As someone who lives in Florida, and thus sees an average of at least two days of outages every year thanks to Hurricane season, I'd dearly love an alternative to generators. Residential batteries make a lot of sense in this area.
You're talking about a company that removed headphone jacks from the line of phones it (in part) uses to sell music. Yes, they are dumb enough to remove Netflix...
No, the first warning signs appeared back in the 80's as Sear
The current year is 2018, around 30 years after the period you're talking about. Since then everything has changed. Sears has different owners, different management, and for the most part the staff is different.
The events I described are post Kmart merger, with the current management, and relate to how the current management system has impacted the company. Whatever happened during the 1980s is really mostly irrelevant. It survived those events.
If you've been paying attention to American retail (as opposed to parroting crap you read somewhere but don't understand)... Chains are dying, and malls are becoming deserted. This isn't due to bricks and mortar being obsolete (though the net has played a role), but rather due to the loss of purchasing power among the American middle class.
You're accusing me of parrotting crap when you yourself repeat the nonsense that American retail is dying? Seriously? Who is parroting bullshit here? 'cos what you've written is textbook "Woe wither retail thanks to Amazon" stuff that could have appeared in Forbes.
So explain it: explain why the vast majority of chains that existed 20 years ago still exist - sometimes rebranded, but almost all of them are still there. You're suggesting that the "middle class" has lost its purchasing power. That should, by rights, given the tight margins of all of retail, caused virtually every chain to be wiped out.
But strangely, the only major chains that have been wiped out have been those you can easily point at and say "That wasn't a loss in business, that was mismanagement." Why do you think that is? Off the top of my head, the only major retail corporations missing now are Borders, which is the one example of a company that might have been killed by Amazon, Circuit City (which was never mall based, and which was poorly run, making some major gambles that didn't pay off including DIVX and firing all their salespeople), Toys R Us (which was extremely profitable, but was intentionally bankrupted by a consortium of vulture capitalists who loaded it up with debts for loans it never saw a dollar from, and forced it to pay them down and pay the interest on them), and, now, Sears, which again we know was mismanaged.
My local mall doesn't seem any less full of stores than it did 20 years ago. And that's surprising, because you'd expect individual retailers to become obsolete as fashions change and technologies to develop entirely new classes of things to buy.
Walmart is an increasing threat to the economy not because bricks and mortar aren't obsolete... But because they sell stuff cheaply, and in real terms American's have ever less purchasing power.
I didn't say they're an increasing threat to the economy because bricks and mortar aren't obsolete, I said they wouldn't be a threat if B&M were obsolete. WALMART IS BRICKS AND MORTAR. If Bricks and Mortar were obsolete, Walmart could not threaten the US economy. It does.
K-Mart didn't merge with Sears as part of their bankruptcy, they bought Sears a few years after their bankruptcy because they were profitable again. Neither company was having significant problems at the time of the merger, and were healthy and successful until Lampert took over.
Let me guess, you think Toys R Us died for the same reason?
There are plenty of brick and mortar companies that still exist and are doing well (at least as well as they were doing twenty years ago.)
The issue with Sears boils down exclusively to mismanagement. Lambert is an ideologue, and insisted on breaking it up into parts that, for no good reason, compete with one another. That means the appliance department competes with the clothing line. There's no good reason for this, and it's impossible for the company to benefit from the synergy of having a wide range of products.
The first warning signs were about a decade or so ago. You may remember that its K-Mart stores turned into "Sears Essentials" (which was fine, it was just a marketing exercise), but then suddenly half the SE stores disappeared. Why? Because of a fiasco where none of the stores had extended hours in the run up to the Holidays, which traditionally is when most stores do most of their business.
Why was this? Well, because in order for that to happen, one division would have had to propose the stores open for longer. That division would then have been on the hook for the costs of all of the stores staying open. The divisions couldn't jointly propose this and share the costs, because Lambert had banned cooperation between them. So nobody proposed extended store openings, and the stores had normal opening times in the run up to Christmas.
Result? The first round of massive cost cuttings. Sears underperformed, and the entire network was pruned. Most Sears Essentials were within ten miles of a mall, which also had a Sears, so they were closed as redundant. This lead to increased losses because not everyone wants to shop at a fucking mall, Sears Essentials was a good idea.
Why does Lambert think this is a good way to run a company? Because this is his reading of Ayn Rand. Never mind the fact that businesses are a thing because people and entities achieve results when they work together, he really thinks that if womens lingerie competes for resources with appliances then somehow they'll both compete better with Macys.
Fuck Lambert. He's destroyed a once great company.
Quit it with the Bricks and Mortar obsolete bullshit. If they were obsolete they would have died long ago, Almost all B&Ms have always been a low margin business. I've heard of store chains actually selling goods at below cost, surviving by paying their suppliers three months late and making money from the Interest. If B&M was obsolete EVERY CHAIN WOULD BE DYING RIGHT NOW. Malls would be deserted. The Thanksgiving parade in New York would now be named "The NBC/Amazon.com Thanksgiving Parade." Walmart, one of the lowest margin companies on Earth, would be a punchline, not an ever growing threat to the economy.
Retail's fine. Businesses go bust from the time to time, even old ones. Lambert is terrible.
Whoever owns Slashdot, could we have a (-1, Jerk) response? Also appropriate for the "Oh, so TFA says someone built a 6502 out of Lego bricks? What's the point in that, it'd be too slow to run Excel!" type comments.
It was also about Twitter because it was only about Twitter. At some point you have to define the bounds of a study. Is a study bad because it's not asking a question you want answered?
I think the point is that question was "Are women getting a lot of abuse on Twitter", rather than "Do women get more abuse than men". I can perfectly understand AmiMojo being somewhat confused as to why you insist there is any useful information that could be gained by also measuring the amount of abuse men get when trying to answer the question.
It's not about gender in the sense that the question isn't about gender as a metric (you're not plotting a graph here with gender as an axis.)
You can, as a separate thing, also ask "Are women getting more abuse than men?", but that's a different question, just as "Are women getting more abuse on Twitter than Faceplace?" would be an interesting question, but an entirely different one. My guess is the only reason Slashdot is up in arms about it not asking "vs men" rather than "vs Mybook+" is because people here are less interested in tech than they are in being suspicious of anything that might be squinted at and seen as possibly slightly related to social justice.
And that's depressing. RIP Slashdot, news for nerds.
First I'd like the point out that the law doesn't work in terms of being defined by vague analogies. If I kill someone, for example, you can't argue from that using a really clever argument that it'd be unjust to convict me of murder because it's just like if I'd driven a car and accidentally squished someone's daffodils which is totally a civil matter so there your honor I rest my case checkmate.
But to address your specific argument: No, there are multiple differences. It's usually impossible to legally make the government do anything or hold it responsible for anything. Also we're not talking about murder, which is a criminal matter, but civil law, particularly the bits relating to liability and damages and so forth.
More critically the ruling here isn't that the registrar is at fault merely because the copyright violator bought a domain from them, it's that the registrar failed to act after they were told that their customer was using the service they provided to cause (what the law says is) harm to the plaintiff.
So if the law was based on vague analogies, your analogy would still fail to sway a judge. You'd have to extend your analogy to a set of circumstances where a private road owner owns a road and continues to allow a lunatic who keeps murderizing other people driving along the same road to drive along it even after it's been pointed out that this is happening and that the person in question is cackling loudly and saying "I'm still going to murder people on this here private road, take that Hilary Rosen and Metallica!", and where it'd literally take merely an email to the right employee of the road owner, who would spend literally only one minute doing whatever is necessary to remove the lunatic because that private road owner bans people all the time.
And in that analogy, it's probably the case that the courts would rule that the road owner is at least partially responsible, in civil courts, when the families of the victims are suing for damages, for what happened.
You know a proof of concept is so called because it proves a concept, right?
The concept being proven here is what's being criticized, not the tunnel (which, ironically, doesn't actually prove the concept to begin with, anyone can build a tunnel, just ask former inmates of Stalag Luft III.) Musk is proposing a complete system including cars joining and exiting the system. Those are the bits in contention. Musk hasn't demoed or even described anything capable of achieving the high rates of ingress/egress needed to even reach the ballpark achieved by, say, the Glasgow Subway.
History might, but only in the same way Edison is celebrated as the same. And Musk deserves less credit than Edison.
There are a multitude of problems with this "tunnel", from those already mentioned to the fact ingress and egress seems to be the bigger issue. A train solves those problems, and actually "trains through cheaply built tunnels" has been a thing for coming up to a century and a half, but Musk insists this thing needs to be for cars.
And that's the real problem, because that wasn't demoed yesterday. The easy bit was demoed. The hard bit everyone keeps saying Musk has no solution to is still out of reach.
It was written by some of the best educated and intelligent men of the day who had an incredible understanding in political science, sociology, and economics. They had insight into our bickering and partisanship that persists to this day.
Yeah, and they still managed to make a document that was maybe three fifths decent and humane.
(You are literally talking about people who put together a constitution that rewarded states that had slavery with more power over the Federal government than those who didn't. Don't start pretending they made particularly great decisions about what's ethical and what isn't.)
You're wrong, Apple and Microsoft never blocked each other's websites, and this isn't about blocking websites, it's about Microsoft optimizing Edge to render YouTube really, really, fast, and then finding it stopped being optimal and rendered at the same speed as normal websites when Google inserted a hidden div, upending all the assumptions Microsoft's engineers had made about how YouTube works.
In other words, if the allegations of said intern are correct, Google sneakily made Edge treat YouTube as a normal website. Oh the horror.
Nobody's accusing them of blanking Microsoft Edge. The conspiracy theory the former Edge engineer spouted is that Google defeated an Edge optimization by inserting a hidden HTML element on their YouTube pages.
The problem with the theory is that to accept this, you have to pretty much accept that Microsoft optimized Edge to render YouTube really well, which means almost any changes would have broken the optimization, and moreover the intent of those optimizations was probably to cheat on benchmarks. If adding a DIV is enough to break an optimization, then that suggests Edge's performance on YouTube was out of whack with its normal performance and you'd expect slower performance on normal websites.
So, it's kinda like Microsoft and Google running an race, Microsoft sneaking into a car and driving half way, only for the car to break down, and then complaining Google must have poured sugar in the gas tank.
Verizon would have difficulty arguing that it is the copyright holder of its users content, which means issues with standing if it did file a lawsuit claiming some sort of DMCA violation.
In this instance, I'd say no, because Google and Facebook do not exactly get on, and the notion that Facebook might be crippling an Android feature and stealing your data is something I can see Google being pissed about.
It's somewhat ironic that Google is the one that's always being accused of selling your data when its business model actually revolves around making money by using the data, but keeping it secret, while Facebook "leaks" (actually sells) your data over and over again, and everyone's attitude is just "Oopsie, don't do it again" when selling your data is their actual business model.
(There's kind of an implicit recognition that they use, rather than sell, the data in your comment, I thought it was worth highlighting. I suspect though that there's more to it than "Google already has your data".)
I disabled FAM, what problem are you having? The issue with FAM is that it's not obvious it exists and needs to be disabled too, not that it can't be disabled.
If you genuinely have a phone that doesn't allow you to disable it, contact Google, I'm about 90% sure they'll either have a fix or they'll have a word with the manufacturer for violating their Google Play licensing agreements.
Alas you're on a website where being charged $20 for a CD of flavor-of-the-month's latest hits is frequently described as rape. Also apparently George Lucas releasing shitty edits to the original trilogy is EXACTLY like that horrific act of sexual assault committed against children.
I've tried. I ended up just foeing people. And then I gave up even doing that...
There's a general view in social justice circles that porn objectifies women and is demeaning and offensive, and that's the real reason it was banned.
The 1980s called, they want their second wave feminism back. One of the (many) reasons the second wave collapsed and third wave rose a few years later was the anti-sex worker attitudes of second wave feminists.
Third wave is generally OK with porn as long as it's consensual and none of the actors are being abused. You'll obviously occasionally find exceptions, but that's the general view.
The discussion is about a three digit suicide hotline, not a mind reading device that can figure out if someone plans to take revenge on their workplace. I seriously doubt many of the latter consists of people who make it a point to call the suicide hotline and then wait for a white van to pick them up from their homes beforehand.
This whole discussion is so fucking dumb. One idiot thinks it'll result in a $4 monthly charge, others think it's a great idea because they think the best way to help suicidal problems is to provide them with financial help, therapy, a shoulder to cry on.... JUST KIDDING... they think that the best way to deal with suicidal people is to punish them by making their lives even shittier.
The suicide hotline, even in its current ten digit form, is stupid and the very pinnacle of "Something must be done" assholery. You want to cut suicides? There's only one way, and it's hard: you have to work on making the world a pleasant place to live.
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who lives in Florida, and thus sees an average of at least two days of outages every year thanks to Hurricane season, I'd dearly love an alternative to generators. Residential batteries make a lot of sense in this area.
You're talking about a company that removed headphone jacks from the line of phones it (in part) uses to sell music. Yes, they are dumb enough to remove Netflix...
The current year is 2018, around 30 years after the period you're talking about. Since then everything has changed. Sears has different owners, different management, and for the most part the staff is different.
The events I described are post Kmart merger, with the current management, and relate to how the current management system has impacted the company. Whatever happened during the 1980s is really mostly irrelevant. It survived those events.
You're accusing me of parrotting crap when you yourself repeat the nonsense that American retail is dying? Seriously? Who is parroting bullshit here? 'cos what you've written is textbook "Woe wither retail thanks to Amazon" stuff that could have appeared in Forbes.
So explain it: explain why the vast majority of chains that existed 20 years ago still exist - sometimes rebranded, but almost all of them are still there. You're suggesting that the "middle class" has lost its purchasing power. That should, by rights, given the tight margins of all of retail, caused virtually every chain to be wiped out.
But strangely, the only major chains that have been wiped out have been those you can easily point at and say "That wasn't a loss in business, that was mismanagement." Why do you think that is? Off the top of my head, the only major retail corporations missing now are Borders, which is the one example of a company that might have been killed by Amazon, Circuit City (which was never mall based, and which was poorly run, making some major gambles that didn't pay off including DIVX and firing all their salespeople), Toys R Us (which was extremely profitable, but was intentionally bankrupted by a consortium of vulture capitalists who loaded it up with debts for loans it never saw a dollar from, and forced it to pay them down and pay the interest on them), and, now, Sears, which again we know was mismanaged.
My local mall doesn't seem any less full of stores than it did 20 years ago. And that's surprising, because you'd expect individual retailers to become obsolete as fashions change and technologies to develop entirely new classes of things to buy.
I didn't say they're an increasing threat to the economy because bricks and mortar aren't obsolete, I said they wouldn't be a threat if B&M were obsolete. WALMART IS BRICKS AND MORTAR. If Bricks and Mortar were obsolete, Walmart could not threaten the US economy. It does.
K-Mart didn't merge with Sears as part of their bankruptcy, they bought Sears a few years after their bankruptcy because they were profitable again. Neither company was having significant problems at the time of the merger, and were healthy and successful until Lampert took over.
Let me guess, you think Toys R Us died for the same reason?
There are plenty of brick and mortar companies that still exist and are doing well (at least as well as they were doing twenty years ago.)
The issue with Sears boils down exclusively to mismanagement. Lambert is an ideologue, and insisted on breaking it up into parts that, for no good reason, compete with one another. That means the appliance department competes with the clothing line. There's no good reason for this, and it's impossible for the company to benefit from the synergy of having a wide range of products.
The first warning signs were about a decade or so ago. You may remember that its K-Mart stores turned into "Sears Essentials" (which was fine, it was just a marketing exercise), but then suddenly half the SE stores disappeared. Why? Because of a fiasco where none of the stores had extended hours in the run up to the Holidays, which traditionally is when most stores do most of their business.
Why was this? Well, because in order for that to happen, one division would have had to propose the stores open for longer. That division would then have been on the hook for the costs of all of the stores staying open. The divisions couldn't jointly propose this and share the costs, because Lambert had banned cooperation between them. So nobody proposed extended store openings, and the stores had normal opening times in the run up to Christmas.
Result? The first round of massive cost cuttings. Sears underperformed, and the entire network was pruned. Most Sears Essentials were within ten miles of a mall, which also had a Sears, so they were closed as redundant. This lead to increased losses because not everyone wants to shop at a fucking mall, Sears Essentials was a good idea.
Why does Lambert think this is a good way to run a company? Because this is his reading of Ayn Rand. Never mind the fact that businesses are a thing because people and entities achieve results when they work together, he really thinks that if womens lingerie competes for resources with appliances then somehow they'll both compete better with Macys.
Fuck Lambert. He's destroyed a once great company.
Quit it with the Bricks and Mortar obsolete bullshit. If they were obsolete they would have died long ago, Almost all B&Ms have always been a low margin business. I've heard of store chains actually selling goods at below cost, surviving by paying their suppliers three months late and making money from the Interest. If B&M was obsolete EVERY CHAIN WOULD BE DYING RIGHT NOW. Malls would be deserted. The Thanksgiving parade in New York would now be named "The NBC/Amazon.com Thanksgiving Parade." Walmart, one of the lowest margin companies on Earth, would be a punchline, not an ever growing threat to the economy.
Retail's fine. Businesses go bust from the time to time, even old ones. Lambert is terrible.
Whoever owns Slashdot, could we have a (-1, Jerk) response? Also appropriate for the "Oh, so TFA says someone built a 6502 out of Lego bricks? What's the point in that, it'd be too slow to run Excel!" type comments.
It was also about Twitter because it was only about Twitter. At some point you have to define the bounds of a study. Is a study bad because it's not asking a question you want answered?
I think the point is that question was "Are women getting a lot of abuse on Twitter", rather than "Do women get more abuse than men". I can perfectly understand AmiMojo being somewhat confused as to why you insist there is any useful information that could be gained by also measuring the amount of abuse men get when trying to answer the question.
It's not about gender in the sense that the question isn't about gender as a metric (you're not plotting a graph here with gender as an axis.)
You can, as a separate thing, also ask "Are women getting more abuse than men?", but that's a different question, just as "Are women getting more abuse on Twitter than Faceplace?" would be an interesting question, but an entirely different one. My guess is the only reason Slashdot is up in arms about it not asking "vs men" rather than "vs Mybook+" is because people here are less interested in tech than they are in being suspicious of anything that might be squinted at and seen as possibly slightly related to social justice.
And that's depressing. RIP Slashdot, news for nerds.
First I'd like the point out that the law doesn't work in terms of being defined by vague analogies. If I kill someone, for example, you can't argue from that using a really clever argument that it'd be unjust to convict me of murder because it's just like if I'd driven a car and accidentally squished someone's daffodils which is totally a civil matter so there your honor I rest my case checkmate.
But to address your specific argument: No, there are multiple differences. It's usually impossible to legally make the government do anything or hold it responsible for anything. Also we're not talking about murder, which is a criminal matter, but civil law, particularly the bits relating to liability and damages and so forth.
More critically the ruling here isn't that the registrar is at fault merely because the copyright violator bought a domain from them, it's that the registrar failed to act after they were told that their customer was using the service they provided to cause (what the law says is) harm to the plaintiff.
So if the law was based on vague analogies, your analogy would still fail to sway a judge. You'd have to extend your analogy to a set of circumstances where a private road owner owns a road and continues to allow a lunatic who keeps murderizing other people driving along the same road to drive along it even after it's been pointed out that this is happening and that the person in question is cackling loudly and saying "I'm still going to murder people on this here private road, take that Hilary Rosen and Metallica!", and where it'd literally take merely an email to the right employee of the road owner, who would spend literally only one minute doing whatever is necessary to remove the lunatic because that private road owner bans people all the time.
And in that analogy, it's probably the case that the courts would rule that the road owner is at least partially responsible, in civil courts, when the families of the victims are suing for damages, for what happened.
You know a proof of concept is so called because it proves a concept, right?
The concept being proven here is what's being criticized, not the tunnel (which, ironically, doesn't actually prove the concept to begin with, anyone can build a tunnel, just ask former inmates of Stalag Luft III.) Musk is proposing a complete system including cars joining and exiting the system. Those are the bits in contention. Musk hasn't demoed or even described anything capable of achieving the high rates of ingress/egress needed to even reach the ballpark achieved by, say, the Glasgow Subway.
Both include the R&D. Also using a used TBM probably helped cut costs somewhat...
It sounds as if Musk's tunnel ultimately cost more than the one it's being compared to.
History might, but only in the same way Edison is celebrated as the same. And Musk deserves less credit than Edison.
There are a multitude of problems with this "tunnel", from those already mentioned to the fact ingress and egress seems to be the bigger issue. A train solves those problems, and actually "trains through cheaply built tunnels" has been a thing for coming up to a century and a half, but Musk insists this thing needs to be for cars.
And that's the real problem, because that wasn't demoed yesterday. The easy bit was demoed. The hard bit everyone keeps saying Musk has no solution to is still out of reach.
Yeah, and they still managed to make a document that was maybe three fifths decent and humane.
(You are literally talking about people who put together a constitution that rewarded states that had slavery with more power over the Federal government than those who didn't. Don't start pretending they made particularly great decisions about what's ethical and what isn't.)
You're wrong, Apple and Microsoft never blocked each other's websites, and this isn't about blocking websites, it's about Microsoft optimizing Edge to render YouTube really, really, fast, and then finding it stopped being optimal and rendered at the same speed as normal websites when Google inserted a hidden div, upending all the assumptions Microsoft's engineers had made about how YouTube works.
In other words, if the allegations of said intern are correct, Google sneakily made Edge treat YouTube as a normal website. Oh the horror.
Nobody's accusing them of blanking Microsoft Edge. The conspiracy theory the former Edge engineer spouted is that Google defeated an Edge optimization by inserting a hidden HTML element on their YouTube pages.
The problem with the theory is that to accept this, you have to pretty much accept that Microsoft optimized Edge to render YouTube really well, which means almost any changes would have broken the optimization, and moreover the intent of those optimizations was probably to cheat on benchmarks. If adding a DIV is enough to break an optimization, then that suggests Edge's performance on YouTube was out of whack with its normal performance and you'd expect slower performance on normal websites.
So, it's kinda like Microsoft and Google running an race, Microsoft sneaking into a car and driving half way, only for the car to break down, and then complaining Google must have poured sugar in the gas tank.
Hi Dad!
Verizon would have difficulty arguing that it is the copyright holder of its users content, which means issues with standing if it did file a lawsuit claiming some sort of DMCA violation.
In this instance, I'd say no, because Google and Facebook do not exactly get on, and the notion that Facebook might be crippling an Android feature and stealing your data is something I can see Google being pissed about.
It's somewhat ironic that Google is the one that's always being accused of selling your data when its business model actually revolves around making money by using the data, but keeping it secret, while Facebook "leaks" (actually sells) your data over and over again, and everyone's attitude is just "Oopsie, don't do it again" when selling your data is their actual business model.
(There's kind of an implicit recognition that they use, rather than sell, the data in your comment, I thought it was worth highlighting. I suspect though that there's more to it than "Google already has your data".)
Sorry, but you're wrong, the Amiga is WAY better than the Atari ST.
Amazing. Every word in that sentence was wrong.
I have very, very, good reasons to be angry about this very issue. And if I were in your shoes, I'd shut the fuck up now and stop digging.
I disabled FAM, what problem are you having? The issue with FAM is that it's not obvious it exists and needs to be disabled too, not that it can't be disabled.
If you genuinely have a phone that doesn't allow you to disable it, contact Google, I'm about 90% sure they'll either have a fix or they'll have a word with the manufacturer for violating their Google Play licensing agreements.
Alas you're on a website where being charged $20 for a CD of flavor-of-the-month's latest hits is frequently described as rape. Also apparently George Lucas releasing shitty edits to the original trilogy is EXACTLY like that horrific act of sexual assault committed against children.
I've tried. I ended up just foeing people. And then I gave up even doing that...
The 1980s called, they want their second wave feminism back. One of the (many) reasons the second wave collapsed and third wave rose a few years later was the anti-sex worker attitudes of second wave feminists.
Third wave is generally OK with porn as long as it's consensual and none of the actors are being abused. You'll obviously occasionally find exceptions, but that's the general view.
The discussion is about a three digit suicide hotline, not a mind reading device that can figure out if someone plans to take revenge on their workplace. I seriously doubt many of the latter consists of people who make it a point to call the suicide hotline and then wait for a white van to pick them up from their homes beforehand.
This whole discussion is so fucking dumb. One idiot thinks it'll result in a $4 monthly charge, others think it's a great idea because they think the best way to help suicidal problems is to provide them with financial help, therapy, a shoulder to cry on.... JUST KIDDING... they think that the best way to deal with suicidal people is to punish them by making their lives even shittier.
The suicide hotline, even in its current ten digit form, is stupid and the very pinnacle of "Something must be done" assholery. You want to cut suicides? There's only one way, and it's hard: you have to work on making the world a pleasant place to live.