> If you're too lazy to actually be a parent, perhaps you shouldn't engage in activities that create the conditions where you become one in the first place.
Well, here your argument came full circle: Sony is playing the long game, not protecting the currently young, but rather the yet to be conceived ones. Research shows that less nudity in computer games lowers the reproduction rate. This in turn leads to fewer children seeing nudity as well.
You don't want to remember your passwords, and you don't want short similar passwords. Instead, auto-generate different long random strings for each site, and use KeePass or similar to store them with one high security master password.
As a bonus, use different email addresses which point back to the site, so you can easily change them when they get hacked. E.g. slashdot2019@baz.com or baz+slashdot19@gmail.com.
> I don't get why more/.'s are not making their own.
I'd guess it's because most "IT people" really aren't that much into technology.
Forget about hobby electronics. Most software engineers I've worked with use the pre-installed OS on their pre-built computer. Maybe they'll change the desktop background.
Hollywood, we're coming for you next! No more of these fake stories about fake people, fake ghosts, fake alien invasions, fake centipedes. From now on, we want the real stuff, you hear! If a guys loses his leg, he better not be seen with it off-set a few days later!!
* Used to be hip, no dull corporate - check * A bubble of cult-like culture - check * Lack of innovation since their one-trick pony - check * Abusive monopoly power, including antitrust lawsuits - check * Too much money for their own good - check * Too big to fade away - check
To be fair, those would also fit many other large corporations. A noticeable difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google has miraculously managed to hold on to their badge of cool-place-to-work, despite all the bad press over the last years. Microsoft never managed to rid themselves of the stigma of shit software and computer crashes and viruses.
No need to go by anecdotes when there are plenty of data around.
See the "The counted" series by the Guardian for info on people dead at the hands of the police in 2015 / 2016. About 1100-1200 per year.
For SWAT team stats, Wikipedia says 50.000 raids in 2005. But for more insight, read Radley Balko's "Rise of the Warrior Cop" (2013).
GP is right. Inviting the police to your home is a really bad idea.
I get herd mentality, fashion, and the lust for status and luxury. However, waiting in line for consumer products which can be ordered online and delivered to your door? Is it really that important to have the first one sold at a particular store? And even if being _the_ very first in line might be fun, what is the point of being number 87?
Regardless of how the price is determined, it is clear that for many events there is a large market for tickets at prices far above the original price from the primary ticket vendor. Usually, scalper prices are at least double or more.
It means that in a free-market or auction sale, people would pay even higher prices than today. If that's worth it just for the sake of getting rid of the third party scalper market is more a question of moral.
In the book "Why Nations Fail" by Acemoglu and Robinson, they would call this a microeconomic solution which in the end has little effect on the prosperity of a nation. That is unless AI is what they call a "critical juncture" - an event or change which is so disruptive that it changes the path of history. Examples of such changes include the industrial revolution; colonization; the Black Death; the French and various other national revolutions. However, I'm doubtful that it will include AI and more Alexa-style products.
From a legal point of view, yes you are right, any government can regulate anything if they want to. If there is not a law in place already, they'll happily pass a new one to make the regulation legal.
However, from a moral point of view, the drugs and CP analogy is absurd, and you know it. So the question is rather, will regulation of crypto-currencies be seen as generally legitimized by protecting people from themselves. Or have we soon reached a tipping-point where further government interference is seen as absolutist, or even totalitarian. While we still maintain the illusion of representative democracy, we can lull ourselves into believing it's not the latter.
The more dystopian scenario is that once unregulated electronic money transfers and cash is all gone, there can only be government approved transactions taking place. By definition, such a state will be a totalitarian.
"Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state". -- Benito Mussolini
> criticized by grocery-store workers' unions, which feared an effort to automate the work done by cashiers, the second-most-common job in the U.S.
This is an excellent example of where the "robots are taking our jobs" mantra is misguided and targeted at the wrong change. If the concern is really about cashiers' work, then the most significant replacement has already been implemented many years ago: self-checkout kiosks. In fact, the ones in the US have already become old fashioned and bulky compared to the slimmer versions which are popping up all over Europe.
What's interesting about the self-checkout boot, is that is does not require any new technology which was not already in use by a human cashier: The barcode-scanner, coin slot, card terminal, touch screen are all technologies from the 80s / 90s or earlier. The change was mainly in process and labor; now the customer has to do the job the cashier used to do.
Amazon's implementation uses much more advanced technology, but the effect on required labor is the same. So should vision-based technology be banned and resisted, while self-checkout boots are fine? Or should we go back to anno 1920, when a shop-keeper would hand you every item from behind the counter? Or maybe Amazon need to pay a "robot-tax" for the workers they displaced? In which case, should we go by the 1990s level when there were maybe hundred in a large Wal-mart store, or the 1920 style, where there were only one or two employees but a long line of customers.
With Google's rich history of axing even popular projects, I fail to see how Fuchsia will get a long life. The story is always the same: A bunch of engineers get together on an exciting project. They make some progress, get their promotions, maybe even launch a half-finished product. Now comes the hard work of finishing it, but most difficult of all is to make some kind of revenue stream from it. That's where the higher VCs and senior VC come in and start cutting. Chopping projects like that might even earn somebody further promotions in "clear leadership". Rinse and repeat on a two or three year cycle.
My bet is that Fuchsia is forgotten by the end of the 2019.
Web sites can run on IIS and.NET, yes. However, the services we now take for granted seems unlikely to have been started, or would have been difficult and expensive to build. Google's, Amazon's and other hosting providers running millions of machines on Microsoft licenses. They would have been dead in the water. Android would probably not have been the same as a propitiatory OS. See Palm, Symbian, etc.
Then there's all the hobby projects, maker communities, Github, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and so on. It would have been a pretty sad place, or maybe a place of lots of arguments about copyrights without free software licenses. The music industry is a good example of what we could have ended up with.
As for other licenses, sure, there's nothing holding anybody back writing them. Some have tried, and some of them also work. Reward based on lines of code has always seemed flawed, but if it works for your community, it's good enough.
Your strategy have probably worked out fine towards your bosses. However, have you considered your team mates?
If I ask you for something, but get the fifth lousy excuse as to why you cannot and will not do anything, I'll just start working around you instead. And if I get to chance, I'll happily back-stab you to get rid of the drag on the team.
How many jobs and teams did you say you've been with over the last 30 years?
Here's a news flash: The US has been a fully operational police state since end of 2001. But if you want to get technical, I guess Nixson's 1960s would be just as valid a milestone. Read "Rise of the warrior cop" by Radley Balko if you want to know more.
The state, its branches of government, has lost all meaningful control over the domestic legal monopoly of violence. The federal and local police now operate semi-autonomously, with large incomes through civil forfeiture, sizable contributions from military surplus, and a legal code which is far removed from the law of the land the rest of us follow. Legislators have tried and failed to reverse this trend.
The question now is, does the US need to go to full totalitarian state or dictatorship before it can be fixed through force, or is there a peaceful way back to a functional state. There are very few cases of historical powers of this magnitude and force which were rectified through peaceful means. The decline of the British Empire and the fall of Soviet Union comes to mind. However, somehow I fail to see the US simply walking away from it all. The motto is "from my cold dead hands", and that's the way I can see it going down.
> And since when does Google and Apple have nukes?!
Between them, they could buy Academi's private army (formerly better known as Blackwater) many thousand times over. So yeah, the next logical step would be nukes. I hear there's a buyer's market in the streets around Kremlin.
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
"The telecomms already are charging companies for access, and the big companies like Google and NetFlix"
For Google, the by far largest contributor to bandwidth use is Youtube. And they way I understand it, Google has deploy thousands of caching servers in the networks of most of the world's ISPs. That makes sense, since the ISP don't incur inbound network cost on those streams, and the end-user gets the content faster.
There are stories about a few banana republic ISPs which have tried to charge Google for hosting these caching servers, missing the point entirely. As far as I understand, they are only a few and far between.
There are events which operate this way, and it's a major PITA. Now they have to deal with people who want to transfer their ticket to somebody else because they couldn't go; bought it as a gift; or just want to give away their ticket.
Then there's the problem of what qualifies as an ID, especially with international events. Even reading a passport and parsing the name can be difficult for some bouncers. These guys are really not at the top of the IQ scale.
No, I'd rather pay twice the price for my tickets than having to go through some draconian bureaucracy and deal with meat-heads at the door.
In this day and age, declaring yourself a victim is The way to promote your cause. An ideology is defined by what it is opposing, not what it tries to achieve. And there is no shortage of ideas, people and politicians to be against. The only problem with that tactic, is that the momentum of your cause rests on the strength of your enemy. If you win, you also lose. The best course of action is thus to merely complain. As long as there is no stand-off, there is no risk of victory nor defeat. Only noise.
The question for parents used to be: "It's 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?"
Well, times have changed. The question is now, do you know who your devices are talking to? Who's reading your data? And last but not least, is that camera or microphone recording, even if it says it aint.
> That's why we have checks and balances built into law enforcement, to keep them from running rampant.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but fail to see where the checks and balances are for "law enforcement". Not from the executive branch, which has been "tough on crime" since Nixon in the 60s. The militarization of the police has gone completely out of control since 2001. (See "Do Not Resist (2016)" or "Rise of the Warrior Cop" 2014 by Radley Balko for some examples). And not from the judicial branch, which usually cheers on the police and fails to hold even the most rampant police brutality accountable.
I cannot elect my local police chief, nor hold him or his staff accountable for their crimes. Around 1100 people die at the hands of US police every single year. Police and other agencies steal billions of USD every year through civil asset forfeitures (see the Washington Post article series from 2014). The whole police and "law enforcement" as an institution, at every level, from local to federal, is now so corrupt and rotten through and through that there seems little hope in reforms, short of a complete purge and very radical new implementation. It is of course never going to happen.
The US police state is here to stay, and with technology, government and "law" on their side, it will only get a whole lot worse. I fail to see how it can get better.
Slashdot Mirror
> If you're too lazy to actually be a parent, perhaps you shouldn't engage in activities that create the conditions where you become one in the first place.
Well, here your argument came full circle: Sony is playing the long game, not protecting the currently young, but rather the yet to be conceived ones. Research shows that less nudity in computer games lowers the reproduction rate. This in turn leads to fewer children seeing nudity as well.
Obligatory: /s
You don't want to remember your passwords, and you don't want short similar passwords. Instead, auto-generate different long random strings for each site, and use KeePass or similar to store them with one high security master password.
As a bonus, use different email addresses which point back to the site, so you can easily change them when they get hacked. E.g. slashdot2019@baz.com or baz+slashdot19@gmail.com.
Are you begging the question...?
> I don't get why more /.'s are not making their own.
I'd guess it's because most "IT people" really aren't that much into technology.
Forget about hobby electronics. Most software engineers I've worked with use the pre-installed OS on their pre-built computer. Maybe they'll change the desktop background.
Hollywood, we're coming for you next! No more of these fake stories about fake people, fake ghosts, fake alien invasions, fake centipedes. From now on, we want the real stuff, you hear! If a guys loses his leg, he better not be seen with it off-set a few days later!!
* Used to be hip, no dull corporate - check
* A bubble of cult-like culture - check
* Lack of innovation since their one-trick pony - check
* Abusive monopoly power, including antitrust lawsuits - check
* Too much money for their own good - check
* Too big to fade away - check
To be fair, those would also fit many other large corporations. A noticeable difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google has miraculously managed to hold on to their badge of cool-place-to-work, despite all the bad press over the last years. Microsoft never managed to rid themselves of the stigma of shit software and computer crashes and viruses.
"Can somebody please take me off this list".
"To everybody, please stop sending reply-to-all messages".
"To Lisa, I love you".
No need to go by anecdotes when there are plenty of data around.
See the "The counted" series by the Guardian for info on people dead at the hands of the police in 2015 / 2016. About 1100-1200 per year.
For SWAT team stats, Wikipedia says 50.000 raids in 2005. But for more insight, read Radley Balko's "Rise of the Warrior Cop" (2013).
GP is right. Inviting the police to your home is a really bad idea.
I get herd mentality, fashion, and the lust for status and luxury. However, waiting in line for consumer products which can be ordered online and delivered to your door? Is it really that important to have the first one sold at a particular store? And even if being _the_ very first in line might be fun, what is the point of being number 87?
Regardless of how the price is determined, it is clear that for many events there is a large market for tickets at prices far above the original price from the primary ticket vendor. Usually, scalper prices are at least double or more. It means that in a free-market or auction sale, people would pay even higher prices than today. If that's worth it just for the sake of getting rid of the third party scalper market is more a question of moral.
In the book "Why Nations Fail" by Acemoglu and Robinson, they would call this a microeconomic solution which in the end has little effect on the prosperity of a nation. That is unless AI is what they call a "critical juncture" - an event or change which is so disruptive that it changes the path of history. Examples of such changes include the industrial revolution; colonization; the Black Death; the French and various other national revolutions. However, I'm doubtful that it will include AI and more Alexa-style products.
From a legal point of view, yes you are right, any government can regulate anything if they want to. If there is not a law in place already, they'll happily pass a new one to make the regulation legal.
However, from a moral point of view, the drugs and CP analogy is absurd, and you know it. So the question is rather, will regulation of crypto-currencies be seen as generally legitimized by protecting people from themselves. Or have we soon reached a tipping-point where further government interference is seen as absolutist, or even totalitarian. While we still maintain the illusion of representative democracy, we can lull ourselves into believing it's not the latter.
The more dystopian scenario is that once unregulated electronic money transfers and cash is all gone, there can only be government approved transactions taking place. By definition, such a state will be a totalitarian.
"Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
-- Benito Mussolini
> criticized by grocery-store workers' unions, which feared an effort to automate the work done by cashiers, the second-most-common job in the U.S.
This is an excellent example of where the "robots are taking our jobs" mantra is misguided and targeted at the wrong change. If the concern is really about cashiers' work, then the most significant replacement has already been implemented many years ago: self-checkout kiosks. In fact, the ones in the US have already become old fashioned and bulky compared to the slimmer versions which are popping up all over Europe.
What's interesting about the self-checkout boot, is that is does not require any new technology which was not already in use by a human cashier: The barcode-scanner, coin slot, card terminal, touch screen are all technologies from the 80s / 90s or earlier. The change was mainly in process and labor; now the customer has to do the job the cashier used to do.
Amazon's implementation uses much more advanced technology, but the effect on required labor is the same. So should vision-based technology be banned and resisted, while self-checkout boots are fine? Or should we go back to anno 1920, when a shop-keeper would hand you every item from behind the counter? Or maybe Amazon need to pay a "robot-tax" for the workers they displaced? In which case, should we go by the 1990s level when there were maybe hundred in a large Wal-mart store, or the 1920 style, where there were only one or two employees but a long line of customers.
With Google's rich history of axing even popular projects, I fail to see how Fuchsia will get a long life. The story is always the same: A bunch of engineers get together on an exciting project. They make some progress, get their promotions, maybe even launch a half-finished product. Now comes the hard work of finishing it, but most difficult of all is to make some kind of revenue stream from it. That's where the higher VCs and senior VC come in and start cutting. Chopping projects like that might even earn somebody further promotions in "clear leadership". Rinse and repeat on a two or three year cycle.
My bet is that Fuchsia is forgotten by the end of the 2019.
Web sites can run on IIS and .NET, yes. However, the services we now take for granted seems unlikely to have been started, or would have been difficult and expensive to build. Google's, Amazon's and other hosting providers running millions of machines on Microsoft licenses. They would have been dead in the water. Android would probably not have been the same as a propitiatory OS. See Palm, Symbian, etc.
Then there's all the hobby projects, maker communities, Github, Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and so on. It would have been a pretty sad place, or maybe a place of lots of arguments about copyrights without free software licenses. The music industry is a good example of what we could have ended up with.
As for other licenses, sure, there's nothing holding anybody back writing them. Some have tried, and some of them also work. Reward based on lines of code has always seemed flawed, but if it works for your community, it's good enough.
> When did this change?
Maybe around the time Dave Grossman, Blackwater and others started to train domestic police to use military combat tactics?
Your strategy have probably worked out fine towards your bosses. However, have you considered your team mates?
If I ask you for something, but get the fifth lousy excuse as to why you cannot and will not do anything, I'll just start working around you instead. And if I get to chance, I'll happily back-stab you to get rid of the drag on the team.
How many jobs and teams did you say you've been with over the last 30 years?
Here's a news flash: The US has been a fully operational police state since end of 2001. But if you want to get technical, I guess Nixson's 1960s would be just as valid a milestone. Read "Rise of the warrior cop" by Radley Balko if you want to know more.
The state, its branches of government, has lost all meaningful control over the domestic legal monopoly of violence. The federal and local police now operate semi-autonomously, with large incomes through civil forfeiture, sizable contributions from military surplus, and a legal code which is far removed from the law of the land the rest of us follow. Legislators have tried and failed to reverse this trend.
The question now is, does the US need to go to full totalitarian state or dictatorship before it can be fixed through force, or is there a peaceful way back to a functional state. There are very few cases of historical powers of this magnitude and force which were rectified through peaceful means. The decline of the British Empire and the fall of Soviet Union comes to mind. However, somehow I fail to see the US simply walking away from it all. The motto is "from my cold dead hands", and that's the way I can see it going down.
> And since when does Google and Apple have nukes?!
Between them, they could buy Academi's private army (formerly better known as Blackwater) many thousand times over. So yeah, the next logical step would be nukes. I hear there's a buyer's market in the streets around Kremlin.
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
-- Rudyard Kipling
"The telecomms already are charging companies for access, and the big companies like Google and NetFlix"
For Google, the by far largest contributor to bandwidth use is Youtube. And they way I understand it, Google has deploy thousands of caching servers in the networks of most of the world's ISPs. That makes sense, since the ISP don't incur inbound network cost on those streams, and the end-user gets the content faster.
There are stories about a few banana republic ISPs which have tried to charge Google for hosting these caching servers, missing the point entirely. As far as I understand, they are only a few and far between.
There are events which operate this way, and it's a major PITA. Now they have to deal with people who want to transfer their ticket to somebody else because they couldn't go; bought it as a gift; or just want to give away their ticket.
Then there's the problem of what qualifies as an ID, especially with international events. Even reading a passport and parsing the name can be difficult for some bouncers. These guys are really not at the top of the IQ scale.
No, I'd rather pay twice the price for my tickets than having to go through some draconian bureaucracy and deal with meat-heads at the door.
In this day and age, declaring yourself a victim is The way to promote your cause. An ideology is defined by what it is opposing, not what it tries to achieve. And there is no shortage of ideas, people and politicians to be against. The only problem with that tactic, is that the momentum of your cause rests on the strength of your enemy. If you win, you also lose. The best course of action is thus to merely complain. As long as there is no stand-off, there is no risk of victory nor defeat. Only noise.
The question for parents used to be: "It's 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?"
Well, times have changed. The question is now, do you know who your devices are talking to? Who's reading your data? And last but not least, is that camera or microphone recording, even if it says it aint.
> That's why we have checks and balances built into law enforcement, to keep them from running rampant.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but fail to see where the checks and balances are for "law enforcement". Not from the executive branch, which has been "tough on crime" since Nixon in the 60s. The militarization of the police has gone completely out of control since 2001. (See "Do Not Resist (2016)" or "Rise of the Warrior Cop" 2014 by Radley Balko for some examples). And not from the judicial branch, which usually cheers on the police and fails to hold even the most rampant police brutality accountable.
I cannot elect my local police chief, nor hold him or his staff accountable for their crimes. Around 1100 people die at the hands of US police every single year. Police and other agencies steal billions of USD every year through civil asset forfeitures (see the Washington Post article series from 2014). The whole police and "law enforcement" as an institution, at every level, from local to federal, is now so corrupt and rotten through and through that there seems little hope in reforms, short of a complete purge and very radical new implementation. It is of course never going to happen.
The US police state is here to stay, and with technology, government and "law" on their side, it will only get a whole lot worse. I fail to see how it can get better.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt55...
https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Wa...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...