I don't mean Slashdot per se, but quite simply it's the empowerment of the internet that fuels this. When I was a kid, you had very clearly defined vectors of dissemination - newspaper, books, tv...if I had an outlandish opinion about NASA faking the moon landings I would literally have to get a book published. Or better yet, have a Hollywood producer read my book and think "I can make a movie out of this - say, I wonder if Jim Brolin is available?" Bang - instant commonly known conspiracy theory. Now, who needs Hollywood? I can have a blog, get interviewed online, find plenty of wackos out there trivially to join my cause and spread the bullshit. It's the "democratization of the internet" that's the problem. So we're screwed, unless of course we can educate all these boobs to learn how to think and recognize something dubious when they read it. Hasn't that always been the problem throughout history?
Your casual comment about "automation has always been a job destroyer" - care to back that up? A study in the UK was done not long ago that proved automation since the Victorian era created more jobs than destroyed - they failed to read your book? Humanity has been predicting falling skies constantly on this topic since the dawn of the printing press - well ok, not the Technocracy movement from the early 1900s, which predicted we'd be lounging around pools being served martinis by robots except for the 3 day work week when we'd pop into our flying cars and check out how the robot masses were doing on the factory floor - but so far we still seem to be here. There are far fewer incredibly dangerous jobs, less all the time, and yup - buggy whip manufacturing and haberdasheries only exist as artisanal pursuits, and good for them because it keeps tradition and history alive by promoting human craftsmanship and eschews factory floor quality. Ask a chimneysweep 100 years ago if they felt sad their livelihood was disappearing, and of course they did. They'll also regale you of their father and grandfather dying at a remarkably young age from lung cancer. Embrace change, for crying out loud, since it's going to happen anyway - grab it by the horns and try to shape it, or sit in the corner crying about it and get left behind.
I really *really* hate this cutesy mainstream crap where old journalists do "human interest pieces" on idiotic coders selling their spam. It only impresses the technically illiterate.
I suspect this is all meant to catch the low hanging fruit - those people who aren't particularly techie or simply don't keep up with the news. Most technically astute users are already long gone or this will prompt the move. The simplest thing is to stop using it - pick a good alternative and start sending out those change of address emails. I still have my ISP account which I have forwarded to my primary, it's mostly a spam account but it's mildly convenient. If they pulled a stunt like this I'd dump it in a heartbeat. Despite people bemoaning how impossible it is for them to change their primary email, it's like cleaning out the basement - yup it's work, but just do it. You'll feel better afterwards.
Par for the course - all human tragedy reduced to obvious zingers and all new things being announced summed up with snide insults, because everyone here is too smart and too cool to post with a humane, considered response. It's not even that someone may well have died, there's a solid possibility members of their family got sentenced to work camps for 10 or 20 years just for being related. That pudgy little fuck plays like a comic idiot but the harsh reality he's a paranoid psycho desperately holding onto power.
I get that there's some value to see the scale of the economics, but isn't bundling all religion into one category and comparing it to individual tech businesses like comparing all companies remotely involved with food to GM? Religion is a pretty massive category containing a crapload of competition. As far as good works and all the "is it good or bad" talk, it's ultimately pointless. Like porn, religion ain't going anywhere. The world would be a far, far better place without it, but given human nature it would be replaced with someone equally idiotic, deceitful and hypocritical. Do I hate religious practitioners? Naw, not as a group, some are really decent people that feel the need to join a club in order to frame their life. I don't care about that unless they can't keep it out of interactions with others.
Is competitor google's car software meant to be truly autonomous? Honestly, I'm confused here - I thought these products were specifically intended to drive your car for you and statistically do a safer job of it. Perhaps Tesla has implemented a differently targeted product, but no matter what this particular product as described by the company is bullshit! What is the purpose of something that requires you to watch it work and be constantly alert for failure other than to tempt Darwin or cause you to fall asleep? People fall asleep at the wheel all the time, this can only raise those numbers. Just drive the damn car, or let software do it if it's safer, or don't drive.
I see you're following the standard Slashdot policy of letting no single comment ever lie with just a nod of the head, you must complain, whine, humiliate that in some way the poster is WRONG and MISSED THE POINT. Jesus, this annoying community. That person's oncologist made a solid point, it's basically true, and wasn't trying to explain your hypothetical "teenager with cancer", even though guess what? Teens in medieval times got cancer too! WHO is a useful organization that does a lot of useful things, but they are subject to the same sloppy data analysis that plagues a lot of scientific papers nowadays - all too influenced by outside economic forces and preconceived notions. Even their lame-duck backpedaling on coffee was caveated with "maybe hot drinks", which is another stab in the dark at what might have conceivably tainted their findings. Chevy Chase said it best - "scientists have determined that saliva causes cancer, but only when taken in small doses over a long period of time."
Yeah, the "forgotten how to code" line is the sort of chatty co-worker aside that anyone would say when returning to something they haven't done in a while, but somehow here it's been turned into a declaration of intellectual poverty. I wonder if it's this guy being a whiney loser or just a regular lazy guy whose comments are being taken out of context by the media.
It's only a non-story to someone trying to be cool and more experienced than everyone else - you know, your average Slashdot user... Come off it - buried in the EULA or not, this is inexplicably idiotic and arguably illegal behaviour. Once again Apple treats it's user base as perpetual noobs who are only aware of the apple garden.
Well, I think it's a bit like porn - hard to explicitly define but know it when I see it etc.,but then I went to the site itself... The My Little Pony vibe is not doing it any favours, at *all*. Frankly I would welcome a break from the constantly toxic, competitive snide attitude that many sites have, but not at the expense of it becoming like those "good news newspapers" that only do feel good crap that reads like excerpts from My Life is a Bowl of Cherries. There is value in dissenting opinions. What's needed is strict policing on material that crosses into personal attacks, which reddit makes no attempt to stop. It's a waste of bandwidth. Don't, however, waste everyone's time with the Happiness Channel.
Naw, it's a social network comprised of snarky, sarcastic, technically minded people locked in an eternal battle striving to be the most innately intelligent, educated, dismissive and first-past-the-post user. Lately it's been feeling like an MMO, and what a grind. Instead of "kill 10 rats" it's "humiliate 2 noobs". In fact, while I consider Fry's comments somewhat true but ultimately pointless(logic can no more stop online membership than screaming" bread and circuses!" in front of a sports stadium), Slashdot is arguably the worse example of the sort of pointless chest thumping communities. It's like a cross between Mensa and American Gladiators.
Yeah, if it requires a Microsoft account, thanks but no thanks. Since bypassing 8 from 7 and going to 10,it's been an "ok" experience with some improvement under the hood, but the win 10 "skin" has been flakey for me (some shell extensions cause the start menu to disappear) and USB drivers can cause random bizarre behaviour such as power cycling back on after shutting down. I can live with these, though, with hopeful improvements over time, but local root for me, please. *No* chance I'm wiring myself into the MS user sphere with my passwords sitting pretty on a Redmond server. The Android thing appealed, but nopes.
You're correct, but still the mainstream takeaway for the general public is "keep using computer to stave off dementia." I must admit that the results from the study seem so weak to me that there's not much takeaway at all. When I hit that age I can look at declining computer use as a (probably temporary) result of games sucking that month and I'm realizing the value of going for walks instead. I'm not blaming the researchers for reporting it, but I just don't think there's much meat there.
Seriously, get real. Run through all the job types - factory assembly line, data entry, computer chip design... and you're going to propose one that requires this degree of intimacy? With the uncanny valley already a serious issue unless the lighting is "just right"? Even if you wanted to argue that clients don't want genuine intimacy, the most this could impact is the sex doll market. Hardly mainstream.
Of course not the majority, but a significant piece of the pie. I simply have no interest in the steaming turd that is the Canadian Netflix, but I find the US version good value. Whether or not this is something they actually want to do (I suspect not), there will be a battle for the short term between them and vpn services, since the latter require functionality to stay alive, and either it goes back to what it was or I walk away from both companies. It's not their entire customer base, but keep in mind a survey done a few months back showed 30% of Canadian subscribers watched the US site. Spread that around the world, it's significant.
I'm not so sure. A dev I know has been using a certain copy pro package for a few years now and since starting it, has yet to have a crack show up in the wild. And yes, it's a well known app that is a classic target for cracking, and no, the copy pro isn't remotely obnoxious or privacy-shattering since the dev is a privacy aficionado. I think the tech is getting there. Add to this that many games offer real benefits to network connectivity and you might see AAA cracks go away. Then there's the awesome Witcher devs, who simply flip the bird to copy pro altogether, I still see cracks(aka copies, in this case) show up for witcher 3 but the game has done fabulously, simply because it's awesome, everyone loves them and wants to see them be successful for making something so wonderful and for steadfastly refusing to be dicks about DLC. That's the best copy pro of all.
I'm Canadian, so I assume your snide reference to liberal would translate to "right wing nut job" up here since the Democrats look like our Conservatives. That aside, though, I think the notion of blocking anything from your net experience is foolish. If you hate Trump, you should *want* to keep up on his psychotic rants. An informed voter is better than uninformed. This does not apply to Justin Bieber, of course...
I'm not sure I'd call it whining - it's a significant investment for many to set up cloud computing the way they need it so I think it's a fair demand that if your gas station insists on measuring it's product in frackles that it give you a fair conversion rate for litres to frackles. My needs would be something predictable like rendering 3d images, so the first thing I'd be doing is measuring render times for the same image there and here. That's easy and relatively cheap to do, and the numbers scale directly, but I can see this being a serious issue for other uses.
I'm a guy who stared up, glassy eyed (mostly because I was a kid in the middle of a serious sunstroke) as Armstrong stepped down that ladder, I had my plastic model of the Saturn V and scrapbook after scrapbook of the Apollo missions,so I guess you could call me a fan of exploration, science, engineering - all the things that had to come together for that moment to happen, but I honestly think those days are gone or at least disappearing. Two things end up driving exploration - a romantic ideal of the need to know, and the chance for someone to make a whack of cash. I think like after the "discovery" of North America, it's the investors that will drive the future of space. Nobody with any control over the sort of money this is going to cost believes that we are genuinely on the edge of destroying Earth - no "Interstellar scenario" is forthcoming - so what it will end up being is profit. Mining, most likely. As robotics advances the arguments are fewer and fewer for putting humans in harm's way. Maybe Mars will end up being on the list, my bet is the asteroid belt, though.
What is a movie, or a book? It's *story* - drama, comedy, tragedy, what have you. It's not the legal right to use the term "beholder" or "owlbear". This announcement should be greeted with the same anticipation as Hugh Jackman selling a high end pen(Montblanc), there's nothing inherently awful about it, but why would you assume it's tidings of anything particularly good? All D&D means is a certain guarantee of bums in seats on opening weekend, nothing more. The bean counters are squirming in their seats, nothing more. I was holding out for Bunnies & Burrows, anyway.
First off - I worked in advertising for 12 years, I've met some of the least self-confident, bullshit-spewing people in that business I've ever had to work with, and a few legitimately clever folks, too. Like any business, I suppose, but the level of emperor's new clothes syndrome reaches incredible heights. I can't watch any "behind the scenes" of an ad campaign without my gag reflex kicking in.
Also, I am one of those people, like some in the threads here, who thinks advertising "doesn't work" on me. My eye is well trained to skip over ad space and to roll skyward when I'm forced to sit through commercials (pretty much only when I go to see a movie in a theatre, which is rare). You can tell me it's all subliminal, my subconscious is being groomed to consume all you want, but in the end when I crave a cola, I pick coke because pepsi tastes like fructose mixed with old coffee grounds, not because they'd like to teach the world to sing. I do think advertising "works", however, because there are shit tons of people out there who gobble this crap up (yes, outraged parent posting your minion toy from Macdonald's saying something vaguely like "shit" on YouTube, I'm looking at you). It's Barnum and Bailey, friend, line those rubes up and take their money.
So entire economies are based on this advertising model, enough to bring countries to their knees, like it or not, so my question is: what exactly is the alternative posed by that navel-gazing article? What shall we do to stand against this outrage against humanity, supposedly somehow different than what advertisers have been doing ever since the first snake oil salesman started barking from a corner in the early morning mists of a village that would one day become Mesopotamia? It just read like a cranky old man piece with no point whatsoever, and worse, no alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't mean Slashdot per se, but quite simply it's the empowerment of the internet that fuels this. When I was a kid, you had very clearly defined vectors of dissemination - newspaper, books, tv...if I had an outlandish opinion about NASA faking the moon landings I would literally have to get a book published. Or better yet, have a Hollywood producer read my book and think "I can make a movie out of this - say, I wonder if Jim Brolin is available?" Bang - instant commonly known conspiracy theory.
Now, who needs Hollywood? I can have a blog, get interviewed online, find plenty of wackos out there trivially to join my cause and spread the bullshit. It's the "democratization of the internet" that's the problem. So we're screwed, unless of course we can educate all these boobs to learn how to think and recognize something dubious when they read it. Hasn't that always been the problem throughout history?
Your casual comment about "automation has always been a job destroyer" - care to back that up? A study in the UK was done not long ago that proved automation since the Victorian era created more jobs than destroyed - they failed to read your book?
Humanity has been predicting falling skies constantly on this topic since the dawn of the printing press - well ok, not the Technocracy movement from the early 1900s, which predicted we'd be lounging around pools being served martinis by robots except for the 3 day work week when we'd pop into our flying cars and check out how the robot masses were doing on the factory floor - but so far we still seem to be here. There are far fewer incredibly dangerous jobs, less all the time, and yup - buggy whip manufacturing and haberdasheries only exist as artisanal pursuits, and good for them because it keeps tradition and history alive by promoting human craftsmanship and eschews factory floor quality.
Ask a chimneysweep 100 years ago if they felt sad their livelihood was disappearing, and of course they did. They'll also regale you of their father and grandfather dying at a remarkably young age from lung cancer.
Embrace change, for crying out loud, since it's going to happen anyway - grab it by the horns and try to shape it, or sit in the corner crying about it and get left behind.
I really *really* hate this cutesy mainstream crap where old journalists do "human interest pieces" on idiotic coders selling their spam. It only impresses the technically illiterate.
I suspect this is all meant to catch the low hanging fruit - those people who aren't particularly techie or simply don't keep up with the news. Most technically astute users are already long gone or this will prompt the move. The simplest thing is to stop using it - pick a good alternative and start sending out those change of address emails. I still have my ISP account which I have forwarded to my primary, it's mostly a spam account but it's mildly convenient. If they pulled a stunt like this I'd dump it in a heartbeat.
Despite people bemoaning how impossible it is for them to change their primary email, it's like cleaning out the basement - yup it's work, but just do it. You'll feel better afterwards.
Par for the course - all human tragedy reduced to obvious zingers and all new things being announced summed up with snide insults, because everyone here is too smart and too cool to post with a humane, considered response.
It's not even that someone may well have died, there's a solid possibility members of their family got sentenced to work camps for 10 or 20 years just for being related. That pudgy little fuck plays like a comic idiot but the harsh reality he's a paranoid psycho desperately holding onto power.
I get that there's some value to see the scale of the economics, but isn't bundling all religion into one category and comparing it to individual tech businesses like comparing all companies remotely involved with food to GM? Religion is a pretty massive category containing a crapload of competition.
As far as good works and all the "is it good or bad" talk, it's ultimately pointless. Like porn, religion ain't going anywhere. The world would be a far, far better place without it, but given human nature it would be replaced with someone equally idiotic, deceitful and hypocritical.
Do I hate religious practitioners? Naw, not as a group, some are really decent people that feel the need to join a club in order to frame their life. I don't care about that unless they can't keep it out of interactions with others.
Is competitor google's car software meant to be truly autonomous? Honestly, I'm confused here - I thought these products were specifically intended to drive your car for you and statistically do a safer job of it. Perhaps Tesla has implemented a differently targeted product, but no matter what this particular product as described by the company is bullshit! What is the purpose of something that requires you to watch it work and be constantly alert for failure other than to tempt Darwin or cause you to fall asleep? People fall asleep at the wheel all the time, this can only raise those numbers. Just drive the damn car, or let software do it if it's safer, or don't drive.
I see you're following the standard Slashdot policy of letting no single comment ever lie with just a nod of the head, you must complain, whine, humiliate that in some way the poster is WRONG and MISSED THE POINT. Jesus, this annoying community.
That person's oncologist made a solid point, it's basically true, and wasn't trying to explain your hypothetical "teenager with cancer", even though guess what? Teens in medieval times got cancer too!
WHO is a useful organization that does a lot of useful things, but they are subject to the same sloppy data analysis that plagues a lot of scientific papers nowadays - all too influenced by outside economic forces and preconceived notions. Even their lame-duck backpedaling on coffee was caveated with "maybe hot drinks", which is another stab in the dark at what might have conceivably tainted their findings.
Chevy Chase said it best - "scientists have determined that saliva causes cancer, but only when taken in small doses over a long period of time."
Yeah, the "forgotten how to code" line is the sort of chatty co-worker aside that anyone would say when returning to something they haven't done in a while, but somehow here it's been turned into a declaration of intellectual poverty. I wonder if it's this guy being a whiney loser or just a regular lazy guy whose comments are being taken out of context by the media.
It's only a non-story to someone trying to be cool and more experienced than everyone else - you know, your average Slashdot user...
Come off it - buried in the EULA or not, this is inexplicably idiotic and arguably illegal behaviour. Once again Apple treats it's user base as perpetual noobs who are only aware of the apple garden.
Well, I think it's a bit like porn - hard to explicitly define but know it when I see it etc.,but then I went to the site itself...
The My Little Pony vibe is not doing it any favours, at *all*. Frankly I would welcome a break from the constantly toxic, competitive snide attitude that many sites have, but not at the expense of it becoming like those "good news newspapers" that only do feel good crap that reads like excerpts from My Life is a Bowl of Cherries. There is value in dissenting opinions. What's needed is strict policing on material that crosses into personal attacks, which reddit makes no attempt to stop. It's a waste of bandwidth. Don't, however, waste everyone's time with the Happiness Channel.
...is kind of a dealbreaker for me. It's still an interesting thought experiment, but that's about it.
Naw, it's a social network comprised of snarky, sarcastic, technically minded people locked in an eternal battle striving to be the most innately intelligent, educated, dismissive and first-past-the-post user. Lately it's been feeling like an MMO, and what a grind. Instead of "kill 10 rats" it's "humiliate 2 noobs".
In fact, while I consider Fry's comments somewhat true but ultimately pointless(logic can no more stop online membership than screaming" bread and circuses!" in front of a sports stadium), Slashdot is arguably the worse example of the sort of pointless chest thumping communities. It's like a cross between Mensa and American Gladiators.
Yeah, if it requires a Microsoft account, thanks but no thanks. Since bypassing 8 from 7 and going to 10,it's been an "ok" experience with some improvement under the hood, but the win 10 "skin" has been flakey for me (some shell extensions cause the start menu to disappear) and USB drivers can cause random bizarre behaviour such as power cycling back on after shutting down. I can live with these, though, with hopeful improvements over time, but local root for me, please. *No* chance I'm wiring myself into the MS user sphere with my passwords sitting pretty on a Redmond server. The Android thing appealed, but nopes.
...is a better way to be an asshole. It's my personal method of choice.
You're correct, but still the mainstream takeaway for the general public is "keep using computer to stave off dementia." I must admit that the results from the study seem so weak to me that there's not much takeaway at all. When I hit that age I can look at declining computer use as a (probably temporary) result of games sucking that month and I'm realizing the value of going for walks instead.
I'm not blaming the researchers for reporting it, but I just don't think there's much meat there.
Seriously, get real. Run through all the job types - factory assembly line, data entry, computer chip design... and you're going to propose one that requires this degree of intimacy? With the uncanny valley already a serious issue unless the lighting is "just right"?
Even if you wanted to argue that clients don't want genuine intimacy, the most this could impact is the sex doll market. Hardly mainstream.
Of course not the majority, but a significant piece of the pie. I simply have no interest in the steaming turd that is the Canadian Netflix, but I find the US version good value. Whether or not this is something they actually want to do (I suspect not), there will be a battle for the short term between them and vpn services, since the latter require functionality to stay alive, and either it goes back to what it was or I walk away from both companies. It's not their entire customer base, but keep in mind a survey done a few months back showed 30% of Canadian subscribers watched the US site. Spread that around the world, it's significant.
I'm not so sure. A dev I know has been using a certain copy pro package for a few years now and since starting it, has yet to have a crack show up in the wild. And yes, it's a well known app that is a classic target for cracking, and no, the copy pro isn't remotely obnoxious or privacy-shattering since the dev is a privacy aficionado. I think the tech is getting there. Add to this that many games offer real benefits to network connectivity and you might see AAA cracks go away. Then there's the awesome Witcher devs, who simply flip the bird to copy pro altogether, I still see cracks(aka copies, in this case) show up for witcher 3 but the game has done fabulously, simply because it's awesome, everyone loves them and wants to see them be successful for making something so wonderful and for steadfastly refusing to be dicks about DLC. That's the best copy pro of all.
I'm Canadian, so I assume your snide reference to liberal would translate to "right wing nut job" up here since the Democrats look like our Conservatives. That aside, though, I think the notion of blocking anything from your net experience is foolish. If you hate Trump, you should *want* to keep up on his psychotic rants. An informed voter is better than uninformed.
This does not apply to Justin Bieber, of course...
I'm not sure I'd call it whining - it's a significant investment for many to set up cloud computing the way they need it so I think it's a fair demand that if your gas station insists on measuring it's product in frackles that it give you a fair conversion rate for litres to frackles. My needs would be something predictable like rendering 3d images, so the first thing I'd be doing is measuring render times for the same image there and here. That's easy and relatively cheap to do, and the numbers scale directly, but I can see this being a serious issue for other uses.
Yup. Plus, he's making the story about himself rather than the science - it's pretty obvious he's had one too many screenings of The Fly.
I'm a guy who stared up, glassy eyed (mostly because I was a kid in the middle of a serious sunstroke) as Armstrong stepped down that ladder, I had my plastic model of the Saturn V and scrapbook after scrapbook of the Apollo missions,so I guess you could call me a fan of exploration, science, engineering - all the things that had to come together for that moment to happen, but I honestly think those days are gone or at least disappearing. Two things end up driving exploration - a romantic ideal of the need to know, and the chance for someone to make a whack of cash. I think like after the "discovery" of North America, it's the investors that will drive the future of space. Nobody with any control over the sort of money this is going to cost believes that we are genuinely on the edge of destroying Earth - no "Interstellar scenario" is forthcoming - so what it will end up being is profit. Mining, most likely. As robotics advances the arguments are fewer and fewer for putting humans in harm's way. Maybe Mars will end up being on the list, my bet is the asteroid belt, though.
What is a movie, or a book? It's *story* - drama, comedy, tragedy, what have you. It's not the legal right to use the term "beholder" or "owlbear". This announcement should be greeted with the same anticipation as Hugh Jackman selling a high end pen(Montblanc), there's nothing inherently awful about it, but why would you assume it's tidings of anything particularly good? All D&D means is a certain guarantee of bums in seats on opening weekend, nothing more. The bean counters are squirming in their seats, nothing more.
I was holding out for Bunnies & Burrows, anyway.
First off - I worked in advertising for 12 years, I've met some of the least self-confident, bullshit-spewing people in that business I've ever had to work with, and a few legitimately clever folks, too. Like any business, I suppose, but the level of emperor's new clothes syndrome reaches incredible heights. I can't watch any "behind the scenes" of an ad campaign without my gag reflex kicking in.
Also, I am one of those people, like some in the threads here, who thinks advertising "doesn't work" on me. My eye is well trained to skip over ad space and to roll skyward when I'm forced to sit through commercials (pretty much only when I go to see a movie in a theatre, which is rare). You can tell me it's all subliminal, my subconscious is being groomed to consume all you want, but in the end when I crave a cola, I pick coke because pepsi tastes like fructose mixed with old coffee grounds, not because they'd like to teach the world to sing. I do think advertising "works", however, because there are shit tons of people out there who gobble this crap up (yes, outraged parent posting your minion toy from Macdonald's saying something vaguely like "shit" on YouTube, I'm looking at you). It's Barnum and Bailey, friend, line those rubes up and take their money.
So entire economies are based on this advertising model, enough to bring countries to their knees, like it or not, so my question is: what exactly is the alternative posed by that navel-gazing article? What shall we do to stand against this outrage against humanity, supposedly somehow different than what advertisers have been doing ever since the first snake oil salesman started barking from a corner in the early morning mists of a village that would one day become Mesopotamia? It just read like a cranky old man piece with no point whatsoever, and worse, no alternatives.