I'm all for reducing^Wgetting rid of protectionist subsidies. Problem is, of course, that but a few, even just one large enough party has to start and everyone follows suit for fear of being left bereft of local producers because they weren't subsidised enough.
Also, not happy with using things we could be eating to generate energy. Corn is just silly, inasmuch that ethanol-for-energy from it being economic illustrates your point. Purpose-picked and -bred crops are better, but still not ideal.
Much rather I'd try, oh, taking PV or some other collection mechanism to a desert, and somehow use it to provide shade and moisture retention for crops that couldn't otherwise grow there, as well as for its energy collection properties.
Tangentially related is the practice of getting fertiliser from faraway, using it locally, then not transporting the waste that normally would be eventually turned into new fertiliser back. That is a problem that ultimately results in exhausted land and then into more destruction of rainforest for more farmland to exhaust. Not the only factor, but still.
If we'd take out all subsidies, including indirect ones (say on fuel), we might find that prices change but not necessarily up the cost of living. The subsidies are paid for by taxpayers, so the net effect over the total population is going to be a small drop due to less overhead (ideally), even if individual food prices will be higher. What it'd do for the individual? Maybe it'll end up promoting a change in lifestyle, reducing obesity, who knows?
Servers didn't use to be beefed-up desktops, no "still" about it. That they are now has to do with cheap desktop ubiquity and wanting to use desktop emulator software to underpin "servers". In short, middle management stupidity.
But that sort of thing fits well with TFA, where they say "look ma, no OS!" when they do have software acting like that, only not calling it that. Put the achievement in perspective and it isn't nearly as ground breaking as implied. So the announcement is a bit pompous. Well, nothing new there either.
It's all a bit bass ackwards, but then so is the whole peecee paradigm. The whole virtualisation thing has been with us for ages, in many guises. This is but yet another. Likewise, single-language app boxen. Lisp machine, anyone? Only this time with erlang.
On another note, rethinking how we organise monitors, supervisors, hypervisors, hardware drivers, and all that, and how they interact with userland, isn't a bad idea. This here idea is a valid approach, but by no means the only one.
Add a bittering agent to make the thing taste bad. It's not that otherwise it won't work, just that if it tastes foul enough (but not too foul) it'll work better.
In a sense there really should be a nicely packaged version with the usual warning sheet and everything. Possibly even a "low dosage" variant you can get at the druggist without prescription.
I'd start a venture producing them (already have a nice product name) if not for the heaps of regulatory red tape and the trouble with the required testing. Before I know it I'd get sued by animal welfare groups for needless animal cruelty or something.
The problem with antibiotics, rather, is that you have to finish the entire run lest you'll end up merely training your infection to become resistant. So it's not strictly a problem of prescribing the stuff too often; it's that plus far too many people starting to feel fine then not finishing the cure.
You'd have to be a right fool to be unable to fool these things. As in the link, as here, the application has very little to do with security. It's a people problem, and you can't fix those solely with technology.
Worse, treating it as a technical problem and attacking it with security kit gives a strong signal to your own {doctors,pupils,*} that they're all criminals and need to be treated as such. This in turn creates a powerful incentive to game the system.
What we have here is an incompetent administration trying to fix their mess through shitting on their underlings some more, using technology. Underlings know and dislike this.
And so gaming the system is what they'll do. This quite apart from biometrics being inappropriate everywhere but in criminal forensics. Be careful what you ask for and all that.
That's fairly natural. The point of most discussion in the USoA has nothing to do with what it says on the tin. The real issue is simply which side you're on, for on any one issue, there's only room for two sides in that big country yonder. Want more choice? Just add issues.
And why that? Why, to villify the other side, of course! What other point could there be?
So big ticket issues become trench warfare, where movement back and forth is guaranteed to be minute and always at gigantic cost. This is the modern interpretation of an "inefficient government"; its very purpose is to be ponderous, and since so many people funnel so much effort to butt heads with the other side on increasingly trivial things, expensive to boot. Also because of the pork barrelling, of course, for why should other people get all the money?
In other words, if you want any one issue to be efficiently resolved, you have to game the system somehow, for it is the system that requires costing a lot while resolving nothing.
You can easily see that this is not inherent in politics, just in American[tm] politics, by looking over the borders. For example, there's countries that decide to not ever even give life sentences, nevermind death penalty. Norway is a good example.
On the other hand, there's countries like those with the Sharia, where you'll get your head lopped off no sweat. Or like China used to do: Shoot the accused and charge the family for the bullet spent. Now they just drive death vans around, with Yu Di, MD in attendance.
If you really wanted efficient, you could have it. So one could conclude that doing your level best to not have efficient means that having efficient is simply not important here.
Actually, no. The hackers were the founding fathers, hacking together something intended to last for a bit, only then the lusers came along and allowed the people's interests to be hijacked by monied sleaze. The malware more or less is running the system. There certainly are no competent administrators around to clean up the mess.
You can only stretch analogies so far, but "government" as "operating system", executing laws and directives and things, and regulating access to resources for corporations and individuals, isn't that bad an analogy, really.
Given that at least that much is crap, and a large chunk consists of stuff set up for no other purpose than to lure in ad revenue, shrinkage here may not be a bad thing.
At the very least it might get advertisers and those depending on them for revenue finally thinking about how to reach people. Traditionally it's by snatching your attention in the most annoying way possible because any exposure is good advertising, right?
And then you get autoplaying videos, or animated gifs, blinking tags, flashing flash, or whatever else they'll think up next. In short, "dancing rodents", in advertising flavour.
I block things when they annoy me and when I do I block everything on the page. That's using an ad-blocker, though without the prefab lists, I just grow my own. So if advertisers want their advertisements to stay visible, well, they better make sure the advertisements do not annoy me.
Annoying includes posing as real content only turning out to be vapid and snickering, having succeeded at wasting my time (adwords, say). Or as simple as burning too many cycles with js, ajax, whatever, especially when the real content could've been served up js-free. "Pingers" that track my eyeballing the site and phoning home every second get booted with prejudice.
Advertisers need to re-think, since "fighting" the audience for their attention has become a lot less useful because the audience can fight back, and rightfully so. For am I the product, or a "consumer" with no other rights than to "consume"? I don't think so.
The key to good business is to add value, and merely screaming loudest you're the best, really, is not adding value. Marketing needs to grow up.
I wonder what they think they gain with that sort of stance. Gather up all IP addresses (which are NOT personal identification) and sue everyone remotely associatable? Including, say, google for indexing those sites? What?
If wordpress somehow cannot refuse (or just doesn't have any balls; this is a possibility) the least they can do is heap all the IP addresses together without specification. It seems that mounting a legal attack on such a broad range of hosts is sure to flounder.
And you'd think even copyright trolls ought to be smarter than that. But since they're entirely made up of sueball, perhaps not.
So it raises the question, and this is a useful thought experiment: What're they hoping to gain? Given such a heap of unspecified IP addresses, what would you be able to figure out from that? What if they are subspecified, what'd you be able to figure out then?
That, and of course machines can only deal with well-defined convenient little category boxes to stuff you in. If you somehow don't fit, it's now your problem, as the machine certainly won't help you.
The end result is invariably that it's not only your problem, it'll also be made your fault and you'll get blamed for not fitting in the system designer's convenient boxes.
We're already used to it because ever larger bureaucracies do the same, only using "process" and (often still paper) forms. But that doesn't justify the tendency at all, especially not since technology could also enable us to do better.
So I think this is abuse of technology (or process) against humans and ought to be a crime.
As long as some human is reachable and can and will actually fix any and all problems, you're welcome to automate the fsck out of whatever you like. Just don't be surprised that some things, or situations, or, well, people, need to be taken care of by humans.
So that must always be possible, even easy and convenient. Why? Because that sets the bar nicely high for the quality of automating: That has to be even easier and more convenient for the common case, otherwise common-case people won't use it. See there, a challenge.
You ever wondered why everything had to become GUI-shaped, why people genuinely thought that if only everyone would use GUIs then productivity would soar?
The answer is simple: marketing. It looks shiny. It's got dancing rodents. This sells.
Hollywood is made of shiny visuals. And, of course, designers love good looking form to the point that function can get skimped on. redmond has been doing their level best to serve up their version of MovieOS, down to the security problems.
This is also why touchscreens got resurrected. Much sexier to have the display span the entire phone than only half and the rest be buttons. And can possibly be more intuitive than having something present with custom buttons for you to poke at, hm?
That there are serious downsides to both GUIs (eg. very hard to script and automate compared to CLIs) and touchscreens ("gorilla arm", for one, lack of tactile feedback for another) pales into insignificance next to the sheer power of a shiny all-singing all-dancing presentation carefully serving up some smooth-looking lies.
Case in point: The new "windows 8" interface and it getting pushed through no matter what, on phones AND desktops. They're giving a powerful message here, and the delivery simply trumps whatever you may want.
This isn't (anti-)fanboiism, by the by: I could also trot out examples from, say, apple, but they're not nearly as clumsy and blunt about it. You don't get much choice either, but the delivery is so much better ("reality distortion field") that it causes symptoms of religious cults in its adherents, making it that much harder to illustrate with without causing instant flamewar.
And part of it is indeed that emotions are involved, often enough deliberately so.
Meaning that the perceived value of the local is lower than what he's getting paid. Instead of harping on how that's failed PR on behalf of the workers I'll just say this: Hey, free market economics in action.
What, you thought MBAs see others as humans? The course told'em they can be treated like black boxes for management purposes. Now you know why "corporate responsibility" sounds like distilled empty buzzword.
The free market answer then is to gather up the fired oldsters and sell their experience back to the companies at inflated consultancy prices. Should be plenty work that with the abundance of the fuckups of inexperience, no?
A "simple measure" that happens to wreak havoc on an already convoluted tax system does not a simple tax system make. Really now, your argument sucks so much that it ought to spontaneously implode.
Let's put it into a... building analogy. I say I'd like a "simple" building, without all sorts of baroque or gothic or whatnot ornaments. And you point to the obvious and simple fact that not having doors would count as simple and that you tried it and got your furniture stolen. No sympathy from me and no, your argument is not a valid counter. Reasons why left as an exercise.
As far as I'm concerned the idea already exposed someone's complete failure to grok what it was about. And that is a good thing, for then we can do something about it.
Apparently companies don't pay taxes (ref) in the sense that anything they do pay someone else gets to pay -- the employees, the customers, the shareholders, you name it.
Even without that caveat I'd be strongly in favour of a simple tax code, one that simply isn't complicated enough to have much in the way of loopholes. Perhaps a flat-fee on income, or a VAT if that really is a cheaper* tax overall to levy, tied to the yearly budget in a straight-forward way so that politician stupidity gives fairly direct feedback in your wallet, and then hopefully influences your voting.
Assuming that indeed, companies would shove off any taxes paid anyway, well, let them not pay taxes, let the people who receive income from the company do. The upside of that is that since more tax is coming from employees, it's now harder to hide taxables on other sides of borders.
The problem with that sort of thing, though, is that simplicity is a two-edged sword: The politicians no longer can hide their shenanigans either. Look at the debt rate. Eventually that's going to have to be paid back from taxes. And suddenly you're keenly aware of that fact.
* Where "cheaper" means less inefficiencies due to collecting and side effects.
Real merchants don't "deserve" your personal details any more or less than appstore merchants. There may be a need to take your address for shipment, and in that case a phone number, email adress, or even additional shipment instructions may be useful. But they ought not be required without good reason.
Note that credit cards muddle the picture by virtue of being a credit facility: You haven't actually paid yet so you are in debt and those obligations add identification requirements. Though strictly speaking all the merchant is supposed to do is pass it on to the credit facility for turning into money, and passing it in the clear is rather outdated, and well-known to be dangerous. Without credit as in payment by cash there and then, much of the need to identify you personally goes away.
That this information is useful for profiling and all sorts of marketeering and so it's nice to gather, well, plenty furrin places you're not even allowed to do that. I'd say the practice to pass on information that really isn't needed is a dangerous habit that needs reconsideration.
N'mind that it may possibly be useful to send emails in case of updates or whatnot. Passing that information automatically without need is a flaw, yes. Even if done by design.
is what the legal status of their "recommendations" is and whether you ought to sue them.
The tried-and-true andwer to that is: Ask a lawyer. I'm quite sure it can and does swing either way depending on local laws and any number of details you haven't provided.
Not sure what you're asking, but I'd consider answering along the lines of not being aware of how your business, software, is --or even possibly could be-- in any way or form infringing on their patents, how any and all hardware that may possibly be subject to the patent is store-bought and therefore assumed to be properly accounted for by the manufacturer, how it is up to them to establish how what you're doing is in fact infringing, and that you're happy to assist them further for a nicely outrageous hourly rate, paid in advance, because patent law is not your core business.
Otherwise, do we really have to start buying our stuff with patent litigation indemnity guarantees or something? This sort of thing just smells abusive. Isn't there an abusive litigation law somewhere?
Or maybe you could offer to license their complete current-and-future patent portfolio for an one-off payment of some small number, like two dollarcents. Be prepared to back up how that is a reasonable number given how, well, you figure something out.
Or perhaps you could counter-sue for frivolous lititgation and wasting your time for the time it's cost you so far which ought to be a small enough number still to fit in small claims court--the one nearest to you, of course. If you choose to talk first, I'd probably at least warn them that your time isn't free and that continuing to argue will incur consulting charges.
But of course you need to talk to some lawyer type, no going around that. But you can try and find one that doesn't immediately cost an arm and a leg, like a student-run free service or something set up by the eff or something.
In a few short years you might even get that, courtesy the Japanese getting older and their aversion to getting non-Japanese to help them out in their old age. It's why you get all those whacky robots from pet dogs to something already close to robot nurses.
Ironically they don't actually need introspective fridges with see-through display doors and built-in speakers (that are problems to clean, and might break, too) for that. If the robot is smart enough to move about on its own it's smart enough to remember what's where or even just to remember to take a quick inventory before ordering (or executing, there's an idea) the scheduled shopping.
So the robots take over our lives. Of course, this is where we mumble "yeah, skynet" and then leave things as they are. But things don't have to walk to become our networked adversaries. They don't even have to mean it. All that's needed is an over-abundance of trying to be "helpful" in just the wrong way. Incidentally that's the way we've been going down so far, with equating "user friendlyness" with "hiding the controls so you don't have to worry about it".
While I sort-of share the sentiment of wanting to not have to do the chores myself, with various defensive strategies in place they're not that much of a problem. What would be a problem is losing control, even the feeling of losing control. And you get that by having all sorts of things try to out-smart you behind your back.
You know, The Wrong Trousers style. Or maybe not even that.
Make the fscking things self-cleaning if you must, but at least give them interfaces with published, open specs that I plug into my kitchen controller that I tell what to do, that talks to me through my phone or whatever device I want to whenever I say so, and so on. I don't want vendor-supplied half-well over-eagerly done patented "easyness". I want those things to do my bidding, and for that they have to talk to me the way I want them to.
On that same note, I wouldn't want things to be too integrated--that just drives up the repair bill through sheer proprietaryness, meaning it won't happen and now half my kitchen doesn't talk to the other half any longer.
Keep it simple. Keep things independent if they don't need to interdepend. Make a speaker that sticks to the fridge with magnets, or take a few old but still functional ones and mount'em somewhere high and out of the way. Though the old trick of mounting a radio under the cabinets over the counter seems good enough still, too. Make one of those with a bluetooth interface and you're golden.
In short, all that integrating just because we can is no good for us. Even when automating.
That's not entirely true since not all stores carry all brands and they're not always all that helpful helping you select; you're supposed to have done your homework. Also, various brands try to do is to create a "community" by offering cheaper or near-free calls within the brand, to tempt you to stick around because your friends do too.
Further, some brands can only be ordered "online" which is a bit of a bummer if you want to keep your name off of it. Some countries actually require you to register your name to the sim, even with a copy of your passport, but then again some are sloppy enough that this is circumventable also (and not a crim does it catch extra, just drives costs up a bit, and makes copies of passports to use for registration more viable as a tradeable commodity). Another caveat is that some of those "online" brands don't offer topping-up vouchers but require a (local) bank account number and permission to dip to ensure you always have enough credit on the card. Handy, innit?
But it isn't really a good question for ask slashdot, no. Since it differs by country it comes down to gathering the price lists and comparing. That or use handy dandy price comparison sites, again per country. The sites offering ex pat-tailored info are usually out of date. Around here, the MVNOs and operator sub-brands pop up and perish like, well, something that isn't expect to last half a decade.
The only generic information to be had is that there are a few that offer roaming for a fixed, predictable price across europe or even the world that's a lot higher than a local PAYG but a lot less than the usual roaming charges, and that cost very little to keep around when not in use. Oh, and that voice and text plans are hairy but not as much trouble as sorting out PAYG data. It's just a spot of work, is all.
On that note, do work out the frequency bands the equipment supports; if it's not "everything" you run some risk of ending up with a dud sim as not all operators are available on all frequency bands in use in a country. For MVNOs you usually have to work out whose network they're using, mapping back to the "parent"'s frequency usability. Again, it's a bit of homework, but generally doable.
I'd call it "mistaking succesful damage control for correct functioning". Apparently the system isn't entirely dysfunctional as patents can be revoken and it is possible to prevail against a patent troll, depending. But that doesn't imply the system as a whole is functional.
The fact that these patents were issued in the first place and that patent troll companies can exist on settlements and the occasional lawsuit already ought to be proof enough that the system is at least partly dysfunctional and therefore not fully functional. I would even argue it is dysfunctional enough to warrant immediate takedown of the entire system, and a rethink of what we originally wanted with the system.
If you can't see that, then maybe you're not really informed and if you're trying to inform the public while in such an uninformed state you're likely to spread misinformation. As such, shame on ars technica for wishful thinking. They ought to have known better.
The thing that's even more often overlooked is the cost to the customer.
To the customer, the very clear, limited, and well-understood risks of handling cash easily outweigh the purported "safety", mainly through obscuring the added complexity and resulting brittleness not to mention increased exposure of electronic alternatives, that for some reason also share the property they're very much not anonymous. But since you only see that trail of time+payer+payee+place+amount much later, ah, it's not a problem, right?
Or maybe it's just that the risk of getting relieved of a day's worth of cash is worth whatever you can get away with pushing off on the customer in terms of fees and privacy risks and whatnot. As long as the customer doesn't notice, it's not a problem, right?
I don't know the size of the costs to each, but if you're going to investigate, do paint a full picture of each, including such things as having to sit on payment records for N years and the risk of losing them (a lost backup tape will do) and resulting fines and tarnished reputation due to having to announce you lost people's details and things like that. Those are usually overlooked, for some reason.
Credit card companies want to have their fees hidden, rather they'd have everyone else too pay for the fees they charge retailers of their lucky convenience-furnished customers. And that they no longer can? Honesty in retail, surely a big speedbump, yes.
A speedbump on the road to a cash-free economy [...]
And that's an issue, because everyone wants cash-free, Shirley. Because, uhm, cash doesn't carry your name and isn't subject to chargebacks, hallmarks of, er, what exactly?
This much ought to be painfully clear, yet government-and-industry keeps drumming the "imminent grave danger" drum like they were sitting on Iraqian WMDs or something.
Which ought to give rise to the next question: Why?
Well, we already know the answer for that, and we coulda seen it coming decades away. Back when it was coined the "military-industrial complex", these days it has a large sideshow in transport security, and the next wave of innovation is in cyber.
There's a few problems with this, of course. The American[tm] image elsewhere, though no American[tm] can be arsed to care about that, for there's nuttin' but yokels in them rest of the world, amirite or amirite? Nevermind that it regularly backfires (contras, and, oh hey, taliban, to name just a few); moving on, what else?
Well, this security thing is a large driver of big data and invasive tracking and whatnot, and starting with the civilian version is great because having to separately "militarise" the tech means a bigger market and fatter margins. Yum, fat margins. Ah, yes there's a cost but facebook, end of privacy discussion, and if not just say "terrorists" or "paedophiles" until detractors shut up, in fact use anytime to keep the pressure on. So, moving on, what else?
Well, it's overhead. As in, while fat government contracts lead to paychecks, they don't create wealth; they're overhead and slowly suck the economy dry. Ah, what the hell, the fed will QE us out.
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I'm all for reducing^Wgetting rid of protectionist subsidies. Problem is, of course, that but a few, even just one large enough party has to start and everyone follows suit for fear of being left bereft of local producers because they weren't subsidised enough.
Also, not happy with using things we could be eating to generate energy. Corn is just silly, inasmuch that ethanol-for-energy from it being economic illustrates your point. Purpose-picked and -bred crops are better, but still not ideal.
Much rather I'd try, oh, taking PV or some other collection mechanism to a desert, and somehow use it to provide shade and moisture retention for crops that couldn't otherwise grow there, as well as for its energy collection properties.
Tangentially related is the practice of getting fertiliser from faraway, using it locally, then not transporting the waste that normally would be eventually turned into new fertiliser back. That is a problem that ultimately results in exhausted land and then into more destruction of rainforest for more farmland to exhaust. Not the only factor, but still.
If we'd take out all subsidies, including indirect ones (say on fuel), we might find that prices change but not necessarily up the cost of living. The subsidies are paid for by taxpayers, so the net effect over the total population is going to be a small drop due to less overhead (ideally), even if individual food prices will be higher. What it'd do for the individual? Maybe it'll end up promoting a change in lifestyle, reducing obesity, who knows?
Servers didn't use to be beefed-up desktops, no "still" about it. That they are now has to do with cheap desktop ubiquity and wanting to use desktop emulator software to underpin "servers". In short, middle management stupidity.
But that sort of thing fits well with TFA, where they say "look ma, no OS!" when they do have software acting like that, only not calling it that. Put the achievement in perspective and it isn't nearly as ground breaking as implied. So the announcement is a bit pompous. Well, nothing new there either.
It's all a bit bass ackwards, but then so is the whole peecee paradigm. The whole virtualisation thing has been with us for ages, in many guises. This is but yet another. Likewise, single-language app boxen. Lisp machine, anyone? Only this time with erlang.
On another note, rethinking how we organise monitors, supervisors, hypervisors, hardware drivers, and all that, and how they interact with userland, isn't a bad idea. This here idea is a valid approach, but by no means the only one.
Add a bittering agent to make the thing taste bad. It's not that otherwise it won't work, just that if it tastes foul enough (but not too foul) it'll work better.
In a sense there really should be a nicely packaged version with the usual warning sheet and everything. Possibly even a "low dosage" variant you can get at the druggist without prescription.
I'd start a venture producing them (already have a nice product name) if not for the heaps of regulatory red tape and the trouble with the required testing. Before I know it I'd get sued by animal welfare groups for needless animal cruelty or something.
The problem with antibiotics, rather, is that you have to finish the entire run lest you'll end up merely training your infection to become resistant. So it's not strictly a problem of prescribing the stuff too often; it's that plus far too many people starting to feel fine then not finishing the cure.
You'd have to be a right fool to be unable to fool these things. As in the link, as here, the application has very little to do with security. It's a people problem, and you can't fix those solely with technology.
Worse, treating it as a technical problem and attacking it with security kit gives a strong signal to your own {doctors,pupils,*} that they're all criminals and need to be treated as such. This in turn creates a powerful incentive to game the system.
What we have here is an incompetent administration trying to fix their mess through shitting on their underlings some more, using technology. Underlings know and dislike this.
And so gaming the system is what they'll do. This quite apart from biometrics being inappropriate everywhere but in criminal forensics. Be careful what you ask for and all that.
That's fairly natural. The point of most discussion in the USoA has nothing to do with what it says on the tin. The real issue is simply which side you're on, for on any one issue, there's only room for two sides in that big country yonder. Want more choice? Just add issues.
And why that? Why, to villify the other side, of course! What other point could there be?
So big ticket issues become trench warfare, where movement back and forth is guaranteed to be minute and always at gigantic cost. This is the modern interpretation of an "inefficient government"; its very purpose is to be ponderous, and since so many people funnel so much effort to butt heads with the other side on increasingly trivial things, expensive to boot. Also because of the pork barrelling, of course, for why should other people get all the money?
In other words, if you want any one issue to be efficiently resolved, you have to game the system somehow, for it is the system that requires costing a lot while resolving nothing.
You can easily see that this is not inherent in politics, just in American[tm] politics, by looking over the borders. For example, there's countries that decide to not ever even give life sentences, nevermind death penalty. Norway is a good example.
On the other hand, there's countries like those with the Sharia, where you'll get your head lopped off no sweat. Or like China used to do: Shoot the accused and charge the family for the bullet spent. Now they just drive death vans around, with Yu Di, MD in attendance.
If you really wanted efficient, you could have it. So one could conclude that doing your level best to not have efficient means that having efficient is simply not important here.
Actually, no. The hackers were the founding fathers, hacking together something intended to last for a bit, only then the lusers came along and allowed the people's interests to be hijacked by monied sleaze. The malware more or less is running the system. There certainly are no competent administrators around to clean up the mess.
You can only stretch analogies so far, but "government" as "operating system", executing laws and directives and things, and regulating access to resources for corporations and individuals, isn't that bad an analogy, really.
Given that at least that much is crap, and a large chunk consists of stuff set up for no other purpose than to lure in ad revenue, shrinkage here may not be a bad thing.
At the very least it might get advertisers and those depending on them for revenue finally thinking about how to reach people. Traditionally it's by snatching your attention in the most annoying way possible because any exposure is good advertising, right?
And then you get autoplaying videos, or animated gifs, blinking tags, flashing flash, or whatever else they'll think up next. In short, "dancing rodents", in advertising flavour.
I block things when they annoy me and when I do I block everything on the page. That's using an ad-blocker, though without the prefab lists, I just grow my own. So if advertisers want their advertisements to stay visible, well, they better make sure the advertisements do not annoy me.
Annoying includes posing as real content only turning out to be vapid and snickering, having succeeded at wasting my time (adwords, say). Or as simple as burning too many cycles with js, ajax, whatever, especially when the real content could've been served up js-free. "Pingers" that track my eyeballing the site and phoning home every second get booted with prejudice.
Advertisers need to re-think, since "fighting" the audience for their attention has become a lot less useful because the audience can fight back, and rightfully so. For am I the product, or a "consumer" with no other rights than to "consume"? I don't think so.
The key to good business is to add value, and merely screaming loudest you're the best, really, is not adding value. Marketing needs to grow up.
I wonder what they think they gain with that sort of stance. Gather up all IP addresses (which are NOT personal identification) and sue everyone remotely associatable? Including, say, google for indexing those sites? What?
If wordpress somehow cannot refuse (or just doesn't have any balls; this is a possibility) the least they can do is heap all the IP addresses together without specification. It seems that mounting a legal attack on such a broad range of hosts is sure to flounder.
And you'd think even copyright trolls ought to be smarter than that. But since they're entirely made up of sueball, perhaps not.
So it raises the question, and this is a useful thought experiment: What're they hoping to gain? Given such a heap of unspecified IP addresses, what would you be able to figure out from that? What if they are subspecified, what'd you be able to figure out then?
That, and of course machines can only deal with well-defined convenient little category boxes to stuff you in. If you somehow don't fit, it's now your problem, as the machine certainly won't help you.
The end result is invariably that it's not only your problem, it'll also be made your fault and you'll get blamed for not fitting in the system designer's convenient boxes.
We're already used to it because ever larger bureaucracies do the same, only using "process" and (often still paper) forms. But that doesn't justify the tendency at all, especially not since technology could also enable us to do better.
So I think this is abuse of technology (or process) against humans and ought to be a crime.
As long as some human is reachable and can and will actually fix any and all problems, you're welcome to automate the fsck out of whatever you like. Just don't be surprised that some things, or situations, or, well, people, need to be taken care of by humans.
So that must always be possible, even easy and convenient. Why? Because that sets the bar nicely high for the quality of automating: That has to be even easier and more convenient for the common case, otherwise common-case people won't use it. See there, a challenge.
You ever wondered why everything had to become GUI-shaped, why people genuinely thought that if only everyone would use GUIs then productivity would soar?
The answer is simple: marketing. It looks shiny. It's got dancing rodents. This sells.
Hollywood is made of shiny visuals. And, of course, designers love good looking form to the point that function can get skimped on. redmond has been doing their level best to serve up their version of MovieOS, down to the security problems.
This is also why touchscreens got resurrected. Much sexier to have the display span the entire phone than only half and the rest be buttons. And can possibly be more intuitive than having something present with custom buttons for you to poke at, hm?
That there are serious downsides to both GUIs (eg. very hard to script and automate compared to CLIs) and touchscreens ("gorilla arm", for one, lack of tactile feedback for another) pales into insignificance next to the sheer power of a shiny all-singing all-dancing presentation carefully serving up some smooth-looking lies.
Case in point: The new "windows 8" interface and it getting pushed through no matter what, on phones AND desktops. They're giving a powerful message here, and the delivery simply trumps whatever you may want.
This isn't (anti-)fanboiism, by the by: I could also trot out examples from, say, apple, but they're not nearly as clumsy and blunt about it. You don't get much choice either, but the delivery is so much better ("reality distortion field") that it causes symptoms of religious cults in its adherents, making it that much harder to illustrate with without causing instant flamewar.
And part of it is indeed that emotions are involved, often enough deliberately so.
Meaning that the perceived value of the local is lower than what he's getting paid. Instead of harping on how that's failed PR on behalf of the workers I'll just say this: Hey, free market economics in action.
What, you thought MBAs see others as humans? The course told'em they can be treated like black boxes for management purposes. Now you know why "corporate responsibility" sounds like distilled empty buzzword.
The free market answer then is to gather up the fired oldsters and sell their experience back to the companies at inflated consultancy prices. Should be plenty work that with the abundance of the fuckups of inexperience, no?
A "simple measure" that happens to wreak havoc on an already convoluted tax system does not a simple tax system make. Really now, your argument sucks so much that it ought to spontaneously implode.
Let's put it into a... building analogy. I say I'd like a "simple" building, without all sorts of baroque or gothic or whatnot ornaments. And you point to the obvious and simple fact that not having doors would count as simple and that you tried it and got your furniture stolen. No sympathy from me and no, your argument is not a valid counter. Reasons why left as an exercise.
As far as I'm concerned the idea already exposed someone's complete failure to grok what it was about. And that is a good thing, for then we can do something about it.
Apparently companies don't pay taxes (ref) in the sense that anything they do pay someone else gets to pay -- the employees, the customers, the shareholders, you name it.
Even without that caveat I'd be strongly in favour of a simple tax code, one that simply isn't complicated enough to have much in the way of loopholes. Perhaps a flat-fee on income, or a VAT if that really is a cheaper* tax overall to levy, tied to the yearly budget in a straight-forward way so that politician stupidity gives fairly direct feedback in your wallet, and then hopefully influences your voting.
Assuming that indeed, companies would shove off any taxes paid anyway, well, let them not pay taxes, let the people who receive income from the company do. The upside of that is that since more tax is coming from employees, it's now harder to hide taxables on other sides of borders.
The problem with that sort of thing, though, is that simplicity is a two-edged sword: The politicians no longer can hide their shenanigans either. Look at the debt rate. Eventually that's going to have to be paid back from taxes. And suddenly you're keenly aware of that fact.
* Where "cheaper" means less inefficiencies due to collecting and side effects.
Real merchants don't "deserve" your personal details any more or less than appstore merchants. There may be a need to take your address for shipment, and in that case a phone number, email adress, or even additional shipment instructions may be useful. But they ought not be required without good reason.
Note that credit cards muddle the picture by virtue of being a credit facility: You haven't actually paid yet so you are in debt and those obligations add identification requirements. Though strictly speaking all the merchant is supposed to do is pass it on to the credit facility for turning into money, and passing it in the clear is rather outdated, and well-known to be dangerous. Without credit as in payment by cash there and then, much of the need to identify you personally goes away.
That this information is useful for profiling and all sorts of marketeering and so it's nice to gather, well, plenty furrin places you're not even allowed to do that. I'd say the practice to pass on information that really isn't needed is a dangerous habit that needs reconsideration.
N'mind that it may possibly be useful to send emails in case of updates or whatnot. Passing that information automatically without need is a flaw, yes. Even if done by design.
is what the legal status of their "recommendations" is and whether you ought to sue them.
The tried-and-true andwer to that is: Ask a lawyer. I'm quite sure it can and does swing either way depending on local laws and any number of details you haven't provided.
Not sure what you're asking, but I'd consider answering along the lines of not being aware of how your business, software, is --or even possibly could be-- in any way or form infringing on their patents, how any and all hardware that may possibly be subject to the patent is store-bought and therefore assumed to be properly accounted for by the manufacturer, how it is up to them to establish how what you're doing is in fact infringing, and that you're happy to assist them further for a nicely outrageous hourly rate, paid in advance, because patent law is not your core business.
Otherwise, do we really have to start buying our stuff with patent litigation indemnity guarantees or something? This sort of thing just smells abusive. Isn't there an abusive litigation law somewhere?
Or maybe you could offer to license their complete current-and-future patent portfolio for an one-off payment of some small number, like two dollarcents. Be prepared to back up how that is a reasonable number given how, well, you figure something out.
Or perhaps you could counter-sue for frivolous lititgation and wasting your time for the time it's cost you so far which ought to be a small enough number still to fit in small claims court--the one nearest to you, of course. If you choose to talk first, I'd probably at least warn them that your time isn't free and that continuing to argue will incur consulting charges.
But of course you need to talk to some lawyer type, no going around that. But you can try and find one that doesn't immediately cost an arm and a leg, like a student-run free service or something set up by the eff or something.
It's for your own good, too. Lookit, the press release says so.
In a few short years you might even get that, courtesy the Japanese getting older and their aversion to getting non-Japanese to help them out in their old age. It's why you get all those whacky robots from pet dogs to something already close to robot nurses.
Ironically they don't actually need introspective fridges with see-through display doors and built-in speakers (that are problems to clean, and might break, too) for that. If the robot is smart enough to move about on its own it's smart enough to remember what's where or even just to remember to take a quick inventory before ordering (or executing, there's an idea) the scheduled shopping.
So the robots take over our lives. Of course, this is where we mumble "yeah, skynet" and then leave things as they are. But things don't have to walk to become our networked adversaries. They don't even have to mean it. All that's needed is an over-abundance of trying to be "helpful" in just the wrong way. Incidentally that's the way we've been going down so far, with equating "user friendlyness" with "hiding the controls so you don't have to worry about it".
While I sort-of share the sentiment of wanting to not have to do the chores myself, with various defensive strategies in place they're not that much of a problem. What would be a problem is losing control, even the feeling of losing control. And you get that by having all sorts of things try to out-smart you behind your back.
You know, The Wrong Trousers style. Or maybe not even that.
Make the fscking things self-cleaning if you must, but at least give them interfaces with published, open specs that I plug into my kitchen controller that I tell what to do, that talks to me through my phone or whatever device I want to whenever I say so, and so on. I don't want vendor-supplied half-well over-eagerly done patented "easyness". I want those things to do my bidding, and for that they have to talk to me the way I want them to.
On that same note, I wouldn't want things to be too integrated--that just drives up the repair bill through sheer proprietaryness, meaning it won't happen and now half my kitchen doesn't talk to the other half any longer.
Keep it simple. Keep things independent if they don't need to interdepend. Make a speaker that sticks to the fridge with magnets, or take a few old but still functional ones and mount'em somewhere high and out of the way. Though the old trick of mounting a radio under the cabinets over the counter seems good enough still, too. Make one of those with a bluetooth interface and you're golden.
In short, all that integrating just because we can is no good for us. Even when automating.
Whadayamean, "mis"read?
Oh, in the literal sense.
Then again, this is Paul Venezia, a hack columnist who forgot an "off" somewhere.
That's not entirely true since not all stores carry all brands and they're not always all that helpful helping you select; you're supposed to have done your homework. Also, various brands try to do is to create a "community" by offering cheaper or near-free calls within the brand, to tempt you to stick around because your friends do too.
Further, some brands can only be ordered "online" which is a bit of a bummer if you want to keep your name off of it. Some countries actually require you to register your name to the sim, even with a copy of your passport, but then again some are sloppy enough that this is circumventable also (and not a crim does it catch extra, just drives costs up a bit, and makes copies of passports to use for registration more viable as a tradeable commodity). Another caveat is that some of those "online" brands don't offer topping-up vouchers but require a (local) bank account number and permission to dip to ensure you always have enough credit on the card. Handy, innit?
But it isn't really a good question for ask slashdot, no. Since it differs by country it comes down to gathering the price lists and comparing. That or use handy dandy price comparison sites, again per country. The sites offering ex pat-tailored info are usually out of date. Around here, the MVNOs and operator sub-brands pop up and perish like, well, something that isn't expect to last half a decade.
The only generic information to be had is that there are a few that offer roaming for a fixed, predictable price across europe or even the world that's a lot higher than a local PAYG but a lot less than the usual roaming charges, and that cost very little to keep around when not in use. Oh, and that voice and text plans are hairy but not as much trouble as sorting out PAYG data. It's just a spot of work, is all.
On that note, do work out the frequency bands the equipment supports; if it's not "everything" you run some risk of ending up with a dud sim as not all operators are available on all frequency bands in use in a country. For MVNOs you usually have to work out whose network they're using, mapping back to the "parent"'s frequency usability. Again, it's a bit of homework, but generally doable.
I'd call it "mistaking succesful damage control for correct functioning". Apparently the system isn't entirely dysfunctional as patents can be revoken and it is possible to prevail against a patent troll, depending. But that doesn't imply the system as a whole is functional.
The fact that these patents were issued in the first place and that patent troll companies can exist on settlements and the occasional lawsuit already ought to be proof enough that the system is at least partly dysfunctional and therefore not fully functional. I would even argue it is dysfunctional enough to warrant immediate takedown of the entire system, and a rethink of what we originally wanted with the system.
If you can't see that, then maybe you're not really informed and if you're trying to inform the public while in such an uninformed state you're likely to spread misinformation. As such, shame on ars technica for wishful thinking. They ought to have known better.
The thing that's even more often overlooked is the cost to the customer.
To the customer, the very clear, limited, and well-understood risks of handling cash easily outweigh the purported "safety", mainly through obscuring the added complexity and resulting brittleness not to mention increased exposure of electronic alternatives, that for some reason also share the property they're very much not anonymous. But since you only see that trail of time+payer+payee+place+amount much later, ah, it's not a problem, right?
Or maybe it's just that the risk of getting relieved of a day's worth of cash is worth whatever you can get away with pushing off on the customer in terms of fees and privacy risks and whatnot. As long as the customer doesn't notice, it's not a problem, right?
I don't know the size of the costs to each, but if you're going to investigate, do paint a full picture of each, including such things as having to sit on payment records for N years and the risk of losing them (a lost backup tape will do) and resulting fines and tarnished reputation due to having to announce you lost people's details and things like that. Those are usually overlooked, for some reason.
Credit card companies want to have their fees hidden, rather they'd have everyone else too pay for the fees they charge retailers of their lucky convenience-furnished customers. And that they no longer can? Honesty in retail, surely a big speedbump, yes.
And that's an issue, because everyone wants cash-free, Shirley. Because, uhm, cash doesn't carry your name and isn't subject to chargebacks, hallmarks of, er, what exactly?
This much ought to be painfully clear, yet government-and-industry keeps drumming the "imminent grave danger" drum like they were sitting on Iraqian WMDs or something.
Which ought to give rise to the next question: Why?
Well, we already know the answer for that, and we coulda seen it coming decades away. Back when it was coined the "military-industrial complex", these days it has a large sideshow in transport security, and the next wave of innovation is in cyber.
There's a few problems with this, of course. The American[tm] image elsewhere, though no American[tm] can be arsed to care about that, for there's nuttin' but yokels in them rest of the world, amirite or amirite? Nevermind that it regularly backfires (contras, and, oh hey, taliban, to name just a few); moving on, what else?
Well, this security thing is a large driver of big data and invasive tracking and whatnot, and starting with the civilian version is great because having to separately "militarise" the tech means a bigger market and fatter margins. Yum, fat margins. Ah, yes there's a cost but facebook, end of privacy discussion, and if not just say "terrorists" or "paedophiles" until detractors shut up, in fact use anytime to keep the pressure on. So, moving on, what else?
Well, it's overhead. As in, while fat government contracts lead to paychecks, they don't create wealth; they're overhead and slowly suck the economy dry. Ah, what the hell, the fed will QE us out.
Alright, no problems there. Carry on.
I probably should be in this business too, eh?