Euthanasia is nothing more than state sponsored suicide. To try to cloak it in anytbing else is to say suicide is ok.
This is not true at all. Euthanasia, by definition, has nothing to do with state sponsorship.
Let's take the human factor out of it. When a vet has to euthanize a dog...is the state paying for it? No. How about a horse? No? Dr. Kevorkian's patients...did the state pay for any of those? No? Hm. But they were all cases of euthanasia. Even if a country were to subsidize it (directly or indirectly) that does not change the meaning of the term, any more than a European country having state-sponsored colleges, free of cost, means that "college" includes "state-sponsored" in its definition.
The word is important because it confers a crucial distinction. Suicide (rightly) carries a stigma of a person in pain that can be escaped via other means. Euthanasia, by it's very definition, relates to death being imminent anyways, and the aversion of pain that is otherwise unavoidable and inescapable. There's a massive difference between a person who is misguided as they end their life when there is another way, and a person who has no other alternative and would prefer to die with dignity than suffer for several months without it and die soon anyways.
Except there are an infinite number of permutations of Gaussian white noise, while there is only one for the word "and".
Yes, but creativity plays no part in creating any of those permutations. Saying there are infinite numbers of permutations as a defense of a particular variant is like taking a recording of an existing song, changing the pitch of a single note, and then claiming that it's a new song. The courts have already ruled on that concept.
Question...and this is a real question, not a retort, because I am curious. Did the alternative therapy work?
Absolutely, although there is a somewhat higher chance of re-occurrence with the treatment that I chose, but surgery involves risks such as nerve damage.
Google Xiaflex.
Interesting...and thank you for answering. I needed that context. I've seen everything from physical therapy accomplishing the same thing as a recommended surgical procedure was supposed to do (good outcome) to an idiot eschewing normal treatments for cancer in favor of herbal remedies...which absolutely did not work at all (very bad outcome). And then of course there's the GNCs of the world, hawking trend after trend for profit, and paying fines to the FTC every few years as a cost of doing business. Every time I hear "alternative" in a medical context, I wonder if it's "do this as an alternative to that," or if it means "oh, you don't need to take insulin for your diabetes! Here...have some dried duck vaginas...it's an ancient alternative remedy that cures diabetes..."
I'm really glad that it worked out for you like it did; obviously, you fall into the first of the two categories described above. Is it weird that I almost feel uncomfortable that this is an Internet conversation about an emotionally-charged topic, and yet everything about our interaction has been totally civilized and truth-based?:)
Doctors in the US over-treat illnesses, use outdated and ineffective treatments and generally run up the costs of medicine.
The above statement is based on my wife's treatment in the USA and in the UK.
In my own case, I had a problem for which one of the treatments is surgery. I was referred to a hand specialist who only discussed the surgical option with me. When I asked about the alternative treatment that I had discovered using Google, his response was that he didn't do that treatment and I would have to see another doctor. Had I not researched it for my self, I would never have known that there was an alternative. That's on top of the fact that I had to pay for a completely useless consultation with the hand surgeon.
Summary, even if you have good insurance in the USA, you may not be getting the best treatment.
Question...and this is a real question, not a retort, because I am curious. Did the alternative therapy work? I don't know what the problem was with your hand, or what the alternative to surgery was, and I could see this going either way.
I see and hear all the time about alternatives to X or Y medical procedure, but usually I haven't seen them turn out so well. But on the other hand, I totally agree that a lot of doctors follow a narrow path and get a bit heavy handed with surgery and drugs. I think I've been lucky; my doctor is fairly conservative and keeps things simple and it's been working very well for me.
At the end of the day, doctors are service providers...they are vendors. Just as with buying a car, a house, or even a pizza, you have to consider your vendor and choose wisely. The fact that they have all taken the Hippocratic Oath does not guarantee quality, intelligence or skill. The good ones are doing the best they can now, and always trying to improve the definition of "best." The bad ones can be lazy, narrow-minded, or just plain greedy.
Honeypot just means you spy on the data. It's not going to "blows out the TCP connection stack and downloads whatever it likes onto your device".
And actually a honeypot would be very easy to set up. Make sure people have to log in with a local phone number like the Chinese do, and then you can work back from an IP to a phone number. If you force all mobile providers to get an ID you can track that back to a person.
So now you've got a system where you can see people do on the internet. For maximum Orwellianness I'd allow access to sites that are normally blocked and just see who tries to visit them.
Hell why not man in the middle SSL sites so facebook.com goes to facebook.nk. Facebook.nk would log times, IP, text, basically everything.
Most devices will complain about the certificate not matching, but then most people will probably click to connect anyway. Of course a competent government would send an national security letter that forces facebook to sign the MITM site, in which case browsers will connect without complaining.
The downside to MITM'ing sites of course is that someone will eventually notice. Then again I bet if the NSA does this sort of thing the MITM site is probably colocated with an indistinguishable from the servers it is MITMing.
However if you're China or North Korea hopefully things are not set up so you can force a local company to issue a certificate that lets you MITM a US site.
While the poster (the one who talks about "blowing out the TCP connection stack," whatever the fuck that means) has the social skills of a rabid ferret, a honeypot can do pretty much what you want it to do; in that respect, he/she does have a good point. And a vulnerability exists which would operate in this fashion as well There was a nasty vulnerability (Broadpwn) in Broadcomm mobile SoCs that can be exploited in exactly this way (via a hostile WiFi AP) without even successfully connecting to a network. It was patched earlier this year...but if you're on an Android phone that isn't particularly new, you are likely vulnerable due to the OS fragmentation/support issue on that platform. And that, of course, ignores other forms of information harvesting (like recording SSID advertisements), or the possibility that they're maybe trying to MiTM everything but haven't gotten their kit working right yet.
Normally I would chalk fears like this up to paranoia...but this is the lounge for international travelers in North Korea's only international airport. I mean, honestly...if I could think of a single place that's most likely a site where travelers would be attacked, this is it. It's practically a line out of a comedy, it's so over-the-top as a description of a risky situation. Can we really say that North Korea...NORTH KOREA...has set up a WiFi network specifically for visiting foreigners just out of the goodness of their heart?
One, when you are standing "next to" a nuclear reactor, you still have all of the shielding between you and the reactor. It's not that much radiation.
Two, the article points out how NASA monitors radiation exposure of it's astronauts, but airlines don't do any such thing for flight crews. Again, this is a false comparison. Astronauts pass outside of our atmosphere entirely, while airplanes do nothing of the sort. You may as well complain that they don't provide space suits when you fly on Jet Blue.
Three, they actually do show a little real science...and illustrate that the annual exposure of a full-time flight crew while in the air is about 3 mSv. And they state that 10 days in space gets you 4.3 mSv of exposure. So even by their own numbers, the simple fact is that this isn't a real problem. Effectively, a flight crew gets 4 times the exposure to "cosmic radiation" (as they call it in the article) as a person who is standing on the ground at sea level.
Next up: Businessinsider.com exposes the "massive" amounts of radiation that high-altitude mountain climbers receive. Not only are they really high up (like real astronauts!), they don't even have a plane around them!
Root your phone, then you'll be able to remove all the crapware.
Actually, no.
The problem with this is that the worst of the crapware (like Adups' garbage) is tied into the OS itself. So while, theoretically you could remove it...you're talking about altering the OS itself at a very low level. And that brings a host of other problems based around maintenance. New Android version from the manufacturer to address vulnerabilities? Get ready to hack the OS all over again and perform surgery to remove the bad parts...assuming that they are where they were last time. Have a problem with something not working right? Could be from the changes you made...but it's hard to tell and good luck getting any technical support at all. And all of this first requires that a person be a guru on the inner workings of Android, which is a pretty tall order; I would think that someone asking about phone variants out there isn't one of these people, because everyone who is a bona fide Android developer (developer of Android itself...not apps for the Android OS) is pretty plugged-in to the cellphone industry.
There is a difference between "technically possible" and "actually feasible."
In the 1960s, [...] users were charged rent for the terminal, a charge for hours of connect time, a charge for seconds of CPU time, and a charge for kilobyte-months of disk storage.
I think you don't understand the difference between the pricing models, or the actual history you're referring to.
In the 1960s, you were charged rent for the terminal, yes. That was above and beyond the contract just to have access to the mainframe in the first place. You couldn't just go and buy a few seconds...or even a few hours...of compute time. You had to buy access on an annual basis.
Even so, the company type (service bureaus) that you're talking about were more like car rental companies. They had access to mainframes and provided defined services, not raw computing power. But even with that level of abstraction, you still couldn't buy on the micro-service level that you can get from AWS. You couldn't buy a minute of computing time, or a small bit of services on demand.
AWS and Azure represent the first time that such access has been available to anyone. Much less anyone who only need have an email address, credit card and the ability to read/watch tutorials on how to get started. There are no contract negotiations, no monthly quota, no credit checks, no need for a Dun and Bradstreet number. This has never happened before...yes, some aspects of pricing were based on timesharing of mainframes. But that was one aspect of pricing. It's like saying "you can rent a car by the mile!" when you can't. The fact that they may charge you an extra dime per mile or whatnot does not alter the fact that it happens in the larger context of a contract that charges you a base rate by the day.
In most other countries, it's hard to get a mortgage without paying credit-card interest rates. Why is this? Because the concept of a "credit rating" doesn't exist in any meaningful way. As a result, it's nearly impossible for banks to assess risk in a highly-standardized fashion. This, in turn, means that entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (who underwrite the vast majority of non-mansion-sized mortgages) cannot exist either, because standarization of risk rating underpins their entire function.
There's an underlying cry of "WHY DO THESE AGENCIES HAVE ACCESS TO ALL OUR INFORMATION???" and it's a good question to ask. Indeed, these agencies hold the keys to identifying (or impersonating) us all, and it's wise to examine whether that's a good thing or not. But they don't have that access for no particular reason besides corporate greed...they are part of a much-larger ecosystem that drives our housing market, among many other things. We shouldn't be examining this like it's just a solitary business function with no ties to anything else.
The larger problem, I think, is the way that we manage identities in the US. The anchor for all of it is the SSN; it was never meant to be used the way it's used today. It's like a login with no password, based on a relatively-predictable sequence, being used for everything. This nation needs an identity standard...but then you have constitutional issues due the the possibility of abuse. What we need is somewhere halfway between the SSN identifier of today and something that can lead to hearing "May I see your papers, please?"
You had me laughing at "Saudi Arabian Textbook," but then the Yoda thing...yeah.
It's especially funny when I think of all the people who would have seen this, having the opportunity to notice that someone who was clearly not human was in the picture...and still did nothing. Which, of course, goes back to why I find the phrase "Saudi Arabian Textbook" so hilarious.
My Nexus 6P also can only fast charge on a USB-C charger.
The real news is that the iPhones don't include the cable and fast charger in the box.
Exactly.
The title of this posting could be paraphrased as, "Something gives you new hardware functionality...BUT ONLY IF YOU BUY THE NEW HARDWARE! *GASP*"
Really, I'm not sure why people don't automatically grasp that faster charging than standard USB = higher flow of charging = higher flow than a non-USB-C connector can supply. It's not Apple's fault that a new hardware spec (USB-C) with a new bit of functionality (an option for higher power supply) doesn't automatically cause that functionality to flow backwards to time and apply itself to prior USB standards.
I'd rather have the chinese spy on me than my own government.
You must not have much of a basis for comparison, then. See what they do to the people they disagree with. In particular, check out the organ harvesting...it's a hoot.
I can actually picture ways it would be good for consumers. Some things like home automation could really work well in this model. It draws a line between service and sales-- "my internet is broken" could be either type of call, but many people would benefit by upgrading equipment.
Easy to screw it up though, so it really comes down to the details.
I think you hit the problem on the head. These aren't going to be implementers...they aren't going to be helpful like that. They won't fix anything, install anything, set up anything. They just want to sell you things. Best Buy is literally taking the worst part of the in-store experience and sending it to people at their homes.
From TFA:
Best Buy has found that shoppers spend more money when at home than in store.
What I think they're missing is the fact that in the store, you're not enjoying the experience that their salespeople provide. For example, the asshole who humped my leg trying to sell me higher-quality HDMI cables because they would have "less signal loss." Or the push to get the warranty for everything. Or the lies that places like Newegg "won't stand behind their products if there's a problem," which turns out to be the opposite of the truth. I stopped going to Best Buy altogether, and the main reason is their inept, dishonest, pushy salesforce.
Reading the comments above, I feel pretty comfortable that my derision and disdain for the blue-shirted assmunches that sell on behalf of Best Buy is a shared experience. Best Buy doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.
but if LockState is telling the truth, they're putting everything they have into fixing the problem
Nothing less should be expected, but that does not in any way diminish what happened. It is also likely not out of a desire to do what's right, but to reduce the number of lawsuits.
Indeed. And they should have put everything they have into not causing the problem in the first place. Not only has this sullied their name, it's impacted AirBnB as well. I doubt that AirBnB (who selected them as an official choice to recommend) will ever forget this.
Yet another data point to underpin the motto "Never allow any data or access or service that you value to be controlled by Somebody Else's Computer"
The problem here isn't that the data or access or service was controlled by someone else's computer...that's true of all software updates. It's that the process behind the update was controlled by someone else's business model. IoT is much like SCADA, in that there are physical consequences to cyber actions. As such, it's very important to maintain control of your own systems. This played out with Nest thermostats that pulled down updates without notice or warning...some of which bricked them. You had pipes freezing in winter in some homes as a result.
So...when buying something that is IoT, ask the vendor (or look through the documentation) to find out how and when updates are done. Bad news: no OTA update option. Worse news: OTA updates that you have no control over.
They've been called "Time Lords" thus far because their incarnations have all been men. The very fact that there is already a feminine equivalent to "lord" implies that there's nothing odd about there being a "Time Lady."
Hmm...I"m wondering, even with liberal use of "eminent domain", it seems that digging, or above ground install and connection of this type of thing, would be quite difficult to do nationwide in the US....and that's just the private property and existing city problems. The wildly varied and often difficult terrain across the US would pose a lot of problems putting together a system like this, that requires what I'm guessing is pretty complex and massive equipment to put tube, and keep power and vacuum on such a system.
While it sounds really cool.....I'm wondering of the practicality of it in becoming anywhere near a mass transit system.
You're missing a piece of the puzzle. As we speak, Musk's tunneling machine...named "Godot," is tunneling in LA. Oh, and the company under which this work is being done? "The Boring Company."
When you have a 30 year mortgage, you don't really need to care about your credit rating. A mortgage will bring a 500 back up to a 700 in 6 months
This isn't exactly true. 1, it depends on who's FICO score you're looking at: two of them ding you for having a mortgage that is, essentially, too new. Another also dings you for having too much of a mortgage balance...so if you've put down less than a 20% down payment (if you can, why do you have a FICO of 500?) that will also actually lower your score, not raise it. The concept that FICO is some standardized, monolithic, and consistent measure is false; creditors refer to them as "fake-o" scores. Another way to look at it: if the FICO score were a reliable, end-all measurement, then creditors would only rely on it, and not require an actual credit report for things like opening credit cards, auto loans, or mortgages.
And I get the sense that you don't know what you're talking about on a broader scale...because suggesting that someone with a FICO score of 500 get a mortgage is like suggesting that a registered sex offender get a job at an elementary school. Creditors aren't going to give someone the time of day with that score.
That gif wasn't a threat of violence. There are plenty of actual threats of violence from Trump and his supporters, so whining about a dumb gif is crying wolf.
Then the person who posted it has nothing to worry about, right?
Once you start donating money in a significant way, you start learning that not all causes are alike...and you learn to make good choices so that your donations will actually matter.
Wouldn't it be great if there was some sort of clearing house that handled your "donations" and made sure they were applied correctly, to people who really need them for medical expenses. Even better if the overhead was lower then any other comparable system. We could call it Medicare, or something like that.
Excellent point...and actually, it's been tried, with mixed success, on a broader scale rather than just medical-expense-related charitable giving. One approach...the United Way...has worked decently though they have had some scandals of their own. Another is the US Federal Government's "Combined Federal Campaign," which kind of serves as a clearing house and also seeks to avoid some other problems as well (like how supervisors used to pressure their subordinates to donate to certain charities.)
I think it's a people problem more than anything else: when you have a lot of money flowing through something, some will inevitably attempt to take advantage. Given that, on a per-family basis, the financial magnitude of need from medical expenses outstrips everything else makes it both a tragedy when real needs are not met and a lucrative target for fraud. And there seems to be a dignity factor with requiring people to produce comprehensive medical and financial records to prove they are in need.
On the whole, people don't want open specifications more than they want something that is well-supported. Open specifications are a good thing, don't get me wrong. But given the choice between something that's a huge hassle to get working (and keep working) smoothly that's open and something that just plain works...well, I offer this survey's results as Exhibit A.
they already took out the folks just randomly asking for money. It's 90% of _medical_ campaigns that fail. But hey, you're uninformed rant probably made you feel better about not providing those 90% with life saving medical care and food/shelter while they're too sick to work, right?
The folks just randomly asking for money are part of the problem, even if you remove them from the study. I found out about them when I went to GoFundMe to give money to a valid cause. A person was injured while volunteering for an event that I was attending (which has a close-knit community) and was injured by an accident. Having a broken ankle and no medical insurance, he put up a GoFundMe to ask for help; it was a textbook example of what the site *should* be used for. I went there, and donated...and then in the course of that I saw just how much insanity there is. It definitely put me off...it didn't dissuade me from donating that time, because I knew about the person involved, knew what happened (I even saw them bringing him to the ambulance), and knew that it was 100% valid. But I also realized that there was absolutely no way to validate any of the other campaigns without that kind of personal connection. My rant is an indictment of GoFundMe in general, because we're talking about the model as a whole.
Which brings me to the issue that I raised but you didn't address: scams. There are tons of scams in GoFundMe, and while some (like those that use stock art for photos) can be uncovered relatively easily with a bit of detective work, I'm willing to be that there is a significant group that are less obvious. How does the study account for them? Looking through the GoFraudMe (I bet you didn't go there, Mr. "Uninformed Rant") site, you'll note that the majority of scams fall within the exact kind of funding campaigns that are the study's focus. And that comes full-circle to my point about funding methods that have some form of due diligence behind them. Yes, I know, you can't start up a non-profit agency just to get your medical bills covered...but there are many non-profit agencies that gather funds en masse and then dole them out for cases like these.
But let's not stop there. Let's put aside the scams, the fact that the whole model is fundamentally broken in that it begs abuse by people who feel entitled to game consoles and whatnot. Let's also include the fact that a significant number of the "medical" campaigns are for things like breast enhancement or bariatric surgery. Or this gem, which has exceeded it's $8,000 goal for hip surgery for a dog...but when I did a Google Image search of the picture, it turns out that the dog pictured belonged to Justin Bieber. How much searching did that take? I typed "surgery" into the search field on GoFundMe, hit return, picked the first item on the first page of results that had a picture rather than a video, and did an image search on the picture. What are the odds of that turning out to be a sign of a scam, if the vast majority of "surgery"-related campaigns are valid? And this case combines both the "this request is bullshit" and "this campaign is a scam" dimensions at the same time.
So...follow the pathway of a person visiting GoFundMe, going for a totally valid reason about which they have no doubts. Add the shocking, rampant, obvious snowflakery and the subsequent discovery of large-scale scamming that goes into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per campaign. What do you think a potential donor is going to do? I think they'll do what I do...only give money to people they know, or give it to 501(c)(3) organizations because both cases involve a lot lower risk of the money going to a scumbag instead of a person who is deserving.
Oh, and in closing...fuck you very much for accusing that I actively deny medical care, food, and shelter to sick people and that I seek solace for trampling upon the poor. You don't know me, or anything about me, and I would bet a year's pay that I donate more to charitable causes than you do. Once you start donating money in a significant way, you start learning that not all causes are alike...and you learn to make good choices so that your donations will actually matter.
I assume that the mentality of the person who did the study was to compare it to conventional non-profits and the way they do fundraising. This is an important distinction because, under that model, there's a certain filtering process. If you've ever looked at a grant application, you'll see that the very nature of any of them tends to point out to you that there needs to be a valid reason for your request for funding. GoFundMe has no such filter, and as a result you get people like these three assholes or this snowflake. And those two are just what I came across by searching "Nintendo" on their site and seeing what came up in the first full set of results.
And then there's the other thing that the filtering process does...which is help reduce the level of scamming. GoFundMe also lacks any means to do this; you see a picture and a nice bit of text but there is absolutely nothing done to validate that either are true. As a result, scams are rampant, to such a degree that there's a whole site dedicated to uncovering the scams.
So, in short...I don't think there's anything wrong with the majority of GoFundMe campaigns failing to reach their goals. Most of them are just fucking ridiculous. And yes, I'm quite sure that some valid campaigns don't get funded as well...but 1, I would put some of the blame on the lack of any vetting process around the campaigns, and 2, that happens in the world of legitimate fundraising too. Posting a picture and type a few paragraphs describing your plight does not automatically guarantee you money...whether you are deserving or not...and that's just how life goes.
Slashdot Mirror
Euthanasia is nothing more than state sponsored suicide. To try to cloak it in anytbing else is to say suicide is ok.
This is not true at all. Euthanasia, by definition, has nothing to do with state sponsorship.
Let's take the human factor out of it. When a vet has to euthanize a dog...is the state paying for it? No. How about a horse? No? Dr. Kevorkian's patients...did the state pay for any of those? No? Hm. But they were all cases of euthanasia. Even if a country were to subsidize it (directly or indirectly) that does not change the meaning of the term, any more than a European country having state-sponsored colleges, free of cost, means that "college" includes "state-sponsored" in its definition.
The word is important because it confers a crucial distinction. Suicide (rightly) carries a stigma of a person in pain that can be escaped via other means. Euthanasia, by it's very definition, relates to death being imminent anyways, and the aversion of pain that is otherwise unavoidable and inescapable. There's a massive difference between a person who is misguided as they end their life when there is another way, and a person who has no other alternative and would prefer to die with dignity than suffer for several months without it and die soon anyways.
Except there are an infinite number of permutations of Gaussian white noise, while there is only one for the word "and".
Yes, but creativity plays no part in creating any of those permutations. Saying there are infinite numbers of permutations as a defense of a particular variant is like taking a recording of an existing song, changing the pitch of a single note, and then claiming that it's a new song. The courts have already ruled on that concept.
Absolutely, although there is a somewhat higher chance of re-occurrence with the treatment that I chose, but surgery involves risks such as nerve damage.
Google Xiaflex.
Interesting...and thank you for answering. I needed that context. I've seen everything from physical therapy accomplishing the same thing as a recommended surgical procedure was supposed to do (good outcome) to an idiot eschewing normal treatments for cancer in favor of herbal remedies...which absolutely did not work at all (very bad outcome). And then of course there's the GNCs of the world, hawking trend after trend for profit, and paying fines to the FTC every few years as a cost of doing business. Every time I hear "alternative" in a medical context, I wonder if it's "do this as an alternative to that," or if it means "oh, you don't need to take insulin for your diabetes! Here...have some dried duck vaginas...it's an ancient alternative remedy that cures diabetes..."
I'm really glad that it worked out for you like it did; obviously, you fall into the first of the two categories described above. Is it weird that I almost feel uncomfortable that this is an Internet conversation about an emotionally-charged topic, and yet everything about our interaction has been totally civilized and truth-based? :)
This simply isn't the real problem.
Doctors in the US over-treat illnesses, use outdated and ineffective treatments and generally run up the costs of medicine.
The above statement is based on my wife's treatment in the USA and in the UK.
In my own case, I had a problem for which one of the treatments is surgery. I was referred to a hand specialist who only discussed the surgical option with me. When I asked about the alternative treatment that I had discovered using Google, his response was that he didn't do that treatment and I would have to see another doctor. Had I not researched it for my self, I would never have known that there was an alternative. That's on top of the fact that I had to pay for a completely useless consultation with the hand surgeon.
Summary, even if you have good insurance in the USA, you may not be getting the best treatment.
Question...and this is a real question, not a retort, because I am curious. Did the alternative therapy work? I don't know what the problem was with your hand, or what the alternative to surgery was, and I could see this going either way.
I see and hear all the time about alternatives to X or Y medical procedure, but usually I haven't seen them turn out so well. But on the other hand, I totally agree that a lot of doctors follow a narrow path and get a bit heavy handed with surgery and drugs. I think I've been lucky; my doctor is fairly conservative and keeps things simple and it's been working very well for me.
At the end of the day, doctors are service providers...they are vendors. Just as with buying a car, a house, or even a pizza, you have to consider your vendor and choose wisely. The fact that they have all taken the Hippocratic Oath does not guarantee quality, intelligence or skill. The good ones are doing the best they can now, and always trying to improve the definition of "best." The bad ones can be lazy, narrow-minded, or just plain greedy.
Honeypot just means you spy on the data. It's not going to "blows out the TCP connection stack and downloads whatever it likes onto your device".
And actually a honeypot would be very easy to set up. Make sure people have to log in with a local phone number like the Chinese do, and then you can work back from an IP to a phone number. If you force all mobile providers to get an ID you can track that back to a person.
So now you've got a system where you can see people do on the internet. For maximum Orwellianness I'd allow access to sites that are normally blocked and just see who tries to visit them.
Hell why not man in the middle SSL sites so facebook.com goes to facebook.nk. Facebook.nk would log times, IP, text, basically everything.
Most devices will complain about the certificate not matching, but then most people will probably click to connect anyway. Of course a competent government would send an national security letter that forces facebook to sign the MITM site, in which case browsers will connect without complaining.
The downside to MITM'ing sites of course is that someone will eventually notice. Then again I bet if the NSA does this sort of thing the MITM site is probably colocated with an indistinguishable from the servers it is MITMing.
UNLIMITED POWER!
However if you're China or North Korea hopefully things are not set up so you can force a local company to issue a certificate that lets you MITM a US site.
While the poster (the one who talks about "blowing out the TCP connection stack," whatever the fuck that means) has the social skills of a rabid ferret, a honeypot can do pretty much what you want it to do; in that respect, he/she does have a good point. And a vulnerability exists which would operate in this fashion as well There was a nasty vulnerability (Broadpwn) in Broadcomm mobile SoCs that can be exploited in exactly this way (via a hostile WiFi AP) without even successfully connecting to a network. It was patched earlier this year...but if you're on an Android phone that isn't particularly new, you are likely vulnerable due to the OS fragmentation/support issue on that platform. And that, of course, ignores other forms of information harvesting (like recording SSID advertisements), or the possibility that they're maybe trying to MiTM everything but haven't gotten their kit working right yet.
Normally I would chalk fears like this up to paranoia...but this is the lounge for international travelers in North Korea's only international airport. I mean, honestly...if I could think of a single place that's most likely a site where travelers would be attacked, this is it. It's practically a line out of a comedy, it's so over-the-top as a description of a risky situation. Can we really say that North Korea...NORTH KOREA...has set up a WiFi network specifically for visiting foreigners just out of the goodness of their heart?
So, a few things.
One, when you are standing "next to" a nuclear reactor, you still have all of the shielding between you and the reactor. It's not that much radiation.
Two, the article points out how NASA monitors radiation exposure of it's astronauts, but airlines don't do any such thing for flight crews. Again, this is a false comparison. Astronauts pass outside of our atmosphere entirely, while airplanes do nothing of the sort. You may as well complain that they don't provide space suits when you fly on Jet Blue.
Three, they actually do show a little real science...and illustrate that the annual exposure of a full-time flight crew while in the air is about 3 mSv. And they state that 10 days in space gets you 4.3 mSv of exposure. So even by their own numbers, the simple fact is that this isn't a real problem. Effectively, a flight crew gets 4 times the exposure to "cosmic radiation" (as they call it in the article) as a person who is standing on the ground at sea level.
Next up: Businessinsider.com exposes the "massive" amounts of radiation that high-altitude mountain climbers receive. Not only are they really high up (like real astronauts!), they don't even have a plane around them!
Root your phone, then you'll be able to remove all the crapware.
Actually, no.
The problem with this is that the worst of the crapware (like Adups' garbage) is tied into the OS itself. So while, theoretically you could remove it...you're talking about altering the OS itself at a very low level. And that brings a host of other problems based around maintenance. New Android version from the manufacturer to address vulnerabilities? Get ready to hack the OS all over again and perform surgery to remove the bad parts...assuming that they are where they were last time. Have a problem with something not working right? Could be from the changes you made...but it's hard to tell and good luck getting any technical support at all. And all of this first requires that a person be a guru on the inner workings of Android, which is a pretty tall order; I would think that someone asking about phone variants out there isn't one of these people, because everyone who is a bona fide Android developer (developer of Android itself...not apps for the Android OS) is pretty plugged-in to the cellphone industry.
There is a difference between "technically possible" and "actually feasible."
Back in the old days, you needed to buy or lease a server if you needed access to compute power," remembers Amazon's AWS blog.
Someone didn't learn History, again.
In the 1960s, [...] users were charged rent for the terminal, a charge for hours of connect time, a charge for seconds of CPU time, and a charge for kilobyte-months of disk storage.
I think you don't understand the difference between the pricing models, or the actual history you're referring to.
In the 1960s, you were charged rent for the terminal, yes. That was above and beyond the contract just to have access to the mainframe in the first place. You couldn't just go and buy a few seconds...or even a few hours...of compute time. You had to buy access on an annual basis.
Even so, the company type (service bureaus) that you're talking about were more like car rental companies. They had access to mainframes and provided defined services, not raw computing power. But even with that level of abstraction, you still couldn't buy on the micro-service level that you can get from AWS. You couldn't buy a minute of computing time, or a small bit of services on demand.
AWS and Azure represent the first time that such access has been available to anyone. Much less anyone who only need have an email address, credit card and the ability to read/watch tutorials on how to get started. There are no contract negotiations, no monthly quota, no credit checks, no need for a Dun and Bradstreet number. This has never happened before...yes, some aspects of pricing were based on timesharing of mainframes. But that was one aspect of pricing. It's like saying "you can rent a car by the mile!" when you can't. The fact that they may charge you an extra dime per mile or whatnot does not alter the fact that it happens in the larger context of a contract that charges you a base rate by the day.
There's a bigger challenge here to keep in mind.
In most other countries, it's hard to get a mortgage without paying credit-card interest rates. Why is this? Because the concept of a "credit rating" doesn't exist in any meaningful way. As a result, it's nearly impossible for banks to assess risk in a highly-standardized fashion. This, in turn, means that entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (who underwrite the vast majority of non-mansion-sized mortgages) cannot exist either, because standarization of risk rating underpins their entire function.
There's an underlying cry of "WHY DO THESE AGENCIES HAVE ACCESS TO ALL OUR INFORMATION???" and it's a good question to ask. Indeed, these agencies hold the keys to identifying (or impersonating) us all, and it's wise to examine whether that's a good thing or not. But they don't have that access for no particular reason besides corporate greed...they are part of a much-larger ecosystem that drives our housing market, among many other things. We shouldn't be examining this like it's just a solitary business function with no ties to anything else.
The larger problem, I think, is the way that we manage identities in the US. The anchor for all of it is the SSN; it was never meant to be used the way it's used today. It's like a login with no password, based on a relatively-predictable sequence, being used for everything. This nation needs an identity standard...but then you have constitutional issues due the the possibility of abuse. What we need is somewhere halfway between the SSN identifier of today and something that can lead to hearing "May I see your papers, please?"
You had me laughing at "Saudi Arabian Textbook," but then the Yoda thing...yeah.
It's especially funny when I think of all the people who would have seen this, having the opportunity to notice that someone who was clearly not human was in the picture...and still did nothing. Which, of course, goes back to why I find the phrase "Saudi Arabian Textbook" so hilarious.
My Nexus 6P also can only fast charge on a USB-C charger.
The real news is that the iPhones don't include the cable and fast charger in the box.
Exactly.
The title of this posting could be paraphrased as, "Something gives you new hardware functionality...BUT ONLY IF YOU BUY THE NEW HARDWARE! *GASP*"
Really, I'm not sure why people don't automatically grasp that faster charging than standard USB = higher flow of charging = higher flow than a non-USB-C connector can supply. It's not Apple's fault that a new hardware spec (USB-C) with a new bit of functionality (an option for higher power supply) doesn't automatically cause that functionality to flow backwards to time and apply itself to prior USB standards.
...does "Mexican tax refund" sound like a euphemism for something not at all related to taxes?
I'd rather have the chinese spy on me than my own government.
You must not have much of a basis for comparison, then. See what they do to the people they disagree with. In particular, check out the organ harvesting...it's a hoot.
I can actually picture ways it would be good for consumers. Some things like home automation could really work well in this model. It draws a line between service and sales-- "my internet is broken" could be either type of call, but many people would benefit by upgrading equipment.
Easy to screw it up though, so it really comes down to the details.
I think you hit the problem on the head. These aren't going to be implementers...they aren't going to be helpful like that. They won't fix anything, install anything, set up anything. They just want to sell you things. Best Buy is literally taking the worst part of the in-store experience and sending it to people at their homes.
From TFA:
Best Buy has found that shoppers spend more money when at home than in store.
What I think they're missing is the fact that in the store, you're not enjoying the experience that their salespeople provide. For example, the asshole who humped my leg trying to sell me higher-quality HDMI cables because they would have "less signal loss." Or the push to get the warranty for everything. Or the lies that places like Newegg "won't stand behind their products if there's a problem," which turns out to be the opposite of the truth. I stopped going to Best Buy altogether, and the main reason is their inept, dishonest, pushy salesforce.
Reading the comments above, I feel pretty comfortable that my derision and disdain for the blue-shirted assmunches that sell on behalf of Best Buy is a shared experience. Best Buy doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.
but if LockState is telling the truth, they're putting everything they have into fixing the problem
Nothing less should be expected, but that does not in any way diminish what happened. It is also likely not out of a desire to do what's right, but to reduce the number of lawsuits.
Indeed. And they should have put everything they have into not causing the problem in the first place. Not only has this sullied their name, it's impacted AirBnB as well. I doubt that AirBnB (who selected them as an official choice to recommend) will ever forget this.
Yet another data point to underpin the motto "Never allow any data or access or service that you value to be controlled by Somebody Else's Computer"
The problem here isn't that the data or access or service was controlled by someone else's computer...that's true of all software updates. It's that the process behind the update was controlled by someone else's business model. IoT is much like SCADA, in that there are physical consequences to cyber actions. As such, it's very important to maintain control of your own systems. This played out with Nest thermostats that pulled down updates without notice or warning...some of which bricked them. You had pipes freezing in winter in some homes as a result.
So...when buying something that is IoT, ask the vendor (or look through the documentation) to find out how and when updates are done. Bad news: no OTA update option. Worse news: OTA updates that you have no control over.
> Nope, Doctor is an alien, not a man.
A Time LORD, not a TIme Lady!
They've been called "Time Lords" thus far because their incarnations have all been men. The very fact that there is already a feminine equivalent to "lord" implies that there's nothing odd about there being a "Time Lady."
Hmm...I"m wondering, even with liberal use of "eminent domain", it seems that digging, or above ground install and connection of this type of thing, would be quite difficult to do nationwide in the US....and that's just the private property and existing city problems. The wildly varied and often difficult terrain across the US would pose a lot of problems putting together a system like this, that requires what I'm guessing is pretty complex and massive equipment to put tube, and keep power and vacuum on such a system.
While it sounds really cool.....I'm wondering of the practicality of it in becoming anywhere near a mass transit system.
You're missing a piece of the puzzle. As we speak, Musk's tunneling machine...named "Godot," is tunneling in LA. Oh, and the company under which this work is being done? "The Boring Company."
Why has this not been modded up?
When you have a 30 year mortgage, you don't really need to care about your credit rating. A mortgage will bring a 500 back up to a 700 in 6 months
This isn't exactly true. 1, it depends on who's FICO score you're looking at: two of them ding you for having a mortgage that is, essentially, too new. Another also dings you for having too much of a mortgage balance...so if you've put down less than a 20% down payment (if you can, why do you have a FICO of 500?) that will also actually lower your score, not raise it. The concept that FICO is some standardized, monolithic, and consistent measure is false; creditors refer to them as "fake-o" scores. Another way to look at it: if the FICO score were a reliable, end-all measurement, then creditors would only rely on it, and not require an actual credit report for things like opening credit cards, auto loans, or mortgages.
And I get the sense that you don't know what you're talking about on a broader scale...because suggesting that someone with a FICO score of 500 get a mortgage is like suggesting that a registered sex offender get a job at an elementary school. Creditors aren't going to give someone the time of day with that score.
That gif wasn't a threat of violence. There are plenty of actual threats of violence from Trump and his supporters, so whining about a dumb gif is crying wolf.
Then the person who posted it has nothing to worry about, right?
Right?
Once you start donating money in a significant way, you start learning that not all causes are alike...and you learn to make good choices so that your donations will actually matter.
Wouldn't it be great if there was some sort of clearing house that handled your "donations" and made sure they were applied correctly, to people who really need them for medical expenses.
Even better if the overhead was lower then any other comparable system.
We could call it Medicare, or something like that.
Excellent point...and actually, it's been tried, with mixed success, on a broader scale rather than just medical-expense-related charitable giving. One approach...the United Way...has worked decently though they have had some scandals of their own. Another is the US Federal Government's "Combined Federal Campaign," which kind of serves as a clearing house and also seeks to avoid some other problems as well (like how supervisors used to pressure their subordinates to donate to certain charities.)
I think it's a people problem more than anything else: when you have a lot of money flowing through something, some will inevitably attempt to take advantage. Given that, on a per-family basis, the financial magnitude of need from medical expenses outstrips everything else makes it both a tragedy when real needs are not met and a lucrative target for fraud. And there seems to be a dignity factor with requiring people to produce comprehensive medical and financial records to prove they are in need.
On the whole, people don't want open specifications more than they want something that is well-supported. Open specifications are a good thing, don't get me wrong. But given the choice between something that's a huge hassle to get working (and keep working) smoothly that's open and something that just plain works...well, I offer this survey's results as Exhibit A.
they already took out the folks just randomly asking for money. It's 90% of _medical_ campaigns that fail. But hey, you're uninformed rant probably made you feel better about not providing those 90% with life saving medical care and food/shelter while they're too sick to work, right?
The folks just randomly asking for money are part of the problem, even if you remove them from the study. I found out about them when I went to GoFundMe to give money to a valid cause. A person was injured while volunteering for an event that I was attending (which has a close-knit community) and was injured by an accident. Having a broken ankle and no medical insurance, he put up a GoFundMe to ask for help; it was a textbook example of what the site *should* be used for. I went there, and donated...and then in the course of that I saw just how much insanity there is. It definitely put me off...it didn't dissuade me from donating that time, because I knew about the person involved, knew what happened (I even saw them bringing him to the ambulance), and knew that it was 100% valid. But I also realized that there was absolutely no way to validate any of the other campaigns without that kind of personal connection. My rant is an indictment of GoFundMe in general, because we're talking about the model as a whole.
Which brings me to the issue that I raised but you didn't address: scams. There are tons of scams in GoFundMe, and while some (like those that use stock art for photos) can be uncovered relatively easily with a bit of detective work, I'm willing to be that there is a significant group that are less obvious. How does the study account for them? Looking through the GoFraudMe (I bet you didn't go there, Mr. "Uninformed Rant") site, you'll note that the majority of scams fall within the exact kind of funding campaigns that are the study's focus. And that comes full-circle to my point about funding methods that have some form of due diligence behind them. Yes, I know, you can't start up a non-profit agency just to get your medical bills covered...but there are many non-profit agencies that gather funds en masse and then dole them out for cases like these.
But let's not stop there. Let's put aside the scams, the fact that the whole model is fundamentally broken in that it begs abuse by people who feel entitled to game consoles and whatnot. Let's also include the fact that a significant number of the "medical" campaigns are for things like breast enhancement or bariatric surgery. Or this gem, which has exceeded it's $8,000 goal for hip surgery for a dog...but when I did a Google Image search of the picture, it turns out that the dog pictured belonged to Justin Bieber. How much searching did that take? I typed "surgery" into the search field on GoFundMe, hit return, picked the first item on the first page of results that had a picture rather than a video, and did an image search on the picture. What are the odds of that turning out to be a sign of a scam, if the vast majority of "surgery"-related campaigns are valid? And this case combines both the "this request is bullshit" and "this campaign is a scam" dimensions at the same time.
So...follow the pathway of a person visiting GoFundMe, going for a totally valid reason about which they have no doubts. Add the shocking, rampant, obvious snowflakery and the subsequent discovery of large-scale scamming that goes into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per campaign. What do you think a potential donor is going to do? I think they'll do what I do...only give money to people they know, or give it to 501(c)(3) organizations because both cases involve a lot lower risk of the money going to a scumbag instead of a person who is deserving.
Oh, and in closing...fuck you very much for accusing that I actively deny medical care, food, and shelter to sick people and that I seek solace for trampling upon the poor. You don't know me, or anything about me, and I would bet a year's pay that I donate more to charitable causes than you do. Once you start donating money in a significant way, you start learning that not all causes are alike...and you learn to make good choices so that your donations will actually matter.
I assume that the mentality of the person who did the study was to compare it to conventional non-profits and the way they do fundraising. This is an important distinction because, under that model, there's a certain filtering process. If you've ever looked at a grant application, you'll see that the very nature of any of them tends to point out to you that there needs to be a valid reason for your request for funding. GoFundMe has no such filter, and as a result you get people like these three assholes or this snowflake. And those two are just what I came across by searching "Nintendo" on their site and seeing what came up in the first full set of results.
And then there's the other thing that the filtering process does...which is help reduce the level of scamming. GoFundMe also lacks any means to do this; you see a picture and a nice bit of text but there is absolutely nothing done to validate that either are true. As a result, scams are rampant, to such a degree that there's a whole site dedicated to uncovering the scams.
So, in short...I don't think there's anything wrong with the majority of GoFundMe campaigns failing to reach their goals. Most of them are just fucking ridiculous. And yes, I'm quite sure that some valid campaigns don't get funded as well...but 1, I would put some of the blame on the lack of any vetting process around the campaigns, and 2, that happens in the world of legitimate fundraising too. Posting a picture and type a few paragraphs describing your plight does not automatically guarantee you money...whether you are deserving or not...and that's just how life goes.