Congratulations to you Mad Mike. In our current social media world there is so much noise as everyone shouts their ideas into the void in order to attract attention; however like a bird in spring with a perfect voice you have reached a level of lunacy which lets you rise about the white noise threshold of crazy. The saddest thing... you are probably not crazy at all, just using this as a strategy to become (in)famous and profit from it.
Is Netflix DRM really so bad? I watch Netflix regularly, and I do it on my laptop, on my phone, on my tablet, on Chromecast. I have not had to buy any special gadgets except the Chromecast - and I could even skip that and watch Netflix on my PS4 or connect the TV to my laptop if I wanted to be masochistic. The whole setup just works - pretty much all the time - and I have access to an order magnitude more entertainment than what I actually have time for, between Netflix and a few other streaming services.
Maybe it is an attitude that just comes with age. When I was in my twenties, I would tinker and create complex technical setups for just about everything. Which is fun when you are into that. But it also means spending hours and hours searching the net for how to do that thing which almost noone is doing which requires that piece of software you have to compile from some alpha version that does not really fit with your setup... you spend hours and hours creating something that works - and then half a year later it breaks due to some version of something changing somewhere or some service changing their protocol - and you barely remember what you did in the first place, and instead of watching that move you planned you end up spending the whole night fixing your tech.
At some point I just got fed up with the complexities of filling up life with nonstandard complex tech setups and doing everything the hard way. My tip - if you have HDMI problems, just spend a few dollars to fix your tool chain. HDMI works just fine for almost all of us. Netflix is not the problem here.
And then what? If you put weapon platforms in space, what is the next step? Well, for the other side to develop means to disable those armed satellites, of course! And what happens if you start exploding satellites in space? Kessler syndrome and losing our ability to get into space entirely.
I cannot see why the US wants to lead a race to the bottom. Respond to aggressive measures by other nations in this field, yes. But to be the one to actually start this craziness? So stupid.
Taking mosquitoes entirely out of the ecosystem by making them sterile? Very dangerous to the ecosystem.
On a recent Science Friday episode they discussed another solution which is actually viable, which is to make mosquitoes shy away from human blood. Humans don't get infected, mosquitoes can continue living, the ecosystem can continue functioning as is, everybody wins.
That non-significant share of colleagues who ignore your emails, possibly pretending they never saw it, are truly annoying. And I am not talking about spam here, but polite non-sociopath emails that are somehow important, in which there are specific questions or calls for action stated to the recipient - some times requiring nothing more than a quick response. Emails that if left unanswered means the project I am in charge of starts grinding to a halt.
Eventually after pulling every possible trick in the book to solve it yourself, you have to escalate and have your boss call that other person's boss, with a lot of negativity following - and the end result (because you were right that person should have responded) (s)he gets the order to help out, which they then do in the most passive aggressive unhelpful manner they can think of. And all the way you are thinking... why was all this bullthis necessary.
At some point after learning I could never expect any response from some particular ill-mannered person, I would start walking over to their desk immediately after sending that email (unfortunately only works on-site), and if they were not there I would put a post-it note in the middle of their computer screen asking them to please look at some email I just sent. Which improved responses, but you would be surprised how many people just ignore the post-it note - and also how many people will look you in the eyes and say they are going to do something for you, and then proceed by doing exactly zero.
If you need to get in touch with someone remotely then post-it notes obviously do not work, but if you have some colleague there who you are on friendly terms with, if the request is important you could send them an email asking to go have a chat with that person, saying that "hey, so and so sent you an email and asked me to tell you it's really important".
Always respond to emails. Often you can apply 80/20 rule, in which a quick reply is all the recipient needs. Or if the request should not be answered as stated, just quickly respond why - in 70% of cases the request goes away. Even stating "this is not a priority because X, do Y instead" will make most the non-priority stuff just evaporate. Or some times, "I will have to get back to you in about X time" is appropriate, but then you also have to follow up.
The problem is products are not built to repair, which is by design and for multiple reasons:
It is cheaper to design, build and document such products. A benefit which _may_ benefit the consumer as the product becomes cheaper to buy, however for many types of products that "gain" will be offset by follow-on added costs. For some cheap toy build-to-repair would be overkill. For a tractor or washing machine, the situation is different.
Build to break. If you are selling washing machines, your revenue stream will mostly dry up if washing machines last 30 years after everyone has bought one. Solution? Design it so it likely breaks 2-3 years after the warranty period ends, and as it will likely be very expensive and lots of hassle to get repaired (if at all possible), consumer has to buy another one to replace it.
And then there is the printer ink cartridges story. Lock the customer in for some product which they have to get it serviced, such as a car or a tractor. Then you mark up those services by a shameless amount and pro$it. Customers make their purchasing decisions mostly on initial price and not lifetime cost, so this is where a lot of money is to be gained.
The answer? As for so many other areas where a pure capital system leads to poor, unfair and overall sub-optimal solutions and practices, regulation is needed. Laws are needed, initially for the most problematic products, to force producers to make products repairable by 3rd parties, and guarantee the rights by others to perform such repairs - plus resolving what effects (if any) such repairs have on warranties.
Unfortunately, greedy industries, their lobbyists and politicians-for-hire continue to successfully manage to muddy the waters, and so I am not optimistic that this will improve any time soon.
If individuals could do whatever they wanted, and let no "government" impose any restrictions, then everyone should be allowed to walk up to someone and stab them in the back.
Stabbing a child in the back? Obviously not - nearly 100% of us instinctively recoil from that idea. But... enough people exercising their right to make idiot decisions causing a measles outbreak, and they will kill that child with weak immune system who cannot get vaccinated due some allergy,.
Dead is dead, whether it is from a knife in the back or from disease. I think that if you took some of those anti-vaxxers to a hospital, showed them that "here is a group of kids in poor health who cannot get vaccine, if we get a measles outbreak one of them is likely to die - let's just get it over with now, we will let your child not have the vaccine if you strangle one of these kids with your own hands" - there would not be too many takers.
This is an extension of the same logic that guns are so dangerous. It is a more impersonal weapon which can kill from a distance. In addition to being a force equalizer, it is a lot easier (I assume) to point at someone and pull the trigger, rather than having to go up and wrestle them while stabbing with a knife. Well, anti-vaxxing is just that. It is something which kills someone you don't know from an action that has no violence associated with it whatsoever.
Those anti-vaxxers should just go live on their own island, and put in place whatever "no government, no regulation, I will do whatever the frack I want" policies - then we send some drones over there and broadcast Lord of the Flies II live for a couple months, until they extinct themselves. Because humans are herd beings, and herds don't functions when its members are not willing to sacrifice for the collective good.
Actually, that would be one way to deal with anti-vaxxers, government saying "ok, if you are going to do that, here is a metric crap ton of benefits we are not going to provide - no healthcare, no school, here is a chip for your car so you will be paying for using roads, no police coming to your house if you call 911, no help from embassies if you get into trouble while abroad, you are banned from national parks,..."
I am guessing some of the more educated people are more likely to overthink things, and fall into the trap that "I am smart, I know better slash I can work things out for myself". Combine a solid lack of knowledge regarding how disease spreads, how immunity works, herd immunity and statistics - with an unhealthy dose of scepticism regarding how "the man" is trying to get you to put things in your bloodstream that you don't know what contains - plus the entirely failed statistics of "some random child somewhere in America had a vaccine and got sick" combined with a lack of understanding of causality - and you get those anti-vaxxers. Plus there is the idea that being subjected to a disease somehow makes your immune system "stronger".
So you take a cocktail of misunderstandings how the world works, put that in a container (brain) which totally overestimates its own abilities to figure out things in a complex world - and voila, out comes an idiot decision.
Plus there may also be an unhealthy dose of "we are smart people, we have good hygiene, we have strong genes... my children don't need vaccines (and thus implicitly: like those other filthy kids)".
Truly smart people understand how little they know and why. I wouldn't say those anti-vaxxers are very educated people. They have lots of credits, yes. But their understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed.
The world is fighting unhealthy eating habits and obesity epidemics. Meanwhile Pepsi is working hard to find new ways to sneak addictive empty calories into your body.
Just leaving this trojan horse headline here for the Turkish thought police in case I ever have to go to the Ottoman empire on vacation, to prove my "support" for Turkish dictators.
A coal mining company cannot possibly keep their business going without mining coal. And Facebook cannot possibly keep their scam going without getting paid for user data (while hitting their insane profitability targets) unless they start charging their users instead. Which is not going to happen.
If anyone in this world deserves to be doxxed and have their entire life exposed, plus have others meddling in their private affairs, it is Mark Zuckerberg. Also, some rich person who cares should buy all the property around wherever MZ lives, and just put up huge billboards in the middle of his view, running ads for whatever Mark would find annoying. Like books on how to become a nice person.
You can sue anyone for anything, just like you can ask for anything. Can you send me a million dollars? I could sue you for using a microwave transmitter to control my brain, forcing me to wear a tinfoil hat, with loss of income as nobody will hire me and emotional trauma. I could sue no problem. On the other hand none of us would expect me to win the lawsuit.
If the majority of the cards have a chip, then the majority of fraud cases will be cards with chip. The point of moving from a magnetic strip to a chip, is that others cannot gain access to your card simply by swiping it. After chip conversion, that vector of attack is mostly gone, and criminals move on to other methods. For which cards with chip are just as good/bad as any other card.
Sure thing. If you give Trump a buck, based on his track record as a "business man" (translation: con artist) he will surely lose it into some scheme that ends with bankruptcy. But the amazing thing is that a new buck will magically enter the system from some unlikely source... like mafia or foreign powers.
With "its fuel supply exhausted", NASA has "elected to [...] leave it in its current, safe orbit". If you have only one option, seems to me there is not much electing to be done...
Cost of maintaining shuttle programme: fixed costs plus cost per shuttle. Kicker: the fixed part is very, very non-trivial!!! An operational shuttle is not something you just keep around.
Secondly, it is well known that the shuttle design was a compromise of so many "things" it was supposed to do, that it was never anywhere near the original ambition of having something you could land and then just fly again, and is seen by many as a bit of a failure. Just search for "space shuttle bad design" and you'll get many hits.
Thirdly, I'd say that if they had kept the shuttle programme going, it would have stifled some of the innovation we are currently seeing.
As much as I would like to have shuttle capabilities, it was always a dead end in terms of being a platform for going further into space exploration.
Data braches and its consequences are wrong for various reasons. People having their data exposed because of a negligent or incompetent company is wrong. Regardless of stock price.
I am tired of the "American" mindset that the effect of "things" are ultimately measured by the performance of the economy. Economy doing ok? Well, then nothing bad has really happened. Sony was hacked in a huge scandal in 2018, but one year later noone cares and four years later nobody remembers? Then it does not matter, and it is as if it never happened - who cares. Elect a p... grabbing dictator loving president and the economy somehow keeps improving? Guess that wasn't so bad then.
The sooner America (and other hardcore capitalists around the world) learn to stop using money as the ultimate measure of good or bad, and start optimizing for things that matter (such as quality of life), is the moment your country(ies) will be able to start improving.
Step 1. Some visionary people build a new, great service which instantly finds a market.
Step 2. Management gets to pat themselves on the shoulders as the business rapidly grows, becoming a global brand - with the main challenge being how to scale up the company fast enough.
Step 3. There are only so many people who want/need the product on Earth, and competitors also start to appear. The fantastic growth stagnates.
Step 4. Enter crisis mode. How do we maintain our revenue growth (failing to recognize the very simple answer: you don't). At this point, new management needing to prove themselves has started to enter the company, and some of the people who enjoyed the ride to the top have cashed in. Crazy ideas start to appear.
Step 5. As the company has gradually forgotten what made the product/service great in the first place, it starts experimenting with revenue-enhancing changes to the service, changes that piece by piece remove the parts of the service that made it so attractive in the first place.
Step 6. The company gradually sinks itself by repeatedly shooting itself in its corporate feet.
Step 7. Some visionaries get together, thinking "hey, we could make a better product/service that people actually want". The form a company, and so the circle continues.
TL;DR: Bitcoin is not an appropriate means of payment, it is gambling not investment, it is not entirely anonymous and the level of anonymity seems to have a net negative impact on society, and it is an environmental disaster. The sooner we get rid of it, the better.
Bitcoin has been fluctuating violently and unpredictably (for those not manipulating the market) for years, which proves that for the last few years, Bitcoin has been completely useless as a means of payment - and makes me believe it will continue to be so for foreseeable future. You want your wallet to be a stable "currency", not a high-risk "investment". Plus when paying for two bottles of milk, you do not want the transaction fee to be 5-10 times the value of the product you are buying (which makes credit card fees of 2-3% seem very, very modest).
As Bitcoin is not viable for generally replacing other means of making payments, that leaves Bitcoin as a possible financial "investment". Which puts everyone not taking part in manipulation of that "market" at a disadvantage, plus investing in something which has no fundamental underlying value is essentially gambling, and you might as well take your money to roulette table at the casino. At least then as an outsider, you have a decent chance of winning.
Bitcoin as a means to make entirely anonymous payments is not entirely real, as the ledgers are public so wallet transactions can be followed, and any conversion to/from real life currency can possibly be identified in some way. Plus the benefits of anonymous payments seem to be entirely outweighed by the negative effects of how it fuels markets for illegal products like drugs.
Add to this the fact that Bitcoin is an environmental disaster, consuming power at a level rivalling the consumption of entire countries...
I hope this fad will be over soon, and it will be regulated into oblivion. Block chains has many fine uses. Payment in its currently implemented form is not one of them.
Here is how one could set up electronic voting. The challenge: votes are anonymous, but transparency in the voting process is needed. How to handle both. Here is the process as I see it:
TL;DR: A public ledger of non-person-identifiable votes that were cast, a system for voters to identify "their" vote and prove whether it was registered correctly, as well as a public register of who casted votes (the vote is still secret) in order to help prevent fake votes from being cast. All enabled through some randomness and cryptographic signatures.
There needs to be a public register of "who voted". Though voting is anonymous, the fact that you voted does not need to be. This enables accountability because the system cannot produce "fake votes" without significant risk, as they have to produce a person for each vote that is case, and this can be checked later.
You enter the voting booth. You select your vote (candidate X, abstain, pro/con Brexit,...).
The system gives you a (very long) unique receipt number for the vote. You have to add some digits to that number yourself (so the system is not allowed to cheat in choosing a number). The resulting number becomes the "vote ID" for that vote.
Upon confirming the vote, the system signs the vote (vote ID + vote), and provides a signature to the voter (also available in the form of e.g. a QR code), signed with a private key for that voting maching (which is at the end point of some trust chain). Also, it provides a signature of only vote ID
If the voter wants, (s)he could e.g. use a mobile app to scan the signatures, to store them and to verify it has been signed, as proof that the signature is valid, so that it can be used as proof that (a) the vote was delivered (vote ID only), or that a vote was cast in a particular way (vote ID + vote).
The vote ID, the vote and the signatures are printed as a paper receipts for the voter and for the vote handling organization, to ensure there is a paper trail that cannot be tampered with. If tree hugging is an issue, print on recycled diapers or something like that. Voters are requested to retain their receipt (helpful in case of later having to do some random checking of the integrity of the election).
When voting ends, all votes are published publically in the form of (vote ID + vote). This allows counting votes and identifying unique votes, however only the voters know which vote is his/her vote.
There is now accountability, because voters can find "their" vote in the ledger, and check whether it has tracked the correct vote. If not, they have proof (in the form of a cryptographic signature) that it is invalid.
Post-election, notifications are sent to all registered voters, that they have been registered in the system (which helps prevent fraud that people are casting votes in your name, in the name of dead people, etc)
So this kind of setup would make it very risky to try to generate fake votes, as well as allowing the integrity of the votes to be verified after the fact.
Not bad for 5 minutes of thinking (plus some time to refine the idea while typing it up). I am sure some really smart heads could cook up something even better, but this is already miles beyond whatever they have going on in Georgia.
So in 2016, the UN Human Rights Council forgot to Cc Ajit Pai on the condemnation of "intentional disruption of internet access by governments", and that "the same rights people have offline must also be protected online" (source).
Norwegian here. This is just how the transportation market seems to be overall these days, and a follow-on effect of the European open market. It has nothing to do with Tesla specifically. It is not their trucks, and it happens for all other kinds of transportation of goods and services. This really should not be a story that so strongly features Tesla.
The pattern is pretty much this, that we keep reading about trucks that were stopped or investigated following an accident, that seem to 95% of the time come from Eastern Europe (the Baltic countries, Poland, and Rumania are typically the points of origin), due to non-functional brakes, tires that are wore down, cargo that is not secured, or whatever. Plus zombie drivers who have skipped the mandatory sleep.
This is particularly prominent in Winter, when we get typical Norwegian weather and some idiot truck driver halts all traffic on a clogged main road due to losing traction on a main road and somehow ending up blocking every lane. And afterwards you read that "the truck had summer tires".
A problem that really needs fixing. These drivers and truck companies ought to start getting something more than a little slap on the wrist for these issues. Super heavy fines and some jail time ought to be a good motivation to follow European safety standards. I see zero reason to cut those crooks any slack.
Fixing Facebook is very easy. All it takes is some regulation. Problem solved
Fixing Facebook is too hard as long as the GOP is in power. US politics is a complete mess, and the republican swamp dwellers in Washington would not lift a pinky finger to make a move against their biggest lobbyists, and more importantly - the main vehicle of social network idiocracy and a key mechanism they kan use in meddling with elections.
Facebook fixing itself, and Suckerberg's "apologies" suggesting they are going to do anything to hurt their revenues? Ha ha ha. Anyone who thinks so has obviously yet to experience the harsh realities and brutally cynical pragmatism of white collar corporate life.
We have this pretty great thing called democracy. And in the US, the people use this to say "hey, why don't we just let the aristocrats rule". The thing that people fought so hard to get, and you guys are just wasting it away, falling prey to this amazingly effective brainwash propaganda that the market force is somehow the fifth fundamental force in the universe, and the most fantastic one because it somehow magically solves everything. Plenty people died in the fight to get unions, which are a key factor in labor life in Europe and a force for good compromises between capital and worker interests - whereas in US the brainwashing machine has successfully painted it as a bad thing and turned the people who would benefit from it, against it.
It's just amazing. Unfortunately, US failure to regulate its revenue making beasts like Google and Facebook is heavily affecting the rest of the world. In what is an incredibly narrow sighted vision of the world limited to next quarter financials, and an inability to see how this basically contributes to destroying society.
Sorry if I sound bleak and pessimistic, but that is because that is what the world currently is in some areas. Either that, or I am tired from losing one hour sleep as we switched to summer time in Europe tonight;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations to you Mad Mike. In our current social media world there is so much noise as everyone shouts their ideas into the void in order to attract attention; however like a bird in spring with a perfect voice you have reached a level of lunacy which lets you rise about the white noise threshold of crazy. The saddest thing ... you are probably not crazy at all, just using this as a strategy to become (in)famous and profit from it.
Is Netflix DRM really so bad? I watch Netflix regularly, and I do it on my laptop, on my phone, on my tablet, on Chromecast. I have not had to buy any special gadgets except the Chromecast - and I could even skip that and watch Netflix on my PS4 or connect the TV to my laptop if I wanted to be masochistic. The whole setup just works - pretty much all the time - and I have access to an order magnitude more entertainment than what I actually have time for, between Netflix and a few other streaming services.
Maybe it is an attitude that just comes with age. When I was in my twenties, I would tinker and create complex technical setups for just about everything. Which is fun when you are into that. But it also means spending hours and hours searching the net for how to do that thing which almost noone is doing which requires that piece of software you have to compile from some alpha version that does not really fit with your setup ... you spend hours and hours creating something that works - and then half a year later it breaks due to some version of something changing somewhere or some service changing their protocol - and you barely remember what you did in the first place, and instead of watching that move you planned you end up spending the whole night fixing your tech.
At some point I just got fed up with the complexities of filling up life with nonstandard complex tech setups and doing everything the hard way. My tip - if you have HDMI problems, just spend a few dollars to fix your tool chain. HDMI works just fine for almost all of us. Netflix is not the problem here.
And then what? If you put weapon platforms in space, what is the next step? Well, for the other side to develop means to disable those armed satellites, of course! And what happens if you start exploding satellites in space? Kessler syndrome and losing our ability to get into space entirely.
I cannot see why the US wants to lead a race to the bottom. Respond to aggressive measures by other nations in this field, yes. But to be the one to actually start this craziness? So stupid.
Taking mosquitoes entirely out of the ecosystem by making them sterile? Very dangerous to the ecosystem.
On a recent Science Friday episode they discussed another solution which is actually viable, which is to make mosquitoes shy away from human blood. Humans don't get infected, mosquitoes can continue living, the ecosystem can continue functioning as is, everybody wins.
That non-significant share of colleagues who ignore your emails, possibly pretending they never saw it, are truly annoying. And I am not talking about spam here, but polite non-sociopath emails that are somehow important, in which there are specific questions or calls for action stated to the recipient - some times requiring nothing more than a quick response. Emails that if left unanswered means the project I am in charge of starts grinding to a halt.
Eventually after pulling every possible trick in the book to solve it yourself, you have to escalate and have your boss call that other person's boss, with a lot of negativity following - and the end result (because you were right that person should have responded) (s)he gets the order to help out, which they then do in the most passive aggressive unhelpful manner they can think of. And all the way you are thinking ... why was all this bullthis necessary.
At some point after learning I could never expect any response from some particular ill-mannered person, I would start walking over to their desk immediately after sending that email (unfortunately only works on-site), and if they were not there I would put a post-it note in the middle of their computer screen asking them to please look at some email I just sent. Which improved responses, but you would be surprised how many people just ignore the post-it note - and also how many people will look you in the eyes and say they are going to do something for you, and then proceed by doing exactly zero.
If you need to get in touch with someone remotely then post-it notes obviously do not work, but if you have some colleague there who you are on friendly terms with, if the request is important you could send them an email asking to go have a chat with that person, saying that "hey, so and so sent you an email and asked me to tell you it's really important".
Always respond to emails. Often you can apply 80/20 rule, in which a quick reply is all the recipient needs. Or if the request should not be answered as stated, just quickly respond why - in 70% of cases the request goes away. Even stating "this is not a priority because X, do Y instead" will make most the non-priority stuff just evaporate. Or some times, "I will have to get back to you in about X time" is appropriate, but then you also have to follow up.
The problem is products are not built to repair, which is by design and for multiple reasons:
The answer? As for so many other areas where a pure capital system leads to poor, unfair and overall sub-optimal solutions and practices, regulation is needed. Laws are needed, initially for the most problematic products, to force producers to make products repairable by 3rd parties, and guarantee the rights by others to perform such repairs - plus resolving what effects (if any) such repairs have on warranties.
Unfortunately, greedy industries, their lobbyists and politicians-for-hire continue to successfully manage to muddy the waters, and so I am not optimistic that this will improve any time soon.
If individuals could do whatever they wanted, and let no "government" impose any restrictions, then everyone should be allowed to walk up to someone and stab them in the back.
Stabbing a child in the back? Obviously not - nearly 100% of us instinctively recoil from that idea. But ... enough people exercising their right to make idiot decisions causing a measles outbreak, and they will kill that child with weak immune system who cannot get vaccinated due some allergy,.
Dead is dead, whether it is from a knife in the back or from disease. I think that if you took some of those anti-vaxxers to a hospital, showed them that "here is a group of kids in poor health who cannot get vaccine, if we get a measles outbreak one of them is likely to die - let's just get it over with now, we will let your child not have the vaccine if you strangle one of these kids with your own hands" - there would not be too many takers.
This is an extension of the same logic that guns are so dangerous. It is a more impersonal weapon which can kill from a distance. In addition to being a force equalizer, it is a lot easier (I assume) to point at someone and pull the trigger, rather than having to go up and wrestle them while stabbing with a knife. Well, anti-vaxxing is just that. It is something which kills someone you don't know from an action that has no violence associated with it whatsoever.
Those anti-vaxxers should just go live on their own island, and put in place whatever "no government, no regulation, I will do whatever the frack I want" policies - then we send some drones over there and broadcast Lord of the Flies II live for a couple months, until they extinct themselves. Because humans are herd beings, and herds don't functions when its members are not willing to sacrifice for the collective good.
Actually, that would be one way to deal with anti-vaxxers, government saying "ok, if you are going to do that, here is a metric crap ton of benefits we are not going to provide - no healthcare, no school, here is a chip for your car so you will be paying for using roads, no police coming to your house if you call 911, no help from embassies if you get into trouble while abroad, you are banned from national parks, ..."
I am guessing some of the more educated people are more likely to overthink things, and fall into the trap that "I am smart, I know better slash I can work things out for myself". Combine a solid lack of knowledge regarding how disease spreads, how immunity works, herd immunity and statistics - with an unhealthy dose of scepticism regarding how "the man" is trying to get you to put things in your bloodstream that you don't know what contains - plus the entirely failed statistics of "some random child somewhere in America had a vaccine and got sick" combined with a lack of understanding of causality - and you get those anti-vaxxers. Plus there is the idea that being subjected to a disease somehow makes your immune system "stronger".
So you take a cocktail of misunderstandings how the world works, put that in a container (brain) which totally overestimates its own abilities to figure out things in a complex world - and voila, out comes an idiot decision.
Plus there may also be an unhealthy dose of "we are smart people, we have good hygiene, we have strong genes ... my children don't need vaccines (and thus implicitly: like those other filthy kids)".
Truly smart people understand how little they know and why. I wouldn't say those anti-vaxxers are very educated people. They have lots of credits, yes. But their understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed.
The world is fighting unhealthy eating habits and obesity epidemics. Meanwhile Pepsi is working hard to find new ways to sneak addictive empty calories into your body.
Just leaving this trojan horse headline here for the Turkish thought police in case I ever have to go to the Ottoman empire on vacation, to prove my "support" for Turkish dictators.
A coal mining company cannot possibly keep their business going without mining coal. And Facebook cannot possibly keep their scam going without getting paid for user data (while hitting their insane profitability targets) unless they start charging their users instead. Which is not going to happen.
If anyone in this world deserves to be doxxed and have their entire life exposed, plus have others meddling in their private affairs, it is Mark Zuckerberg. Also, some rich person who cares should buy all the property around wherever MZ lives, and just put up huge billboards in the middle of his view, running ads for whatever Mark would find annoying. Like books on how to become a nice person.
You can sue anyone for anything, just like you can ask for anything. Can you send me a million dollars? I could sue you for using a microwave transmitter to control my brain, forcing me to wear a tinfoil hat, with loss of income as nobody will hire me and emotional trauma. I could sue no problem. On the other hand none of us would expect me to win the lawsuit.
"22% of Americans for some unfathomable reason still trust Facebook's handling of personal info"
If the majority of the cards have a chip, then the majority of fraud cases will be cards with chip. The point of moving from a magnetic strip to a chip, is that others cannot gain access to your card simply by swiping it. After chip conversion, that vector of attack is mostly gone, and criminals move on to other methods. For which cards with chip are just as good/bad as any other card.
Sure thing. If you give Trump a buck, based on his track record as a "business man" (translation: con artist) he will surely lose it into some scheme that ends with bankruptcy. But the amazing thing is that a new buck will magically enter the system from some unlikely source ... like mafia or foreign powers.
With "its fuel supply exhausted", NASA has "elected to [...] leave it in its current, safe orbit". If you have only one option, seems to me there is not much electing to be done ...
Cost of maintaining shuttle programme: fixed costs plus cost per shuttle. Kicker: the fixed part is very, very non-trivial!!! An operational shuttle is not something you just keep around.
Secondly, it is well known that the shuttle design was a compromise of so many "things" it was supposed to do, that it was never anywhere near the original ambition of having something you could land and then just fly again, and is seen by many as a bit of a failure. Just search for "space shuttle bad design" and you'll get many hits.
Thirdly, I'd say that if they had kept the shuttle programme going, it would have stifled some of the innovation we are currently seeing.
As much as I would like to have shuttle capabilities, it was always a dead end in terms of being a platform for going further into space exploration.
Data braches and its consequences are wrong for various reasons. People having their data exposed because of a negligent or incompetent company is wrong. Regardless of stock price.
I am tired of the "American" mindset that the effect of "things" are ultimately measured by the performance of the economy. Economy doing ok? Well, then nothing bad has really happened. Sony was hacked in a huge scandal in 2018, but one year later noone cares and four years later nobody remembers? Then it does not matter, and it is as if it never happened - who cares. Elect a p... grabbing dictator loving president and the economy somehow keeps improving? Guess that wasn't so bad then.
The sooner America (and other hardcore capitalists around the world) learn to stop using money as the ultimate measure of good or bad, and start optimizing for things that matter (such as quality of life), is the moment your country(ies) will be able to start improving.
To be fair though, everyone who is heavily into investing in (*cough* gambling with *cough*) cryptocurrency deserves to get mocked.
Step 1. Some visionary people build a new, great service which instantly finds a market.
Step 2. Management gets to pat themselves on the shoulders as the business rapidly grows, becoming a global brand - with the main challenge being how to scale up the company fast enough.
Step 3. There are only so many people who want/need the product on Earth, and competitors also start to appear. The fantastic growth stagnates.
Step 4. Enter crisis mode. How do we maintain our revenue growth (failing to recognize the very simple answer: you don't). At this point, new management needing to prove themselves has started to enter the company, and some of the people who enjoyed the ride to the top have cashed in. Crazy ideas start to appear.
Step 5. As the company has gradually forgotten what made the product/service great in the first place, it starts experimenting with revenue-enhancing changes to the service, changes that piece by piece remove the parts of the service that made it so attractive in the first place.
Step 6. The company gradually sinks itself by repeatedly shooting itself in its corporate feet.
Step 7. Some visionaries get together, thinking "hey, we could make a better product/service that people actually want". The form a company, and so the circle continues.
TL;DR: Bitcoin is not an appropriate means of payment, it is gambling not investment, it is not entirely anonymous and the level of anonymity seems to have a net negative impact on society, and it is an environmental disaster. The sooner we get rid of it, the better.
Bitcoin has been fluctuating violently and unpredictably (for those not manipulating the market) for years, which proves that for the last few years, Bitcoin has been completely useless as a means of payment - and makes me believe it will continue to be so for foreseeable future. You want your wallet to be a stable "currency", not a high-risk "investment". Plus when paying for two bottles of milk, you do not want the transaction fee to be 5-10 times the value of the product you are buying (which makes credit card fees of 2-3% seem very, very modest).
As Bitcoin is not viable for generally replacing other means of making payments, that leaves Bitcoin as a possible financial "investment". Which puts everyone not taking part in manipulation of that "market" at a disadvantage, plus investing in something which has no fundamental underlying value is essentially gambling, and you might as well take your money to roulette table at the casino. At least then as an outsider, you have a decent chance of winning.
Bitcoin as a means to make entirely anonymous payments is not entirely real, as the ledgers are public so wallet transactions can be followed, and any conversion to/from real life currency can possibly be identified in some way. Plus the benefits of anonymous payments seem to be entirely outweighed by the negative effects of how it fuels markets for illegal products like drugs.
Add to this the fact that Bitcoin is an environmental disaster, consuming power at a level rivalling the consumption of entire countries ...
I hope this fad will be over soon, and it will be regulated into oblivion. Block chains has many fine uses. Payment in its currently implemented form is not one of them.
Here is how one could set up electronic voting. The challenge: votes are anonymous, but transparency in the voting process is needed. How to handle both. Here is the process as I see it:
TL;DR: A public ledger of non-person-identifiable votes that were cast, a system for voters to identify "their" vote and prove whether it was registered correctly, as well as a public register of who casted votes (the vote is still secret) in order to help prevent fake votes from being cast. All enabled through some randomness and cryptographic signatures.
So this kind of setup would make it very risky to try to generate fake votes, as well as allowing the integrity of the votes to be verified after the fact.
Not bad for 5 minutes of thinking (plus some time to refine the idea while typing it up). I am sure some really smart heads could cook up something even better, but this is already miles beyond whatever they have going on in Georgia.
So in 2016, the UN Human Rights Council forgot to Cc Ajit Pai on the condemnation of "intentional disruption of internet access by governments", and that "the same rights people have offline must also be protected online" (source).
Norwegian here. This is just how the transportation market seems to be overall these days, and a follow-on effect of the European open market. It has nothing to do with Tesla specifically. It is not their trucks, and it happens for all other kinds of transportation of goods and services. This really should not be a story that so strongly features Tesla.
The pattern is pretty much this, that we keep reading about trucks that were stopped or investigated following an accident, that seem to 95% of the time come from Eastern Europe (the Baltic countries, Poland, and Rumania are typically the points of origin), due to non-functional brakes, tires that are wore down, cargo that is not secured, or whatever. Plus zombie drivers who have skipped the mandatory sleep.
This is particularly prominent in Winter, when we get typical Norwegian weather and some idiot truck driver halts all traffic on a clogged main road due to losing traction on a main road and somehow ending up blocking every lane. And afterwards you read that "the truck had summer tires".
A problem that really needs fixing. These drivers and truck companies ought to start getting something more than a little slap on the wrist for these issues. Super heavy fines and some jail time ought to be a good motivation to follow European safety standards. I see zero reason to cut those crooks any slack.
Fixing Facebook is very easy. All it takes is some regulation. Problem solved
Fixing Facebook is too hard as long as the GOP is in power. US politics is a complete mess, and the republican swamp dwellers in Washington would not lift a pinky finger to make a move against their biggest lobbyists, and more importantly - the main vehicle of social network idiocracy and a key mechanism they kan use in meddling with elections.
Facebook fixing itself, and Suckerberg's "apologies" suggesting they are going to do anything to hurt their revenues? Ha ha ha. Anyone who thinks so has obviously yet to experience the harsh realities and brutally cynical pragmatism of white collar corporate life.
We have this pretty great thing called democracy. And in the US, the people use this to say "hey, why don't we just let the aristocrats rule". The thing that people fought so hard to get, and you guys are just wasting it away, falling prey to this amazingly effective brainwash propaganda that the market force is somehow the fifth fundamental force in the universe, and the most fantastic one because it somehow magically solves everything. Plenty people died in the fight to get unions, which are a key factor in labor life in Europe and a force for good compromises between capital and worker interests - whereas in US the brainwashing machine has successfully painted it as a bad thing and turned the people who would benefit from it, against it.
It's just amazing. Unfortunately, US failure to regulate its revenue making beasts like Google and Facebook is heavily affecting the rest of the world. In what is an incredibly narrow sighted vision of the world limited to next quarter financials, and an inability to see how this basically contributes to destroying society.
Sorry if I sound bleak and pessimistic, but that is because that is what the world currently is in some areas. Either that, or I am tired from losing one hour sleep as we switched to summer time in Europe tonight ;-)