Software doesn't hate black people. Software doesn't dislike Islam. Software doesn't think kids these days need to pull their damned pants up and stop playing that crap music too loudly.
Apologizing for a program miscategorizing an image it has never seen before as somehow "racist" makes about as much sense as GE apologizing because my toaster looks like a frowny-face from just the right angle.
Seriously, have you actually used any modern Linux distros? Hey, good news, it has gotten so easy to install and use, you don't even need to install it! Download any of a dozen LiveCD / DVD / BRD / Thumbdrive versions, burn it to the appropriate media, and reboot. Bam! You have a fully functional modern OS at your fingertips.
Give it a try, and if you don't like it, it comes with a 100% money back guarantee.
Because that should definetly be the benchmark, right?
Not in the way you meant it, but yes, it should!
If it disgusts us to hear about $150M wasted on an endeavor that enriches all of humanity, how much more disgust should we feel over F-35s that cost twice as much and don't even work? How much more disgust should we feel over spending trillions on a never-ending war on terrorism? How much more disgust should we feel about paying 250 times that much to oppress our own citizens in a show of Security Theatre?
Yes, NASA wasting $150M disgusts me - Because of all the complete bullshit our taxes go toward, NASA shouldn't even need to blink at the cost to human-rate this thing.
"I found a game world with a lot to offer. Player created civilizations, unique monsters, and the sheer mystery of the world combine to keep this ancient MMO compelling. For all the ways in which the genre has improved, Ultima Online remains one of just a few MMOs that let you live an alternative life. That feeling of ownership... combined with the diversity on offer, keeps players coming back day after day."
Does that help, or should someone post an mp3 of themselves reading it for you?
How about you respect your wife's choices and let her decide what she wants to do, you're treating her like a teenage child.
The subtext of the TFS makes that pretty clear - Because "sitting around the house watching Oprah and eating Cheetos" doesn't pay the bills.
Hey, guess what - I feel "not very eager" to get my ass out of bed every morning just so I can go make some rich inbreds even more rich. But the mortgage doesn't pay itself.
I think he just means that optical disks don't have quite the same amount of inertia or need to do internal self-checks as HDDs, before you can actually access them. They still "spin them up", but it happens in a few ms rather than on the order of 5-15s.
then draw a wild conclusion that people are using it to get Windows 10?!
I recently helped a local nonprofit upgrade to Win7 for exactly that reason.
Yes, I can think of plenty of other reasons for people to pick up a Win7 license (as the most obvious, "I just got a new laptop with Win8, help!"), but the average retail customer will realistically just use whatever the computer comes with, and keep it for the life of the machine.
If, therefore, we see an uptick in sales of an OS you can't even easily get on a new machine anymore (yes, we geeks can still get it, but Granny, not so much) - That means something.
Court orders to reveal someone's identity are also a government thing.
anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion
And the real courts have fuck-all to do with that. Using them as a tool to out your enemies goes against everything we supposedly believe in.
In this particular case, the business owner believes that the reviews are malicious, fake, the act of a single person, etc. etc.
I "believe" Google should pay me for beta-testing their various products that almost never leave beta. When can I expect the courts to make them send me a check?
So overall the fast results are what we want out of a search engine- the answer.
This. Giving me the correct answer doesn't count as "anti-competitive", it means doing their job well.
I don't go to Google to save me typing in "www.m-w.com" and then searching for a word - I go to Google because it gives me more useful answers than searching directly on almost any specific site. Merriam-Webster considers itself too digified to define "blumpkin" for me; UrbanDictionary has no such qualms. UD doesn't do so well in explaining "Pepe" to me - KnowYourMeme has the whole history of it even giving credit to the original author. None of the above has a good definition for "Mary Sue", but TV Tropes nails it.
But, instead of searching on MW... Then UD... Then KYM... Then TT, and then who knows what else - I can just type it into Google, and bam! It gives me exactly what I wanted to know, and often does so faster than most ad-riddled pages can even load.
Companies need to quit whining about free exposure, and instead focus on doing their own jobs well. If anyone really want to vanish from the Googleable internet, they always have the option of setting noindex/nofollow on their pages. Huh, I don't see many of these righteously indignant sites doing that, I wonder why not?
Your phrasing implies that we need to have some sort of centrally managed plan to handle the fallout of disruptive technologies. We don't, and realistically, can't.
It's fine to say; "Well, just learn something new" when it's not you with a family and a tight budget having to jump into the marketplace and retrain while competing with people who've done that task their entire life
I run the risk of someone creating a "real" AI today that can out-code any human on the planet. That would instantly put my entire profession on the unemployment line. I have hedged against that threat by choosing positions that allow me to diversify my skillset (both in terms of experience and education), making me qualified to work in any of a dozen broad categories of "professional" positions.
I would recommend cabbies (and Uber drivers, as you point out) start doing the same today - They can already see the writing on the wall, and still have time to act accordingly.
The world changes around us. We need to adapt, or die - Simple as that, really.
Wait... Some companies actually give programmers a drug test?
And they actually manage to find any? Wow, impressive! Or rather, can I get a list of these companies so I can short their stock, since they apparently resort to people that desperate for a job?
Our (illegal) drugs-of-choice vary, but I can count the number of programmers I know who don't use anything on one finger (and even she has "tried" weed, "back in college").
dimwit, how else will people pay attention? inconveniencing the idle rich IS THE WHOLE POINT of non-violent protesting.
"Non-violent protest" doesn't include flipping cars, burning tires, beating up drivers, and blocking emergency vehicles,
As for "the whole point" - Yeah, look how well shutting down critical infrastructure worked for PATCO.
I feel sympathetic toward cabbies, I really do - Their industry basically died overnight because someone came up with an alternative that makes them irrelevant. All the world's protectionist systems of placards and medallions and special licensing, "poof", suddenly worthless.
Finding new lines of work sucks, no doubt. But when you manufacture buggy-whips, you implicitly depend on the continued use of horse-based transportation to make your living. Similarly, when you deliver low quality rudely-delivered service at a high price and with upcharges for the top 90% of destinations - You implicitly depend on a complete lack of any viable alternatives.
This. People just looove it when their homepage or search provider changes. Why, just the other day, a coworker told me how much he loved Bing coming back after every round of Windows updates.
Oh, no, wait, he switched to Chrome because he hated it so much. Take the hint, Marissa.
As an aside, though - Does anyone actually allow Java to update itself? Of all the common self-updating software out there, Java easily wins as the single most obnoxious. Aside from hijacking the top result when I type "update" in the start menu's search bar... Aside from running all the fucking time rather than just when Java starts... Aside from nagging the user more relentlessly than even the far more legitimate Windows update (Bing aside) - It actively breaks shit every time it updates. You had one job, Larry...
I suspect we don't differ all that much, in the volume of our data that we consider really important (what I described as backed up truly offsite) - I can fit it on a large thumbdrive that I leave in my desk at work, and rotate out between two drives more-or-less weekly).
We mostly differ in what we perceive as the value of "everything else". My music library, for example - Sure, I could re-rip it, or probably pirate it from somewhere if I lost the original discs tomorrow... But just re-ripping it would take hundreds of hours (I have around 4-5000 CDs). Same idea for my DVD collection, and those take a good bit longer to rip. And the software I've collected over the years, some of that I probably couldn't get back (though in fairness I highly doubt I'll ever need my top 100 utilities for OS/2 ever again), but realistically, I could almost certainly find and download any of it I actually still have a use for.
So that said... For me, I consider it worth spending a grand every three to five years to have a solid NAS plus a hot backup so I don't ever need to recover all that data from a million and one sources. Someone else (less of a packrat than me) may well only care about the sort of data I keep on my thumbdrive.
Then it won't matter if when your drive/PC fails. Him having a backup on the same machine is almost as bad as not having one at all, IMO.
I have to disagree - Yes, I personally go for a waaay more paranoid backup approach, but just backing up to an external USB HDD (though with a "real" backup, not his manual drag-and-drop BS) puts someone a whole world of hurt better off than 99% of computer users.
If Grandma calls and says her HDD died and she hasn't "run that DVD backup thing" in a few months, well gee, sucks for you, granny! If, however, she calls and asks for help getting her nightly USB drive backup reinstalled to a new computer, hey, cool, she's lost almost nothing.
Now, sure, perhaps her computer got hit by lightning and toasted both. Perhaps her house got flooded and nothing electronic in it still works. Perhaps her PSU went bad and toasted every component in the machine (although even then, USB devices will often survive that). Perhaps she caught a cryptolocker-type virus that ate the backups as well. Sure, a single connected backup device has a lot of points of failure in common with the system drive itself. But in practice, it drops that "lose everything once every few years" down to "lose everything once in a lifetime".
Short answer: If you actually care, you need better backups.
If the HDD in one of my PCs dies, I don't care in the least. Restore it from last night's backup to the NAS, and call it good.
If up to two of the HDDs in my NAS die, I buy new ones, swap them in, resilver them, and call it good.
If my entire NAS dies, I would start to get worried, but at that point I can still fully recover (at least to where I left everything last night) from my partially offsite backup, an exact snapshot of my NAS that lives in my detached garage.
If my house and garage somehow both get destroyed at the same time, I would lose a lot, but do still have my most important data mirrored offsite... Though at that point, I probably have more important things to worry about than re-ripping my music library.:)
But if you care about when any one particular drive will fail on you, you've already accepted the eventual catastrophic failure and loss of your life's work as entirely acceptable.
Re:The problem is that landfills are too cheap
on
Recycling Is Dying
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I beg to differ. I'd sort, but I'm not going to sort AND pay extra money.
My town has a pretty decent way of handling this - I pay per bag of trash, and they take properly-sorted recyclables for free.
I don't get a fine if I accidentally throw away a glass bottle. I don't get told off for not rinsing out my cans. I don't have any sort of "recycling gestapo" going around inspecting mandatory clear trash bags looking for any excuse to hassle me. They just call anything non-compliant "garbage", and I pay per bag.
I therefore get to personally make the decision whether to pay more or recycle more.
What if this anonymous speaker turns out to be the staff of his political opposition? Certainly election law comes into play. Does that change anything for you?
Not in the least, for two reasons:
1) That still means that we have someone prosecuted for exercising their first amendment rights (the FEC doesn't get a pass on "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech"), pretty much exactly what dnaumov described (even if not quite as gruesome of an outcome likely), and...
2) Rational adults should accord anonymous internet trolls the level of credibility they deserve - ie, none in the absence of proof.
Slashdot Mirror
Software doesn't hate black people. Software doesn't dislike Islam. Software doesn't think kids these days need to pull their damned pants up and stop playing that crap music too loudly.
Apologizing for a program miscategorizing an image it has never seen before as somehow "racist" makes about as much sense as GE apologizing because my toaster looks like a frowny-face from just the right angle.
Yes, Virginia, we've taken this shit too far.
1999 called and wants its meme back.
Seriously, have you actually used any modern Linux distros? Hey, good news, it has gotten so easy to install and use, you don't even need to install it! Download any of a dozen LiveCD / DVD / BRD / Thumbdrive versions, burn it to the appropriate media, and reboot. Bam! You have a fully functional modern OS at your fingertips.
Give it a try, and if you don't like it, it comes with a 100% money back guarantee.
Because that should definetly be the benchmark, right?
Not in the way you meant it, but yes, it should!
If it disgusts us to hear about $150M wasted on an endeavor that enriches all of humanity, how much more disgust should we feel over F-35s that cost twice as much and don't even work? How much more disgust should we feel over spending trillions on a never-ending war on terrorism? How much more disgust should we feel about paying 250 times that much to oppress our own citizens in a show of Security Theatre?
Yes, NASA wasting $150M disgusts me - Because of all the complete bullshit our taxes go toward, NASA shouldn't even need to blink at the cost to human-rate this thing.
Here, let me quote TFS to you:
... combined with the diversity on offer, keeps players coming back day after day."
"I found a game world with a lot to offer. Player created civilizations, unique monsters, and the sheer mystery of the world combine to keep this ancient MMO compelling. For all the ways in which the genre has improved, Ultima Online remains one of just a few MMOs that let you live an alternative life. That feeling of ownership
Does that help, or should someone post an mp3 of themselves reading it for you?
How about you respect your wife's choices and let her decide what she wants to do, you're treating her like a teenage child.
The subtext of the TFS makes that pretty clear - Because "sitting around the house watching Oprah and eating Cheetos" doesn't pay the bills.
Hey, guess what - I feel "not very eager" to get my ass out of bed every morning just so I can go make some rich inbreds even more rich. But the mortgage doesn't pay itself.
I think he just means that optical disks don't have quite the same amount of inertia or need to do internal self-checks as HDDs, before you can actually access them. They still "spin them up", but it happens in a few ms rather than on the order of 5-15s.
then draw a wild conclusion that people are using it to get Windows 10?!
I recently helped a local nonprofit upgrade to Win7 for exactly that reason.
Yes, I can think of plenty of other reasons for people to pick up a Win7 license (as the most obvious, "I just got a new laptop with Win8, help!"), but the average retail customer will realistically just use whatever the computer comes with, and keep it for the life of the machine.
If, therefore, we see an uptick in sales of an OS you can't even easily get on a new machine anymore (yes, we geeks can still get it, but Granny, not so much) - That means something.
Soo, you want to replace a democratically elected government because you disagree with the electorate?
...And yet, we still have these asshats in FISA blatantly saying "to hell with all of the above, fuck 'em even harder, NSA!".
Did you even read TFS? The electorate fully agrees with him. Congress mostly agrees with him. The 2nd circuit agrees with him.
Yeah, we have a problem here. And the "democratically elected government" ain't it.
Freedom of speech is a government thing.
Court orders to reveal someone's identity are also a government thing.
anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of public opinion
And the real courts have fuck-all to do with that. Using them as a tool to out your enemies goes against everything we supposedly believe in.
In this particular case, the business owner believes that the reviews are malicious, fake, the act of a single person, etc. etc.
I "believe" Google should pay me for beta-testing their various products that almost never leave beta. When can I expect the courts to make them send me a check?
Hear hear! Now let's go turn ourselves in for infringing on Webster's famous API for the English Language.
Fucking lawyers - Do we think we can just go around using words without paying their rightful owner?
So overall the fast results are what we want out of a search engine- the answer.
This. Giving me the correct answer doesn't count as "anti-competitive", it means doing their job well.
I don't go to Google to save me typing in "www.m-w.com" and then searching for a word - I go to Google because it gives me more useful answers than searching directly on almost any specific site. Merriam-Webster considers itself too digified to define "blumpkin" for me; UrbanDictionary has no such qualms. UD doesn't do so well in explaining "Pepe" to me - KnowYourMeme has the whole history of it even giving credit to the original author. None of the above has a good definition for "Mary Sue", but TV Tropes nails it.
But, instead of searching on MW... Then UD... Then KYM... Then TT, and then who knows what else - I can just type it into Google, and bam! It gives me exactly what I wanted to know, and often does so faster than most ad-riddled pages can even load.
Companies need to quit whining about free exposure, and instead focus on doing their own jobs well. If anyone really want to vanish from the Googleable internet, they always have the option of setting noindex/nofollow on their pages. Huh, I don't see many of these righteously indignant sites doing that, I wonder why not?
Does anyone have a plan for this?
Your phrasing implies that we need to have some sort of centrally managed plan to handle the fallout of disruptive technologies. We don't, and realistically, can't.
It's fine to say; "Well, just learn something new" when it's not you with a family and a tight budget having to jump into the marketplace and retrain while competing with people who've done that task their entire life
I run the risk of someone creating a "real" AI today that can out-code any human on the planet. That would instantly put my entire profession on the unemployment line. I have hedged against that threat by choosing positions that allow me to diversify my skillset (both in terms of experience and education), making me qualified to work in any of a dozen broad categories of "professional" positions.
I would recommend cabbies (and Uber drivers, as you point out) start doing the same today - They can already see the writing on the wall, and still have time to act accordingly.
The world changes around us. We need to adapt, or die - Simple as that, really.
Wait... Some companies actually give programmers a drug test?
And they actually manage to find any? Wow, impressive! Or rather, can I get a list of these companies so I can short their stock, since they apparently resort to people that desperate for a job?
Our (illegal) drugs-of-choice vary, but I can count the number of programmers I know who don't use anything on one finger (and even she has "tried" weed, "back in college").
dimwit, how else will people pay attention? inconveniencing the idle rich IS THE WHOLE POINT of non-violent protesting.
"Non-violent protest" doesn't include flipping cars, burning tires, beating up drivers, and blocking emergency vehicles,
As for "the whole point" - Yeah, look how well shutting down critical infrastructure worked for PATCO.
I feel sympathetic toward cabbies, I really do - Their industry basically died overnight because someone came up with an alternative that makes them irrelevant. All the world's protectionist systems of placards and medallions and special licensing, "poof", suddenly worthless.
Finding new lines of work sucks, no doubt. But when you manufacture buggy-whips, you implicitly depend on the continued use of horse-based transportation to make your living. Similarly, when you deliver low quality rudely-delivered service at a high price and with upcharges for the top 90% of destinations - You implicitly depend on a complete lack of any viable alternatives.
I believe GP was talking about home users, and it seems pretty obvious that he was.
I am the GGP, and specifically mentioned "coworkers". The GP said nothing to change that context.
I like Linux. I run Linux at home. But I make my living putting up with Windows.
This. People just looove it when their homepage or search provider changes. Why, just the other day, a coworker told me how much he loved Bing coming back after every round of Windows updates.
Oh, no, wait, he switched to Chrome because he hated it so much. Take the hint, Marissa.
As an aside, though - Does anyone actually allow Java to update itself? Of all the common self-updating software out there, Java easily wins as the single most obnoxious. Aside from hijacking the top result when I type "update" in the start menu's search bar... Aside from running all the fucking time rather than just when Java starts... Aside from nagging the user more relentlessly than even the far more legitimate Windows update (Bing aside) - It actively breaks shit every time it updates. You had one job, Larry...
I suspect we don't differ all that much, in the volume of our data that we consider really important (what I described as backed up truly offsite) - I can fit it on a large thumbdrive that I leave in my desk at work, and rotate out between two drives more-or-less weekly).
We mostly differ in what we perceive as the value of "everything else". My music library, for example - Sure, I could re-rip it, or probably pirate it from somewhere if I lost the original discs tomorrow... But just re-ripping it would take hundreds of hours (I have around 4-5000 CDs). Same idea for my DVD collection, and those take a good bit longer to rip. And the software I've collected over the years, some of that I probably couldn't get back (though in fairness I highly doubt I'll ever need my top 100 utilities for OS/2 ever again), but realistically, I could almost certainly find and download any of it I actually still have a use for.
So that said... For me, I consider it worth spending a grand every three to five years to have a solid NAS plus a hot backup so I don't ever need to recover all that data from a million and one sources. Someone else (less of a packrat than me) may well only care about the sort of data I keep on my thumbdrive.
Then it won't matter if when your drive/PC fails. Him having a backup on the same machine is almost as bad as not having one at all, IMO.
I have to disagree - Yes, I personally go for a waaay more paranoid backup approach, but just backing up to an external USB HDD (though with a "real" backup, not his manual drag-and-drop BS) puts someone a whole world of hurt better off than 99% of computer users.
If Grandma calls and says her HDD died and she hasn't "run that DVD backup thing" in a few months, well gee, sucks for you, granny! If, however, she calls and asks for help getting her nightly USB drive backup reinstalled to a new computer, hey, cool, she's lost almost nothing.
Now, sure, perhaps her computer got hit by lightning and toasted both. Perhaps her house got flooded and nothing electronic in it still works. Perhaps her PSU went bad and toasted every component in the machine (although even then, USB devices will often survive that). Perhaps she caught a cryptolocker-type virus that ate the backups as well. Sure, a single connected backup device has a lot of points of failure in common with the system drive itself. But in practice, it drops that "lose everything once every few years" down to "lose everything once in a lifetime".
Short answer: If you actually care, you need better backups.
:)
If the HDD in one of my PCs dies, I don't care in the least. Restore it from last night's backup to the NAS, and call it good.
If up to two of the HDDs in my NAS die, I buy new ones, swap them in, resilver them, and call it good.
If my entire NAS dies, I would start to get worried, but at that point I can still fully recover (at least to where I left everything last night) from my partially offsite backup, an exact snapshot of my NAS that lives in my detached garage.
If my house and garage somehow both get destroyed at the same time, I would lose a lot, but do still have my most important data mirrored offsite... Though at that point, I probably have more important things to worry about than re-ripping my music library.
But if you care about when any one particular drive will fail on you, you've already accepted the eventual catastrophic failure and loss of your life's work as entirely acceptable.
I beg to differ. I'd sort, but I'm not going to sort AND pay extra money.
My town has a pretty decent way of handling this - I pay per bag of trash, and they take properly-sorted recyclables for free.
I don't get a fine if I accidentally throw away a glass bottle. I don't get told off for not rinsing out my cans. I don't have any sort of "recycling gestapo" going around inspecting mandatory clear trash bags looking for any excuse to hassle me. They just call anything non-compliant "garbage", and I pay per bag.
I therefore get to personally make the decision whether to pay more or recycle more.
What if this anonymous speaker turns out to be the staff of his political opposition? Certainly election law comes into play. Does that change anything for you?
... abridging the freedom of speech"), pretty much exactly what dnaumov described (even if not quite as gruesome of an outcome likely), and...
Not in the least, for two reasons:
1) That still means that we have someone prosecuted for exercising their first amendment rights (the FEC doesn't get a pass on "Congress shall make no law
2) Rational adults should accord anonymous internet trolls the level of credibility they deserve - ie, none in the absence of proof.
Identifying a person as the speaker is not a criminal prosecution.
And I repeat - Do you suppose Hadley just wants a new penpal?
My logic does not say that. You cited an example of criminal prosecution for expressing an opinion. That is not free speech.
"Illinois Supreme Court: Comcast Must Identify Anonymous Internet Commenter"
So, uh... Do you suppose this case went all the way to the ILSC because Bill Hadley wants to send him a sternly-worded rebuttal?
Nice try, but I've kept both mice and rats as pets.
"Picking them up against their will" does not equate to hanging them by their tails until they go limp from exhaustion.
They'll get over picking them up by the tail. That doesn't mean you dangle the toddler by its arms until it passes out from the effort.