Uh, that auctioneering "degree" is from a community college, not a university... and had all of 18 people in the program, which sounds about right for a jobs training platform. That "degree" comprises six classes, costs much less than $10,000 to complete, and is part of the process of being a licensed auctioneer in the state of Pennsylvania. So much for "useless degree".
Chained to your desk? Dubious. Unless this is handled like child support by the courts, where the judge can impute you a salary based on what they think you should be earning, and then when you don't pay, hold you in contempt and eventually put you in jail. Otherwise, it sounds like you can go to college tuition-free if you are willing to forego a percentage of your future earnings, but only if your future earnings are above a certain point.
The real problem I see with this is that many people will play games with their incomes if they can, just like you sometimes see in family court where a guy has a business that suddenly doesn't make much money, but his expensive car, etc, is somehow a business expense.
The other problem I see is: how do you actually live during school? Many of today's student loans can be spent on housing, food, clothing, etc, not just tuition. Even tuition-free college would require some other form of support to be able to get a degree in a reasonable time-frame.
I should note that there is an open data format that every bank I've worked with uses to allow me to download my data in a form I can then load it into a program like Quicken or GnuCash: OFX/QFX, but this requires me to login into every separate bank web site myself. Which is what I actually do. Only I didn't like either Quicken or GnuCash much last time I looked into them, and I strongly considered working with the GnuCash code base, but I wanted enough different features that it seemed easier to implement my own accounting software, which is what I did.
I would. I'm probably being a bit rose-colored glasses about it, but if my bank puts out an app that I can load on my phone, I'm happy to use it. What I'm not remotely happy to do is give my username/password information to anyone other than the institution that issued the account. I mean, think about it... even my bank shouldn't actually know what my password is. They should have taken the password I gave them, salted it, hashed it 10-20 times, and stored the resulting hash in the database for future reference. This has been widely known as best practice for well over a decade now. They should have absolutely no way to recover the actual password I used based on their stored information. And so, as if to thumb my nose at security best practices, I'm going to simply hand not only my username, but actual password, over to some stranger? Just so I can use some dumb app on my phone? No way in hell.
We need to regulate this practice of giving third parties your username/password with your bank to use an app like Mint or whatever into oblivion-- with all the hackings of places like Target and Experian I'm actually sort of shocked that one of these third party backends hasn't been hacked (or more likely it has been, but keeping that fact secret is highly lucrative to the hackers, so we just haven't heard about it). Mostly what I understand these backends do with your login behind the scenes is a lot of screen-scraping to get your info. Last time I checked, it's not like there is an open format/API that financial companies are required to use to allow third party apps to access your data for you. I'm sure some banks have developed "relationships" with the Quickens of the world, but I'm guessing that many more have not, and it's probably still firmly in the pay-to-play realm, rather than an open standard that anyone can partake in.
But said porch pirate would need to get a delivery to access the map... thing I don't like about the feature is that it really doesn't help me out much since it doesn't show up until the package is almost there. Not even Alexa has a relevant skill in this area that I'm aware of. I get one doofy notice in the morning that I'm going to get a package... and then I get a notification after the package is delivered (sometimes a long time after I've already retrieved said package), but you'd think if they are route-planning the deliveries they could estimate the time down to at least a 2-3 hour range and let us know something a lot more accurate than "before 9pm".
Frankly, I wish they wouldn't ring the doorbell so often. It drives the dogs nuts. I'm surprised at the number of complaints I'm seeing here about how Amazon delivery is working for some people because ours has been impeccable thus far. Often they set it on some planter shelves we have, or behind a pillar, or even in the door. Even so, I'm liking the idea of just getting a lidded box, no lock even needed. That way you can't tell if there's a package from the street. But the garage? No way. My bicycle cost more than several deliveries put together and garage doors can be finicky about closing easily.
Having listened to only digital music stored in computer files for about a decade or so now, I can tell you without doubt that I have no concerns whatsoever that my "computer brand" is going to interfere with my ongoing access to the music files I have. They are largely encoded in a format that isn't even encumbered by patent anymore, let alone intrinsic DRM. Exact copies of the files are stored offline in spare HDs and online in "cloud" backup services.
I'm sure there are streaming services that will rent you music that has DRM to prevent easy ripping of the streams... but I guess if I'm going to pay for music, I'll stick to buying no-DRM, available-offline MP3s. Anyway, you really should compare streaming services with radio/broadcast, not with buying physical media.
Compare my digital files to the cassettes, vinyl, and CDs I own which are single point of failure and are probably degrading or warping as we speak. And if the house burns down, bye bye physical media... but the digital files are safe in TWO separate offsite locations at minimal cost.
Does getting your next and current employers into some sort of bidding match actually work out for you? Have you ever managed to stay where you were with a significant increase in pay? Or has it only worked as a negotiation tactic for your next salary? And have you ever negotiated more than $5k with this?
But when you are playing soccer or beach volleyball or badminton or ping-pong (or any number of other games in the Olympics), you are not competing against the players from 776 BC until the future, you are competing directly against the other teams that are there at that time.
The biggest problem I have with this idea is that in "e-sports" all of the games are franchises of one company or another. The game itself is not public domain in the way that all traditional sports/games are. Unless the games are open source and managed by a non-profit, choosing any video game would be an instant profit center for one, and only one, company.
There's lots of games in the Olympics: basketball, hockey, soccer, badminton, tennis, table tennis, and golf even. And it is called the Olympic "Games" after all. Don't ask me how curling is there, but not bowling (except that they already have enough sports for summer and winter is pretty sparse by comparison).
Some of the differences seem sort of arbitrary here... why wouldn't darts be an olympic sport when things like archery or javelin throwing are? Why not golf? I mean, they have beach volleyball and "artistic" swimming in there, after all.
But I agree, eSports don't belong in the Olympics. Too nebulous and the games themselves change too often to be worth it... not to mention that the games themselves are franchises of for-profit companies. That's way too different from all of the existing games where the fundamental game itself is public domain.
If she refuses to sign the form, the effect will be the same either way, won't it? I don't really have any idea about how often doctors refuse this surgery and why... but it certainly strikes me as ironic that my wife can most certainly have several forms of birth control without my knowledge, but I'd need to notify her of this.
That "little snip" does have lasting side effects in many cases... 1-2% of those getting vasectomies report chronic scrotal pain. Those aren't the best odds for something that can't be undone easily. A younger man without children cannot use vasectomy to prevent pregnancy until it's wanted, either. Frozen sperm? Maybe... but realize that doctors are fairly picky about who they will perform vasectomies on. In fact, in my personal experience, if you are married you need your wife's signature on the forms to be approved! I'm guessing being fairly young and childless will also cause most doctors to refuse to perform the procedure.
In my own job, I outsource a lot of work to "robots". I mean, the compiler put a lot of good assembly programmers out of work!
Over at the farm a few years ago, can you believe they made this machine called a thresher that put all these folks who used to beat the grain off the stalk by hand out of work? Of course, the old threshers used actual horse power... then they came up with the combine! Damn machine cuts the grain and threshes it right there in the field!
How about the environmental argument: which is more energy efficient, a human being that burns calories, or a kiosk that can be run on solar or wind energy?
If automation is the future, what we need to do is focus on promoting the idea that things like basic income or social dividends are not optional. As it stands, in the USA there is no jobs shortage and we can embrace automation as a way of weaning our country off the (near) slave labor that provides most of our cheap goods.
I was very reluctant to read TFA, in part because it was written by a "cloud architect", but also because the headline is such obvious clickbait. No, I do not lose my decades of experience coding when I switch jobs. My changing jobs every so often has actually improved my programming over the long-term because I've been exposed to a much wider array of tools, techniques, and programming styles... what I've learned best is the *practice* of programming, whatever language or tools are at hand. In fact, if changing jobs doesn't make you a better programmer, nothing will.
No. They use systems like PhotoDNA that standardizes the image (resize, monochrome, etc) and then creates a hash from the image file itself using image properties. They are not simply SHA1 hashing the raw file.
The real question gets to be: what images are in that DB that don't belong there? What if an 18+ porn star just looks young? They might look perfectly legal coming from a legit porn site, but still get flagged if someone started posting them on a "Lolita" Tumblr, pretending they are child porn. How about stills from the movie "Pretty Baby"? The movie is available through legal channels, so presumably stills from the movie could be used under Fair Use... perhaps even in a Tumblr post about how the movie is disgusting and should be illegal. And since you can't just download the hashing software and the list of hashes from GitHub (as far as I know), how does the use of this type of system not have a chilling effect? You're taking a pretty big chance if an image falls into a grey area where someone might have included it in this database and you use it and get tagged.
Regulations were made to be broken. An outright ban would be considerably more effective. The odds of an agri-chemical business trying to sell a banned substance are much lower than 100s of individual farms properly complying with regulations. The real question to answer is how well we can get along without these substances. If it means we'll all die of starvation, then maybe regulation is the only option. But if we have reasonable alternatives, an outright ban may as well step one.
Straw man? What about your false dilemma? The guy hassling me over a pocket knife is actively participating in an oppressive system (if it's truly oppression to have to submit to airport security procedures, that is). Without an army of "small potatoes" to enforce the rules, the billionaire has no power.
Entry level TSA agents make $12-$18/hr (https://www.federallawenforcement.org/tsa/). While that is certainly higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, it is very much in line with what people make for unskilled labor jobs in urban markets all across the country. It's definitely lower than the median wage of $21/hr. And with a median wage of $22/hr for law enforcement (https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Police_Officer/Salary/9d8677f9/Entry-Level), I'd say the TSA pay rate is pretty abysmal, even if it is higher than their private sector predecessors' pay. Also of note: it's NOT higher than the current pay rates for private sector security guards, which is $13-$17 (https://www1.salary.com/Security-Guard-hourly-wages.html). If the airports were being staffed by non-unionized, private sector personnel.
The question of whether they are similarly effective at detecting prohibited items is also hard to settle since these days so many more items are prohibited. In fact, one might argue that the deluge of newly prohibited items is actually making it harder to detect actual threats. I mean, seriously, it's not the TSA screeners who decided that shoes and belt buckles and bottles of shampoo all needed to be deemed potential threats. And the even harder question to solve is whether the enhanced screening techniques have worked as deterrents to actual terrorists. Any idiot with a motor vehicle can commit a terrorist act and get instantaneous worldwide coverage these days. Why bother trying to evade airport security at all at this point?
Slashdot Mirror
According to Wikipedia, HBCI is now called FinTS and it's a German thing, not USA.
Uh, that auctioneering "degree" is from a community college, not a university... and had all of 18 people in the program, which sounds about right for a jobs training platform. That "degree" comprises six classes, costs much less than $10,000 to complete, and is part of the process of being a licensed auctioneer in the state of Pennsylvania. So much for "useless degree".
Chained to your desk? Dubious. Unless this is handled like child support by the courts, where the judge can impute you a salary based on what they think you should be earning, and then when you don't pay, hold you in contempt and eventually put you in jail. Otherwise, it sounds like you can go to college tuition-free if you are willing to forego a percentage of your future earnings, but only if your future earnings are above a certain point.
The real problem I see with this is that many people will play games with their incomes if they can, just like you sometimes see in family court where a guy has a business that suddenly doesn't make much money, but his expensive car, etc, is somehow a business expense.
The other problem I see is: how do you actually live during school? Many of today's student loans can be spent on housing, food, clothing, etc, not just tuition. Even tuition-free college would require some other form of support to be able to get a degree in a reasonable time-frame.
I should note that there is an open data format that every bank I've worked with uses to allow me to download my data in a form I can then load it into a program like Quicken or GnuCash: OFX/QFX, but this requires me to login into every separate bank web site myself. Which is what I actually do. Only I didn't like either Quicken or GnuCash much last time I looked into them, and I strongly considered working with the GnuCash code base, but I wanted enough different features that it seemed easier to implement my own accounting software, which is what I did.
I would. I'm probably being a bit rose-colored glasses about it, but if my bank puts out an app that I can load on my phone, I'm happy to use it. What I'm not remotely happy to do is give my username/password information to anyone other than the institution that issued the account. I mean, think about it... even my bank shouldn't actually know what my password is. They should have taken the password I gave them, salted it, hashed it 10-20 times, and stored the resulting hash in the database for future reference. This has been widely known as best practice for well over a decade now. They should have absolutely no way to recover the actual password I used based on their stored information. And so, as if to thumb my nose at security best practices, I'm going to simply hand not only my username, but actual password, over to some stranger? Just so I can use some dumb app on my phone? No way in hell.
We need to regulate this practice of giving third parties your username/password with your bank to use an app like Mint or whatever into oblivion-- with all the hackings of places like Target and Experian I'm actually sort of shocked that one of these third party backends hasn't been hacked (or more likely it has been, but keeping that fact secret is highly lucrative to the hackers, so we just haven't heard about it). Mostly what I understand these backends do with your login behind the scenes is a lot of screen-scraping to get your info. Last time I checked, it's not like there is an open format/API that financial companies are required to use to allow third party apps to access your data for you. I'm sure some banks have developed "relationships" with the Quickens of the world, but I'm guessing that many more have not, and it's probably still firmly in the pay-to-play realm, rather than an open standard that anyone can partake in.
But said porch pirate would need to get a delivery to access the map... thing I don't like about the feature is that it really doesn't help me out much since it doesn't show up until the package is almost there. Not even Alexa has a relevant skill in this area that I'm aware of. I get one doofy notice in the morning that I'm going to get a package... and then I get a notification after the package is delivered (sometimes a long time after I've already retrieved said package), but you'd think if they are route-planning the deliveries they could estimate the time down to at least a 2-3 hour range and let us know something a lot more accurate than "before 9pm".
Frankly, I wish they wouldn't ring the doorbell so often. It drives the dogs nuts. I'm surprised at the number of complaints I'm seeing here about how Amazon delivery is working for some people because ours has been impeccable thus far. Often they set it on some planter shelves we have, or behind a pillar, or even in the door. Even so, I'm liking the idea of just getting a lidded box, no lock even needed. That way you can't tell if there's a package from the street. But the garage? No way. My bicycle cost more than several deliveries put together and garage doors can be finicky about closing easily.
Having listened to only digital music stored in computer files for about a decade or so now, I can tell you without doubt that I have no concerns whatsoever that my "computer brand" is going to interfere with my ongoing access to the music files I have. They are largely encoded in a format that isn't even encumbered by patent anymore, let alone intrinsic DRM. Exact copies of the files are stored offline in spare HDs and online in "cloud" backup services.
I'm sure there are streaming services that will rent you music that has DRM to prevent easy ripping of the streams... but I guess if I'm going to pay for music, I'll stick to buying no-DRM, available-offline MP3s. Anyway, you really should compare streaming services with radio/broadcast, not with buying physical media.
Compare my digital files to the cassettes, vinyl, and CDs I own which are single point of failure and are probably degrading or warping as we speak. And if the house burns down, bye bye physical media... but the digital files are safe in TWO separate offsite locations at minimal cost.
OK. At the risk of sounding like an uncultured troglodyte, what on earth is a "birds nest" that costs $750?
Does getting your next and current employers into some sort of bidding match actually work out for you? Have you ever managed to stay where you were with a significant increase in pay? Or has it only worked as a negotiation tactic for your next salary? And have you ever negotiated more than $5k with this?
So which browser do you recommend over Firefox?
The biggest problem I have with this idea is that in "e-sports" all of the games are franchises of one company or another. The game itself is not public domain in the way that all traditional sports/games are. Unless the games are open source and managed by a non-profit, choosing any video game would be an instant profit center for one, and only one, company.
There's lots of games in the Olympics: basketball, hockey, soccer, badminton, tennis, table tennis, and golf even. And it is called the Olympic "Games" after all. Don't ask me how curling is there, but not bowling (except that they already have enough sports for summer and winter is pretty sparse by comparison).
Correcting myself. It turns out golf IS an Olympic sport.
But I agree, eSports don't belong in the Olympics. Too nebulous and the games themselves change too often to be worth it... not to mention that the games themselves are franchises of for-profit companies. That's way too different from all of the existing games where the fundamental game itself is public domain.
If she refuses to sign the form, the effect will be the same either way, won't it? I don't really have any idea about how often doctors refuse this surgery and why... but it certainly strikes me as ironic that my wife can most certainly have several forms of birth control without my knowledge, but I'd need to notify her of this.
Only when I visit relatives in Flint, MI.
That "little snip" does have lasting side effects in many cases... 1-2% of those getting vasectomies report chronic scrotal pain. Those aren't the best odds for something that can't be undone easily. A younger man without children cannot use vasectomy to prevent pregnancy until it's wanted, either. Frozen sperm? Maybe... but realize that doctors are fairly picky about who they will perform vasectomies on. In fact, in my personal experience, if you are married you need your wife's signature on the forms to be approved! I'm guessing being fairly young and childless will also cause most doctors to refuse to perform the procedure.
Over at the farm a few years ago, can you believe they made this machine called a thresher that put all these folks who used to beat the grain off the stalk by hand out of work? Of course, the old threshers used actual horse power... then they came up with the combine! Damn machine cuts the grain and threshes it right there in the field!
How about the environmental argument: which is more energy efficient, a human being that burns calories, or a kiosk that can be run on solar or wind energy?
If automation is the future, what we need to do is focus on promoting the idea that things like basic income or social dividends are not optional. As it stands, in the USA there is no jobs shortage and we can embrace automation as a way of weaning our country off the (near) slave labor that provides most of our cheap goods.
I was very reluctant to read TFA, in part because it was written by a "cloud architect", but also because the headline is such obvious clickbait. No, I do not lose my decades of experience coding when I switch jobs. My changing jobs every so often has actually improved my programming over the long-term because I've been exposed to a much wider array of tools, techniques, and programming styles... what I've learned best is the *practice* of programming, whatever language or tools are at hand. In fact, if changing jobs doesn't make you a better programmer, nothing will.
The real question gets to be: what images are in that DB that don't belong there? What if an 18+ porn star just looks young? They might look perfectly legal coming from a legit porn site, but still get flagged if someone started posting them on a "Lolita" Tumblr, pretending they are child porn. How about stills from the movie "Pretty Baby"? The movie is available through legal channels, so presumably stills from the movie could be used under Fair Use... perhaps even in a Tumblr post about how the movie is disgusting and should be illegal. And since you can't just download the hashing software and the list of hashes from GitHub (as far as I know), how does the use of this type of system not have a chilling effect? You're taking a pretty big chance if an image falls into a grey area where someone might have included it in this database and you use it and get tagged.
Um, crazy cat lady, for starters.
Regulations were made to be broken. An outright ban would be considerably more effective. The odds of an agri-chemical business trying to sell a banned substance are much lower than 100s of individual farms properly complying with regulations. The real question to answer is how well we can get along without these substances. If it means we'll all die of starvation, then maybe regulation is the only option. But if we have reasonable alternatives, an outright ban may as well step one.
Straw man? What about your false dilemma? The guy hassling me over a pocket knife is actively participating in an oppressive system (if it's truly oppression to have to submit to airport security procedures, that is). Without an army of "small potatoes" to enforce the rules, the billionaire has no power.
Entry level TSA agents make $12-$18/hr (https://www.federallawenforcement.org/tsa/). While that is certainly higher than the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr, it is very much in line with what people make for unskilled labor jobs in urban markets all across the country. It's definitely lower than the median wage of $21/hr. And with a median wage of $22/hr for law enforcement (https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Police_Officer/Salary/9d8677f9/Entry-Level), I'd say the TSA pay rate is pretty abysmal, even if it is higher than their private sector predecessors' pay. Also of note: it's NOT higher than the current pay rates for private sector security guards, which is $13-$17 (https://www1.salary.com/Security-Guard-hourly-wages.html). If the airports were being staffed by non-unionized, private sector personnel.
The question of whether they are similarly effective at detecting prohibited items is also hard to settle since these days so many more items are prohibited. In fact, one might argue that the deluge of newly prohibited items is actually making it harder to detect actual threats. I mean, seriously, it's not the TSA screeners who decided that shoes and belt buckles and bottles of shampoo all needed to be deemed potential threats. And the even harder question to solve is whether the enhanced screening techniques have worked as deterrents to actual terrorists. Any idiot with a motor vehicle can commit a terrorist act and get instantaneous worldwide coverage these days. Why bother trying to evade airport security at all at this point?