Odd, I had the same thought when I read this - I've had the same smartphone for a bit over three years now, and it still works just fine. I fully expect I'll keep it at least another two or three years.
When I don't want to play along with the upgrade treadmill... I don't.
If you couldn't specify one, he'd fail the review, and if you could, he'd want you to rewrite it to use at least 2 or 3 more patterns.
"You are the team lead, a largely honorary title that effectively says you get all the blame if this project fails, with nothing but a title to show for it. Most notably, you neither determine my raises, nor have the power to fire or otherwise punish me in any way. If you want to use that role to pretend this is a OOD-201 class at the local university, have fun. If you need me, I'll be over there actually writing the code our employer pays us to produce - And going forward, all my classes will all be named after sitcom characters."
We haven't granted Ford the power of eminent domain to steal my road frontage.
As long as the phone companies do have that power - FUCK THEIR PROFITABILITY and get a goddamned halfway decent internet connection to my rural house!
I haven't needed a landline phone in over a decade, and since the FCC doesn't require the cable companies to serve my area, they won't serve my area. Remind me, again, how it benefits me to have telephone poles growing in my front yard, when I'm not "profitable" enough to run one more strand of copper (or, god-forbid, fiber) over those pre-existing poles?
Oh, wait, I actually count as more profitable without DSL available, because I pay almost $100/month for 4G service, rather than $19.95/month for 10x the throughput and 1000x the data cap (if any). Gee, no conflict of interest there!
This isn't that unusual - if you buy a dead tree newspaper, that doesn't mean that you get one without the ads.
Key difference - Most of the ads in a dead-tree paper occur in one or two dedicated sections. Many people buy the paper specifically for the ads. Even the small number that manage to creep into other sections don't leap out and nag you, they just sit there quietly and well-behaved as you read around them and probably don't even notice they exist.
Compare that to the "experience" at most newspapers' websites today - Practically as bad as a porn site (and in some ways worse because, well, no porn). And adding insult to injury... For those who buy the paper just for the ads (ie, coupons or classified), online newspaper sites typically don't have those (or somehow limit access for non-subscribers)!
Why would anyone who dislikes ads even use facebook?
The irony here, 99% of the time I go to Facebook, I go there specifically for ads.
Except... Not the ads Facebook wants me to see. I go there for things like menus and hours and contact info for local small businesses (because apparently controlling your online presence by having your own website has become passe).
Eventually, the power company will want the right to turn your appliances on and off remotely to handle demand whether you like it or not, and there might well be legislation to make it illegal to hook equipment without remote control up to the grid.
Oddly, I agree with you to the extent that I see exactly that as a much more unavoidable risk than random hackers.
Fortunately, the utility companies have less than 20 years left before solar (or more accurately, storage, since PV itself has already gotten "good enough") makes them about as relevant as buggy whips.
Sure, I'd rather have a grid tie to fall back on - But the day they start telling me how I can use the power I pay for, I won't hesitate to cut that last cord.
Oh, make no mistake, I "get" the benefit of having my home HVAC controllable remotely - Why should I need to wait fifteen minutes after getting home for the house to reach a comfortable temperature when I could remotely tell it when I leave work, and it will know exactly when to turn on for my maximum comfort?
That said, until someone can convince me otherwise, I consider the risks as massively outweighing any potential benefits.
If I'm renting, I don't care about the cost of getting someone out on a Sunday morning in a blizzard to fix it, because appliances like a furnace count as 100% the problem of the landlord.
That said, if the landlord drags his feet - A screwdriver still works just fine. Let him try to take me to court for a problem directly resulting from his own negligence.
Not sure how an oven - Or a refrigerator - Or anything else, for that matter, involves a substantially different solution:
The IoT is a bad idea, period. I don't need any appliance in my house to have internet access, and will actively go out of my way to make damned sure they don't.
And before someone says "eventually you won't have any choice" - Of course we will. We might pay a bit a bit extra for the "marine" or "remote cabin" version, but as long as someone has a use case requiring offline use, that will remain an option.
You can - Just make separate accounts for the two separate functions. Really that easy.
Hell, half the internet already accepts SSO via Google, Facebook, or Twitter; I do not use any of those to log in anywhere except Google, Facebook, or Twitter.
You have confused "useful" with "I give a shit". I can think of a million "useful" data-points to have on every single American. That doesn't mean you have any right whatsoever to collect or access that data.
More importantly, you should keep in mind that such data has a serious sampling bias - It selects for people 1) bored enough to fill it out, 2) not at all concerned with their privacy, and 3) who have never heard of Japanese-American internment camps.
We got it a couple years back and I refused any information beyond what the regular census requires.
Ditto. The (US) government has the right to a count of people for apportionment of representation. They have fuck-all right to anything more than that, not my name, not my ethnicity, not my education level, not my phone number.
Now, I don't know how Australia sends these out, but in the US, the ACS gets sent to an address, not to a specific person. That would make it somewhat hard to actually fine someone (particularly in a multi-unrelated-adult household) for not filling it out.
This adds no additional security to a system secured with a password
Sure it does - It means you have two passwords, rather than a password and a piece of publicly-available information... Though the GP already gets that, I basically just rephrased his "type garbage, and save a copy" as something a bit more user-friendly.:)
That said, I otherwise agree with you completely - Though, I also don't really see the problem here. Biometrics would solve some of the usability issues with passwords, but at the cost of introducing entirely new ones.
Really, I think a lot of this comes down to "how much security is enough"? Sending an SMS for two-factor counts as far, far more than adequate 99% of the time; and that even counts as massive overkill 99% of the time. For virtually all uses, just using something like your favorite porn star's name is good enough.
Also, security questions are a joke. Where was I born? The whole world knows by now. Why would I provide yet another vector for compromising my account?
You realize that you don't need to give a meaningful (nevermind "true") answer to those security questions?
"Mother's maiden name?" "#10 dual-window envelopes".
...Time to patent a way to make a steeple/pole/tower (that I own, on private property) "look" like a drone recharging station, that actually fries those fuckers.
Make no mistake, I have nothing against drones, as a concept; but fuck me if I'll give Amazon a free charge to help them expand Prime.
or rather, they designed the game to need access to your GPS so they can get your geolocation for advertising purposes
I would normally agree with you, but PoGo has exactly zero ads in it (not even the voluntary "Watch this short ad for a buff" type so common in Freemium games). Nor, for that matter, have I received a single even remotely spammy email of any kind at the throwaway GMail account I used to register.
Really, no need - People apparently can't throw money at it fast enough. Can't say I quite get it, though... Cute toy, but to have literally doubled Nintendo's market cap in the past few weeks? Wow.
That link doesn't support your claim. The single strongest claim in that article says "Google pays taxes in Ireland, where it is charged at a lower rate than in France" - Not exactly a smoking gun, just France behaving in its usual petulantly xenophobic way over the horrible, horrible unfairness that any non-French company dare to exist.
Google, and all the other companies we keep bitching about, do pay their taxes. They just don't pay more than the law requires them to.
Do you pay more in taxes than you need to? Do you skip itemizing your mortgage interest because you consider it an unfair advantage over renters? Do you keep your retirement savings in a taxable taxable brokerage account rather than "dodging" your fair share of capital gains tax with one of those evil 401k "tax shelters"?
Same deal here. Google, Apple, et al have done nothing more illegal than intentionally structuring themselves to minimize their tax liability. Yes, those loopholes damned well need to end; but you want to blame someone? Don't look at Google, blame yourself for voting for the status quo (D, R, makes no difference). You want the system to stop favoring billionaires and captains of industry? Stop electing billionaires.
Google "Emergency Banking Act of 1933" and "Executive Order 6102". Although FDR didn't create the Federal Reserve, he single-handedly gave it the teeth it needed to begin our current era of wholesale devaluation of the dollar.
Make no mistake, this didn't start with the Millennials. We started firmly down this path in the 1930s; WWII saved our grandparents, the cold war saved our parents, and the advent of the "Computer Age" saved Gen-X.
Unless the Millennials can pull a similar rabbit out of their hats, should it really surprise us that FDR's pyramid schemes (yes, plural) have finally run out of new suckers and can only head one way from here?
Holy shit, and people make fun of "preppers" in the US?
Guess what, China - The US already has high-res satellite imagery of every base, outpost, cave, and jeep (or whatever brand) you own.
It would better serve the Earth's (and your own, as inhabitants thereof) needs if you focused more on not spewing crackpot bullshit like TFA, than worrying about whether or not we notice your target practice city-grids out in the middle of nowhere based on kids not crawling around them looking for pokestuff.
4) Your customers all switch to a solution hosted in Costa Rica and ostentatiously protest that those bastards won't turn over the keys to the UK government.
Slashdot Mirror
Odd, I had the same thought when I read this - I've had the same smartphone for a bit over three years now, and it still works just fine. I fully expect I'll keep it at least another two or three years.
When I don't want to play along with the upgrade treadmill... I don't.
If you couldn't specify one, he'd fail the review, and if you could, he'd want you to rewrite it to use at least 2 or 3 more patterns.
"You are the team lead, a largely honorary title that effectively says you get all the blame if this project fails, with nothing but a title to show for it. Most notably, you neither determine my raises, nor have the power to fire or otherwise punish me in any way. If you want to use that role to pretend this is a OOD-201 class at the local university, have fun. If you need me, I'll be over there actually writing the code our employer pays us to produce - And going forward, all my classes will all be named after sitcom characters."
And our governments are rolling over, exposing their soft, bloated underbellies to ISIS.
This proposal did come from France, after all...
We haven't granted Ford the power of eminent domain to steal my road frontage.
As long as the phone companies do have that power - FUCK THEIR PROFITABILITY and get a goddamned halfway decent internet connection to my rural house!
I haven't needed a landline phone in over a decade, and since the FCC doesn't require the cable companies to serve my area, they won't serve my area. Remind me, again, how it benefits me to have telephone poles growing in my front yard, when I'm not "profitable" enough to run one more strand of copper (or, god-forbid, fiber) over those pre-existing poles?
Oh, wait, I actually count as more profitable without DSL available, because I pay almost $100/month for 4G service, rather than $19.95/month for 10x the throughput and 1000x the data cap (if any). Gee, no conflict of interest there!
This isn't that unusual - if you buy a dead tree newspaper, that doesn't mean that you get one without the ads.
Key difference - Most of the ads in a dead-tree paper occur in one or two dedicated sections. Many people buy the paper specifically for the ads. Even the small number that manage to creep into other sections don't leap out and nag you, they just sit there quietly and well-behaved as you read around them and probably don't even notice they exist.
Compare that to the "experience" at most newspapers' websites today - Practically as bad as a porn site (and in some ways worse because, well, no porn). And adding insult to injury... For those who buy the paper just for the ads (ie, coupons or classified), online newspaper sites typically don't have those (or somehow limit access for non-subscribers)!
Why would anyone who dislikes ads even use facebook?
The irony here, 99% of the time I go to Facebook, I go there specifically for ads.
Except... Not the ads Facebook wants me to see. I go there for things like menus and hours and contact info for local small businesses (because apparently controlling your online presence by having your own website has become passe).
That said - Challenge accepted, Zuckmeister! Let's see how effective you can block ads (or block those who try). Why, just look how well it worked for the likes of Forbes and Wired!
Eventually, the power company will want the right to turn your appliances on and off remotely to handle demand whether you like it or not, and there might well be legislation to make it illegal to hook equipment without remote control up to the grid.
Oddly, I agree with you to the extent that I see exactly that as a much more unavoidable risk than random hackers.
Fortunately, the utility companies have less than 20 years left before solar (or more accurately, storage, since PV itself has already gotten "good enough") makes them about as relevant as buggy whips.
Sure, I'd rather have a grid tie to fall back on - But the day they start telling me how I can use the power I pay for, I won't hesitate to cut that last cord.
Oh, make no mistake, I "get" the benefit of having my home HVAC controllable remotely - Why should I need to wait fifteen minutes after getting home for the house to reach a comfortable temperature when I could remotely tell it when I leave work, and it will know exactly when to turn on for my maximum comfort?
That said, until someone can convince me otherwise, I consider the risks as massively outweighing any potential benefits.
If you're renting, it could well be.
If I'm renting, I don't care about the cost of getting someone out on a Sunday morning in a blizzard to fix it, because appliances like a furnace count as 100% the problem of the landlord.
That said, if the landlord drags his feet - A screwdriver still works just fine. Let him try to take me to court for a problem directly resulting from his own negligence.
Not sure how an oven - Or a refrigerator - Or anything else, for that matter, involves a substantially different solution:
The IoT is a bad idea, period. I don't need any appliance in my house to have internet access, and will actively go out of my way to make damned sure they don't.
And before someone says "eventually you won't have any choice" - Of course we will. We might pay a bit a bit extra for the "marine" or "remote cabin" version, but as long as someone has a use case requiring offline use, that will remain an option.
You can - Just make separate accounts for the two separate functions. Really that easy.
Hell, half the internet already accepts SSO via Google, Facebook, or Twitter; I do not use any of those to log in anywhere except Google, Facebook, or Twitter.
Where is collecting this information forbidden?
I didn't say it was forbidden, I said they have no right to it. They can ask - I (and many, many others) just won't answer.
Not at all, just make all adults liable, it's really easy.
Really? If it's that easy to identify all possible liable adults in a household... Then why do we need a formal census in the first place?
You have confused "useful" with "I give a shit". I can think of a million "useful" data-points to have on every single American. That doesn't mean you have any right whatsoever to collect or access that data.
More importantly, you should keep in mind that such data has a serious sampling bias - It selects for people 1) bored enough to fill it out, 2) not at all concerned with their privacy, and 3) who have never heard of Japanese-American internment camps.
We got it a couple years back and I refused any information beyond what the regular census requires.
Ditto. The (US) government has the right to a count of people for apportionment of representation. They have fuck-all right to anything more than that, not my name, not my ethnicity, not my education level, not my phone number.
Now, I don't know how Australia sends these out, but in the US, the ACS gets sent to an address, not to a specific person. That would make it somewhat hard to actually fine someone (particularly in a multi-unrelated-adult household) for not filling it out.
This adds no additional security to a system secured with a password
:)
Sure it does - It means you have two passwords, rather than a password and a piece of publicly-available information... Though the GP already gets that, I basically just rephrased his "type garbage, and save a copy" as something a bit more user-friendly.
That said, I otherwise agree with you completely - Though, I also don't really see the problem here. Biometrics would solve some of the usability issues with passwords, but at the cost of introducing entirely new ones.
Really, I think a lot of this comes down to "how much security is enough"? Sending an SMS for two-factor counts as far, far more than adequate 99% of the time; and that even counts as massive overkill 99% of the time. For virtually all uses, just using something like your favorite porn star's name is good enough.
Also, security questions are a joke. Where was I born? The whole world knows by now. Why would I provide yet another vector for compromising my account?
You realize that you don't need to give a meaningful (nevermind "true") answer to those security questions?
"Mother's maiden name?" "#10 dual-window envelopes".
...Time to patent a way to make a steeple/pole/tower (that I own, on private property) "look" like a drone recharging station, that actually fries those fuckers.
Make no mistake, I have nothing against drones, as a concept; but fuck me if I'll give Amazon a free charge to help them expand Prime.
or rather, they designed the game to need access to your GPS so they can get your geolocation for advertising purposes
I would normally agree with you, but PoGo has exactly zero ads in it (not even the voluntary "Watch this short ad for a buff" type so common in Freemium games). Nor, for that matter, have I received a single even remotely spammy email of any kind at the throwaway GMail account I used to register.
Really, no need - People apparently can't throw money at it fast enough. Can't say I quite get it, though... Cute toy, but to have literally doubled Nintendo's market cap in the past few weeks? Wow.
That link doesn't support your claim. The single strongest claim in that article says "Google pays taxes in Ireland, where it is charged at a lower rate than in France" - Not exactly a smoking gun, just France behaving in its usual petulantly xenophobic way over the horrible, horrible unfairness that any non-French company dare to exist.
Google, and all the other companies we keep bitching about, do pay their taxes. They just don't pay more than the law requires them to.
Do you pay more in taxes than you need to? Do you skip itemizing your mortgage interest because you consider it an unfair advantage over renters? Do you keep your retirement savings in a taxable taxable brokerage account rather than "dodging" your fair share of capital gains tax with one of those evil 401k "tax shelters"?
Same deal here. Google, Apple, et al have done nothing more illegal than intentionally structuring themselves to minimize their tax liability. Yes, those loopholes damned well need to end; but you want to blame someone? Don't look at Google, blame yourself for voting for the status quo (D, R, makes no difference). You want the system to stop favoring billionaires and captains of industry? Stop electing billionaires.
Umm... WTF you on about?
Google "Emergency Banking Act of 1933" and "Executive Order 6102". Although FDR didn't create the Federal Reserve, he single-handedly gave it the teeth it needed to begin our current era of wholesale devaluation of the dollar.
Make no mistake, this didn't start with the Millennials. We started firmly down this path in the 1930s; WWII saved our grandparents, the cold war saved our parents, and the advent of the "Computer Age" saved Gen-X.
Unless the Millennials can pull a similar rabbit out of their hats, should it really surprise us that FDR's pyramid schemes (yes, plural) have finally run out of new suckers and can only head one way from here?
You can have more than one phone number, y'know... :)
Holy shit, and people make fun of "preppers" in the US?
Guess what, China - The US already has high-res satellite imagery of every base, outpost, cave, and jeep (or whatever brand) you own.
It would better serve the Earth's (and your own, as inhabitants thereof) needs if you focused more on not spewing crackpot bullshit like TFA, than worrying about whether or not we notice your target practice city-grids out in the middle of nowhere based on kids not crawling around them looking for pokestuff.
4) Your customers all switch to a solution hosted in Costa Rica and ostentatiously protest that those bastards won't turn over the keys to the UK government.