I do work for an outsourcing company, won't say which, but your I don't think you comments about dangers of outsourcing quality are accurate right now.
Not IBM, but some outsourcing companies have learned to provide very good quality services, and do anything, from providing more staff, to taking over all IT from a company.
I wouldn't outsource my core business IT if I were a CIO/CEO, but I know why old fashioned companies would do it. You may pay less, but you can at the same time get way better results. Outsourcing companies scale up and down a lot more easily, they bring experience from other industries, you get some free consulting, and you even get to "fire" employees for any reason, no question asked, no sheriffs to call.
It would be interesting to have some kind of rating system for the internet. I would like something like sites rating their content with some kind of header, so you can do client filtering more easily. You could just use sites rating, and have a grey/blacklist of sites that misrepresent their content. As an example, I don't care whether my kids see tits, but I would like to filter some of the violence they see in children oriented content.
Identifying actual users is very expensive, but most importantly, opens the door to track everything everyone sees, with a strong identity, like if all your browsing activity went through Facebook. We just don't want that to happen, it's spooky, and very dangerous,
Slashdot probably has more uses for a marketing agency than trying to sell stuff to engineers. I would use primarily it as a research lab. You have a great community of dedicated people who will contribute valuable content. You can just let it live, gather valuable information, and play your experiments there. Do they contribute more when headlines are more sensationalist? Do they react to unfair moderation? How many ads will they put up with before complaining? Also... can this be used to leverage engineers as "influencers" ? I don't mean slashvertisements, I mean well planned manipulation.
The food pyramid recommends I eat most of my calories from cereals and other carbohydrates. There is no scientific evidence that carbohydrates need to be most of your diet, calorie-wise. You might need a very small amount of them, to jump start your day, maybe, but no reason to fill half your plate with them.
A diet of only protein and veggies is a lot better for me. I am overweight, but I do lose weight if I diet, I just cut as many carbs as possible, add as many veggies as possible, make sure all meal have enough protein, and not care about fats. If I add exercise, I can lose 2-4 pounds a week. I managed to lose over 40 pounds that way. Gained half that over several years of bad diet, no exercise.
Before that strategy, I tried several times low calorie, "balanced" diet, with exercise, I might lose 2 pounds in a month. My doctor says that carbs are bad specially when you are fat, and many fat people benefit from cutting carbs.
Also, most importantly, there's a psychological side to this. Eating is not something yo decide to do, it's more like an addiction. Some foods make you more likely to keep your diet. That's very important. Losing weight can be an test on discipline, but it's much better if some technique is found that helps you lose weight _without_ discipline. That would help more people.
A crying baby can be incredibly soothing to some of us, when we realize it's actually not our kid that is crying. (shamelessly stolen from some twitter guy, but true)
This is not a debate contest. I'm just complaining about the article, which is stupid and tries to ridicule people having reasonable doubts about something that is indeed dangerous..
Is this better?
"Then you need to prove [or at least estimate] the herd effect [for this vaccine] is very useful. [Meaning that it's strong enough, for this particular disease and this particular vaccine, and this particular population, to justify the investment of making people get the vaccines and its enforcement.]"
The whole article is an ad hominen . The piece tries to sell vaccines by calling anyone against _this_ particular vaccine an Anti-Vaxxer, and saying that rejecting this vaccine is is Anti-Vax nonsense.
It's not nonsense. Vaccines can be very risky. The first thing you have to do is doubt them.
Then they need to be proven safe. They can be sold then.
Then they need to be proven effective. You might want to use them then.
Then they need to be proven beneficial to the people as a whole, as opposed to the same money used on the next best. Then you can have governments pay for it.
Then you need to prove the herd effect is very useful. Then you can have the government ask everybody to use it.
Serious Drupal shops and clients -never- live update their sites.
I'm glad things are so great for you on Mount Olympus. Some of us AREN'T serious Drupal shops. We upgrade when the software says upgrade. When things break, like they shouldn't, we get pissed off.
You can pay someone to worry about that for you. It's pretty easy to move to a hosted Drupal service, so you don't have to worry about these issues, and get a nice SLA so you can complain to someone to make your site work for you.
The web is a spooky place. It's becoming harder and harder to keep your web business online, without a serious team dedicated to secure it.
Fuck that. I wanted an Open Source CMS so that I could run it cheaply.
"Open Source" doesn't mean that it will run cheaply. In some cases it means just the opposite. Also, it doesn't mean "easy". You don't have to pay for licenses, but you still need to do your homework at understanding whether a specific tool suits your use case, at a reasonable cost/effort.
Drupal is very good if you need to do something hard, like integrate with different applications, build your own modules, or you have a large number of documents, something like that. They use it at my city government, and they do great stuff, they handle a lot of data, a lot of traffic, a lot of services provided to citizens, looking great.
If you want something easy, you need something easy, like wordpress, or something hosted. It's quite cheap and easy to run. Just need the right tool.
Magnetic stripe cards provide no security themselves. They are good enough for now, but card makers and some customers want something with a bit more security. Chip cards provide reasonably good encryption, and are much harder to clone.
Phones, on the other hand, are used for payment a lot right now. They are used when you pay for Uber, or when you buy apps, or when I pay my rent with a bank transfer using my phone's web browser + a coordinate card. Plus, it's usually with you, so it's convenient, that is also important.
That's not how democracy works. You can't just take people that only lived under a dictatorship, send them to vote, and then say that they are responsible for the outcome.
I live in a country with a long tradition of democracy (not in the seventies) and strong political parties. Of course I am responsible for the guys in office.
In Irak, they are only partially resposible for whatever came out of the polls. More responsible are the guys who killed the dictator with the supposed intention to replace him with something better. That seldom works. What happened was exactly what was feared by those who opposed military action.
I think this is the most probable outcome when you just destroy a government from the outside, democratic or otherwise. It has some characteristics in common to what happened in Central America when the US used to throw more of their their weight around. Chaos and mayhem. Extremists thrive in that environment, for fun or for profit.
First of all, you are right, the category is "your rights online". Some discussion about how there is no longer an online and offline distinction might be interesting, but you are right .
About citizens having some rights and foreigners only having privileges, that is very convenient, but deeply unethical.
All people have the same rights regardless of anything. You usually can deny some of them to foreigners, based on practical considerations, like lack or resources or something similar.
In any case, it's so very wrong to say that someone has different rights only because they were born inside some geographic shape, or have a specific lineage.
A table of poker is linked to probability. Playing poker for a living is more associated to statistics. That's would be a good example, yet bad advice .
This is exactly what you were waiting for. There are lots of awesome battery ideas out there. Prototyping the battery in the 18650 format means that it can work as a drop-in replacement for lithium batteries.
To the crowd that wants product, not science, this is a big thing. A new battery technology is ready at last, and can be used to replace what we have. They will surely need need a fab process, and money (probably the reason for the press release), but the technology itself is ready at this point.
But the old saying is "in order to finish first, first you must finish". It will be interesting to see how aggressive different algorithms are, and how they respond to different circumstances. There is always a possibility of an "error in calculation", but the algorithms are unlikely to be out and out reckless, because they won't achieve anything by not finishing.
The fact that Senna existed proves that saying teaches you nothing . He was a lot more aggressive than other drivers, had lots of problems because of that, not just accidents, but managed to get 3 championships. I'm pretty sure the reason others are not more like Senna is that they don't want to end their life against a wall. AIs won't care about that kind of thing.
If successful, you also get the existence of the product, in the offered conditions.
Example, you pay $200, and you get you widget next year, or you have to wait until Apple/whoever "creates" it in 4-5 years, patents it, and then you have a chance to buy it for $500.
Yes, that's essentially the same thing, you believe the economy will keep growing forever, because there will always be scarcity to fuel it.
The problem with that is that you can sell only 7 billion iphones a year, and the minute you achieve that, you just can't keep growing anymore.
The few things that are naturally scarce are not enough to fuel an economy. A small fraction of people work because they want nicer things, but most do it because they need to pay the mortgage or feed their kids. That's a large part of the economy.
In any case, it's easy to understand that there _will_ come a time where money stops being the center of our lives, and we produce enough stuff for everyone without having everyone work 40+ hours a week.
The question is _when_, and _how_ that change happens. Marx thought it would happen soon. The commies thought it was possible a century ago. Looks like they were wrong in that, also in their methods. They also thought they knew what people wanted, looks like they were mostly wrong. We still need to see what happens with China's version.
The lukewarm socialist think that the welfare state is going to grow until everything is taken care of by the state. Has it problems, but might work. Basic income is one of the big steps in that direction, and one of the easiest measures to implement.
Right wing people seem to just think that economy, both physical and virtual, is going to keep growing forever, and that scarcity will fuel its growth forever. If there comes a time that that no longer happens, there's no plan, and they probably hope to be already dead by then.
Slashdot Mirror
I do work for an outsourcing company, won't say which, but your I don't think you comments about dangers of outsourcing quality are accurate right now.
Not IBM, but some outsourcing companies have learned to provide very good quality services, and do anything, from providing more staff, to taking over all IT from a company.
I wouldn't outsource my core business IT if I were a CIO/CEO, but I know why old fashioned companies would do it. You may pay less, but you can at the same time get way better results. Outsourcing companies scale up and down a lot more easily, they bring experience from other industries, you get some free consulting, and you even get to "fire" employees for any reason, no question asked, no sheriffs to call.
You do make sense, but I don't agree.
It would be interesting to have some kind of rating system for the internet. I would like something like sites rating their content with some kind of header, so you can do client filtering more easily. You could just use sites rating, and have a grey/blacklist of sites that misrepresent their content. As an example, I don't care whether my kids see tits, but I would like to filter some of the violence they see in children oriented content.
Identifying actual users is very expensive, but most importantly, opens the door to track everything everyone sees, with a strong identity, like if all your browsing activity went through Facebook. We just don't want that to happen, it's spooky, and very dangerous,
I was to the US, and experienced that too. I crossed a bridge, and got from New York State, into New Jersey State. No checkpoint! Awesome!!
Slashdot probably has more uses for a marketing agency than trying to sell stuff to engineers.
I would use primarily it as a research lab. You have a great community of dedicated people who will contribute valuable content.
You can just let it live, gather valuable information, and play your experiments there. Do they contribute more when headlines are more sensationalist? Do they react to unfair moderation? How many ads will they put up with before complaining?
Also... can this be used to leverage engineers as "influencers" ? I don't mean slashvertisements, I mean well planned manipulation.
Cities are man-made, complex, and they are way less fragile than a human body, or a brain.
The food pyramid recommends I eat most of my calories from cereals and other carbohydrates.
There is no scientific evidence that carbohydrates need to be most of your diet, calorie-wise.
You might need a very small amount of them, to jump start your day, maybe, but no reason to fill half your plate with them.
A diet of only protein and veggies is a lot better for me. I am overweight, but I do lose weight if I diet, I just cut as many carbs as possible, add as many veggies as possible, make sure all meal have enough protein, and not care about fats. If I add exercise, I can lose 2-4 pounds a week. I managed to lose over 40 pounds that way. Gained half that over several years of bad diet, no exercise.
Before that strategy, I tried several times low calorie, "balanced" diet, with exercise, I might lose 2 pounds in a month. My doctor says that carbs are bad specially when you are fat, and many fat people benefit from cutting carbs.
Also, most importantly, there's a psychological side to this. Eating is not something yo decide to do, it's more like an addiction. Some foods make you more likely to keep your diet. That's very important. Losing weight can be an test on discipline, but it's much better if some technique is found that helps you lose weight _without_ discipline. That would help more people.
A crying baby can be incredibly soothing to some of us, when we realize it's actually not our kid that is crying. (shamelessly stolen from some twitter guy, but true)
This is not a debate contest. I'm just complaining about the article, which is stupid and tries to ridicule people having reasonable doubts about something that is indeed dangerous..
Is this better?
"Then you need to prove [or at least estimate] the herd effect [for this vaccine] is very useful. [Meaning that it's strong enough, for this particular disease and this particular vaccine, and this particular population, to justify the investment of making people get the vaccines and its enforcement.]"
The whole article is an ad hominen .
The piece tries to sell vaccines by calling anyone against _this_ particular vaccine an Anti-Vaxxer, and saying that rejecting this vaccine is is Anti-Vax nonsense.
It's not nonsense. Vaccines can be very risky. The first thing you have to do is doubt them.
Then they need to be proven safe. They can be sold then.
Then they need to be proven effective. You might want to use them then.
Then they need to be proven beneficial to the people as a whole, as opposed to the same money used on the next best. Then you can have governments pay for it.
Then you need to prove the herd effect is very useful. Then you can have the government ask everybody to use it.
Serious Drupal shops and clients -never- live update their sites.
I'm glad things are so great for you on Mount Olympus. Some of us AREN'T serious Drupal shops. We upgrade when the software says upgrade. When things break, like they shouldn't, we get pissed off.
You can pay someone to worry about that for you.
It's pretty easy to move to a hosted Drupal service, so you don't have to worry about these issues, and get a nice SLA so you can complain to someone to make your site work for you.
The web is a spooky place. It's becoming harder and harder to keep your web business online, without a serious team dedicated to secure it.
Fuck that. I wanted an Open Source CMS so that I could run it cheaply.
"Open Source" doesn't mean that it will run cheaply. In some cases it means just the opposite.
Also, it doesn't mean "easy". You don't have to pay for licenses, but you still need to do your homework at understanding whether a specific tool suits your use case, at a reasonable cost/effort.
Drupal is very good if you need to do something hard, like integrate with different applications, build your own modules, or you have a large number of documents, something like that. They use it at my city government, and they do great stuff, they handle a lot of data, a lot of traffic, a lot of services provided to citizens, looking great.
If you want something easy, you need something easy, like wordpress, or something hosted. It's quite cheap and easy to run. Just need the right tool.
You said the same as the parent.
Poor kids can get an education, but it's much harder for them than it is for rich kids.
About correlation between poverty and parents perceived value of education, well, I can't think clearly on a empty stomach, can you?
Magnetic stripe cards provide no security themselves. They are good enough for now, but card makers and some customers want something with a bit more security. Chip cards provide reasonably good encryption, and are much harder to clone.
Phones, on the other hand, are used for payment a lot right now. They are used when you pay for Uber, or when you buy apps, or when I pay my rent with a bank transfer using my phone's web browser + a coordinate card. Plus, it's usually with you, so it's convenient, that is also important.
So this is a blog, but with payments. We are back in the nineties.
That's not how democracy works.
You can't just take people that only lived under a dictatorship, send them to vote, and then say that they are responsible for the outcome.
I live in a country with a long tradition of democracy (not in the seventies) and strong political parties. Of course I am responsible for the guys in office.
In Irak, they are only partially resposible for whatever came out of the polls. More responsible are the guys who killed the dictator with the supposed intention to replace him with something better. That seldom works. What happened was exactly what was feared by those who opposed military action.
I think this is the most probable outcome when you just destroy a government from the outside, democratic or otherwise. It has some characteristics in common to what happened in Central America when the US used to throw more of their their weight around. Chaos and mayhem. Extremists thrive in that environment, for fun or for profit.
First of all, you are right, the category is "your rights online". Some discussion about how there is no longer an online and offline distinction might be interesting, but you are right .
About citizens having some rights and foreigners only having privileges, that is very convenient, but deeply unethical.
All people have the same rights regardless of anything. You usually can deny some of them to foreigners, based on practical considerations, like lack or resources or something similar.
In any case, it's so very wrong to say that someone has different rights only because they were born inside some geographic shape, or have a specific lineage.
You overran Iraqs government, and armed those guys. Just saying it isn't so won't change it.
A table of poker is linked to probability. Playing poker for a living is more associated to statistics. That's would be a good example, yet bad advice .
.. unimaginative douchebag.
News at 11
In order to keep they buoyancy, they won't be able to fart a lot.
This is exactly what you were waiting for.
There are lots of awesome battery ideas out there. Prototyping the battery in the 18650 format means that it can work as a drop-in replacement for lithium batteries.
To the crowd that wants product, not science, this is a big thing. A new battery technology is ready at last, and can be used to replace what we have. They will surely need need a fab process, and money (probably the reason for the press release), but the technology itself is ready at this point.
But the old saying is "in order to finish first, first you must finish". It will be interesting to see how aggressive different algorithms are, and how they respond to different circumstances. There is always a possibility of an "error in calculation", but the algorithms are unlikely to be out and out reckless, because they won't achieve anything by not finishing.
The fact that Senna existed proves that saying teaches you nothing .
He was a lot more aggressive than other drivers, had lots of problems because of that, not just accidents, but managed to get 3 championships.
I'm pretty sure the reason others are not more like Senna is that they don't want to end their life against a wall. AIs won't care about that kind of thing.
It's not exactly that.
If successful, you also get the existence of the product, in the offered conditions.
Example, you pay $200, and you get you widget next year, or you have to wait until Apple/whoever "creates" it in 4-5 years, patents it, and then you have a chance to buy it for $500.
It _is_ an investment.
Yes, that's essentially the same thing, you believe the economy will keep growing forever, because there will always be scarcity to fuel it.
The problem with that is that you can sell only 7 billion iphones a year, and the minute you achieve that, you just can't keep growing anymore.
The few things that are naturally scarce are not enough to fuel an economy. A small fraction of people work because they want nicer things, but most do it because they need to pay the mortgage or feed their kids. That's a large part of the economy.
3 is just an implementation of 2, maybe flawed.
In any case, it's easy to understand that there _will_ come a time where money stops being the center of our lives, and we produce enough stuff for everyone without having everyone work 40+ hours a week.
The question is _when_, and _how_ that change happens. Marx thought it would happen soon. The commies thought it was possible a century ago. Looks like they were wrong in that, also in their methods. They also thought they knew what people wanted, looks like they were mostly wrong. We still need to see what happens with China's version.
The lukewarm socialist think that the welfare state is going to grow until everything is taken care of by the state. Has it problems, but might work. Basic income is one of the big steps in that direction, and one of the easiest measures to implement.
Right wing people seem to just think that economy, both physical and virtual, is going to keep growing forever, and that scarcity will fuel its growth forever. If there comes a time that that no longer happens, there's no plan, and they probably hope to be already dead by then.