To some businesses, switching onto machines right away seems like a good idea. Poor foresight I guess.
I would say that your post is one of the best posts I've ever since. There is a lot to it that should give people pause in trying to understand the effects of raising the minimum. With that said, the decision to switch to robots is not necessarily one that is 100% factual or objective, but one of instinct.
In this particular sentence I'm quoting, you suggest that early adoption might be poor foresight. But that is only for companies that are expecting early yields or if expected yields are the only consideration.
This doesn't apply to companies that are looking at the long term and from whom the additional cost up front is seen as a form of insurance against the risk of not doing the transition. You might want to adopt early to immediately assess the risk, to understand the nature of operations. You might to add the additional cost of an early transition because the transition can give you an edge (in terms of quality or quantity) against competitors.
A not-so-perfect analogy of swallowing upfront costs as a strategic move is Amazon selling its Kindle Fire line of products at a lost. It is natural for a business to run on the red for the first few years, or to operate on the red when trying to position itself favorably. So the decision to having an otherwise unnecessary cost upfront early one, by itself, is not necessarily poor foresight.
You do, however, highlight both 1) the real dynamics of robots phasing out workers, and 2) the acceleration rate of such workforce replacement.
It is at this point that we need to stop looking at this purely from a private business or economics point of view, and look at this as a matter of social/national policy. Sooner or later we are going to have to face some (or all of the following):
the possibility of adopting some form of basic income
the necessity to move to single payer health care plan and bring health care costs down (which are a factor that prevent many white-collar professionals from opening their own businesses)
have a national policy for the continuing education of our workforce - including moving focus away from 4-year college education and into vocational/adult training.
do away with double taxation which is the primary cause for companies to move operations (and job and wealth) to other countries.
This nation needs to have a better social safety net, a better educated workforce (hopefully a workforce of autodidacts) and a simplified corporate tax code.
We have the capacity to do so. We simply lack the foresight and will (and we will pay for it.)
And in six months buying a $25,000 robot will be cheaper than paying an employee $12/hr...
And in a year buying a $15,000 robot will be cheaper than paying an employee $9/hr...
They're going to replace employees with robots anyhow, I don't buy that increasing the minimum wage to whatever has anything to do with it.
Exactly. We have been using robots like, forever. Think of all the automation and machining that has gone around making, say, an ice bucket (which is nothing new). Or how robots have revolutionized the auto industry (whose workers are very well paid.)
Robots are coming regardless of how well or little we get paid.
I don't want your account with a weak password to get pwned and send me spam or phishing emails.
Neither do I, but does that mean that MS should be able to force me to use one that they consider "strong"?
Most accounts aren't cracked by password guessing, most are pwned by malware and keyloggers. You do know that, don't you?
Is their system, so they can set the rules. If we don't like them, we can go somewhere else. The same applies to gmail or yahoo or whatever. Applying "should" to the question is pretty much threading into "is/ought problem" land.
If you ban common passwords. Then you end up with a new set of common passwords. Going to ban those too?
Why not? It would be within the company's capacity to maintain a dictionary of hashes (not the actual passwords) from where to determine the most common passwords at any given time. Then you ban them. It is a moving target.
For example, think about a Windows group policy that does not let you reuse a password. This is a perfectly reasonable strategy. That is possible for members of a domain, but prohibitive for a global audience. So an extension to the idea is to look for indications that your password is among the most common ones and ban it.
This could imply that what is not banned today can be banned tomorrow, and that what is banned today might not be in the future. This notion could be relaxed by enforcing the ban only on new passwords. If your current password happens to become a common one in the future, you still keep it, but any new password from another principal matching yours would get banned.
I don't see what the fundamental, fatal problem is here. Like all strategies, it has its pros and cons.
Of course, the advantages of using a language that non-programmers can "pick up in a weekend" are mostly lost because you'll be working with programmers who learned to program in a weekend.
Exhibit A: Python. Exhibit B: PHP.
You want to teach coding? How about do it holistically - teach CS, and use a language like Pascal and/or Basic to teach the CS. For teens, perhaps teach from SICP.
Thinking what language to use to teach coding and coding fundamentals is still the wrong thing.
We should not be teaching coding. We should be teaching technology proficiency first and foremost. And before that, we should be ensuring that, across the board, there is proficiency in math, reading, logical thinking, personal finance and rudimentary bookkeeping. And coding or no coding, when a kid gets out of HS, he or she should be coming out with an idea of what to do, or at most a specific trade.
But that is too difficult, so we pretend we do something meaningful by "teaching coding".
My experience agrees with you. It's management that gets the pay, while the actual gruntwork of producing code gets squat.
Unless you get to sit in the C-suite, management pay over grunt pay is marginal once you count the number of hours and responsibility involved (not to mention that middle and above-middle management are the first to go during an acquisition).
You can be smart about being a grunt and make a good salary not far from base management salary without all the grievance involved in managing people.
Am I the only one that thinks we should be teaching IT and business applications first and foremost. Teach a kid how to use excel (or whatever FOSS spreadsheet) of your choice to compute simple but real world problems with what-if analysis, or how to plot numbers and see how that changes when you change the variables.
Show how much money you will get in 20 years if you change the interest rate on a referenced cell. Or how much money you need to spend in building a fence if you change the cost of lumber per yard, or the cost of delivery per unit. And so on and so on. Right there you will be teaching kinds important lessons on how to use software realistically.
Teach a kid how to put a LEGO robot together. Or how to put a computer together, or go even further down into the basics with a focus on shop class.
The future is not going to be dominated by software developers, but by integrators, machinists and service people for whom custom coding will be a secondary (important, but secondary) activity.
The approach we are taking is like teaching plumbing apprentices casting and forging metallurgy to create their own plumbing before teaching them actual trade of plumbing.
Watered down CS classes is exactly what most people need.
Even my wife's job, an attendance clerk for a elementary school, takes some significant IT understanding to do.
The software the district uses requires the end users to create their own reports, in dumb downed version of SQL.
"Real" IT people need more detailed courses, but the current system geared to make office workers needs to be upgraded to produce IT savvy workers.
In that case, don't teach watered down CS (whatever the fuck that means). Teach IT. You don't take some crap and call it watered down calculus when all you need to do is teaching the basics of math and, I dunno, understanding the differences between simple and compound interest, do you?
It is understandable when the general population conflate CS with IT (in the same way they conflate Zoology with Botany.). It is not OK when people who should know better push such an invalid notion.
How about we leaving the teaching to the teachers and the armchair quarterbacks can go fuck themselves? I like that approach.
Yes and no. I want armchair quaterbacks to leave teachers the fuck alone so that they do what they do best. OTH, we should not be asking teachers to teach material they are not familiar with. In this case, programming.
As a matter of fact, I cringe at the notion of teaching programming everywhere. Technology is important, and we will inevitably move into a society where automation and robotics will reign supreme. But the solution is not to teach programming as if it were a silver bullet.
What we need, first and foremost, is to create a society of autodidacts, focusing early on with general, across-the-board competency in math, reading, logical thinking, personal finance and rudimentary bookkeeping. Teaching programming won't do shit without a solid foundation across the board.
The contractors have ZERO incentive to ever provide a working product.
I have worked on tech projects both as a government employee and as a contractor. Most projects were disasters for the reasons you list, but I have seen a few successes. Here is a quick checklist:
1. Do NOT use a contractor. They have a vested interest in bloat and delay.
2. Use your own subordinates so they have skin in the game, and their future raises and promotions depend on the success of the project.
3. Make sure they are a small team that has worked together successfully in the past on similar projects.
4. Starve them of resources, so they have no choice but to implement a clean and simple design, with only basic functionality.
5. Avoid hyping or even announcing the project until you have something working. If you hype it early, you will get demands for every feature, including the kitchen sink, thrown at you, and you will get politically connected contractors forced on you.
#4 is idiotic, and #1 is plain generalization bullshit. I worked with government contracts also, and employees are not above bloat, delays and vested interests. Most of the bloating and delays occur because of management bloat and red tape that inevitably arises when dealing with the government (yes, acquisition processes used by the government promotes bloat.)
It is rank-n-file employees and contractors that have to deal with that shit. Certainly there are some who use that to their advantage ($$$), but the majority are trying to do a good job, or at least keep their heads up and not cut their wrists when dealing with a tidal wave of shit that comes inevitably with government contracts.
There is plenty of moral hazard blame to throw around. Don't be disingenuous trying to peg it all on contractors.
Yes, that's great until you start running out of living humans with the ability to actually operate that stuff. I'm not saying I dislike quality or custom gear for the military, but support and logistics is a real thing.
And unlike the wishful thinking about aliens and black ops the real reason we have $20,000 toilet seats is because the government can't just use something that everyone else does. And half the time, the reason isn't even something as intelligent as security or reliability, it's because someone wrote some dumb-ass regulation that everyone has forgotten why it existed in the first place but its chiseled right there in that stone tablet that everyone has to abide by or they get thrown in jail.
The fact that it just happens to be more secure was more of an accident than anything else. That's a shaky premise for good security. If you could find someone with enough motivation to learn how, it would be trivial to break this stuff.
It is not obsolete if it works and can still be maintained. I don't quite see what the problem is. Unless we are facing a serious shortage of 8" floppies, or we are seeing r/w failures so often that they compromise the systems' functions, then nothing is broken and nothing needs fixing.
Changing this setup will most likely involve rewriting critical software. We can barely try to rewrite a website without triggering a bug zombie apocalypse, I seriously would not want a critical system to be rewritten, upgraded or modified unless absolutely necessary.
Americans didn't "use" 10 trillion megabytes of data, they exchanged them.
Mobile carriers however like people to think they "use" data because then they can charge for usage more easily.
They exchanged data, but that does not mean they did not use it. After all, can you get back the data that was transmitted (in particular content in the streaming use case, because content is data)? This is like saying you exchange but not use signals when talking over a phone line.
What's the use of having an IQ of 150 if you cannot get away with doing illegal things?
And that, ladies and gents, is what we call a sociopath.
I think the real sociopath is the one who agreed to put their work into the public domain for a limited time of protection, but then reneged on the deal to keep their stuff out of the public domain forever. Funny how the biggest culprit of this is the very company this news is about.
It's their work and they can do with it as they please. That it inconveniences you in some way or another does not necessarily vindicate the way you see things.
I buy a TON of things from Amazon, I'm a heavy Prime customer...
That being said, my last three price adjustment requests in the past two weeks have all been denied, which is very odd.
I do it manually, just when I notice things... I buy at least a half a dozen items a week from Amazon.
This change will make me think twice before buying as much.
You're doing this manually but noticed three price adjustments in a two week period? Are you unemployed? I buy something on Amazon because I don't have the time to go to the store and pick it up. The last thing I am going to do is keep my eye out for price adjustments. If it's something like a TV that will deflate in value over the next year then I just watch the price myself until it's time to pull the trigger - or better yet - use a website to watch the price for me. If I needed it so badly that I couldn't wait for a price I was happy with, well what's a few dollars, then?
You do not need to be unemployed (or say, doing nothing) to keep tabs on things. Like with all abilities, some people are better than others.
Soon you will choose your phone by the content you want. Like ESPN, well that's a Sprint Exclusive. Like HBO, well only on android Phones.
As it is I have Netflix (canceled my DVD after the price hike) and amazon because I want prime anyhow. But it galls me to then have to shell out for HBO to see one show (GOT). And Starz to see one show (Black sails). etc... Splintered content.
Verizon, At&T, Tmobile, comcast are all trying to defeat net neutrality. Things like binge-on that don't count against data caps are just a way to play the gatekeeper to their private internet. Same with facebooks internet.org.
If someone told me that this is how they finally make a profit after years of loss leaders to build market share I'd like to hear that argument. Is it really the case that paying $1.99 an episode would not get me something like Game of Thrones or the other golden age of "TV" shows? Or is it that they just see they can make money by splintering things?
Too bad things like popcorn time are illegal. It sure takes the frustration out of this. I want one market place for everything be it amazon, or itunes or google play.
I've been thinking along the same lines (about having to fork extra money for exclusive content.) Cable syndrome indeed:/
I have Netflix, Hulu and Prime. The former two make it easy to cancel and rejoin at any time without penalty. So I have been considering regularly cancel one provider (either Hulu or Netflix) and funnel the "liberated" funds to pay for exclusive content while I binge-watch it. Once done, I either rejoin the former or sign up for another exclusive content provider.
Obviously this works only if the providers allows to cancel and rejoin at any time without penalty. Otherwise, we are back to the cable world clusterfuck.
Just setup a gmail account specifically for amazon.
Word. That's what I do: one for shopping (amazon, ebay, paypal), one for social media (facebook and linkedin), and one for personal usage, and another my wife and I share for school activities, all gmail. A couple for MS tool registration at hotmail/msn, and another at yahoo that I use whenever I suspect someone is trying to spam me (said account is aptly named is spirit of one's rear orifice.) Each with a different password (which is a burden, but not an impossible one.)
For the general population, two accounts typically suffice. And once you explain the benefits to a non-techie, they are quick to adopt the scheme... or so has been my experience.
Which is why you don't let them scan your normal email account, and create a sandboxed account instead. Perhaps you should have paid attention to the words you cropped out:
specifically for amazon
Exactly. A person simply needs to set up sandboxed e-mail accounts for different things. That's what my wife and I do... and she isn't a techie. Non-tech people typically do not think that way, which is understandable (and precarious). But once you explain the benefits, they jump right. It is (supposed) tech people who do not think that way that baffles me.
without the possibility to patch and recompile the old environment for new hardware you are stuck with an impaired development tool.
Who is sitting on 15 year old code that has had no effort to keep it current made?
A system or code base that can run for 15 years is something I would rather consider a success. I get and understand fully the need to keep things up to date, but more often than not all I see are upgrades just done for shits and giggles and a desire to pad one's resumes (and very little to do with valid business/technical requirements.)
On the one hand, Twitter is for people who care about what and how they write.
On the other hand, Twitter is for attention whores.
It's quite amazing how they managed to get so many users while targetting a non-existant demographic.
Let's pretend you said something insightful so that you can reiterate how awesome you are.
Can anyone tell me why this matters? I doubt it. Twitter isn't a good place for informed discussion. Plus, it's easy enough to post multiple tweets if something exceeds the 140 character limit. So, why would anyone care about this? Besides, social media is for people who aren't intelligent and don't care about privacy. I'll get modded down to -1 for asking this because Slashdot users don't like answering important questions. But this needs to be asked, and I challenge any of you to give me a real answer rather than insulting me. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone here is up to the challenge.
And that's what I call a person holding self-fulfilling prophesies. You are not interested in a conversation. You are interested in a confrontation. If you doubt the audience is willing or capable to give you an intelligent answer to something you seem to have set your mind already, then why bother if not just still some emotional e-shit?
This is like those people who go to dating sites putting adds that read "am I attractive" or "are there any good men left, I doubt it."
Feel free to take this post as proof that you were right, that none of us are up to the challenge (as you so eloquently put it.)
Don't forget: Jim Crow laws were laws. They were the government telling businesses that they were not permitted to treat black folks the same as white folks.
No doubt some of the businesses were totally enthusiastic about the laws, but equally no doubt some of the businesses would have preferred to just serve all the customers.
The only way to get all the businesses to do something bad is to use the force of law.
Sure. Tell yourself that. When the Feds finally said those laws were illegal, the push-back to retain them came prominently from the population, -business people included. Undoubtedly there businesses that didn't care about race existed at time... just as there were abolitionists during slavery.
And that's not just laws regulating what type of customers you could have. These laws regulated what water fountain to drink in a public government building or who you could legally marry. Those two examples (and many, many more) had shit to do with regulating business.
Those Jim Crow laws, yes, they were passed by the states... as a function of the people, of the electorate, or an active majority. Some people were indifferent and would do business with anyone, but that amounts to nothing because omission of opposing a sin is the same a commission of a sin.
Jim Crow laws were a function of states exercising the will of a majority who did not consider a minority as equal human beings. No amount of revisionism is every going to wash away that stain from history.
Slashdot Mirror
To some businesses, switching onto machines right away seems like a good idea. Poor foresight I guess.
I would say that your post is one of the best posts I've ever since. There is a lot to it that should give people pause in trying to understand the effects of raising the minimum. With that said, the decision to switch to robots is not necessarily one that is 100% factual or objective, but one of instinct.
In this particular sentence I'm quoting, you suggest that early adoption might be poor foresight. But that is only for companies that are expecting early yields or if expected yields are the only consideration.
This doesn't apply to companies that are looking at the long term and from whom the additional cost up front is seen as a form of insurance against the risk of not doing the transition. You might want to adopt early to immediately assess the risk, to understand the nature of operations. You might to add the additional cost of an early transition because the transition can give you an edge (in terms of quality or quantity) against competitors.
A not-so-perfect analogy of swallowing upfront costs as a strategic move is Amazon selling its Kindle Fire line of products at a lost. It is natural for a business to run on the red for the first few years, or to operate on the red when trying to position itself favorably. So the decision to having an otherwise unnecessary cost upfront early one, by itself, is not necessarily poor foresight.
You do, however, highlight both 1) the real dynamics of robots phasing out workers, and 2) the acceleration rate of such workforce replacement.
It is at this point that we need to stop looking at this purely from a private business or economics point of view, and look at this as a matter of social/national policy. Sooner or later we are going to have to face some (or all of the following):
This nation needs to have a better social safety net, a better educated workforce (hopefully a workforce of autodidacts) and a simplified corporate tax code.
We have the capacity to do so. We simply lack the foresight and will (and we will pay for it.)
And in six months buying a $25,000 robot will be cheaper than paying an employee $12/hr... And in a year buying a $15,000 robot will be cheaper than paying an employee $9/hr...
They're going to replace employees with robots anyhow, I don't buy that increasing the minimum wage to whatever has anything to do with it.
Exactly. We have been using robots like, forever. Think of all the automation and machining that has gone around making, say, an ice bucket (which is nothing new). Or how robots have revolutionized the auto industry (whose workers are very well paid.)
Robots are coming regardless of how well or little we get paid.
I don't want your account with a weak password to get pwned and send me spam or phishing emails.
Neither do I, but does that mean that MS should be able to force me to use one that they consider "strong"?
Most accounts aren't cracked by password guessing, most are pwned by malware and keyloggers. You do know that, don't you?
Is their system, so they can set the rules. If we don't like them, we can go somewhere else. The same applies to gmail or yahoo or whatever. Applying "should" to the question is pretty much threading into "is/ought problem" land.
If you ban common passwords. Then you end up with a new set of common passwords. Going to ban those too?
Why not? It would be within the company's capacity to maintain a dictionary of hashes (not the actual passwords) from where to determine the most common passwords at any given time. Then you ban them. It is a moving target.
For example, think about a Windows group policy that does not let you reuse a password. This is a perfectly reasonable strategy. That is possible for members of a domain, but prohibitive for a global audience. So an extension to the idea is to look for indications that your password is among the most common ones and ban it.
This could imply that what is not banned today can be banned tomorrow, and that what is banned today might not be in the future. This notion could be relaxed by enforcing the ban only on new passwords. If your current password happens to become a common one in the future, you still keep it, but any new password from another principal matching yours would get banned.
I don't see what the fundamental, fatal problem is here. Like all strategies, it has its pros and cons.
Of course, the advantages of using a language that non-programmers can "pick up in a weekend" are mostly lost because you'll be working with programmers who learned to program in a weekend.
Exhibit A: Python. Exhibit B: PHP.
You want to teach coding? How about do it holistically - teach CS, and use a language like Pascal and/or Basic to teach the CS. For teens, perhaps teach from SICP.
Thinking what language to use to teach coding and coding fundamentals is still the wrong thing.
We should not be teaching coding. We should be teaching technology proficiency first and foremost. And before that, we should be ensuring that, across the board, there is proficiency in math, reading, logical thinking, personal finance and rudimentary bookkeeping. And coding or no coding, when a kid gets out of HS, he or she should be coming out with an idea of what to do, or at most a specific trade.
But that is too difficult, so we pretend we do something meaningful by "teaching coding".
My experience agrees with you. It's management that gets the pay, while the actual gruntwork of producing code gets squat.
Unless you get to sit in the C-suite, management pay over grunt pay is marginal once you count the number of hours and responsibility involved (not to mention that middle and above-middle management are the first to go during an acquisition).
You can be smart about being a grunt and make a good salary not far from base management salary without all the grievance involved in managing people.
American Schools Teaching Kids To Code All Wrong
Am I the only one that thinks we should be teaching IT and business applications first and foremost. Teach a kid how to use excel (or whatever FOSS spreadsheet) of your choice to compute simple but real world problems with what-if analysis, or how to plot numbers and see how that changes when you change the variables.
Show how much money you will get in 20 years if you change the interest rate on a referenced cell. Or how much money you need to spend in building a fence if you change the cost of lumber per yard, or the cost of delivery per unit. And so on and so on. Right there you will be teaching kinds important lessons on how to use software realistically.
Teach a kid how to put a LEGO robot together. Or how to put a computer together, or go even further down into the basics with a focus on shop class.
The future is not going to be dominated by software developers, but by integrators, machinists and service people for whom custom coding will be a secondary (important, but secondary) activity.
The approach we are taking is like teaching plumbing apprentices casting and forging metallurgy to create their own plumbing before teaching them actual trade of plumbing.
Watered down CS classes is exactly what most people need.
Even my wife's job, an attendance clerk for a elementary school, takes some significant IT understanding to do.
The software the district uses requires the end users to create their own reports, in dumb downed version of SQL.
"Real" IT people need more detailed courses, but the current system geared to make office workers needs to be upgraded to produce IT savvy workers.
In that case, don't teach watered down CS (whatever the fuck that means). Teach IT. You don't take some crap and call it watered down calculus when all you need to do is teaching the basics of math and, I dunno, understanding the differences between simple and compound interest, do you?
It is understandable when the general population conflate CS with IT (in the same way they conflate Zoology with Botany.). It is not OK when people who should know better push such an invalid notion.
How about we leaving the teaching to the teachers and the armchair quarterbacks can go fuck themselves? I like that approach.
Yes and no. I want armchair quaterbacks to leave teachers the fuck alone so that they do what they do best. OTH, we should not be asking teachers to teach material they are not familiar with. In this case, programming.
As a matter of fact, I cringe at the notion of teaching programming everywhere. Technology is important, and we will inevitably move into a society where automation and robotics will reign supreme. But the solution is not to teach programming as if it were a silver bullet.
What we need, first and foremost, is to create a society of autodidacts, focusing early on with general, across-the-board competency in math, reading, logical thinking, personal finance and rudimentary bookkeeping. Teaching programming won't do shit without a solid foundation across the board.
The contractors have ZERO incentive to ever provide a working product.
I have worked on tech projects both as a government employee and as a contractor. Most projects were disasters for the reasons you list, but I have seen a few successes. Here is a quick checklist:
1. Do NOT use a contractor. They have a vested interest in bloat and delay. 2. Use your own subordinates so they have skin in the game, and their future raises and promotions depend on the success of the project. 3. Make sure they are a small team that has worked together successfully in the past on similar projects. 4. Starve them of resources, so they have no choice but to implement a clean and simple design, with only basic functionality. 5. Avoid hyping or even announcing the project until you have something working. If you hype it early, you will get demands for every feature, including the kitchen sink, thrown at you, and you will get politically connected contractors forced on you.
#4 is idiotic, and #1 is plain generalization bullshit. I worked with government contracts also, and employees are not above bloat, delays and vested interests. Most of the bloating and delays occur because of management bloat and red tape that inevitably arises when dealing with the government (yes, acquisition processes used by the government promotes bloat.)
It is rank-n-file employees and contractors that have to deal with that shit. Certainly there are some who use that to their advantage ($$$), but the majority are trying to do a good job, or at least keep their heads up and not cut their wrists when dealing with a tidal wave of shit that comes inevitably with government contracts.
There is plenty of moral hazard blame to throw around. Don't be disingenuous trying to peg it all on contractors.
Yes, that's great until you start running out of living humans with the ability to actually operate that stuff. I'm not saying I dislike quality or custom gear for the military, but support and logistics is a real thing.
And unlike the wishful thinking about aliens and black ops the real reason we have $20,000 toilet seats is because the government can't just use something that everyone else does. And half the time, the reason isn't even something as intelligent as security or reliability, it's because someone wrote some dumb-ass regulation that everyone has forgotten why it existed in the first place but its chiseled right there in that stone tablet that everyone has to abide by or they get thrown in jail.
The fact that it just happens to be more secure was more of an accident than anything else. That's a shaky premise for good security. If you could find someone with enough motivation to learn how, it would be trivial to break this stuff.
There is something called training.
There's probably more rationale here than many realize.
I'd doubt it. More like,
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
That's all the rationale (and wisdom) you need in most cases.
Security through obsolescence.
It is not obsolete if it works and can still be maintained. I don't quite see what the problem is. Unless we are facing a serious shortage of 8" floppies, or we are seeing r/w failures so often that they compromise the systems' functions, then nothing is broken and nothing needs fixing.
Changing this setup will most likely involve rewriting critical software. We can barely try to rewrite a website without triggering a bug zombie apocalypse, I seriously would not want a critical system to be rewritten, upgraded or modified unless absolutely necessary.
Americans didn't "use" 10 trillion megabytes of data, they exchanged them.
Mobile carriers however like people to think they "use" data because then they can charge for usage more easily.
They exchanged data, but that does not mean they did not use it. After all, can you get back the data that was transmitted (in particular content in the streaming use case, because content is data)? This is like saying you exchange but not use signals when talking over a phone line.
What's the use of having an IQ of 150 if you cannot get away with doing illegal things?
And that, ladies and gents, is what we call a sociopath.
I think the real sociopath is the one who agreed to put their work into the public domain for a limited time of protection, but then reneged on the deal to keep their stuff out of the public domain forever. Funny how the biggest culprit of this is the very company this news is about.
It's their work and they can do with it as they please. That it inconveniences you in some way or another does not necessarily vindicate the way you see things.
Because all illegal things are always wrong. Women voting, smoking marijuana at home, gay marriage, etc.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a straw man fallacy.
I buy a TON of things from Amazon, I'm a heavy Prime customer...
That being said, my last three price adjustment requests in the past two weeks have all been denied, which is very odd.
I do it manually, just when I notice things... I buy at least a half a dozen items a week from Amazon.
This change will make me think twice before buying as much.
You're doing this manually but noticed three price adjustments in a two week period? Are you unemployed? I buy something on Amazon because I don't have the time to go to the store and pick it up. The last thing I am going to do is keep my eye out for price adjustments. If it's something like a TV that will deflate in value over the next year then I just watch the price myself until it's time to pull the trigger - or better yet - use a website to watch the price for me. If I needed it so badly that I couldn't wait for a price I was happy with, well what's a few dollars, then?
You do not need to be unemployed (or say, doing nothing) to keep tabs on things. Like with all abilities, some people are better than others.
Soon you will choose your phone by the content you want. Like ESPN, well that's a Sprint Exclusive. Like HBO, well only on android Phones.
As it is I have Netflix (canceled my DVD after the price hike) and amazon because I want prime anyhow. But it galls me to then have to shell out for HBO to see one show (GOT). And Starz to see one show (Black sails). etc... Splintered content.
Verizon, At&T, Tmobile, comcast are all trying to defeat net neutrality. Things like binge-on that don't count against data caps are just a way to play the gatekeeper to their private internet. Same with facebooks internet.org.
If someone told me that this is how they finally make a profit after years of loss leaders to build market share I'd like to hear that argument. Is it really the case that paying $1.99 an episode would not get me something like Game of Thrones or the other golden age of "TV" shows? Or is it that they just see they can make money by splintering things?
Too bad things like popcorn time are illegal. It sure takes the frustration out of this. I want one market place for everything be it amazon, or itunes or google play.
I've been thinking along the same lines (about having to fork extra money for exclusive content.) Cable syndrome indeed :/
I have Netflix, Hulu and Prime. The former two make it easy to cancel and rejoin at any time without penalty. So I have been considering regularly cancel one provider (either Hulu or Netflix) and funnel the "liberated" funds to pay for exclusive content while I binge-watch it. Once done, I either rejoin the former or sign up for another exclusive content provider.
Obviously this works only if the providers allows to cancel and rejoin at any time without penalty. Otherwise, we are back to the cable world clusterfuck.
What's the use of having an IQ of 150 if you cannot get away with doing illegal things?
And that, ladies and gents, is what we call a sociopath.
Just setup a gmail account specifically for amazon.
Word. That's what I do: one for shopping (amazon, ebay, paypal), one for social media (facebook and linkedin), and one for personal usage, and another my wife and I share for school activities, all gmail. A couple for MS tool registration at hotmail/msn, and another at yahoo that I use whenever I suspect someone is trying to spam me (said account is aptly named is spirit of one's rear orifice.) Each with a different password (which is a burden, but not an impossible one.)
For the general population, two accounts typically suffice. And once you explain the benefits to a non-techie, they are quick to adopt the scheme... or so has been my experience.
Which is why you don't let them scan your normal email account, and create a sandboxed account instead. Perhaps you should have paid attention to the words you cropped out:
specifically for amazon
Exactly. A person simply needs to set up sandboxed e-mail accounts for different things. That's what my wife and I do... and she isn't a techie. Non-tech people typically do not think that way, which is understandable (and precarious). But once you explain the benefits, they jump right. It is (supposed) tech people who do not think that way that baffles me.
without the possibility to patch and recompile the old environment for new hardware you are stuck with an impaired development tool.
Who is sitting on 15 year old code that has had no effort to keep it current made?
A system or code base that can run for 15 years is something I would rather consider a success. I get and understand fully the need to keep things up to date, but more often than not all I see are upgrades just done for shits and giggles and a desire to pad one's resumes (and very little to do with valid business/technical requirements.)
On the one hand, Twitter is for people who care about what and how they write. On the other hand, Twitter is for attention whores. It's quite amazing how they managed to get so many users while targetting a non-existant demographic.
Let's pretend you said something insightful so that you can reiterate how awesome you are.
Can anyone tell me why this matters? I doubt it. Twitter isn't a good place for informed discussion. Plus, it's easy enough to post multiple tweets if something exceeds the 140 character limit. So, why would anyone care about this? Besides, social media is for people who aren't intelligent and don't care about privacy. I'll get modded down to -1 for asking this because Slashdot users don't like answering important questions. But this needs to be asked, and I challenge any of you to give me a real answer rather than insulting me. Unfortunately, I don't think anyone here is up to the challenge.
And that's what I call a person holding self-fulfilling prophesies. You are not interested in a conversation. You are interested in a confrontation. If you doubt the audience is willing or capable to give you an intelligent answer to something you seem to have set your mind already, then why bother if not just still some emotional e-shit?
This is like those people who go to dating sites putting adds that read "am I attractive" or "are there any good men left, I doubt it."
Feel free to take this post as proof that you were right, that none of us are up to the challenge (as you so eloquently put it.)
enforcing Jim Crow laws
Don't forget: Jim Crow laws were laws. They were the government telling businesses that they were not permitted to treat black folks the same as white folks.
No doubt some of the businesses were totally enthusiastic about the laws, but equally no doubt some of the businesses would have preferred to just serve all the customers.
The only way to get all the businesses to do something bad is to use the force of law.
Sure. Tell yourself that. When the Feds finally said those laws were illegal, the push-back to retain them came prominently from the population, -business people included. Undoubtedly there businesses that didn't care about race existed at time... just as there were abolitionists during slavery.
And that's not just laws regulating what type of customers you could have. These laws regulated what water fountain to drink in a public government building or who you could legally marry. Those two examples (and many, many more) had shit to do with regulating business.
Those Jim Crow laws, yes, they were passed by the states... as a function of the people, of the electorate, or an active majority. Some people were indifferent and would do business with anyone, but that amounts to nothing because omission of opposing a sin is the same a commission of a sin.
Jim Crow laws were a function of states exercising the will of a majority who did not consider a minority as equal human beings. No amount of revisionism is every going to wash away that stain from history.