The solution to that particular problem is obvious: Megacorp does not, in fact, do business in the EU but rather has licensed everything EU-related to a company named MiniMus. The fact that MiniMus is a wholly-owned (or practically-so) subsidiary is beside the point, as it'd still be legally another company...and the Megacorp can rightfully say that they'd love to comply but that data is MiniMus's property. The overall result would be that there'd be a very annoyed judge wondering why the US DoJ even bothered him with trying to get the court orders issued.
This doesn't solve the issue of whose laws apply when the data is moving internationally, especially when it comes to things like "Who has jurisdiction?" if we're talking about things that are legal only in one of the countries. For example, do we go with the server/seller for setting it, meaning that somebody in the US is perfectly safe obtaining works not in the public domain in the US from servers/sellers located in countries where they are? Do we insist on both ends here, so if it's illegal in one then it's illegal throughout? Do countries the data merely travels through have a say, especially since that might be hard to determine exactly?
People act differently when they are not accountable for what they say. You know that from reading every online forum ever. My facebook feed to positively civil compared to every anonymous forum.
The problem is that we've no proof that FB's real name policy does do that--and serious concerns that the closest to 'accountable' it gets is that the internet lynch mob will know where to find you. The latter should be sufficient reason for requiring strong evidence to support the thesis that a publicly-displaced real-name policy is worth it, especially since crusaders have an annoying tendency to assume that all means are just in the pursuit of justice.
The main problem here is that employers have an annoying tendency to assume that one has a FB account and there's a reason we've had articles about the hijinks that result from that over here. Honestly, I think we're better off pushing instead for employers to not be able to demand such--and possibly making it so any place which requires publicly-displayed real names is legally liable for the consequences of such.
FB will probably end that policy very quickly once that's settled, possibly with an entertaining denial of it being a direct consequence and of their legal team having explained just how much they could be hurt financially by it.
Perhaps, but imagine for a moment that you're an LGBT (or otherwise marginalised) teen living in a fairly hostile community. You'd want to reach out and communicate with people who could empathise, but wouldn't want to reveal your identity lest it lead to retribution. Not requiring a real name would allow them to reach out in a safer manner on that particular platform.
Until they screw up and contaminate their 'real' account with their 'secret' account... Facebook has a real names policy and plenty of people seem pretty happy with that, if someone wants to use a pseudonym then use a service that allows them.
More importantly, you can pretty much rely on the current crop to not only do this, but not get why older members of the group are less than amused with them doing the exact same thing if trusted with that kind of info.
Requiring a public display of your real name really does nothing to help--and, if it did, Facebook should at this point be able to prove that--and the only reason to demand it privately might be the actually reasonable one of wanting to be able to ensure that you can have an at least somewhat enforceable ban system by making the ban be linked to your real name. (Except I seriously doubt that Facebook actually would want any of its communities to be able to ban people, from having watched its overall attitude. On the whole I just don't use Facebook because I want privacy dammit.)
It is pretty obvious that the current method of forcing smart phones into being disposable products is by welding self destructing batteries in place and thus ensuring the death of that phone/tablet and thus also blocking resale. This in turn will eventually force new regulations blocking this tactic (a truly insane abuse of planetary resources) and ensure a longer consumer life for those products.
It's also blocking some basic useful procedures for dealing with a brick-y smart phone--mine came out last year, and I can and will cheerfully pop the back off so I can pull its battery.
In my experience, though, that and the occasional travel/storage situation where for safety reasons you want to pop the battery (if nothing else so if it dies horribly it does so somewhat quietly) are the reasons to complain about the current tendency to not have batteries user-accessible. I've only had one phone that managed to actually outlast the battery it came with, and it didn't do that by much--if you want to complain about wastes of resources here, a failure to make recycling dead smartphones easy is a better thing to point to. (It might be worthwhile to require that phone companies be legally responsible for recycling phones locked to their systems--odds are, they'd prefer to unlock your phone instead, but that's just as useful in its own way as phones that might have otherwise been tossed might be kept since the only real problem with said phone was who it was locked to.)
New customers make you money but old customers are a drain on your financials.
And old customers will bitch and complain, but will succumb to the sunk costs fallacy since they have the device, and just continue to pay. It's easier to bitch than to actually take your business elsewhere, and people don't like to believe they have been suckered.
Except those of us considering buying a new phone will hear the old customers' bitching and complaining, and decide y'know what, let's buy something else.
Old customers stop being a drain on your financials the moment they start spreading negative word-of-mouth about your product.
I dunno. If I had to choose between negotiating with Steve Jobs or Vladimir Putin, I think I'd pick Putin as the safer choice.
Yeah, all things considered I'd say Putin wishes he was Jobs. I mean, the odds are pretty good that if Putin dropped dead tomorrow...there'd be a huge party on his grave right after his funeral...and it'd only not be replacing his funeral is because, well, appearances.
It's unlikely that even now you could manage to get anywhere near the same turnout for a party on Jobs's grave, even this long after his death. Instead, he has a mourning cult of personality that seems relatively healthy.
If you're going to compare to compare Steve Jobs to a Russian leader of the past century or so, try Lenin or Stalin. (I have across from me one of Stalin's distant relatives taking offense, though, because that's not fair to Stalin...)
What was the Corvalis Group going to do? Keep making really nice but rather expensive, calculators for an ever dwindling market?
Make them really nice but less expensive.
You can get from a dollar store occasionally a scientific calculator that will do pretty much everything you'll need through the end of a basic STEM degree, at least at those times where you're not able to access a spreadsheet program or Wolfram Alpha.
Honestly, I don't think anybody's going to offer me a calculator that I'd spend much for, simply because to get me to pay more than a few bucks for one I'd want to get something on the level of Wolfram Alpha, at least for straight-up math, without the need for an internet connection--that said, I'd pay a decent amount for precisely that.
At least one common and good IQ test in current use is one which does not require any verbal skills and is only biased against those with issues with visual processing: Raven's Progressive Matrices. It was developed in part to deal with the issues that stem from trying to figure out how smart somebody who can't talk is.
The one I think you're talking about is possibly an ancient version of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, and please note just how much of the test actually is likely to be culturally biased in its current form--cultural biases in IQ tests are considered a problem by people who are designing the tests, precisely because it's a source of avoidable error and keeping the effects of any & all sources of error to a minimum is a major goal in all psychological testing. It's also worth noting that with how most IQ tests are scored, scores stop meaning much once you get much past two standard deviations above and below the median score--it's rather like pegging the meter. This means that if you can hit the upper mark while missing every single question that requires cultural knowledge, then the effects of such questions are probably negligible as long as people taking the test are reminded to just skip the confusing shit. (This is basic advice for anybody sitting any test, ever, and some of the best advice I've ever been given--it's especially useful when not answering questions is not penalized.)
That said, your examples themselves show some rather interesting signs of bias, given that even Alaska experiences all four seasons--that doesn't stop being a thing until you get close to the equator--and just because dinner isn't often a thing doesn't mean you won't know place settings will work. In fact, it might be a question food-insecure kid has a better chance of answering, given that the people most likely to know the details of place settings now are people paid to do so, and we pay them poorly--how many people under ~35 who are not & never have been in the hospitality industry know how to set tables, anyway?
A lot of gifted programs, and this one is no exception, only partially rely on a test for selection decisions. They also rely on teacher recommendations to a large extent. And while I'm sympathetic to the view that you have to be able to pass the test if it's reasonable, I would be shocked if there were no bias in the teacher recommendation process.
As somebody who was in such a gifted program: Yes, there are indeed teacher biases, but they've got nothing (directly) to do with race. They selected for those who had some flavor of behavioral issues--if you were smart nobody gave a damn what race you were, because every smart kid that the school could keep would help raise averages, and that was what mattered to the staff overall. The tolerance for misbehavior tended to go up the more desperate the school was for the impact of the smart kid's scores on the tests, too.
The end result? You only could really manage to get the recommendation if you managed to be more trouble than your scores to raise the school average was worth. One of the few exceptions while I was around was an incredibly nice African-American girl whose grandma cared enough to make up the difference in...well...bother to get her the recommendation she needed.
Where it starts having to do with race is when you start looking at which schools are failing and thus in greater need of students who can reliably pull the entire school's averages up, meaning that it takes a lot more...well...issues for them to get recommended for these kinds of programs. This isn't to say they were the most...troubled in the program anyway; for the batch I was in with, that would have been the homicidal white kid whom even the adults feared. (I wish I was kidding.)
How is this different than a mailto: link which can populate the subject, body, etc. but not actually send it until you tap send?
While I don't use iJunk, my guess is that it's not set up to be one transparently and/or intentionally in the coding--so, it's basically a case where intent made the difference between a useful feature and a security hole.
This "email-gate" scandal is so fucking stupid anyway. Why can't the Defense Department just pull the emails they want from the recipients mailboxes (off the legitimate government email servers)?
Surely, Hillary did not use her private email server to send emails just to herself.
Anybody who knows jack shit about technology, knows that emails always go through _your_ email server, to _their_ email server. There are always two fucking servers involved -- Hillary ran her own private server, why doesn't the government pull whatever historical information they want from their own damn servers?
*end rant*
From what I can tell, the problem is that it did not universally go through their servers--because Hillary had a private email server when she was supposed to be using theirs.
Surely, Hillary did not send every single email sent from her private server to people using the Fed servers.
That, and exactly how do you think this technical feat can be done, assuming all of her emails did improbably enough go to somebody whose email is handled by official government servers? Do you think the Fed's servers are so well-organized that they can find all the emails sent to people by someone by combing through all the emails anybody's sent internally just to find everything sent by one person?
This goes to the main reason I'm not worried about the NSA's spying except in a meta sense: I sincerely doubt that they've got the data crunching abilities necessary to do anything useful with what they're getting, if nothing else because of the sheer number of people necessary, meaning that they're probably doing it purely so they can brag about how big their data is. It's certainly fundamentally worthless for practical purposes, unless the NSA's true dream is quit the spying gig to be everybody's backup server.
However, Chrome's performance is also far better than Firefox's, for real world browsing.
So if you use Firefox, you get a shitty UI, and shitty performance.
If you use Chrome, you get a shitty UI, but good performance.
[...]
I usually have a resource monitor running in the background, especially when I'm browsing. I have both Firefox and Chrome, too, and I can and will have lots of tabs open since I've often been flipping between many, many pages as I'm working, especially if I'm doing research for a paper--as a result, stability and resource management are pretty major, as well as crash recovery and performance under heavy use. This probably works decently well as a heavy-duty test for real-world browsing, too, unless you really don't do much except watch cat videos.
Firefox is the only one that can actually handle it--I've got nearly a thousand tabs open though many are not loaded, and it's not even lagging. Chrome becomes practically unusable at about 20-25 tabs loaded, well below where Firefox starts misbehaving, and if it crashes I'm going to have to fight it in order to get back most of those tabs as session restore is not a feature it has natively & the extension I did find is vastly disappointing as it isn't automatic and doesn't allow selective restoration.
I keep Chrome around mostly because certain sites perform and behave better on it, and those sites are either Google-owned or, well, possessed by buggy scripts I have to allow to run to use the site. Since one crashed tab won't take all of Chrome down with it--which on the flip side is why it sucks up resources like a pig if you need a lot of tabs--it's not so bad with crashy sites. (That said, the overlap between 'sites owned by Google' and 'sites with essential but buggy scripts' is...interesting.)
I do agree on how bad Firefox's UI is, but honestly it still behaves better than Chrome does when you need lots of tabs, even with how much of a pain it can be to click between tabs sometimes since they thought the curved profiles were utterly essential. Would it have really been too much for them to let that be a skinning option, if they thought the reason why people were picking up Chrome was because it looks 'pretty'?
Bottom line is, even with its unwieldy UI and memory leaks, Firefox does what I need a browser to do--and Chrome just can't.
(That said, it is quite good if what you want to do is watch cat videos and play with Facebook, and switching browsers seems to break some of the tracking. That, or the ad servers have gotten very confused over what I've been reading...)
For your analogy to be comparable it would have to be Target and Home Depot following people around who leave the store to see where else they shop, what they buy, and what they look for in catalogues/flyers. And then sell that to 3rd parties.
Or just getting their customers to sign up for "a loyalty card", which supermarkets seem to be very successful at.
Almost none of those are much use outside of the store--and given that nearly every single one in my area does tailored coupons, if they were that good at stalking customers I'd not be getting coupons for peanut butter and pork. That, or they want me dead.
And possibly that governments are easier to overthrow when the countries are undergoing climate stress. People and politics are complicated, and depend on many things.
So is the climate, with factors we may not even suspect yet, and using the law to silence criticism of any scientific claim has significant problems, if nothing else by setting the precedent for using the law to settle matters of science--and because of that, regardless what the science involved is, the moment a proposal like this pops up, those who proposed it should no longer be accepted as practicing good science in good faith.
This is a lot of what happened in the Medieval and Renaissance period, except at the time they used religion instead of law to silence critics. (The Church's level of interest often enough was "How much are you paying us to care?" with the Pope once going on private record as giving no fucks about which orbited what as long as the calendars are right. Though, in one case it was the guy's friends who, well, wanted him under permanent house arrest for his own safety. As far as I can tell, his modern equivalent would be the guy who is awesome at advanced physics but also will call people strings of slurs to their faces. Including, say, the all-gay outlaw biker gang. Possibly even especially them. We don't talk about his personal life much now for good reason, okay?)
If you want to avoid systemd, just pay a bit of attention when choosing your Linix distro. Which reminds me, I've a few linux disks to burn off for casual playing with on a system I need to nuke the OS on anyway...
Why do people fear the radiation released by nuclear blasts far more than the damn blast itself?
Most people are irrationally scared of radiation, full stop. It's not even a rational fear, based in a sound knowledge of radiation--that would mean people were not operating on the quaint notion that they're not being exposed to radiation pretty much all the time, with some sources of radiation more or less entirely unavoidable given that there's this really huge fusion reactor about eight lightminutes away that we kinda need.
Stop talking rubbish. There is no connection between the natural radiation from the sun and being given a lethal dose of radiation from an atomic bomb, causing you to die a slow painful death. Fear of the latter is entirely rational.
Offhand, I'd say it's because like you most people wrongly estimate precisely how easy it is to get sufficient radiation from a nuclear bomb to die from it, though your comparison falls apart given that currently radiation from the sun is more likely to kill you. How many people worrying their little heads over a slight spike in their daily radiation dose don't take basic precautions against the sun's output?
Not only that, but if we're only talking about receiving a lethal dose of radiation very quickly, the same group of people don't show the proper levels of concern about other events that are as likely--if not more likely--ranging from a dirty bomb (google it) to things like the Goiânia accident. A lot of the data on radiation poisoning from nuclear bombs--which mostly comes from very old versions and the patterns with modern nukes would likely end up being very different because as I recall there was some effort to limit fallout since it's a touch hard to control its geographic spread--seems to indicate that the thermal radiation is still more likely to off you anyway.
Why do people fear the radiation released by nuclear blasts far more than the damn blast itself?
Most people are irrationally scared of radiation, full stop. It's not even a rational fear, based in a sound knowledge of radiation--that would mean people were not operating on the quaint notion that they're not being exposed to radiation pretty much all the time, with some sources of radiation more or less entirely unavoidable given that there's this really huge fusion reactor about eight lightminutes away that we kinda need.
The Millennials have the backwash of the self-esteem movement on top of it all, being a pretty decent case study in precisely why that combination is a horrible, terrible idea as the self-esteem movement could be one of the poster children for the last part. When you've been told you're awesome for most of your life, it's a bit of a comedown to realize that you are, at best, normal, and maybe at the low end of that too. It doesn't help if you had the additional problem of having even what is normal expected behavior treated as praiseworthy, and discover that once an adult people will no longer praise you for such.
You say there is a case study? Can I get a link to that paper? Is is Psychological or Sociological in scope?
If you want the published materials, hit up social psychology and you will get many papers--no formal case study since it basically was a massive experiment conducted informally, and odds are good that if it had to go through the formal routes it'd have had the Ethics Review Board go "Why did you think this was a good idea?" given that as far as I can tell there was strong evidence against its theoretical underpinnings from the start. Its theoretical underpinnings now are pretty much destroyed, in part by it.
On the bright side, the self-esteem movement is large part of how we got pretty good confirmation that even small children can correctly identify bull--and some reasonably wonder why you are praising them for something that is, well, normal and expected for their age...and don't like the obvious answer.
Thank you for offering a great example of what Costlow says is wrong with Millennials. Outrage, minimal analysis, bumper sticker solutions.
I lack to see how that differs from any other generation. "Outrage, minimal analysis, bumper sticker solutions." is a prefect description of not only my generation for the most part (Gen X) but certainly the current state of mind of the Baby Boomers as evidenced by my parents and their friends.
The Millennials have the backwash of the self-esteem movement on top of it all, being a pretty decent case study in precisely why that combination is a horrible, terrible idea as the self-esteem movement could be one of the poster children for the last part. When you've been told you're awesome for most of your life, it's a bit of a comedown to realize that you are, at best, normal, and maybe at the low end of that too. It doesn't help if you had the additional problem of having even what is normal expected behavior treated as praiseworthy, and discover that once an adult people will no longer praise you for such.
Even cheap Chinese laborers are being replaced by machines now, a new era is quickly approaching. I once agreed with your opinion, but in an era where most college graduates have to move back in with their parents - laziness is not the problem.
Laziness is the problem because it tracks backwards to the adults: Since having a high school diploma is associated with higher lifetime earnings, instead of offering more aid for those students on the edge to raise their grades, they went the lazy route of lowering the standards and were surprised when a high school diploma's value on the job market correspondingly plummeted. Since having a college degree is associated with higher lifetime earnings... The process with high school diplomas is in the process of being repeated, especially in fields where it's not likely anybody will notice the decreasing quality of graduates.
This is why the assumption isn't that they can train up a college graduate for what they actually need, incidentally--though professional schools are going the other direction, and some graduate programs will take anybody with an appropriate undergrad degree.
It doesn't exactly help that some students go into some fields expecting to be able to get a job with their bachelors when, really, it doesn't take much effort to know that the entry level degree for the field is the masters unless you did the right degree stacking. (Any of the social and life sciences stacked with a stats degree means you can quite possibly get to have people engaging in bidding wars for you if you made a point of being good at stats. You will, however, be doing lots of stats, so you better really enjoy stats.)
I honestly don't care what the medium actually is, I want media. I don't want a company to be able to take away titles that I've bought because they screwed up somehow. Same reason why I have not yet subscribed to a paid movie service, I want to be able to watch the movies that I have access to forever, not simply for the time that a particular service temporarily has rights. I want to have access to a permanent library, not something temporary and based on shifting license agreements and shifting tastes coupled with limited storage.
The real example was, ironically enough, 1984 that was yanked from networked ebook readers of a certain variety when there was a dispute. Sorry, I'm not going to have that happen to my movies, my books, my games.
That was pretty much what killed off my willingness to spend money on DRM'd media, really--I'll take download-only with the DRM I'd expect from Microsoft only if it's on a lending library system, where what I'm actually paying for is access to the library and not any specific game. Drop the fiction of selling me the games, sell me access to a library that I borrow my games from and can return the ones I'm done with for new/different ones for no additional cost, and you might get me in the door.
You'd have to make sure the cost of the system itself was low, possibly treating it as a loss leader, so people wouldn't be put off by the simple fact that it becomes useless once the library dies. It might be good to explicitly have plans in place for the library's EOL to include releasing dumps of the library to preservationist groups. It might even be smart to make it so you can play games on physical media for the previous generation(s) on it, just to reassure potential buyers.
None of this is something I'd expect Microsoft to think to do, especially after the disastrous choices that brought us the Xbox One.
Hey for all the numbnuts out there, there is no such thing as 1/2 this or 1/16 that, you are or you are not, end of race bullshit. So by what ever means you gain access, whether approved immigration or birth or marrying in or adoption, you are either in or not, suck it up. Culture choices become the illusion of race as a result of racists.
I see you're not from an ethnic group where blood matters, or more likely you are but it's one where it rarely comes up, so let me fill you in on the exciting details of kinship across cultures, from somebody who had to learn the rules young.
I'll keep this simple, so: some groups are matrilineal, some are patrilineal, and then you get the ones which do fractions which are at least effectively ambilineal. (If you need definitions I suggest looking it up yourself.) These all matter because your membership in a group is at the earliest age is determined by your lineage, and when this changes depends a lot cultural factors--some settle for 'act like a member,' others require initiation ceremonies (such as baptism or spirit quests), some require different ceremonies if you're not recognized as (sufficiently) kin because you effectively need to be adopted in (assuming adoption is a thing) and the age at which this may happen can differ from when somebody born within the group gets their initiation.
When you've a large enough group of people who because of differing ways of determining kinship are not being claimed by either side of their family's cultures, you get things like the Métis, and even without that problem you may get creole ethnic groups arising from the mix of cultures.
If you're going to make this sort of sweeping statement, at least try to understand that kinship is serious business for some cultures--and is not always a matter of choice.
What gets me is that it would be easy enough to handle gender and race variants as alternate forms of the base characters, something Unicode already supports and which would let those of us perfectly fine with using literally yellow people of any gender just go with that. It also means that the new emoji will be more supported from the start, as those whose systems don't display the new ones will get the basic one instead of a Mystery Box.
This seems like it would suit Unicode's goals a lot better anyway. (Especially since I think it would generally be more useful for us all to have to go to some trouble if for some reason we need to specify in our emoji that M* Duck is a Mr or a Ms, since I suspect normally nobody cares.)
That said, Chinese is not as much a single language with many dialects as it is a family of languages that share a common grammar and writing system. It would be somewhat like if all the Romance languages used a common writing system so anybody who could read one literally could read them all, and in a pinch could people who didn't have in common a spoken language could still communicate with each other by passing a notebook back and forth.
What prevents this historically with Chinese is the sheer number of hanzi needed for literacy, though touch screens and electronic dictionaries mean I can look up a character I don't know without needing to know the reading: I just write it on my screen.
Honestly, I'd be fine with pushing emoji towards working like an easier-to-learn version of it: work out a common grammar of some basic flavor, keep all of the symbols pictographic, and start mapping them after a certain point as alts to the corresponding Han characters instead of as unique characters to save space in Unicode. Basically, set it up as a way for people without a language in common to communicate important non-abstract things like bathroom locations or a need for a doctor. Abstract concepts can be saved for when you can manage to have a full language in common, concrete concepts are less likely to require a common culture and more likely to have urgency.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution to that particular problem is obvious: Megacorp does not, in fact, do business in the EU but rather has licensed everything EU-related to a company named MiniMus. The fact that MiniMus is a wholly-owned (or practically-so) subsidiary is beside the point, as it'd still be legally another company...and the Megacorp can rightfully say that they'd love to comply but that data is MiniMus's property. The overall result would be that there'd be a very annoyed judge wondering why the US DoJ even bothered him with trying to get the court orders issued.
This doesn't solve the issue of whose laws apply when the data is moving internationally, especially when it comes to things like "Who has jurisdiction?" if we're talking about things that are legal only in one of the countries. For example, do we go with the server/seller for setting it, meaning that somebody in the US is perfectly safe obtaining works not in the public domain in the US from servers/sellers located in countries where they are? Do we insist on both ends here, so if it's illegal in one then it's illegal throughout? Do countries the data merely travels through have a say, especially since that might be hard to determine exactly?
People act differently when they are not accountable for what they say. You know that from reading every online forum ever. My facebook feed to positively civil compared to every anonymous forum.
The problem is that we've no proof that FB's real name policy does do that--and serious concerns that the closest to 'accountable' it gets is that the internet lynch mob will know where to find you. The latter should be sufficient reason for requiring strong evidence to support the thesis that a publicly-displaced real-name policy is worth it, especially since crusaders have an annoying tendency to assume that all means are just in the pursuit of justice.
The main problem here is that employers have an annoying tendency to assume that one has a FB account and there's a reason we've had articles about the hijinks that result from that over here. Honestly, I think we're better off pushing instead for employers to not be able to demand such--and possibly making it so any place which requires publicly-displayed real names is legally liable for the consequences of such.
FB will probably end that policy very quickly once that's settled, possibly with an entertaining denial of it being a direct consequence and of their legal team having explained just how much they could be hurt financially by it.
Until they screw up and contaminate their 'real' account with their 'secret' account... Facebook has a real names policy and plenty of people seem pretty happy with that, if someone wants to use a pseudonym then use a service that allows them.
More importantly, you can pretty much rely on the current crop to not only do this, but not get why older members of the group are less than amused with them doing the exact same thing if trusted with that kind of info.
Requiring a public display of your real name really does nothing to help--and, if it did, Facebook should at this point be able to prove that--and the only reason to demand it privately might be the actually reasonable one of wanting to be able to ensure that you can have an at least somewhat enforceable ban system by making the ban be linked to your real name. (Except I seriously doubt that Facebook actually would want any of its communities to be able to ban people, from having watched its overall attitude. On the whole I just don't use Facebook because I want privacy dammit.)
It is pretty obvious that the current method of forcing smart phones into being disposable products is by welding self destructing batteries in place and thus ensuring the death of that phone/tablet and thus also blocking resale. This in turn will eventually force new regulations blocking this tactic (a truly insane abuse of planetary resources) and ensure a longer consumer life for those products.
It's also blocking some basic useful procedures for dealing with a brick-y smart phone--mine came out last year, and I can and will cheerfully pop the back off so I can pull its battery.
In my experience, though, that and the occasional travel/storage situation where for safety reasons you want to pop the battery (if nothing else so if it dies horribly it does so somewhat quietly) are the reasons to complain about the current tendency to not have batteries user-accessible. I've only had one phone that managed to actually outlast the battery it came with, and it didn't do that by much--if you want to complain about wastes of resources here, a failure to make recycling dead smartphones easy is a better thing to point to. (It might be worthwhile to require that phone companies be legally responsible for recycling phones locked to their systems--odds are, they'd prefer to unlock your phone instead, but that's just as useful in its own way as phones that might have otherwise been tossed might be kept since the only real problem with said phone was who it was locked to.)
New customers make you money but old customers are a drain on your financials.
And old customers will bitch and complain, but will succumb to the sunk costs fallacy since they have the device, and just continue to pay. It's easier to bitch than to actually take your business elsewhere, and people don't like to believe they have been suckered.
Except those of us considering buying a new phone will hear the old customers' bitching and complaining, and decide y'know what, let's buy something else.
Old customers stop being a drain on your financials the moment they start spreading negative word-of-mouth about your product.
I dunno. If I had to choose between negotiating with Steve Jobs or Vladimir Putin, I think I'd pick Putin as the safer choice.
Yeah, all things considered I'd say Putin wishes he was Jobs. I mean, the odds are pretty good that if Putin dropped dead tomorrow...there'd be a huge party on his grave right after his funeral...and it'd only not be replacing his funeral is because, well, appearances.
It's unlikely that even now you could manage to get anywhere near the same turnout for a party on Jobs's grave, even this long after his death. Instead, he has a mourning cult of personality that seems relatively healthy.
If you're going to compare to compare Steve Jobs to a Russian leader of the past century or so, try Lenin or Stalin. (I have across from me one of Stalin's distant relatives taking offense, though, because that's not fair to Stalin...)
What was the Corvalis Group going to do? Keep making really nice but rather expensive, calculators for an ever dwindling market?
Make them really nice but less expensive.
You can get from a dollar store occasionally a scientific calculator that will do pretty much everything you'll need through the end of a basic STEM degree, at least at those times where you're not able to access a spreadsheet program or Wolfram Alpha.
Honestly, I don't think anybody's going to offer me a calculator that I'd spend much for, simply because to get me to pay more than a few bucks for one I'd want to get something on the level of Wolfram Alpha, at least for straight-up math, without the need for an internet connection--that said, I'd pay a decent amount for precisely that.
At least one common and good IQ test in current use is one which does not require any verbal skills and is only biased against those with issues with visual processing: Raven's Progressive Matrices. It was developed in part to deal with the issues that stem from trying to figure out how smart somebody who can't talk is.
The one I think you're talking about is possibly an ancient version of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, and please note just how much of the test actually is likely to be culturally biased in its current form--cultural biases in IQ tests are considered a problem by people who are designing the tests, precisely because it's a source of avoidable error and keeping the effects of any & all sources of error to a minimum is a major goal in all psychological testing. It's also worth noting that with how most IQ tests are scored, scores stop meaning much once you get much past two standard deviations above and below the median score--it's rather like pegging the meter. This means that if you can hit the upper mark while missing every single question that requires cultural knowledge, then the effects of such questions are probably negligible as long as people taking the test are reminded to just skip the confusing shit. (This is basic advice for anybody sitting any test, ever, and some of the best advice I've ever been given--it's especially useful when not answering questions is not penalized.)
That said, your examples themselves show some rather interesting signs of bias, given that even Alaska experiences all four seasons--that doesn't stop being a thing until you get close to the equator--and just because dinner isn't often a thing doesn't mean you won't know place settings will work. In fact, it might be a question food-insecure kid has a better chance of answering, given that the people most likely to know the details of place settings now are people paid to do so, and we pay them poorly--how many people under ~35 who are not & never have been in the hospitality industry know how to set tables, anyway?
A lot of gifted programs, and this one is no exception, only partially rely on a test for selection decisions. They also rely on teacher recommendations to a large extent. And while I'm sympathetic to the view that you have to be able to pass the test if it's reasonable, I would be shocked if there were no bias in the teacher recommendation process.
As somebody who was in such a gifted program: Yes, there are indeed teacher biases, but they've got nothing (directly) to do with race. They selected for those who had some flavor of behavioral issues--if you were smart nobody gave a damn what race you were, because every smart kid that the school could keep would help raise averages, and that was what mattered to the staff overall. The tolerance for misbehavior tended to go up the more desperate the school was for the impact of the smart kid's scores on the tests, too.
The end result? You only could really manage to get the recommendation if you managed to be more trouble than your scores to raise the school average was worth. One of the few exceptions while I was around was an incredibly nice African-American girl whose grandma cared enough to make up the difference in...well...bother to get her the recommendation she needed.
Where it starts having to do with race is when you start looking at which schools are failing and thus in greater need of students who can reliably pull the entire school's averages up, meaning that it takes a lot more...well...issues for them to get recommended for these kinds of programs. This isn't to say they were the most...troubled in the program anyway; for the batch I was in with, that would have been the homicidal white kid whom even the adults feared. (I wish I was kidding.)
How is this different than a mailto: link which can populate the subject, body, etc. but not actually send it until you tap send?
While I don't use iJunk, my guess is that it's not set up to be one transparently and/or intentionally in the coding--so, it's basically a case where intent made the difference between a useful feature and a security hole.
This "email-gate" scandal is so fucking stupid anyway. Why can't the Defense Department just pull the emails they want from the recipients mailboxes (off the legitimate government email servers)?
Surely, Hillary did not use her private email server to send emails just to herself.
Anybody who knows jack shit about technology, knows that emails always go through _your_ email server, to _their_ email server. There are always two fucking servers involved -- Hillary ran her own private server, why doesn't the government pull whatever historical information they want from their own damn servers?
*end rant*
From what I can tell, the problem is that it did not universally go through their servers--because Hillary had a private email server when she was supposed to be using theirs.
Surely, Hillary did not send every single email sent from her private server to people using the Fed servers.
That, and exactly how do you think this technical feat can be done, assuming all of her emails did improbably enough go to somebody whose email is handled by official government servers? Do you think the Fed's servers are so well-organized that they can find all the emails sent to people by someone by combing through all the emails anybody's sent internally just to find everything sent by one person?
This goes to the main reason I'm not worried about the NSA's spying except in a meta sense: I sincerely doubt that they've got the data crunching abilities necessary to do anything useful with what they're getting, if nothing else because of the sheer number of people necessary, meaning that they're probably doing it purely so they can brag about how big their data is. It's certainly fundamentally worthless for practical purposes, unless the NSA's true dream is quit the spying gig to be everybody's backup server.
[...]
However, Chrome's performance is also far better than Firefox's, for real world browsing.
So if you use Firefox, you get a shitty UI, and shitty performance.
If you use Chrome, you get a shitty UI, but good performance.
[...]
I usually have a resource monitor running in the background, especially when I'm browsing. I have both Firefox and Chrome, too, and I can and will have lots of tabs open since I've often been flipping between many, many pages as I'm working, especially if I'm doing research for a paper--as a result, stability and resource management are pretty major, as well as crash recovery and performance under heavy use. This probably works decently well as a heavy-duty test for real-world browsing, too, unless you really don't do much except watch cat videos.
Firefox is the only one that can actually handle it--I've got nearly a thousand tabs open though many are not loaded, and it's not even lagging. Chrome becomes practically unusable at about 20-25 tabs loaded, well below where Firefox starts misbehaving, and if it crashes I'm going to have to fight it in order to get back most of those tabs as session restore is not a feature it has natively & the extension I did find is vastly disappointing as it isn't automatic and doesn't allow selective restoration.
I keep Chrome around mostly because certain sites perform and behave better on it, and those sites are either Google-owned or, well, possessed by buggy scripts I have to allow to run to use the site. Since one crashed tab won't take all of Chrome down with it--which on the flip side is why it sucks up resources like a pig if you need a lot of tabs--it's not so bad with crashy sites. (That said, the overlap between 'sites owned by Google' and 'sites with essential but buggy scripts' is...interesting.)
I do agree on how bad Firefox's UI is, but honestly it still behaves better than Chrome does when you need lots of tabs, even with how much of a pain it can be to click between tabs sometimes since they thought the curved profiles were utterly essential. Would it have really been too much for them to let that be a skinning option, if they thought the reason why people were picking up Chrome was because it looks 'pretty'?
Bottom line is, even with its unwieldy UI and memory leaks, Firefox does what I need a browser to do--and Chrome just can't.
(That said, it is quite good if what you want to do is watch cat videos and play with Facebook, and switching browsers seems to break some of the tracking. That, or the ad servers have gotten very confused over what I've been reading...)
Or just getting their customers to sign up for "a loyalty card", which supermarkets seem to be very successful at.
Almost none of those are much use outside of the store--and given that nearly every single one in my area does tailored coupons, if they were that good at stalking customers I'd not be getting coupons for peanut butter and pork. That, or they want me dead.
And possibly that governments are easier to overthrow when the countries are undergoing climate stress. People and politics are complicated, and depend on many things.
So is the climate, with factors we may not even suspect yet, and using the law to silence criticism of any scientific claim has significant problems, if nothing else by setting the precedent for using the law to settle matters of science--and because of that, regardless what the science involved is, the moment a proposal like this pops up, those who proposed it should no longer be accepted as practicing good science in good faith.
This is a lot of what happened in the Medieval and Renaissance period, except at the time they used religion instead of law to silence critics. (The Church's level of interest often enough was "How much are you paying us to care?" with the Pope once going on private record as giving no fucks about which orbited what as long as the calendars are right. Though, in one case it was the guy's friends who, well, wanted him under permanent house arrest for his own safety. As far as I can tell, his modern equivalent would be the guy who is awesome at advanced physics but also will call people strings of slurs to their faces. Including, say, the all-gay outlaw biker gang. Possibly even especially them. We don't talk about his personal life much now for good reason, okay?)
If you want to avoid systemd, just pay a bit of attention when choosing your Linix distro. Which reminds me, I've a few linux disks to burn off for casual playing with on a system I need to nuke the OS on anyway...
Why do people fear the radiation released by nuclear blasts far more than the damn blast itself?
Most people are irrationally scared of radiation, full stop. It's not even a rational fear, based in a sound knowledge of radiation--that would mean people were not operating on the quaint notion that they're not being exposed to radiation pretty much all the time, with some sources of radiation more or less entirely unavoidable given that there's this really huge fusion reactor about eight lightminutes away that we kinda need.
Stop talking rubbish. There is no connection between the natural radiation from the sun and being given a lethal dose of radiation from an atomic bomb, causing you to die a slow painful death. Fear of the latter is entirely rational.
Offhand, I'd say it's because like you most people wrongly estimate precisely how easy it is to get sufficient radiation from a nuclear bomb to die from it, though your comparison falls apart given that currently radiation from the sun is more likely to kill you. How many people worrying their little heads over a slight spike in their daily radiation dose don't take basic precautions against the sun's output?
Not only that, but if we're only talking about receiving a lethal dose of radiation very quickly, the same group of people don't show the proper levels of concern about other events that are as likely--if not more likely--ranging from a dirty bomb (google it) to things like the Goiânia accident. A lot of the data on radiation poisoning from nuclear bombs--which mostly comes from very old versions and the patterns with modern nukes would likely end up being very different because as I recall there was some effort to limit fallout since it's a touch hard to control its geographic spread--seems to indicate that the thermal radiation is still more likely to off you anyway.
Why do people fear the radiation released by nuclear blasts far more than the damn blast itself?
Most people are irrationally scared of radiation, full stop. It's not even a rational fear, based in a sound knowledge of radiation--that would mean people were not operating on the quaint notion that they're not being exposed to radiation pretty much all the time, with some sources of radiation more or less entirely unavoidable given that there's this really huge fusion reactor about eight lightminutes away that we kinda need.
The Millennials have the backwash of the self-esteem movement on top of it all, being a pretty decent case study in precisely why that combination is a horrible, terrible idea as the self-esteem movement could be one of the poster children for the last part. When you've been told you're awesome for most of your life, it's a bit of a comedown to realize that you are, at best, normal, and maybe at the low end of that too. It doesn't help if you had the additional problem of having even what is normal expected behavior treated as praiseworthy, and discover that once an adult people will no longer praise you for such.
You say there is a case study? Can I get a link to that paper? Is is Psychological or Sociological in scope?
If you want the published materials, hit up social psychology and you will get many papers--no formal case study since it basically was a massive experiment conducted informally, and odds are good that if it had to go through the formal routes it'd have had the Ethics Review Board go "Why did you think this was a good idea?" given that as far as I can tell there was strong evidence against its theoretical underpinnings from the start. Its theoretical underpinnings now are pretty much destroyed, in part by it.
On the bright side, the self-esteem movement is large part of how we got pretty good confirmation that even small children can correctly identify bull--and some reasonably wonder why you are praising them for something that is, well, normal and expected for their age...and don't like the obvious answer.
Thank you for offering a great example of what Costlow says is wrong with Millennials. Outrage, minimal analysis, bumper sticker solutions.
I lack to see how that differs from any other generation. "Outrage, minimal analysis, bumper sticker solutions." is a prefect description of not only my generation for the most part (Gen X) but certainly the current state of mind of the Baby Boomers as evidenced by my parents and their friends.
The Millennials have the backwash of the self-esteem movement on top of it all, being a pretty decent case study in precisely why that combination is a horrible, terrible idea as the self-esteem movement could be one of the poster children for the last part. When you've been told you're awesome for most of your life, it's a bit of a comedown to realize that you are, at best, normal, and maybe at the low end of that too. It doesn't help if you had the additional problem of having even what is normal expected behavior treated as praiseworthy, and discover that once an adult people will no longer praise you for such.
Even cheap Chinese laborers are being replaced by machines now, a new era is quickly approaching. I once agreed with your opinion, but in an era where most college graduates have to move back in with their parents - laziness is not the problem.
Laziness is the problem because it tracks backwards to the adults: Since having a high school diploma is associated with higher lifetime earnings, instead of offering more aid for those students on the edge to raise their grades, they went the lazy route of lowering the standards and were surprised when a high school diploma's value on the job market correspondingly plummeted. Since having a college degree is associated with higher lifetime earnings... The process with high school diplomas is in the process of being repeated, especially in fields where it's not likely anybody will notice the decreasing quality of graduates.
This is why the assumption isn't that they can train up a college graduate for what they actually need, incidentally--though professional schools are going the other direction, and some graduate programs will take anybody with an appropriate undergrad degree.
It doesn't exactly help that some students go into some fields expecting to be able to get a job with their bachelors when, really, it doesn't take much effort to know that the entry level degree for the field is the masters unless you did the right degree stacking. (Any of the social and life sciences stacked with a stats degree means you can quite possibly get to have people engaging in bidding wars for you if you made a point of being good at stats. You will, however, be doing lots of stats, so you better really enjoy stats.)
I honestly don't care what the medium actually is, I want media. I don't want a company to be able to take away titles that I've bought because they screwed up somehow. Same reason why I have not yet subscribed to a paid movie service, I want to be able to watch the movies that I have access to forever, not simply for the time that a particular service temporarily has rights. I want to have access to a permanent library, not something temporary and based on shifting license agreements and shifting tastes coupled with limited storage.
The real example was, ironically enough, 1984 that was yanked from networked ebook readers of a certain variety when there was a dispute. Sorry, I'm not going to have that happen to my movies, my books, my games.
That was pretty much what killed off my willingness to spend money on DRM'd media, really--I'll take download-only with the DRM I'd expect from Microsoft only if it's on a lending library system, where what I'm actually paying for is access to the library and not any specific game. Drop the fiction of selling me the games, sell me access to a library that I borrow my games from and can return the ones I'm done with for new/different ones for no additional cost, and you might get me in the door.
You'd have to make sure the cost of the system itself was low, possibly treating it as a loss leader, so people wouldn't be put off by the simple fact that it becomes useless once the library dies. It might be good to explicitly have plans in place for the library's EOL to include releasing dumps of the library to preservationist groups. It might even be smart to make it so you can play games on physical media for the previous generation(s) on it, just to reassure potential buyers.
None of this is something I'd expect Microsoft to think to do, especially after the disastrous choices that brought us the Xbox One.
Hey for all the numbnuts out there, there is no such thing as 1/2 this or 1/16 that, you are or you are not, end of race bullshit. So by what ever means you gain access, whether approved immigration or birth or marrying in or adoption, you are either in or not, suck it up. Culture choices become the illusion of race as a result of racists.
I see you're not from an ethnic group where blood matters, or more likely you are but it's one where it rarely comes up, so let me fill you in on the exciting details of kinship across cultures, from somebody who had to learn the rules young.
I'll keep this simple, so: some groups are matrilineal, some are patrilineal, and then you get the ones which do fractions which are at least effectively ambilineal. (If you need definitions I suggest looking it up yourself.) These all matter because your membership in a group is at the earliest age is determined by your lineage, and when this changes depends a lot cultural factors--some settle for 'act like a member,' others require initiation ceremonies (such as baptism or spirit quests), some require different ceremonies if you're not recognized as (sufficiently) kin because you effectively need to be adopted in (assuming adoption is a thing) and the age at which this may happen can differ from when somebody born within the group gets their initiation.
When you've a large enough group of people who because of differing ways of determining kinship are not being claimed by either side of their family's cultures, you get things like the Métis, and even without that problem you may get creole ethnic groups arising from the mix of cultures.
If you're going to make this sort of sweeping statement, at least try to understand that kinship is serious business for some cultures--and is not always a matter of choice.
What gets me is that it would be easy enough to handle gender and race variants as alternate forms of the base characters, something Unicode already supports and which would let those of us perfectly fine with using literally yellow people of any gender just go with that. It also means that the new emoji will be more supported from the start, as those whose systems don't display the new ones will get the basic one instead of a Mystery Box. This seems like it would suit Unicode's goals a lot better anyway. (Especially since I think it would generally be more useful for us all to have to go to some trouble if for some reason we need to specify in our emoji that M* Duck is a Mr or a Ms, since I suspect normally nobody cares.)
That said, Chinese is not as much a single language with many dialects as it is a family of languages that share a common grammar and writing system. It would be somewhat like if all the Romance languages used a common writing system so anybody who could read one literally could read them all, and in a pinch could people who didn't have in common a spoken language could still communicate with each other by passing a notebook back and forth. What prevents this historically with Chinese is the sheer number of hanzi needed for literacy, though touch screens and electronic dictionaries mean I can look up a character I don't know without needing to know the reading: I just write it on my screen. Honestly, I'd be fine with pushing emoji towards working like an easier-to-learn version of it: work out a common grammar of some basic flavor, keep all of the symbols pictographic, and start mapping them after a certain point as alts to the corresponding Han characters instead of as unique characters to save space in Unicode. Basically, set it up as a way for people without a language in common to communicate important non-abstract things like bathroom locations or a need for a doctor. Abstract concepts can be saved for when you can manage to have a full language in common, concrete concepts are less likely to require a common culture and more likely to have urgency.