First, you need to give up your freedom. Be denied all contact with all other humans, and be cut off from the world. You'd need to accept spending the rest of your natural life like that. Never again see a sunrise, or a rolling ocean. Never again join a motorcycle club. Never again say "Gee, it's nice out, I think I'll go for a walk!" Never again become excited with the arrival of spring. Never again feel the wind in your hair or the sun on your face. And accept that there is no hope, none, not ever, that that will ever change.
If you're willing to give up all that in exchange for a few video games, a treadmill, and three square a day, well sir, kudos to you. I wouldn't.
While I agree that this is an undesirable side effect of raising the minimum wage in some (or many?) circumstances, I also at the same time disagree with the idea that wages should be kept low (and in some cases well below the poverty line) simply to provide employment. By your argument, the result of this minimum wage hike is that McDonald's now has more productive workers at the expense of lesser skilled workers being more often unemployed. I see that as a zero-gain, but also zero-loss, proposition.
Now while your point that it removes an important rung on the economic ladder is at least in some (or again, many?) cases true, I tend towards my more capitalistic opinions - that wages should not be kept low simply to provide employment to the unskilled. There should be a wage floor that allows unskilled workers to consume baskets of goods, not merely subsist on them. For the record, I am currently unemployed, have been for a year, and live on a shoestring budget. 90% of my expenses are tax-free, give or take. Things like groceries, diapers, medications, rent, all of it is tax-free in most modern societies. Raise the minimum wage for my wife, and we'll have more money for luxuries, or at least, for taxable consumer goods, returning nearly all of that to the economy rather than a savings account or investment fund, and also returning more of it to government coffers.
Without minimum wage legislation, the market will tend towards indentured servitude (I know, that's a rather poignant term to use). I would rather see poverty level wages eliminated entirely, and a corresponding rise in unemployment, than see subsistence level wages proliferated. If that means I pay more for my Big Macs, I'm all for it. There is a reason I don't shop at WalMart, and don't buy clothing made in Bangladesh. I want the people who manufacture and sell my consumer goods to be capable of supporting a family. It's why I buy my coffee from Starbucks - they pay well (decently, at least, at least in Canada). I for one am happy to see more productive, and hopefully better paid, workers at McDonalds, knowing that the people working there can afford to feed a family. If that means higher unemployment, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
I suppose it all boils down to this - I'd rather see fewer better paying jobs than more lesser paying jobs (grammar, ugh...).
Yes, that is fair. My point was that we heard the exact same arguments.
It actually wasn't too long ago that we raised the minimum wage from $7.45 to $10.25, either. We increased it by about 50% in the seven years prior to 2011 (source) with little noticeable effect on unemployment (no source for that, but it all gets a tad murky due to the 2008 recession at that point).
Here in Ontario, Canada, we raised the minimum wage from $10.25 to $11.00, and unemployment went down in the following months and year, from around 7.5 %to 6.75% (source). While that doesn't prove that minimum wage increases never result in unemployment rises, it does disprove that they always result in unemployment rises.
Minimum wage increases killing jobs is a ridiculous notion - prices can always raise as well, and besides, the naysayers repeat this line almost Every. Single. Time. - even for overdue inflation-indexed increases, which generally casts doubt on their positions. In reality, it's a lot more complicated than that.
I will never understand why minimum wage is not tied to inflation rates - this is a ridiculous argument to have Every Five Years.
I tought maybe he was Ray Bradbury's son. Turns out, he's even less important. Why are we giving this nobody airtime? Who the fuck actually cares what he says?
This is all great - I can see it might actually work (but then again, it might not).
But I am typically a pedestrian. How will I cross the street? Do these smart cars just do their "ballet dance" around me? Do I press a button and tell all cars to stop, while I proceed through the intersection? All the article can say is
seamlessly knitting together flows of cars, pedestrians and bikers.
How, exactly? I can see a system of autonomous cars being able to do this, but TFA mentions squat about how it will handle bicycles and pedestrians; only that somehow, magically, it will. There are no pedestrians in the promotional video, so it's pretty hard to tell. How will a computer system predict when I will cross the road? With no "light" to instruct me, how am I supposed to know when to cross?
Seems to me they left out a rather important thing about intersections - the humans using them are inherently unpredictable.
Yes - USB drives are not archival quality storage. But no - they're not expensive. I have several dozen el cheapo flash drives in my desk drawer, most of which were freebies. Just back up on to a cheap storage medium multiple times. If you're so worried that a flash drive won't survive until you need it (Protip: it will, for about 10 years. Then just rewrite it and you're good for another ten years. They wear out from use, not electrical charge leakage.), then make 10 backups. I'd bet my big toe that at least one of them will survive a couple of generations. Keep one or two passphrase encrypted copies online somewhere (not necessarily cloud storage - online meaning you don't need to fetch a thumb drive for it), and you've got a good compromise. For corporate use, just use a safety deposit box with a few thumbdrives and reflash them once a year. That's simple, effective, and secure enough for most applications.
What do I do? I keep my KeePass database (which contains many encryption keys) on a cloud storage provider. The combination of passphrase and keyfile encryption is good enough for me, and strikes the balance I need between ease of use, accessibility, and security.
You're overanalyzing. This is a solved problem. Make multiple backups, some offline, and store them in a secure location, e.g. the parent's suggestion of a safety deposit box.
All true, with one oversight - if they can break the encryption on your phone, they don't even care if the information exists elsewhere - which is why we need strong encryption on mobile phones. I think we agree on that.
Think something like, once they know which cloud file storage provider I use, it's easy enough to construct an investigation path to plausibly lead them to that conclusion by other means, even though they'd never have known without breaking my phone - and then get a warrant for DropBox or Box or Amazon or whoever I use.
The problem would be where the FBI presents evidence via parallel construction only where it was attainable by some other means, and they omit the evidence elsewhere. The ability to break into everyone's phone would allow this - it would give the feds access to information they don't otherwise have, and they then choose to present before the court only that information which could plausibly have been obtained elsewhere. It happens regularly (but I can't source that. It's a hunch:p)
Any one of those "Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems" could be the "upgrade" to Windows 10 - that's the whole problem. Well okay, assuming the update size is listed correctly, they aren't, but you get the point.
The eye-safe system is able to aim lasers, with a wavelength of 1,550 nanometres, up from the ground towards an aircraft, which is fitted with a special reflector which captures the beam.
It's just a fluff piece about a line of research that's not finished yet. They've managed to send information over a laser at a distance of 1km, which, while not necessarily easy, is a far cry from low earth orbit.
The whole article is full of phrases like "suggested applications", "could also be applied", "could help speed up", "leading to exciting developments", "will potentially make", and so on and so forth. So in other words, while it's an interesting line of research, they have accomplished nothing so far.
It's just a PR piece meant to drum up research dollars (or pounds) and justify the project's continued existence - according to their web site, they were slated to shut down halfway through last year.
Nuclear accounts for approximately 20% of the power generated in the US. How, pray tell, does the NRC plan to replace this generation capacity?
Oh wait, it's mdsolar, all nuclear is bad and we live in a happy slappy unicorn world where the consequences don't matter. It's a non-story regarding a minor problem that somebody wants to blow out of proportion, because NUCLEAR EVIL.
The problem is when those decisions end up putting someone out of business. I actually fully expected Mozilla to go Full Asshole on this; they consistently ignore the needs of users anyway. But it seems they were willing to reach a compromise, and especially in this case, I feel it's quite warranted:
Worldpay blames this situation on a communications mishap. They say that someone forgot to ask for these certificates before the January 1 deadline.
The company says they are already in the midst of the process of updating their servers to SHA-2, but this blunder now puts some of its users in danger of not having their payments go through. -snip- Internally, Mozilla has agreed to allow Symantec to issue these certificates under two conditions: the entire process should be transparent, and that the certificates should expire after only 90 days.
WorldPay is a rather large online payment processor - this would affect a rather large number of innocent users, which certainly wasn't the purpose behind the deadline. As much as I agree that SHA-1 based certs should be phased out, and phased out yesterday, Mozilla is right here - there are exceptions to every rule. This deadline was put in place to protect users, not put them out of business.
As a related aside, a friend of mine, a lawyer, recently asked for advice on how to store her passwords; she works as a crown prosecutor in a very tightly locked down environment. This jurisdiction's policies are so restrictive that the only workable solution employees can find to reasonably securely store passwords and logins is on their personal mobile phones - the sheer number of passwords is impossible to manage without writing them down or using a password manager (which they can't, due to application whitelisting). Yet another example of how overly restrictive security policies manage to achieve the exact opposite of their intent.
Security is a process, and a series of tradeoffs, not an absolute, and generally, those who fail to realize this end up harming the people they are supposed to protect.
CloudFlare is not targeting Tor users. They aren't doing anything not considered best practices in general and practised all over the net. Showing a CAPTCHA to a Tor user is used in many places, including Google and Yahoo, who employ this method without irking people. The issue is that the technology CloudFlare is using to accomplish this is malfunctioning, and not that they are targeting Tor users.
So far, the Tor project hasn't accused them of surveillance publicly. That would be overkill. Adding a cookie to a web browsing session (which I presume is so that session is not subjected to such measures in the future) is hardly mass surveillance. Tor are being their usual anal selves and refusing to compromise. This problem is a technical malfunction, not mass surveillance of CloudFlare users.
They do have a point that CloudFlare can be notoriously difficult to resolve problems with, though. CloudFlare can be just as anal as Tor.
But what is sorely lacking is mention of specificaly which issues were fixed - a CVE number would be nice, where possible, for example "Fixed issues with authentication, update installation, and operating system installation" still doesn't really tell me much. How many issues? Which issues? Am I experiencing these issues, and therefore should prioritize this update? But at least it's a step in the right direction from them.
Now, if we could get them do do something similar for all the encrypted telemetry data, we'd be getting somewhere...
Slashdot Mirror
First, you need to give up your freedom. Be denied all contact with all other humans, and be cut off from the world. You'd need to accept spending the rest of your natural life like that. Never again see a sunrise, or a rolling ocean. Never again join a motorcycle club. Never again say "Gee, it's nice out, I think I'll go for a walk!" Never again become excited with the arrival of spring. Never again feel the wind in your hair or the sun on your face. And accept that there is no hope, none, not ever, that that will ever change.
If you're willing to give up all that in exchange for a few video games, a treadmill, and three square a day, well sir, kudos to you. I wouldn't.
It might not. It might consume twice as much, or possibly half. What's the point here, exactly?
Exactly this. Where do businesses expect to sell their products if too few people make enough money to buy them?
They have no idea. They expect to pay very little to the very poor, and sell very much to the very rich. That's the whole problem.
While I agree that this is an undesirable side effect of raising the minimum wage in some (or many?) circumstances, I also at the same time disagree with the idea that wages should be kept low (and in some cases well below the poverty line) simply to provide employment. By your argument, the result of this minimum wage hike is that McDonald's now has more productive workers at the expense of lesser skilled workers being more often unemployed. I see that as a zero-gain, but also zero-loss, proposition.
Now while your point that it removes an important rung on the economic ladder is at least in some (or again, many?) cases true, I tend towards my more capitalistic opinions - that wages should not be kept low simply to provide employment to the unskilled. There should be a wage floor that allows unskilled workers to consume baskets of goods, not merely subsist on them. For the record, I am currently unemployed, have been for a year, and live on a shoestring budget. 90% of my expenses are tax-free, give or take. Things like groceries, diapers, medications, rent, all of it is tax-free in most modern societies. Raise the minimum wage for my wife, and we'll have more money for luxuries, or at least, for taxable consumer goods, returning nearly all of that to the economy rather than a savings account or investment fund, and also returning more of it to government coffers.
Without minimum wage legislation, the market will tend towards indentured servitude (I know, that's a rather poignant term to use). I would rather see poverty level wages eliminated entirely, and a corresponding rise in unemployment, than see subsistence level wages proliferated. If that means I pay more for my Big Macs, I'm all for it. There is a reason I don't shop at WalMart, and don't buy clothing made in Bangladesh. I want the people who manufacture and sell my consumer goods to be capable of supporting a family. It's why I buy my coffee from Starbucks - they pay well (decently, at least, at least in Canada). I for one am happy to see more productive, and hopefully better paid, workers at McDonalds, knowing that the people working there can afford to feed a family. If that means higher unemployment, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.
I suppose it all boils down to this - I'd rather see fewer better paying jobs than more lesser paying jobs (grammar, ugh...).
Yes, that is fair. My point was that we heard the exact same arguments.
It actually wasn't too long ago that we raised the minimum wage from $7.45 to $10.25, either. We increased it by about 50% in the seven years prior to 2011 (source) with little noticeable effect on unemployment (no source for that, but it all gets a tad murky due to the 2008 recession at that point).
But then again, it may not...
Here in Ontario, Canada, we raised the minimum wage from $10.25 to $11.00, and unemployment went down in the following months and year, from around 7.5 %to 6.75% (source). While that doesn't prove that minimum wage increases never result in unemployment rises, it does disprove that they always result in unemployment rises.
Minimum wage increases killing jobs is a ridiculous notion - prices can always raise as well, and besides, the naysayers repeat this line almost Every. Single. Time. - even for overdue inflation-indexed increases, which generally casts doubt on their positions. In reality, it's a lot more complicated than that.
I will never understand why minimum wage is not tied to inflation rates - this is a ridiculous argument to have Every Five Years.
http://www.thenation.com/artic...
http://www.thestar.com/busines...
https://www.weforum.org/agenda...
No - I don't think you understand. The DMCA is an American law, and this is a German court.
That's great, for those of us with the option to leave work early on Mondays...
I tought maybe he was Ray Bradbury's son. Turns out, he's even less important. Why are we giving this nobody airtime? Who the fuck actually cares what he says?
This is all great - I can see it might actually work (but then again, it might not).
But I am typically a pedestrian. How will I cross the street? Do these smart cars just do their "ballet dance" around me? Do I press a button and tell all cars to stop, while I proceed through the intersection? All the article can say is
seamlessly knitting together flows of cars, pedestrians and bikers.
How, exactly? I can see a system of autonomous cars being able to do this, but TFA mentions squat about how it will handle bicycles and pedestrians; only that somehow, magically, it will. There are no pedestrians in the promotional video, so it's pretty hard to tell. How will a computer system predict when I will cross the road? With no "light" to instruct me, how am I supposed to know when to cross?
Seems to me they left out a rather important thing about intersections - the humans using them are inherently unpredictable.
Mod parent up.
Yes - USB drives are not archival quality storage. But no - they're not expensive. I have several dozen el cheapo flash drives in my desk drawer, most of which were freebies. Just back up on to a cheap storage medium multiple times. If you're so worried that a flash drive won't survive until you need it (Protip: it will, for about 10 years. Then just rewrite it and you're good for another ten years. They wear out from use, not electrical charge leakage.), then make 10 backups. I'd bet my big toe that at least one of them will survive a couple of generations. Keep one or two passphrase encrypted copies online somewhere (not necessarily cloud storage - online meaning you don't need to fetch a thumb drive for it), and you've got a good compromise. For corporate use, just use a safety deposit box with a few thumbdrives and reflash them once a year. That's simple, effective, and secure enough for most applications.
What do I do? I keep my KeePass database (which contains many encryption keys) on a cloud storage provider. The combination of passphrase and keyfile encryption is good enough for me, and strikes the balance I need between ease of use, accessibility, and security.
You're overanalyzing. This is a solved problem. Make multiple backups, some offline, and store them in a secure location, e.g. the parent's suggestion of a safety deposit box.
All true, with one oversight - if they can break the encryption on your phone, they don't even care if the information exists elsewhere - which is why we need strong encryption on mobile phones. I think we agree on that.
Think something like, once they know which cloud file storage provider I use, it's easy enough to construct an investigation path to plausibly lead them to that conclusion by other means, even though they'd never have known without breaking my phone - and then get a warrant for DropBox or Box or Amazon or whoever I use.
Nah, I read it, but I was also being sarcastic.
The problem would be where the FBI presents evidence via parallel construction only where it was attainable by some other means, and they omit the evidence elsewhere. The ability to break into everyone's phone would allow this - it would give the feds access to information they don't otherwise have, and they then choose to present before the court only that information which could plausibly have been obtained elsewhere. It happens regularly (but I can't source that. It's a hunch :p)
Any one of those "Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems" could be the "upgrade" to Windows 10 - that's the whole problem. Well okay, assuming the update size is listed correctly, they aren't, but you get the point.
You clearly have not heard of the concept of parallel construction.
I know, I know. I actually read the article.
The eye-safe system is able to aim lasers, with a wavelength of 1,550 nanometres, up from the ground towards an aircraft, which is fitted with a special reflector which captures the beam.
Nothing to worry about.
It's just a fluff piece about a line of research that's not finished yet. They've managed to send information over a laser at a distance of 1km, which, while not necessarily easy, is a far cry from low earth orbit.
The whole article is full of phrases like "suggested applications", "could also be applied", "could help speed up", "leading to exciting developments", "will potentially make", and so on and so forth. So in other words, while it's an interesting line of research, they have accomplished nothing so far.
It's just a PR piece meant to drum up research dollars (or pounds) and justify the project's continued existence - according to their web site, they were slated to shut down halfway through last year.
Data storage capacities are going up. News at 11.
Nuclear accounts for approximately 20% of the power generated in the US. How, pray tell, does the NRC plan to replace this generation capacity?
Oh wait, it's mdsolar, all nuclear is bad and we live in a happy slappy unicorn world where the consequences don't matter. It's a non-story regarding a minor problem that somebody wants to blow out of proportion, because NUCLEAR EVIL.
The problem is when those decisions end up putting someone out of business. I actually fully expected Mozilla to go Full Asshole on this; they consistently ignore the needs of users anyway. But it seems they were willing to reach a compromise, and especially in this case, I feel it's quite warranted:
Worldpay blames this situation on a communications mishap. They say that someone forgot to ask for these certificates before the January 1 deadline.
The company says they are already in the midst of the process of updating their servers to SHA-2, but this blunder now puts some of its users in danger of not having their payments go through.
-snip-
Internally, Mozilla has agreed to allow Symantec to issue these certificates under two conditions: the entire process should be transparent, and that the certificates should expire after only 90 days.
WorldPay is a rather large online payment processor - this would affect a rather large number of innocent users, which certainly wasn't the purpose behind the deadline. As much as I agree that SHA-1 based certs should be phased out, and phased out yesterday, Mozilla is right here - there are exceptions to every rule. This deadline was put in place to protect users, not put them out of business.
As a related aside, a friend of mine, a lawyer, recently asked for advice on how to store her passwords; she works as a crown prosecutor in a very tightly locked down environment. This jurisdiction's policies are so restrictive that the only workable solution employees can find to reasonably securely store passwords and logins is on their personal mobile phones - the sheer number of passwords is impossible to manage without writing them down or using a password manager (which they can't, due to application whitelisting). Yet another example of how overly restrictive security policies manage to achieve the exact opposite of their intent.
Security is a process, and a series of tradeoffs, not an absolute, and generally, those who fail to realize this end up harming the people they are supposed to protect.
CloudFlare is not targeting Tor users. They aren't doing anything not considered best practices in general and practised all over the net. Showing a CAPTCHA to a Tor user is used in many places, including Google and Yahoo, who employ this method without irking people. The issue is that the technology CloudFlare is using to accomplish this is malfunctioning, and not that they are targeting Tor users.
So far, the Tor project hasn't accused them of surveillance publicly. That would be overkill. Adding a cookie to a web browsing session (which I presume is so that session is not subjected to such measures in the future) is hardly mass surveillance. Tor are being their usual anal selves and refusing to compromise. This problem is a technical malfunction, not mass surveillance of CloudFlare users.
They do have a point that CloudFlare can be notoriously difficult to resolve problems with, though. CloudFlare can be just as anal as Tor.
The only way they can trace you is if you use a store card and they are not allowed to sell that data.
It's called an Air Miles card, and here in North America, you can get it added as an option to your CC. So, silly tracking regulations averted!
Operating system installs YOU!
But what is sorely lacking is mention of specificaly which issues were fixed - a CVE number would be nice, where possible, for example "Fixed issues with authentication, update installation, and operating system installation" still doesn't really tell me much. How many issues? Which issues? Am I experiencing these issues, and therefore should prioritize this update? But at least it's a step in the right direction from them.
Now, if we could get them do do something similar for all the encrypted telemetry data, we'd be getting somewhere...
Sorry about that. Gonna make sure to stop this going forward
Thank you, sir. It is much appreciated, I'm sure by everyone. We cannot discuss an article we cannot read.