Any employer that doesn't agree to any of the above can go FSCK themselves. I have a life outside of work, and the details of that life are NONE of their F'ing business!!!!!
Not everybody can afford to turn down jobs - after a while, people can become desperate, and accept what they normally wouldn't.
If you enter the code/put your hand one the reader/put your finger on the scanner, you show your intent.
Yes, no and no. The latter two does not show intent, only credentials. If I knock you unconscious, I can still open your phone with a fingerprint reader. However, if it's locked with a code, I can't.
Biometrics (and this implant) is just a username, not a password. It does not convey intent. If relying on just a username, you open the door for identity theft, you don't add security. Security must always check whether the access is intended or not, and not make an assumption of "because who then what".
I hope we can do better than that. I really wanna see the unions say no! No union? Time to make one. This behavior should not be tolerated.
It's past that time, alas. We've accepted selling ourself into indentured servitude for long enough that it's expected already - this is just one more example.
Work demanding to know your cell phone number, you having to wear a step tracker and heart rate monitor to get full insurance benefits, having to give HR your username/password to any social networking sites you use, fingerprint and eye scanners, scanning your network drives and reporting the content when you VPN in... It should all have been protested a long time ago. But it's the proverbial lobster pot. One tiny temperature increment at a time, and you won't throw a fit and try to clamber out, until it's too late. Which it already is for many.
I don't have a sim card for my cell phone. I use it for a lot of things[*] - pretty much anything except phone calls and SMS works just fine. Some use cases requires a WiFi connection, but certainly no connection to a cell tower. Given that actual phone calls is the least use most put a smartphone to, I am sure that many can do just fine without it.
[*]: Books, music, audiobooks, GPS, exercise monitor/logger, calculator, metronome, 2FA token server... When near WiFi also checking e-mail, checking news, instant messaging, ssh, updating apps.
Whether you ask out loud or type it into a keyboard has very little impact on how impressive it is
No, but it has a lot of impact on how precise it is. Speech is inherently error-prone and ambiguous. People mishear each other all the time. If you really want to avoid misunderstandings, you write things down.
Voice systems aren't optimal even when humans are listening. Much of the automation and overall design we use in our daily lives became popular because it reduced the amount of talking we had to do. It might have started with pulling a string instead of calling a servant, but it could have been even earlier, perhaps a library index allowing a monk to find the right manuscript without having to talk to their fellow menk.
Speech is inefficient and error prone. I predict that a few thousand years down the line, we will have evolved away from it.
Yes, the scientists here appear to have forgotten evolution, in several ways. Both, as you say, how all the failures are quickly forgotten and taken over by the successes, but also that the lifeforms that compete do not stand still; they evolve continuously, adapting to the unstable ecosystems. Mathematical models without generations, where the offspring is always different from its parents, are not going to reflect what happens in nature.
Tell you what, give me a bezel so my fat hands can hold it, make it thicker so I don't need to worry about breaking it and so it has better battery life, take that stupid notch out, and stop sacrificing screen space so you can make it a fraction of a mm thinner.
This is why I ended up with an Xperia XZ1 Compact, despite it being made by Umbrella Corporation. It's small enough to hold with one hand, has stereo speakers I can actually hear due to the bezels, lies flat and don't wobble or move around, and the battery lasts more than a work day. Now if only it had come without uninstallable and undisableable crapware, and had a cameraless model, I'd be really happy.
Adulterating it with sugar and fats turns a zero calorie drink into something you should avoid.
Coffee isn't zero calorie. Unsweetened coffee without milk or other additives have from 1-12 calories per cup, depending on the coffee and size of the cup. That's if it's room temperature. If it's hot, add the heat calories it will give off cooling to your body temperature after drinking.
Not so much help with reading or physical activities, though.
At first I thought that these kids were just using Alexa as an ersatz teddy bear. Then I thought it over a bit more, and came to the conclusion that I'm right, except that this teddy only listens in the hope of generating sales leads.
but remember these were the days a few MB on a cover floppy was actually quite cool
The capacity of floppies were smaller than you remember.
A typical 3.5" floppy held 720 kB, later 1.44 MB, slightly more on Amiga and Macintosh, but not "a few MB". A typical 5.25" floppy, which were really floppy and better suited for magazines, could hold 1.2 MB, again not "a few MB".
There are some older operating systems like DOS where users did have full control, but there are also modern operating systems where there is no privilege separation, like microcontroller operating systems. Your kitchen scales don't need to prevent privilege escalation exploits. (Although it would be a good hack to have the scales report too high weights of anything healthy and too low weights of anything unhealthy, slowly increasing the risks of death for the users.)
A reasonable amount of non-work at work makes the employees more content, and content workers is usually a plus. It should of course be reasonable, but if you expect people to work like slaves for hours straight with no amount of non-work activity interspersed, expect malcontents and burn-outs. Fifteen minutes of shopping or news reading or something a couple of times a day might be acceptable. Hours on end, not so much.
They talk about a blacklist of sites when they should be talking about a whitelist of allowed sites.
While this sounds nice in theory, in practice it is very hard to implement in a way that works and doesn't just hinder work. The people who administer the whitelist are not going to know what is needed for every job function. Nor will they have the capacity to monitor every whitelisted object to ensure that it remains safe. (One of the whitelisted sites might start serving ads proxied through their server - ads which aren't safe.) And for the users, requesting sites being added to a whitelist as needed can delay entire teams for days on end. What do you mean, we cannot download the schematics for the microcontroller we just discovered a problem with until it's added to a whitelist? And when it delays a high level manager who needs to look at a web site of a potentially new supplier or customer, the whitelist system will be gone.
When the Linux kernel depends on non-standard language extensions that only GCC implements, that's OK.
Except that VLAs are part of the C99 standard, and there's nothing in the standard that says they can't be used in a struct - it's just difficult for the compilers. gcc has chosen to technically implement it as an extension, while Clang/LLVM doesn't support it (nor the floating point pragmas of C99, which has also been an issue for some kernel code).
Slashdot Mirror
Is there a difference?
f I used social networking (I don't),
Evidence to the contrary, you post here.
Any employer that doesn't agree to any of the above can go FSCK themselves. I have a life outside of work, and the details of that life are NONE of their F'ing business!!!!!
Not everybody can afford to turn down jobs - after a while, people can become desperate, and accept what they normally wouldn't.
If you enter the code/put your hand one the reader/put your finger on the scanner, you show your intent.
Yes, no and no. The latter two does not show intent, only credentials.
If I knock you unconscious, I can still open your phone with a fingerprint reader. However, if it's locked with a code, I can't.
"Security" would involve biometric authentication
Biometrics (and this implant) is just a username, not a password.
It does not convey intent. If relying on just a username, you open the door for identity theft, you don't add security.
Security must always check whether the access is intended or not, and not make an assumption of "because who then what".
I hope we can do better than that. I really wanna see the unions say no! No union? Time to make one. This behavior should not be tolerated.
It's past that time, alas.
We've accepted selling ourself into indentured servitude for long enough that it's expected already - this is just one more example.
Work demanding to know your cell phone number, you having to wear a step tracker and heart rate monitor to get full insurance benefits, having to give HR your username/password to any social networking sites you use, fingerprint and eye scanners, scanning your network drives and reporting the content when you VPN in...
It should all have been protested a long time ago. But it's the proverbial lobster pot. One tiny temperature increment at a time, and you won't throw a fit and try to clamber out, until it's too late. Which it already is for many.
I don't have a sim card for my cell phone. I use it for a lot of things[*] - pretty much anything except phone calls and SMS works just fine. Some use cases requires a WiFi connection, but certainly no connection to a cell tower.
Given that actual phone calls is the least use most put a smartphone to, I am sure that many can do just fine without it.
[*]: Books, music, audiobooks, GPS, exercise monitor/logger, calculator, metronome, 2FA token server... When near WiFi also checking e-mail, checking news, instant messaging, ssh, updating apps.
Voice recognition really doesn't work well for the elderly, who both have problems raising their voice to enunciate clearly, and problems hearing.
Whether you ask out loud or type it into a keyboard has very little impact on how impressive it is
No, but it has a lot of impact on how precise it is.
Speech is inherently error-prone and ambiguous. People mishear each other all the time. If you really want to avoid misunderstandings, you write things down.
Voice systems aren't optimal even when humans are listening.
Much of the automation and overall design we use in our daily lives became popular because it reduced the amount of talking we had to do.
It might have started with pulling a string instead of calling a servant, but it could have been even earlier, perhaps a library index allowing a monk to find the right manuscript without having to talk to their fellow menk.
Speech is inefficient and error prone. I predict that a few thousand years down the line, we will have evolved away from it.
If you want to go that way, you got the wrong gas. It's a giant machine built to generate and consume O2.
No, life thrived for about half a billion years before the oxygen catastrophe.
Yes, the scientists here appear to have forgotten evolution, in several ways. Both, as you say, how all the failures are quickly forgotten and taken over by the successes, but also that the lifeforms that compete do not stand still; they evolve continuously, adapting to the unstable ecosystems.
Mathematical models without generations, where the offspring is always different from its parents, are not going to reflect what happens in nature.
Tell you what, give me a bezel so my fat hands can hold it, make it thicker so I don't need to worry about breaking it and so it has better battery life, take that stupid notch out, and stop sacrificing screen space so you can make it a fraction of a mm thinner.
This is why I ended up with an Xperia XZ1 Compact, despite it being made by Umbrella Corporation. It's small enough to hold with one hand, has stereo speakers I can actually hear due to the bezels, lies flat and don't wobble or move around, and the battery lasts more than a work day. Now if only it had come without uninstallable and undisableable crapware, and had a cameraless model, I'd be really happy.
Having worked at 7-Eleven for four months, I can attest that most customers don't think we're human beings.
There could be at least two reasons for that.
Yeah you canÃ(TM)t buy beer and cigarettes at Amazon
Sure you can - beer, at least.
(For cigarettes, only herbal varieties.)
So I guess all the douche bros who like IPA beer are psychos?
No, but 100% of douche bros who like IPA beer are douche bros.
Adulterating it with sugar and fats turns a zero calorie drink into something you should avoid.
Coffee isn't zero calorie. Unsweetened coffee without milk or other additives have from 1-12 calories per cup, depending on the coffee and size of the cup. That's if it's room temperature. If it's hot, add the heat calories it will give off cooling to your body temperature after drinking.
Indeed. I think "stoned people" belong on the list of people who should not be trusted to handle 2000 mW lasers.
Not so much help with reading or physical activities, though.
At first I thought that these kids were just using Alexa as an ersatz teddy bear. Then I thought it over a bit more, and came to the conclusion that I'm right, except that this teddy only listens in the hope of generating sales leads.
but remember these were the days a few MB on a cover floppy was actually quite cool
The capacity of floppies were smaller than you remember.
A typical 3.5" floppy held 720 kB, later 1.44 MB, slightly more on Amiga and Macintosh, but not "a few MB".
A typical 5.25" floppy, which were really floppy and better suited for magazines, could hold 1.2 MB, again not "a few MB".
There are some older operating systems like DOS where users did have full control, but there are also modern operating systems where there is no privilege separation, like microcontroller operating systems. Your kitchen scales don't need to prevent privilege escalation exploits.
(Although it would be a good hack to have the scales report too high weights of anything healthy and too low weights of anything unhealthy, slowly increasing the risks of death for the users.)
A reasonable amount of non-work at work makes the employees more content, and content workers is usually a plus.
It should of course be reasonable, but if you expect people to work like slaves for hours straight with no amount of non-work activity interspersed, expect malcontents and burn-outs.
Fifteen minutes of shopping or news reading or something a couple of times a day might be acceptable. Hours on end, not so much.
They talk about a blacklist of sites when they should be talking about a whitelist of allowed sites.
While this sounds nice in theory, in practice it is very hard to implement in a way that works and doesn't just hinder work. The people who administer the whitelist are not going to know what is needed for every job function. Nor will they have the capacity to monitor every whitelisted object to ensure that it remains safe. (One of the whitelisted sites might start serving ads proxied through their server - ads which aren't safe.)
And for the users, requesting sites being added to a whitelist as needed can delay entire teams for days on end. What do you mean, we cannot download the schematics for the microcontroller we just discovered a problem with until it's added to a whitelist? And when it delays a high level manager who needs to look at a web site of a potentially new supplier or customer, the whitelist system will be gone.
Every OS has privilege excalation exploits
There are OSes with no privilege separation, and thus no privilege escalation, and thus no privilege escalation exploits.
Of course, that's not the type of operating systems an end-user would use, but still, your "every" is wrong.
When the Linux kernel depends on non-standard language extensions that only GCC implements, that's OK.
Except that VLAs are part of the C99 standard, and there's nothing in the standard that says they can't be used in a struct - it's just difficult for the compilers. gcc has chosen to technically implement it as an extension, while Clang/LLVM doesn't support it (nor the floating point pragmas of C99, which has also been an issue for some kernel code).