in the winter. I have an old-fashioned cell phone with buttons that allow me to answer the phone with thinner gloves I have on under heavy mittens, but forget fingerless gloves.
Most of my tech friends have gmail accounts, many of them from the days when they were hard to get and almost considered a status symbol. But why is Google's data mining preferable to AOL's or any other? I know that AOL has long been derided as being associated with grandmothers and "free" AOL disks, but their basic email is free now.
Non-tech family and friends tend to have <cable-company>.com email addresses, more or less locking them into a specific cable provider.
As for myself, I chose an ISP that I'm pretty sure isn't interested in data mining my correspondence. And I have my own permanent domain name I can move to a different ISP should things change. I pay a small monthly fee, but it is mainly for my web site with an email account included. A small price I don't mind paying for basically total control over these things. I'd do it with my own server, but all cable companies in this area block incoming port 80 and probably others unless you buy an expensive "business" account for far more than I pay for the web site ISP.
Warning: Regardless of the disabling procedure you use, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT ALL HIGH VOLTAGE COMPONENTS ARE
ENERGIZED! Cutting, crushing, or touching high voltage components can result in serious injury or death.
I'm guessing reading is hard for you
On p. 14, "Cutting the front trunk first responder loop", it shows how to disable the high voltage. Under the hood there is a coiled loop of red wire with a big bright orange label with a picture of wire cutters. You cut the red wire. This shuts down the high voltage system outside of the high voltage battery itself. For extra safety, you cut a section out of it so it won't reconnect accidentally.
IMO they should put this on the first page. But at least it is there.
I received one of these emails from Verizon, which for $59.99 "is a great opportunity to enhance your Fios experience with faster Wi-Fi speeds."
It isn't so much the money or speed I worry about as the ability to control the router's advanced settings for server ports, etc. that I have now in the "old" router.
I couldn't find any detailed information about the new router. I am seriously worried that the advanced settings will be dumbed down or made unavailable, so their outsourced customer service won't have to be concerned with technical stuff and thus require less training. Maybe the monthly fee for the old router is a red flag that this is the case, since they may need customer support with more training. I don't want to buy the new router and then be screwed unless I upgrade to an expensive "business" account. I doubt they will let me go back to the old router.
If she had any sense of ethics, she would be grateful the CMS is doing its job of protecting the
public from dishonest people like her. Why isn't she in jail for falsifying test results and
endangering people's lives?
She's not sorry she did it, only that she got caught. Typically psychopathic behavior,
Sadly she'll probably be successful someday, lying, cheating, and using people on her way up.
My phone has a "lightning" charger. Should I hold it out in the rain and hope for a surge to fill up the battery?
Sure, if that's what you think it means, be my guest. However, the issue is not what you or I think it means but whether a jury can be convinced. In your case, good luck.
The problem is not the Autopilot feature but the way it has been
misleadingly and dangerously marketed.
Musk bragged to the press that
Autopilot was "almost twice as good as a person," certainly sending the
wrong message. His ex-wife posted a YouTube video of her driving while
covering her eyes and dancing around while on Autopilot on a crowded
highway. All this has encouraged
a bunch of other YouTube videos of
people behaving foolishly while on Autopilot.
Even the marketing name "Autopilot" is probably misleading to some
people, who might interpret as "the car drives itself without human assistance".
It should have been more conservatively called
"driver assist" or some such.
In the end their marketing stupidity is probably going to bite them
financially. A dashboard warning doesn't excuse it.
I say this regretfully as a Tesla stockholder.
Of all the pointless YouTube uses mentioned, this is the one I hate the most. There is nothing that is a bigger waste of time, especially if you want to see a few of the pictures but don't care about the rest. What the world needs is a browser add-on that converts YouTube slideshows to a directory of jpegs.
I have a shelf full of DEC TK50 tape cartridges, and I do know what's on them: all the programs, many in C, that I wrote before the mid-90s. Some of which I was rather proud of, with clever algorithms (IMNSHO) and meticulously documented.. The VAX gave up the ghost with no funds to repair/replace, and the backup tapes were all that was left.. While I don't have any realistic hope of recovering them without spending a lot of money, I keep them around in case my lottery ticket comes through.
The assumption is that we have to initiate contact for them
to respond. Why wouldn't they be trying to initiate contact
also? In theory, we could hear from them tomorrow if they
are more advanced and initiated contact long ago.
Studying the "hexadecimal" number some more, it doesn't have hex digits E and F. Instead, it seems that the artist took numbers from 1 to 99 and followed each of them with a letter from A to D, like the answers in a multiple-choice quiz. Then he took this long list and cut it into sections, some with the numbers increasing and some decreasing, and re-concatenated them. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.
While the overall result is impressive, the "stitching" isn't perfect. On most pictures it's hard to tell since the brushstrokes have lower resolution than the photography. But on one picture in particular, called "O Livro (os Cem)" by Jac Leirner (1987), the stitching irregularities are easy to find. Type "O Livro" in the search box to find this image.
Essentially this picture is a giant canvas of words in Portuguese. (I speak Portuguese, and it starts off as a bunch of rambling thoughts on money and love, degenerating into what to me makes no sense).
Anyway, to pick an easy to locate spot where stitching apparently took place, find the line about 2/3 down that consists of a giant hexadecimal number (what the hell is that, anyway?). The line starts "D21D22C23..." Blow it up to maximum resolution. The first and second D, and the second 2, have alignment artifacts, and the lower portion of this starting string is slightly blurrier that the top portion. This even gives some insight into the algorithm, where you can see that it's desperately trying to align the top and bottom portions, even distorting or shifting some in-between parts to achieve the result.
How about they implement blocking autorun of all videos by default
You mean like YouTube, where when you middle-click open several tabs of videos of possible interest, they all start
playing in a cacophonous roar? Then you have to open each tab to pause it before you can
even start watching one of them, defeating the whole purpose of "open in new tab".
Oh wait, Google bought YouTube and added that incredibly annoying autorun
"feature".
I don't know what they were thinking, but I do know that it has caused me to do a lot
less casual sampling of their videos..
Cigarette smokers are about 30% less likely to develop Parkinson's disease. It hasn't been studied for pure nicotine, but that would be the likely source of the neuroprotection.
This interests me because my father has Parkinson's, his brother had Parkinson's, and a member of my mother's family has Parkinson's. None of them have ever smoked.
I had my whole genome sequenced, and out of 10 or so known markers related to Parkinson's (according to my promethease.com full genome analysis), I have all but one (for early onset familial Parkinson's). So I'm probably screwed. Interestingly, I also have a marker that indicates my chances of developing Parkinson's is lower if I consume caffeine regularly (which I do). This might be the same one as for nicotine, although apparently that hasn't been studied genetically.
In any case, I'm hoping to reduce my chances of Parkinson's or at least delay it, so I have started chewing nicotine gum. I couldn't find any negative consequences of nicotine gum in the literature. As a bonus it seems to help me think better.
It doesn't bother me that much because whatever I post I intend to make public anyway. If reading and posting to Slashdot required an app that snooped on everything I do, I'd be outta here.
When my son was young, I bought him those velcro-fastened shoes. You
could instantly fasten, unfasten, and adjust them to whatever tension
you want. It seems to me they had all the advantages of these
"self-lacing" shoes and also had no battery to wear out. And I'm sure they were
far less expensive. I would be surprised if these new shoes, which likely whirr
a second or two while the motors run, are as fast as velcro fasteners,
which respond literally instantly to a slight pull.
While you could be right that the necessary technology still won't be available in 40 years, the quantum world is fundamentally different from the analog world. In the analog world, noise and other errors determine an absolute limit as to how much precision you can achieve. In the quantum world, there is the miracle of quantum error correction that can compensate for errors. It is quite amazing mathematically that linear transformations performed by quantum gates can correct errors, but the mathematics works (I have worked through it myself, it's not terribly hard, requiring only linear algebra) and small error-correcting qubit circuits have been demonstrated.
Most important is the
threshold theorem that says if we can reduce the noise in a qubit below about 1 part in 10^5 (IIRC), error correction can allow a quantum computer to grow to an unlimited number of qubits. That's when the revolution will start.
Indeed, the abuse possibilities of a direct brain interface are illustrated in the episode of Black Mirror called White Christmas, which I think is a marvelous piece of science fiction. It can be found on Youtube between periodic DCMA takedowns by BBC, and maybe on Netflix.
I watched the video with my wife and she was mad at someone being mean to the robot.
As irrational and ridiculous as it sounds, I sometimes subconsciously feel a slight twinge of guilt when I take a different route than instructed by the GPS voice, making the poor thing confused and forcing it to recalculate. Thankfully my conscious self always overrides that feeling.
Slashdot Mirror
8) Hidden menus and mystery meat.
Google Maps is the prototype example. In the first or second iterations some years ago, Google Maps was very nice. Menus and functions used to be obvious and intuitive. They've hidden more and more things behind cryptic icons or that only show up on mouseover. I'm sure I could read up on it and figure it all out, but I use it so rarely that it's not worth my effort. Alternatives such as Mapquest are easier to use, and for occasional things like printing directions they're adequate (although Mapquest is also moving in the Google direction).
Just 2 days ago I needed some custom directions, because a road where I wanted to go was closed by construction making the GPS useless. I tried to use Google maps and futzed around until I sort of had the route I wanted on the screen, but when I tried to print only a small portion was shown and the rest chopped off. By trial and error, I kept zooming out until it fit the printer page, but then the street names became suppressed because I zoomed out too far. After about 10 minutes I gave up and used Mapquest.
(I now remember that the previous time I used Google Maps a few months ago I also gave up on printing directly and instead captured a screen shot and printed that! I forgot about that trick 2 days ago.)
And while I'm on a Google rant, they used to have links to to translate, books, etc. on the main page, and now there's nothing. I have no idea how people find these anymore (I have bookmarks for them). Well, I guess they can Google for "Google translate", but you have to know that it even exists before you can do that.
The Oracle EULA (2012) includes the clause: "Publication Prohibition. You shall not publish any results of benchmark tests run on the SOFTWARE."
I wonder if this new law means we will start seeing them.
It's not that hard to drill the hole, because the third speaker hole from the right serves as a guide that prevents the drill bit from slipping,
I have Raynaud syndrome and cannot even take food out of the freezer without gloves - my fingers, even ones I didn't touch anything with, turn ghostly white, then purple, then start hurting. Outside in the winter, even a brief exposure without gloves results in chilblain (mild frostbite) ulcers that take weeks to heal. Diltiazem helps a little, but I have still gotten chilblains while on it.
In my case, an iPhone or any touchscreen at all is out of the question in the winter. I have an old-fashioned cell phone with buttons that allow me to answer the phone with thinner gloves I have on under heavy mittens, but forget fingerless gloves.
Most of my tech friends have gmail accounts, many of them from the days when they were hard to get and almost considered a status symbol. But why is Google's data mining preferable to AOL's or any other? I know that AOL has long been derided as being associated with grandmothers and "free" AOL disks, but their basic email is free now.
Non-tech family and friends tend to have <cable-company>.com email addresses, more or less locking them into a specific cable provider.
As for myself, I chose an ISP that I'm pretty sure isn't interested in data mining my correspondence. And I have my own permanent domain name I can move to a different ISP should things change. I pay a small monthly fee, but it is mainly for my web site with an email account included. A small price I don't mind paying for basically total control over these things. I'd do it with my own server, but all cable companies in this area block incoming port 80 and probably others unless you buy an expensive "business" account for far more than I pay for the web site ISP.
On p. 14, "Cutting the front trunk first responder loop", it shows how to disable the high voltage. Under the hood there is a coiled loop of red wire with a big bright orange label with a picture of wire cutters. You cut the red wire. This shuts down the high voltage system outside of the high voltage battery itself. For extra safety, you cut a section out of it so it won't reconnect accidentally.
IMO they should put this on the first page. But at least it is there.
I received one of these emails from Verizon, which for $59.99 "is a great opportunity to enhance your Fios experience with faster Wi-Fi speeds."
It isn't so much the money or speed I worry about as the ability to control the router's advanced settings for server ports, etc. that I have now in the "old" router.
I couldn't find any detailed information about the new router. I am seriously worried that the advanced settings will be dumbed down or made unavailable, so their outsourced customer service won't have to be concerned with technical stuff and thus require less training. Maybe the monthly fee for the old router is a red flag that this is the case, since they may need customer support with more training. I don't want to buy the new router and then be screwed unless I upgrade to an expensive "business" account. I doubt they will let me go back to the old router.
Does anyone know the specs for the new router?
" While we are disappointed by CMS' decision,..."
If she had any sense of ethics, she would be grateful the CMS is doing its job of protecting the public from dishonest people like her. Why isn't she in jail for falsifying test results and endangering people's lives?
She's not sorry she did it, only that she got caught. Typically psychopathic behavior, Sadly she'll probably be successful someday, lying, cheating, and using people on her way up.
My phone has a "lightning" charger. Should I hold it out in the rain and hope for a surge to fill up the battery?
Sure, if that's what you think it means, be my guest. However, the issue is not what you or I think it means but whether a jury can be convinced. In your case, good luck.
The problem is not the Autopilot feature but the way it has been misleadingly and dangerously marketed.
Musk bragged to the press that Autopilot was "almost twice as good as a person," certainly sending the wrong message. His ex-wife posted a YouTube video of her driving while covering her eyes and dancing around while on Autopilot on a crowded highway. All this has encouraged a bunch of other YouTube videos of people behaving foolishly while on Autopilot.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tesla-mixes-warnings-bravado-hands-free-driving-002343250--finance.html
Even the marketing name "Autopilot" is probably misleading to some people, who might interpret as "the car drives itself without human assistance". It should have been more conservatively called "driver assist" or some such.
In the end their marketing stupidity is probably going to bite them financially. A dashboard warning doesn't excuse it. I say this regretfully as a Tesla stockholder.
Of all the pointless YouTube uses mentioned, this is the one I hate the most. There is nothing that is a bigger waste of time, especially if you want to see a few of the pictures but don't care about the rest. What the world needs is a browser add-on that converts YouTube slideshows to a directory of jpegs.
I have a shelf full of DEC TK50 tape cartridges, and I do know what's on them: all the programs, many in C, that I wrote before the mid-90s. Some of which I was rather proud of, with clever algorithms (IMNSHO) and meticulously documented.. The VAX gave up the ghost with no funds to repair/replace, and the backup tapes were all that was left.. While I don't have any realistic hope of recovering them without spending a lot of money, I keep them around in case my lottery ticket comes through.
The assumption is that we have to initiate contact for them to respond. Why wouldn't they be trying to initiate contact also? In theory, we could hear from them tomorrow if they are more advanced and initiated contact long ago.
Studying the "hexadecimal" number some more, it doesn't have hex digits E and F. Instead, it seems that the artist took numbers from 1 to 99 and followed each of them with a letter from A to D, like the answers in a multiple-choice quiz. Then he took this long list and cut it into sections, some with the numbers increasing and some decreasing, and re-concatenated them. Beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.
While the overall result is impressive, the "stitching" isn't perfect. On most pictures it's hard to tell since the brushstrokes have lower resolution than the photography. But on one picture in particular, called "O Livro (os Cem)" by Jac Leirner (1987), the stitching irregularities are easy to find. Type "O Livro" in the search box to find this image.
Essentially this picture is a giant canvas of words in Portuguese. (I speak Portuguese, and it starts off as a bunch of rambling thoughts on money and love, degenerating into what to me makes no sense).
Anyway, to pick an easy to locate spot where stitching apparently took place, find the line about 2/3 down that consists of a giant hexadecimal number (what the hell is that, anyway?). The line starts "D21D22C23..." Blow it up to maximum resolution. The first and second D, and the second 2, have alignment artifacts, and the lower portion of this starting string is slightly blurrier that the top portion. This even gives some insight into the algorithm, where you can see that it's desperately trying to align the top and bottom portions, even distorting or shifting some in-between parts to achieve the result.
You mean like YouTube, where when you middle-click open several tabs of videos of possible interest, they all start playing in a cacophonous roar? Then you have to open each tab to pause it before you can even start watching one of them, defeating the whole purpose of "open in new tab".
Oh wait, Google bought YouTube and added that incredibly annoying autorun "feature".
I don't know what they were thinking, but I do know that it has caused me to do a lot less casual sampling of their videos..
Cigarette smokers are about 30% less likely to develop Parkinson's disease. It hasn't been studied for pure nicotine, but that would be the likely source of the neuroprotection.
This interests me because my father has Parkinson's, his brother had Parkinson's, and a member of my mother's family has Parkinson's. None of them have ever smoked.
I had my whole genome sequenced, and out of 10 or so known markers related to Parkinson's (according to my promethease.com full genome analysis), I have all but one (for early onset familial Parkinson's). So I'm probably screwed. Interestingly, I also have a marker that indicates my chances of developing Parkinson's is lower if I consume caffeine regularly (which I do). This might be the same one as for nicotine, although apparently that hasn't been studied genetically.
In any case, I'm hoping to reduce my chances of Parkinson's or at least delay it, so I have started chewing nicotine gum. I couldn't find any negative consequences of nicotine gum in the literature. As a bonus it seems to help me think better.
Unless you mean "he who has the gold makes the rules," the Golden Rule is to imagine your situation swapped with the other person...
Never mind, I don't think someone who gets upset by an impoverished fruit vendor in front of their mansion could grasp the concept.
It doesn't bother me that much because whatever I post I intend to make public anyway. If reading and posting to Slashdot required an app that snooped on everything I do, I'd be outta here.
When my son was young, I bought him those velcro-fastened shoes. You could instantly fasten, unfasten, and adjust them to whatever tension you want. It seems to me they had all the advantages of these "self-lacing" shoes and also had no battery to wear out. And I'm sure they were far less expensive. I would be surprised if these new shoes, which likely whirr a second or two while the motors run, are as fast as velcro fasteners, which respond literally instantly to a slight pull.
While you could be right that the necessary technology still won't be available in 40 years, the quantum world is fundamentally different from the analog world. In the analog world, noise and other errors determine an absolute limit as to how much precision you can achieve. In the quantum world, there is the miracle of quantum error correction that can compensate for errors. It is quite amazing mathematically that linear transformations performed by quantum gates can correct errors, but the mathematics works (I have worked through it myself, it's not terribly hard, requiring only linear algebra) and small error-correcting qubit circuits have been demonstrated.
Most important is the threshold theorem that says if we can reduce the noise in a qubit below about 1 part in 10^5 (IIRC), error correction can allow a quantum computer to grow to an unlimited number of qubits. That's when the revolution will start.
Indeed, the abuse possibilities of a direct brain interface are illustrated in the episode of Black Mirror called White Christmas, which I think is a marvelous piece of science fiction. It can be found on Youtube between periodic DCMA takedowns by BBC, and maybe on Netflix.
As irrational and ridiculous as it sounds, I sometimes subconsciously feel a slight twinge of guilt when I take a different route than instructed by the GPS voice, making the poor thing confused and forcing it to recalculate. Thankfully my conscious self always overrides that feeling.
Interesting post, but 500ps is 0.0005 microsec, not 0.0000005 microsec. Look at it another way: 500ps is 1/2 ns, i.e. 1/2 of 0.001 usec.