It's not just that, it's also managing to hurt them as a brand at this point--what is probably needed is a boycott with a petition and/or letter-writing campaign telling them that the utter hostility to the very same group that they normally could rely on having turn up for any Star Trek media they chose to make, regardless of quality, is alienating those once-sure ticket sales.
Honestly, if they really thought it might do better than their next Star Trek movie, they should have tried throwing money directly at the problem: bought into Axanar, and done it in a way that they get a payout no matter which movie does well. The risks to them with doing something like getting the theatrical release rights or the like for Axanar would have low because actually making the movie had been covered by the crowdfunding, at least before they decided that they were going to make that money be spent on lawyers too. It'd have made it easier for them to court future promising crowdfunded projects and/or tell some pitches that they will get $$$ from them if they can successfully get off the ground via crowdfunding.
Now? I seriously doubt anybody would be willing to make such deals with them, ever.
It is also worth knowing what the laws are; in some places if the landlord fails sufficiently at maintaining the place, the property is forfeited to either the state or the tenants. (Either way odds are your rent drops afterwards.)
A medical-grade version gets at a different tiny market...but at least part of it has deep pockets. Think about just how much money goes into professional athletes--the medical-grade version would almost certainly be a pretty minimalist device, to cut down on R&D and certification costs, but remote monitoring of athletes' vitals is pretty much going to become a thing.
Too bad then that you can buy a medical grade pulse measurement for $100. The only downside is wearing a chest strap (not a big ask for a workout). That is what they were using as their accurate baseline to compare these fitbits to.
I've also seen how those go if you're trying to remotely monitor--unless they've finally gone wireless? It's been a while since I last checked in there, since it's not quite my field.
Wrist based measurement will never be as accurate (especially while being knocked around on the sporting field) as chest strap based monitors. Any serious athlete knows this and has a PROPER heart rate monitor for their sport.
Disclosure: Professional level athlete. I wear a wrist based smart watch for sleep tracking and resting heart rates etc. (where wrist is appropriate). I take this off for my sport and wear a chest strap band and Garmin watch. The right tool for the right job.
Honestly I'd not design it for the wrist, either--it seems gimmicky, too vulnerable, and I know from personal experience that there are some people who you have to check their pulse elsewhere if you want to find it reliably...because I'm one of those people. The main goal would be remote monitoring, and preferably more than just the pulse because it doesn't necessarily tell me more than that the heart is beating--your vitals are your pulse rate, temperature, respiration rate, and blood pressure. A chest strap might actually be ideal for getting most of those at once, if not all; meanwhile, I sincerely doubt anything attached to your wrist is going to be able to tell you a thing about your respiration rate.
Disclosure: Trained in medical research and participate in sports where a wrist-worn anything is likely to get broken quickly...among other things. (I favor sports where take your watch off before practicing, no less competing.) The amount I care for where you wear a monitor is vastly less than I care about its accuracy, reliability, and durability. And, okay, if tethering is going to be a thing because no.
I would be wanting to develop a medical-grade version anyway
I doubt you would want to do that. It's very, very, very expensive and has a tiny market. Fitbit is a hobby device; it was intended to give a rough estimate of your activity as a motivational tool. It is not a medical device and never will be.
I do know both the 'very, very, very expensive' part and the 'tiny market' part already.
However, part of why that 'tiny market' is because it's a hobby device and as such expensive for what it does. A medical-grade version gets at a different tiny market...but at least part of it has deep pockets. Think about just how much money goes into professional athletes--the medical-grade version would almost certainly be a pretty minimalist device, to cut down on R&D and certification costs, but remote monitoring of athletes' vitals is pretty much going to become a thing.
The only questions are who is going to get that particular technology to market first, and when they'll do it; that professional sports will buy it is pretty much a given with the sheer amount of money invested in professional athletes.
(And okay there's some people in medicine who are eagerly awaiting this, but they won't have the money as easily. They'll scrape it together with enough time, but...I'd expect most of the costs to get made back by sales to professional athletics.)
Right... Companies shouldn't be held accountable just because they made a crap product that advertises functionality that it doesn't have. It's all those idiot users' fault for believing that consumer protection laws should require a product to do what is advertised.
FitBit and others did not claim to be medical devices but rather a way to keep track of your activity as part of a wellness regime. Now, a paid study finds that they are not as accurate as medical devices and somehow the company is defrauding the consumer? I have a number of issues with FitBit including their desire to have me send them my exercise information rather than just load it into the app and they are itchy and uncomfortable. It would be nice to see the raw data on which the conclusions are based to see what "up to 20 beats" really means and how accurate FitBit is in various situations.
"Up to 20 beats" is best considered in light of a pulse chart like this one. The normal resting pulse of an adult is somewhere between 60 to 100 beats per minute--a well-trained athlete's resting pulse would be in the 40 to 60 range. Presuming the FitBit uses the same measure--which is the standard one--then being off by 20 beats is not negligible at utter best...though the summary suggests that it is not actually consistent in its error, which is really concerning since people are typically pushed to get their heart rate up to a target...even if that just isn't going to happen. (I have a very good heart, and I've never quite mastered pushing it much out of its resting heart rate.)
I would expect if someone is undergoing a severe exercise regimen the would carefully research the tools they use to track vital signs to ensure their safety. If I were on a jury and someone said "I was injured because my FitBit didn't tell me my heartbeat was too high while I did this extreme workout..." I'd respond with a "Sorry, but the legal system can't fix stupid, but mother nature can and did" judgement.
Part of the problem is we expect computers to be precise and accurate and they often are not, and when they aren't people get upset instead of adjusting their expectations.
I will agree here--though I've no idea how somebody could fail to notice if their heartbeat got too high, it'd be slightly easier to fail to notice that you just lost a limb. (Seriously, you should not be capable of missing it.) The problem is that this is a really significant amount of error--this is snake oil ranges, and as somebody else has noted, employers are requiring you use these things and financially penalizing you for failing to hit milestones.
I would be with you if I was on that jury for the case you give as an example, but what about if it was someone saying they were financially harmed because their employer-required FitBit keeps saying they're pushing their heart rate dangerously high or not high enough?
(The best solution would be to flat-out forbid employers from requiring these things, but given that if they're even vaguely accurate and reliable then they may be already a violation of medical privacy laws... The question may really be one of who actually gets to take it to court.)
The lawyers sponsored the study, and it looks like it's actually pretty decent methodology--comparing the pulse from the EKG (which I certainly hope is reliable) to the FitBits on the wrists at the same time means you've got one of the gold standards of study design, since the pulse ought to be the same in the same person no matter what point you measure it from (and how you measure it) so you make it a lot easier to analyze the data. You've controlled both for the issues if you used different subjects and for if you measured at different times, so the only real question when doing the analysis is "How well do the parts of each set align?" (You do multiple subjects to make sure you didn't have something rather weird happen like somebody somehow pulling off 'different pulse depending on where measured,' and the number looks actually rather good--a bit more subjects than I'd expect a study like this without money being thrown at it to have, actually.)
The only thing that seems particularly weird here is that I'd have expected the company to have sponsored this study or something very much like it during its own R&D cycle, because it would be both good for marketing and good practices. Doing this sort of basic study is pretty...basic, if you're trying to make something that monitors {foo}. About the only reason I could see for not doing that would be "FDA might get panties in a wad," except that is something that I'm amazed hasn't happened already...and I would be wanting to develop a medical-grade version anyway. It should sell, especially if I can add in remote monitoring; that would probably net me sales to both health care facilities and in professional sports...
Not really, the problem is that people used to actually smack both sets of idiot idealistic brats around until they got over the 'typical college age nonsense.' You didn't have it getting carried on and encouraged as long as you had the correct set of sociopolitical views.
Well, adding sympathy for those people stuck in jobs that require you have Windows will grease the wheels of change. If it's seen as an undesirable working condition, companies will have an incentive they're not anywhere near as insulated from to start moving away now. Get it seen as a cheap way to make employees happier and a way to improve your looks when trying to get new employees who have options without having to increase the wage offers, and they'll not wait until Win10's privacy issues cause them direct harm.
That will do a lot more than the 'younger people switching to tablets'--I probably am one of the younger people you're talking about, and ha ha no. The tablet market pretty much has stagnated, because tablets are really lousy if you want to do much of anything worklike that is more serious than read, write emails and take notes. They're definitely not replacements for desktops and laptops yet, and it'll probably take serious advances in touchscreen technology for them to even begin to get to where they'd need to be in order for them to replace traditional systems. Missing this--and wanting to make home PCs work like tablets--is part of what had killed Win8.
Win10 is probably going to generate some interesting lawsuits with some of the problems coming out like the ads and forced undesired program re-installations, and no matter how much money you have...that doesn't really help when you don't have enough. I'm suspecting part of their legal department is wondering if anybody would notice if they started doing things like reciting rap lyrics when asked for input...
So, does the lack of sympathy extend to the people who don't have a voice in their organization's software choices? I'm with you pretty much up to that point, but when somebody isn't high enough up to have much say about the software they must use in their job, shouldn't you at least have some sympathy for them when their employers stick them with having to use Windows?
A right to privacy would only really let you have much of a chance to do something useful if you became aware of the book before it was published, and the law is likely not established yet on if it would be protected or of the same status as if you had left it yourself in a bin by the side of the road to be collected as garbage.
The best solution would really be a short period of automatic copyright coverage for the originator(s) plus heirs no matter what, with anything more requiring an official registration...and all extentions requiring a fee.
I would be fine with letting Disney eternally renew the copyright on their mouse on those conditions. I would have the renewal fee increase with repeated use, but if they think it's worth it... Why not have them pay the money (somewhat more) directly to society, instead of in bribes to politicians?
In some areas, the problem is that you may well find yourself with a lovely selection of candidates that are some combination of corrupt and/or incapable--somebody who is neither almost certainly only made it on because they were perceived as not electable by the machine. This has backfired.
Actually, where I'm at...owning the home is very appealing. I get to be responsible for repairs! Which means they happen in a reasonable amount of time without my needing to harass anybody or anything! It sounds amazing, really. (My apartment complex is still dealing with having only recently gotten bought by an apartment management company as opposed to a holding company. With the previous management, I could have probably gotten them declared in violation of the lease at pretty much any time I chose...)
But if all they have against you is locked-away in an encrypted phone, that means that unless they get you to decrypt it, they can't even charge you with anything, since "he wouldn't decrypt his phone" isn't an indictable offense.
Number one, if all they had on you was a locked-up, encrypted phone then it would be mighty hard for them to get a warrant, now wouldn't it?
Number two, the OP isn't talking about not decrypting the phone, he's talking about wiping the phone. Not decrypting the phone is really smart as long as you can avoid doing so without violating a valid court order. But regardless of the evidence they use to get the order, they can fairly easily prove your newly wiped phone does not match up to the data your provider gave them, which is a five-year felony in the Federal system.
Not only that, but while SCOTUS hasn't ruled on court-ordered decryption by you of evidence against you directly yet, from the decisions on closely-aligned cases it seems safe to expect them to rule that they got to hire somebody else to do it if they want to use a court order.
Ever heard of negligent homicide? Criminally negligent manslaughter? Depraved-heart or depraved-indifference murder? Those are all things already on the books in most places. We don't need laws specifically against texting or the like--we need to start prosecuting people who text and drive under whichever of those laws are both appropriate and on the books in that jurisdiction.
Already-existing laws would also cover people doing things like driving while doing their makeup or reading a book, too. If it's not criminal negligence and reckless driving to not be looking at the road while operating a large mass of metal moving at significant speed...what the hell is?
The issue here is entirely if the laws specifically against texting and driving actually increase the hazards created by people doing it: Does making it double-illegal improve the situation or make it worse? Does somebody who is trying to hide that they're texting and driving actually end up driving more recklessly? (Are you having to make it double-illegal to keep judges from tossing the tickets?) Do the results of ticketing somebody for reckless driving instead of texting while driving have a more adverse effect on their behavior?
When it should be already covered, it seems reasonable to ask if adding a new law to the books will produce better results compared to merely enforcing what we've got...and if the answer is yes, why & how it will do that so it can be written to maximize its benefit.
IANAL--but I have been caught by people who have been admitted to the SCOTUS bar, and not the merely honorary one.
This case probably will need to be kicked along until it hits the SCOTUS, but a good, strong case could be made that decryption would be self-incrimination and thus a violation of the 5th Amendment protections under the Act of Production Doctrine--check into United States v. Hubbell, 530 U.S. 27 (2000), where it was ruled that Mr Hubbell's response to the subpoena and producing the papers counted as testimony. The implications for it with encryption are explored here by somebody who probably is a lawyer given it was published originally in a law journal.
This only directly applies to evidence obtained via keys given in return for immunity, but in keeping somebody locked up without trial indefinitely for refusing to produce the key or combination, due process rights are most definitely violated no matter what. (It would be different if a third party was being asked for the key, but it isn't.)
There is one difference that I can spot, and I do consider it important--government has a monopoly of force, so it's still necessary for corps to bribe the government into things like forcing people to do business with them and to attain a captive market.
Under a communist system, those in government would not need to arrange for the bribe but could pocket the money (and/or favors) directly.
The problem isn't the economic system, but how easy it is for those in power to get away with corruption--the fewer people who could be bribed into doing something and the more aware of how short that list is, the better. Fear of getting caught is a lot more reliable than blind trust...or, if you're an optimist instead of a realist, it makes it a lot less tempting for them to not live up to the trust and thus less stressful. (Upside is, if one fails anyway, it'll be a lot easier and faster to catch them.)
It's already illegal, chanimg the law won't really save them because that generally isn't retroactive, and with the PR issues the case and the legalization effort would bring, the odds are that it'll be vastly more than they can actually afford which has already happened to them.
Throwing Rightscorp under a bus, however, will be cheap and do an equally good job of saving their rears. It would also leave Rightscorp facing the court by itself without the aid of the powerful friends it almost certainly was expecting to have in order to try to convince the courts this isn't a new version of the already tested threatening letter routine...
Actually, many of the same laws put on the books to combat those tactics by the Mafia could likely be used here, which means that we're talking criminal court instead of civil since extortion is extortion is extortion. The question of if the person who is being extorted did something illegal is irrelevant...and the fun thing is that if their clients can be in any sense construed as having approved/taken part in this behavior...well, guess who gets to join them on the stand? Here, the PR does matter: do you want to risk being on trial because the people you hired weren't willing to pass their bright ideas in front of competent lawyers and listen when told it is not actually legal? Who basically decided to follow the rule that it's only illegal if you get caught? Even if they do think they could bribe their way out of legal consequences, it's not exactly ideal to be having that be caused by idiot sub-minions. It burns through favors and money you could have used to get out of trouble you got yourself into.
I think we've left "none of the above" in the dust and are around "can we just line them all up against the wall and shoot them?" This would be a time where a third party has a chance--except absolutely none of them are willing to make the necessary sausage in order to actually be a viable replacement for one of the major parties, which is pretty much the bottom line for getting better than pitiful numbers. It probably would be (have been?) a good time for the Libertarian party if it was willing to go with the nice, essentialist platform. All it would take probably is cutting it down to "less laws, less government" and going centrist/apathetic on everything else would do it, especially if some things are explicitly treated as simply not the government's job regardless of their morality. (This goes well with the essentialist platform, and may help with long-term maintenance of that goal: make the first question always be that of if it's the government's problem, and only care about the morality if and only if it is decided to be the government's job to care at all.)
I missed it entirely, but I have to agree that if you misclicked it...you failed one of the basics of doing professional emails: reading carefully everything and manually clicking send. (Don't use hotkeys, and you might be best off turning them off if you can't remember to never use them when it matters.) Being able to mute somebody is an awesome ability, and if you can't exercise basic care when sending emails related to your job search you probably won't manage anyway to hold down any job where 'paying attention to important details' is required...and that's assuming you get it in the first place...
This is pretty much the reason I'd have split the systems and had one targeted to hardcore gamers and casuals who want the upgrade--only having the premium one be subjected to new-every-few-years still is precisely because people would understand that well as it is marketed as the premium system.
You might even deliberately maintain a core that means that in a few generations old games could be played still, even if it may require a special peripheral. The game library does matter, and this is a cheap way to make it a selling point...and lets you grab for retro gamers long-term. ("Don't like the current batch of games? That's fine, just buy the Retro Gamer Bundle! It comes with a couple classics and everything you need to get started playing old games for the Foobar on the Foobar 6!")
Actually, the 3DS is exactly what I'd suggest to anybody who is wanting to try stuff more serious than casual games, from my own experience--most of the casual smartphone games I tried were either boring after a while or a pain in the rear...with the major exception being robotfindskitten. Yes, carrying a 3DS takes a little more space, but the games I get and the better controls are worth it--and it can be very cheap to find fun casual games for it.
It's just that the Wii U really doesn't seem to have much that even a gamer who loves Nintendo can see as a reason to pick one up. (I would have gotten a chance to play with one if that was the case.) It would be nice to know if they're planning to have whatever replaces the Wii U able to let you play Wii U games, like how I can play many DS games on my 3DS, but the games that are slightly interesting to me that are for the Wii U just don't quite justify even buying a used one.
However, the 'team up with Apple' idea is lousy. This isn't their first miss, and honestly I think it's more a miss because it was a good spot to split things: have an entry-level system to draw in the social and casual gamers that should have lower generational churn simply because it's meant to be an inexpensive intro system, and split off an advanced system for people who decide they want more/newer. It doesn't help that backwards compatibility is not in, never mind that I'd be a lot more interested even if I had to buy an emulator dongle to play the older games. There's only so much space for game systems and I don't like the idea of being dependant on rereleases if I want to play an old-but-interesting game and do it fully legally.
The main thing I get from this is that you don't understand what life expectancy means. It's the average lifespan; with some species, it may not even really reflect well what you can expect as they have a vicious bathtub curve--all species have a bathtub curve, but some have it so gradual that it isn't noticed. Others have a high mortality rate right up to where it levels off. (Do your own research for orcas, but I suspect the short answer is that most of the research wraps up with what those who know the style will recognize as a plea for funding so the sample can fail to suck.)
Just because one individual manages to live 100 years does not mean that this is the life expectancy for the species is that. There are a few that spam young despite having long lifespans when they hit maturity because that last conditional is so hard to meet; those where the curve levels out later may not have the same selective pressures.
Let's use humans, pre-antibiotics. I don't have the references on hand, I'm on a cellphone, but basically the child mortality rates were around the scale you're talking about--even in affluent families it is entirely normal for at least one child to die before puberty, counting miscarriages and stillborn children. The thing is, it was relatively normal for somebody who made it past the dangerous ages to manage what we now would consider old age--and often they would be considered rather healthy by modern standards too.
I will grant that SeaWorld does not run a quality breeding problem and doesn't take proper care of their animals. The track record suggests a lot of the orcas should have been pulled from the program on suspicion of genetic problems...or, rather, would have been if other health issues were just as likely as the cause, including too-small living spaces improperly maintained and/or improper diet.
As far as if they belong in captivity, the proper measure is our capability to provide them a proper living space and diet. By all reports, SeaWorld is not a place to use as a measure of our capability there for any species and hasn't been for a long while. As far as I know, it may never have been.
I think you missed entirely that the differences are the problem: I can leave somebody vastly happier with a Linux box despite them being a user by your definition of a user with it pretty much configured to do background updates. If it's not one meant for as much uptime as possible--I've used a few boxes as basically more human-friendly voicemail, as it's more likely to reach me--then you wouldn't even need the user to ever know, and you might well design it to only do the notifications of reboots being wanted if it notices it's on a system that spends most of its time up.
The fact that Windows has the longer shutdowns and bootups--and, I should note, I've flat-out watched people have even Win10 spontaneously reboot itself for updates--is exactly what encourages people to block updates. How much blunter do I need to be about bad design being why the problem exists? Invisible, seamless updates is good design precisely because it does not encourage users to block updates.
My experience is that yeah, I've only been hit once by a buggy update--but it only takes being burned once, and if you have it so the old versions of the files hang around in the system you could have it so rolling back a bad update is painless. I suspect if you were willing to put the effort in, you could even do it so it happens relatively automatically after a failed post-update boot, meaning that once you've rolled out the new update system it would take a spectacularly horrible update to actually leave somebody burned & the time sufficient to ensure you or somebody close to you experiences such might be longer than a lifetime, even without necessarily improving the QA process.
If you don't understand that this problem existed in the first place precisely because of bad design, and isn't going to be fixed without fixing the design, I'm not sure how to help you except by suggesting you consider learning some of the psychology involved in what makes a design good or bad & why it matters. Their 'fix' done by fiat instead of by implementing a good design means I find myself stuck helping people learn how to find the version of Linux that best suits their needs because they don't want to deal with things like their computer deciding to reboot without letting them save their work while they're working on a major paper. (Remember, they're users: don't assume they have it set to save automatically or save manually as they work.)
I was referring to the process itself, though the fact they do push out OS-breaking patches to the general public makes the confusion understandable...and the fact it is reaching them is more than a bug, because yeah, they want it to just work. They don't want to be bothered by bad updates, and they don't want Windows Update behaving like a 'helpful' virus by hijacking their computer suddenly to install updates and sometimes let them do nothing else while it happens. They wanted to post pictures to Facebook, or email Grandma, or work--and instead they're sitting there for who-knows-how-long waiting for their computer to finish updates. This is what will get them to turn off updates, permanently.
If they were techies, they'd still run them, but by hand and after a suitable delay to ensure that they know what updates to not install. Updates done well fix things you want fixed, and if you're a techie you are aware of this.
The Linux method sounds pretty good as a way to get around it: It can run silently in the background, no need to be hard to distinguish from malware or a virus, and if the need for reboots is kept to a minimum you can probably get away with having it do something like a polite popup letting you know to reboot the computer sometime soon and swapping the wallpaper to a "REBOOT ME!" notice. As long as it takes about the same time as a normal shutdown and reboot, the normal user may never see any reason to want to disable updates--especially if OS-breaking ones are kept to a minimum, and the suggested method might enable having a quick rollback method built in.
Windows 10 forcing updates is a direct result of Microsoft pushing out bad updates to the general public and an updater that works like malware or a virus, stop and think about that.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just that, it's also managing to hurt them as a brand at this point--what is probably needed is a boycott with a petition and/or letter-writing campaign telling them that the utter hostility to the very same group that they normally could rely on having turn up for any Star Trek media they chose to make, regardless of quality, is alienating those once-sure ticket sales.
Honestly, if they really thought it might do better than their next Star Trek movie, they should have tried throwing money directly at the problem: bought into Axanar, and done it in a way that they get a payout no matter which movie does well. The risks to them with doing something like getting the theatrical release rights or the like for Axanar would have low because actually making the movie had been covered by the crowdfunding, at least before they decided that they were going to make that money be spent on lawyers too. It'd have made it easier for them to court future promising crowdfunded projects and/or tell some pitches that they will get $$$ from them if they can successfully get off the ground via crowdfunding.
Now? I seriously doubt anybody would be willing to make such deals with them, ever.
It is also worth knowing what the laws are; in some places if the landlord fails sufficiently at maintaining the place, the property is forfeited to either the state or the tenants. (Either way odds are your rent drops afterwards.)
A medical-grade version gets at a different tiny market...but at least part of it has deep pockets. Think about just how much money goes into professional athletes--the medical-grade version would almost certainly be a pretty minimalist device, to cut down on R&D and certification costs, but remote monitoring of athletes' vitals is pretty much going to become a thing.
Too bad then that you can buy a medical grade pulse measurement for $100. The only downside is wearing a chest strap (not a big ask for a workout). That is what they were using as their accurate baseline to compare these fitbits to.
I've also seen how those go if you're trying to remotely monitor--unless they've finally gone wireless? It's been a while since I last checked in there, since it's not quite my field.
Wrist based measurement will never be as accurate (especially while being knocked around on the sporting field) as chest strap based monitors. Any serious athlete knows this and has a PROPER heart rate monitor for their sport.
Disclosure: Professional level athlete. I wear a wrist based smart watch for sleep tracking and resting heart rates etc. (where wrist is appropriate). I take this off for my sport and wear a chest strap band and Garmin watch. The right tool for the right job.
Honestly I'd not design it for the wrist, either--it seems gimmicky, too vulnerable, and I know from personal experience that there are some people who you have to check their pulse elsewhere if you want to find it reliably...because I'm one of those people. The main goal would be remote monitoring, and preferably more than just the pulse because it doesn't necessarily tell me more than that the heart is beating--your vitals are your pulse rate, temperature, respiration rate, and blood pressure. A chest strap might actually be ideal for getting most of those at once, if not all; meanwhile, I sincerely doubt anything attached to your wrist is going to be able to tell you a thing about your respiration rate.
Disclosure: Trained in medical research and participate in sports where a wrist-worn anything is likely to get broken quickly...among other things. (I favor sports where take your watch off before practicing, no less competing.) The amount I care for where you wear a monitor is vastly less than I care about its accuracy, reliability, and durability. And, okay, if tethering is going to be a thing because no.
I would be wanting to develop a medical-grade version anyway
I doubt you would want to do that. It's very, very, very expensive and has a tiny market. Fitbit is a hobby device; it was intended to give a rough estimate of your activity as a motivational tool. It is not a medical device and never will be.
I do know both the 'very, very, very expensive' part and the 'tiny market' part already.
However, part of why that 'tiny market' is because it's a hobby device and as such expensive for what it does. A medical-grade version gets at a different tiny market...but at least part of it has deep pockets. Think about just how much money goes into professional athletes--the medical-grade version would almost certainly be a pretty minimalist device, to cut down on R&D and certification costs, but remote monitoring of athletes' vitals is pretty much going to become a thing.
The only questions are who is going to get that particular technology to market first, and when they'll do it; that professional sports will buy it is pretty much a given with the sheer amount of money invested in professional athletes.
(And okay there's some people in medicine who are eagerly awaiting this, but they won't have the money as easily. They'll scrape it together with enough time, but...I'd expect most of the costs to get made back by sales to professional athletics.)
Right... Companies shouldn't be held accountable just because they made a crap product that advertises functionality that it doesn't have. It's all those idiot users' fault for believing that consumer protection laws should require a product to do what is advertised.
FitBit and others did not claim to be medical devices but rather a way to keep track of your activity as part of a wellness regime. Now, a paid study finds that they are not as accurate as medical devices and somehow the company is defrauding the consumer? I have a number of issues with FitBit including their desire to have me send them my exercise information rather than just load it into the app and they are itchy and uncomfortable. It would be nice to see the raw data on which the conclusions are based to see what "up to 20 beats" really means and how accurate FitBit is in various situations.
"Up to 20 beats" is best considered in light of a pulse chart like this one. The normal resting pulse of an adult is somewhere between 60 to 100 beats per minute--a well-trained athlete's resting pulse would be in the 40 to 60 range. Presuming the FitBit uses the same measure--which is the standard one--then being off by 20 beats is not negligible at utter best...though the summary suggests that it is not actually consistent in its error, which is really concerning since people are typically pushed to get their heart rate up to a target...even if that just isn't going to happen. (I have a very good heart, and I've never quite mastered pushing it much out of its resting heart rate.)
I would expect if someone is undergoing a severe exercise regimen the would carefully research the tools they use to track vital signs to ensure their safety. If I were on a jury and someone said "I was injured because my FitBit didn't tell me my heartbeat was too high while I did this extreme workout..." I'd respond with a "Sorry, but the legal system can't fix stupid, but mother nature can and did" judgement.
Part of the problem is we expect computers to be precise and accurate and they often are not, and when they aren't people get upset instead of adjusting their expectations.
I will agree here--though I've no idea how somebody could fail to notice if their heartbeat got too high, it'd be slightly easier to fail to notice that you just lost a limb. (Seriously, you should not be capable of missing it.) The problem is that this is a really significant amount of error--this is snake oil ranges, and as somebody else has noted, employers are requiring you use these things and financially penalizing you for failing to hit milestones.
I would be with you if I was on that jury for the case you give as an example, but what about if it was someone saying they were financially harmed because their employer-required FitBit keeps saying they're pushing their heart rate dangerously high or not high enough?
(The best solution would be to flat-out forbid employers from requiring these things, but given that if they're even vaguely accurate and reliable then they may be already a violation of medical privacy laws... The question may really be one of who actually gets to take it to court.)
The lawyers sponsored the study, and it looks like it's actually pretty decent methodology--comparing the pulse from the EKG (which I certainly hope is reliable) to the FitBits on the wrists at the same time means you've got one of the gold standards of study design, since the pulse ought to be the same in the same person no matter what point you measure it from (and how you measure it) so you make it a lot easier to analyze the data. You've controlled both for the issues if you used different subjects and for if you measured at different times, so the only real question when doing the analysis is "How well do the parts of each set align?" (You do multiple subjects to make sure you didn't have something rather weird happen like somebody somehow pulling off 'different pulse depending on where measured,' and the number looks actually rather good--a bit more subjects than I'd expect a study like this without money being thrown at it to have, actually.)
The only thing that seems particularly weird here is that I'd have expected the company to have sponsored this study or something very much like it during its own R&D cycle, because it would be both good for marketing and good practices. Doing this sort of basic study is pretty...basic, if you're trying to make something that monitors {foo}. About the only reason I could see for not doing that would be "FDA might get panties in a wad," except that is something that I'm amazed hasn't happened already...and I would be wanting to develop a medical-grade version anyway. It should sell, especially if I can add in remote monitoring; that would probably net me sales to both health care facilities and in professional sports...
Not really, the problem is that people used to actually smack both sets of idiot idealistic brats around until they got over the 'typical college age nonsense.' You didn't have it getting carried on and encouraged as long as you had the correct set of sociopolitical views.
Well, adding sympathy for those people stuck in jobs that require you have Windows will grease the wheels of change. If it's seen as an undesirable working condition, companies will have an incentive they're not anywhere near as insulated from to start moving away now. Get it seen as a cheap way to make employees happier and a way to improve your looks when trying to get new employees who have options without having to increase the wage offers, and they'll not wait until Win10's privacy issues cause them direct harm.
That will do a lot more than the 'younger people switching to tablets'--I probably am one of the younger people you're talking about, and ha ha no. The tablet market pretty much has stagnated, because tablets are really lousy if you want to do much of anything worklike that is more serious than read, write emails and take notes. They're definitely not replacements for desktops and laptops yet, and it'll probably take serious advances in touchscreen technology for them to even begin to get to where they'd need to be in order for them to replace traditional systems. Missing this--and wanting to make home PCs work like tablets--is part of what had killed Win8.
Win10 is probably going to generate some interesting lawsuits with some of the problems coming out like the ads and forced undesired program re-installations, and no matter how much money you have...that doesn't really help when you don't have enough. I'm suspecting part of their legal department is wondering if anybody would notice if they started doing things like reciting rap lyrics when asked for input...
So, does the lack of sympathy extend to the people who don't have a voice in their organization's software choices? I'm with you pretty much up to that point, but when somebody isn't high enough up to have much say about the software they must use in their job, shouldn't you at least have some sympathy for them when their employers stick them with having to use Windows?
A right to privacy would only really let you have much of a chance to do something useful if you became aware of the book before it was published, and the law is likely not established yet on if it would be protected or of the same status as if you had left it yourself in a bin by the side of the road to be collected as garbage.
The best solution would really be a short period of automatic copyright coverage for the originator(s) plus heirs no matter what, with anything more requiring an official registration...and all extentions requiring a fee.
I would be fine with letting Disney eternally renew the copyright on their mouse on those conditions. I would have the renewal fee increase with repeated use, but if they think it's worth it... Why not have them pay the money (somewhat more) directly to society, instead of in bribes to politicians?
In some areas, the problem is that you may well find yourself with a lovely selection of candidates that are some combination of corrupt and/or incapable--somebody who is neither almost certainly only made it on because they were perceived as not electable by the machine. This has backfired.
Actually, where I'm at...owning the home is very appealing. I get to be responsible for repairs! Which means they happen in a reasonable amount of time without my needing to harass anybody or anything! It sounds amazing, really. (My apartment complex is still dealing with having only recently gotten bought by an apartment management company as opposed to a holding company. With the previous management, I could have probably gotten them declared in violation of the lease at pretty much any time I chose...)
But if all they have against you is locked-away in an encrypted phone, that means that unless they get you to decrypt it, they can't even charge you with anything, since "he wouldn't decrypt his phone" isn't an indictable offense.
Number one, if all they had on you was a locked-up, encrypted phone then it would be mighty hard for them to get a warrant, now wouldn't it?
Number two, the OP isn't talking about not decrypting the phone, he's talking about wiping the phone. Not decrypting the phone is really smart as long as you can avoid doing so without violating a valid court order. But regardless of the evidence they use to get the order, they can fairly easily prove your newly wiped phone does not match up to the data your provider gave them, which is a five-year felony in the Federal system.
Not only that, but while SCOTUS hasn't ruled on court-ordered decryption by you of evidence against you directly yet, from the decisions on closely-aligned cases it seems safe to expect them to rule that they got to hire somebody else to do it if they want to use a court order.
Ever heard of negligent homicide? Criminally negligent manslaughter? Depraved-heart or depraved-indifference murder? Those are all things already on the books in most places. We don't need laws specifically against texting or the like--we need to start prosecuting people who text and drive under whichever of those laws are both appropriate and on the books in that jurisdiction.
Already-existing laws would also cover people doing things like driving while doing their makeup or reading a book, too. If it's not criminal negligence and reckless driving to not be looking at the road while operating a large mass of metal moving at significant speed...what the hell is?
The issue here is entirely if the laws specifically against texting and driving actually increase the hazards created by people doing it: Does making it double-illegal improve the situation or make it worse? Does somebody who is trying to hide that they're texting and driving actually end up driving more recklessly? (Are you having to make it double-illegal to keep judges from tossing the tickets?) Do the results of ticketing somebody for reckless driving instead of texting while driving have a more adverse effect on their behavior?
When it should be already covered, it seems reasonable to ask if adding a new law to the books will produce better results compared to merely enforcing what we've got...and if the answer is yes, why & how it will do that so it can be written to maximize its benefit.
IANAL--but I have been caught by people who have been admitted to the SCOTUS bar, and not the merely honorary one.
This case probably will need to be kicked along until it hits the SCOTUS, but a good, strong case could be made that decryption would be self-incrimination and thus a violation of the 5th Amendment protections under the Act of Production Doctrine--check into United States v. Hubbell, 530 U.S. 27 (2000), where it was ruled that Mr Hubbell's response to the subpoena and producing the papers counted as testimony. The implications for it with encryption are explored here by somebody who probably is a lawyer given it was published originally in a law journal.
This only directly applies to evidence obtained via keys given in return for immunity, but in keeping somebody locked up without trial indefinitely for refusing to produce the key or combination, due process rights are most definitely violated no matter what. (It would be different if a third party was being asked for the key, but it isn't.)
There is one difference that I can spot, and I do consider it important--government has a monopoly of force, so it's still necessary for corps to bribe the government into things like forcing people to do business with them and to attain a captive market.
Under a communist system, those in government would not need to arrange for the bribe but could pocket the money (and/or favors) directly.
The problem isn't the economic system, but how easy it is for those in power to get away with corruption--the fewer people who could be bribed into doing something and the more aware of how short that list is, the better. Fear of getting caught is a lot more reliable than blind trust...or, if you're an optimist instead of a realist, it makes it a lot less tempting for them to not live up to the trust and thus less stressful. (Upside is, if one fails anyway, it'll be a lot easier and faster to catch them.)
It's already illegal, chanimg the law won't really save them because that generally isn't retroactive, and with the PR issues the case and the legalization effort would bring, the odds are that it'll be vastly more than they can actually afford which has already happened to them.
Throwing Rightscorp under a bus, however, will be cheap and do an equally good job of saving their rears. It would also leave Rightscorp facing the court by itself without the aid of the powerful friends it almost certainly was expecting to have in order to try to convince the courts this isn't a new version of the already tested threatening letter routine...
Actually, many of the same laws put on the books to combat those tactics by the Mafia could likely be used here, which means that we're talking criminal court instead of civil since extortion is extortion is extortion. The question of if the person who is being extorted did something illegal is irrelevant...and the fun thing is that if their clients can be in any sense construed as having approved/taken part in this behavior...well, guess who gets to join them on the stand? Here, the PR does matter: do you want to risk being on trial because the people you hired weren't willing to pass their bright ideas in front of competent lawyers and listen when told it is not actually legal? Who basically decided to follow the rule that it's only illegal if you get caught? Even if they do think they could bribe their way out of legal consequences, it's not exactly ideal to be having that be caused by idiot sub-minions. It burns through favors and money you could have used to get out of trouble you got yourself into.
I think we've left "none of the above" in the dust and are around "can we just line them all up against the wall and shoot them?" This would be a time where a third party has a chance--except absolutely none of them are willing to make the necessary sausage in order to actually be a viable replacement for one of the major parties, which is pretty much the bottom line for getting better than pitiful numbers. It probably would be (have been?) a good time for the Libertarian party if it was willing to go with the nice, essentialist platform. All it would take probably is cutting it down to "less laws, less government" and going centrist/apathetic on everything else would do it, especially if some things are explicitly treated as simply not the government's job regardless of their morality. (This goes well with the essentialist platform, and may help with long-term maintenance of that goal: make the first question always be that of if it's the government's problem, and only care about the morality if and only if it is decided to be the government's job to care at all.)
I missed it entirely, but I have to agree that if you misclicked it...you failed one of the basics of doing professional emails: reading carefully everything and manually clicking send. (Don't use hotkeys, and you might be best off turning them off if you can't remember to never use them when it matters.) Being able to mute somebody is an awesome ability, and if you can't exercise basic care when sending emails related to your job search you probably won't manage anyway to hold down any job where 'paying attention to important details' is required...and that's assuming you get it in the first place...
You might even deliberately maintain a core that means that in a few generations old games could be played still, even if it may require a special peripheral. The game library does matter, and this is a cheap way to make it a selling point...and lets you grab for retro gamers long-term. ("Don't like the current batch of games? That's fine, just buy the Retro Gamer Bundle! It comes with a couple classics and everything you need to get started playing old games for the Foobar on the Foobar 6!")
Actually, the 3DS is exactly what I'd suggest to anybody who is wanting to try stuff more serious than casual games, from my own experience--most of the casual smartphone games I tried were either boring after a while or a pain in the rear...with the major exception being robotfindskitten. Yes, carrying a 3DS takes a little more space, but the games I get and the better controls are worth it--and it can be very cheap to find fun casual games for it.
It's just that the Wii U really doesn't seem to have much that even a gamer who loves Nintendo can see as a reason to pick one up. (I would have gotten a chance to play with one if that was the case.) It would be nice to know if they're planning to have whatever replaces the Wii U able to let you play Wii U games, like how I can play many DS games on my 3DS, but the games that are slightly interesting to me that are for the Wii U just don't quite justify even buying a used one.
However, the 'team up with Apple' idea is lousy. This isn't their first miss, and honestly I think it's more a miss because it was a good spot to split things: have an entry-level system to draw in the social and casual gamers that should have lower generational churn simply because it's meant to be an inexpensive intro system, and split off an advanced system for people who decide they want more/newer. It doesn't help that backwards compatibility is not in, never mind that I'd be a lot more interested even if I had to buy an emulator dongle to play the older games. There's only so much space for game systems and I don't like the idea of being dependant on rereleases if I want to play an old-but-interesting game and do it fully legally.
The main thing I get from this is that you don't understand what life expectancy means. It's the average lifespan; with some species, it may not even really reflect well what you can expect as they have a vicious bathtub curve--all species have a bathtub curve, but some have it so gradual that it isn't noticed. Others have a high mortality rate right up to where it levels off. (Do your own research for orcas, but I suspect the short answer is that most of the research wraps up with what those who know the style will recognize as a plea for funding so the sample can fail to suck.)
Just because one individual manages to live 100 years does not mean that this is the life expectancy for the species is that. There are a few that spam young despite having long lifespans when they hit maturity because that last conditional is so hard to meet; those where the curve levels out later may not have the same selective pressures.
Let's use humans, pre-antibiotics. I don't have the references on hand, I'm on a cellphone, but basically the child mortality rates were around the scale you're talking about--even in affluent families it is entirely normal for at least one child to die before puberty, counting miscarriages and stillborn children. The thing is, it was relatively normal for somebody who made it past the dangerous ages to manage what we now would consider old age--and often they would be considered rather healthy by modern standards too.
I will grant that SeaWorld does not run a quality breeding problem and doesn't take proper care of their animals. The track record suggests a lot of the orcas should have been pulled from the program on suspicion of genetic problems...or, rather, would have been if other health issues were just as likely as the cause, including too-small living spaces improperly maintained and/or improper diet.
As far as if they belong in captivity, the proper measure is our capability to provide them a proper living space and diet. By all reports, SeaWorld is not a place to use as a measure of our capability there for any species and hasn't been for a long while. As far as I know, it may never have been.
I think you missed entirely that the differences are the problem: I can leave somebody vastly happier with a Linux box despite them being a user by your definition of a user with it pretty much configured to do background updates. If it's not one meant for as much uptime as possible--I've used a few boxes as basically more human-friendly voicemail, as it's more likely to reach me--then you wouldn't even need the user to ever know, and you might well design it to only do the notifications of reboots being wanted if it notices it's on a system that spends most of its time up.
The fact that Windows has the longer shutdowns and bootups--and, I should note, I've flat-out watched people have even Win10 spontaneously reboot itself for updates--is exactly what encourages people to block updates. How much blunter do I need to be about bad design being why the problem exists? Invisible, seamless updates is good design precisely because it does not encourage users to block updates.
My experience is that yeah, I've only been hit once by a buggy update--but it only takes being burned once, and if you have it so the old versions of the files hang around in the system you could have it so rolling back a bad update is painless. I suspect if you were willing to put the effort in, you could even do it so it happens relatively automatically after a failed post-update boot, meaning that once you've rolled out the new update system it would take a spectacularly horrible update to actually leave somebody burned & the time sufficient to ensure you or somebody close to you experiences such might be longer than a lifetime, even without necessarily improving the QA process.
If you don't understand that this problem existed in the first place precisely because of bad design, and isn't going to be fixed without fixing the design, I'm not sure how to help you except by suggesting you consider learning some of the psychology involved in what makes a design good or bad & why it matters. Their 'fix' done by fiat instead of by implementing a good design means I find myself stuck helping people learn how to find the version of Linux that best suits their needs because they don't want to deal with things like their computer deciding to reboot without letting them save their work while they're working on a major paper. (Remember, they're users: don't assume they have it set to save automatically or save manually as they work.)
I was referring to the process itself, though the fact they do push out OS-breaking patches to the general public makes the confusion understandable...and the fact it is reaching them is more than a bug, because yeah, they want it to just work. They don't want to be bothered by bad updates, and they don't want Windows Update behaving like a 'helpful' virus by hijacking their computer suddenly to install updates and sometimes let them do nothing else while it happens. They wanted to post pictures to Facebook, or email Grandma, or work--and instead they're sitting there for who-knows-how-long waiting for their computer to finish updates. This is what will get them to turn off updates, permanently.
If they were techies, they'd still run them, but by hand and after a suitable delay to ensure that they know what updates to not install. Updates done well fix things you want fixed, and if you're a techie you are aware of this.
The Linux method sounds pretty good as a way to get around it: It can run silently in the background, no need to be hard to distinguish from malware or a virus, and if the need for reboots is kept to a minimum you can probably get away with having it do something like a polite popup letting you know to reboot the computer sometime soon and swapping the wallpaper to a "REBOOT ME!" notice. As long as it takes about the same time as a normal shutdown and reboot, the normal user may never see any reason to want to disable updates--especially if OS-breaking ones are kept to a minimum, and the suggested method might enable having a quick rollback method built in.
Windows 10 forcing updates is a direct result of Microsoft pushing out bad updates to the general public and an updater that works like malware or a virus, stop and think about that.