The BBB is a rubber-stamp. All you need to do to display the BBB logo in your ads or claim you are "BBB Approved" is to send them a check.
A little while ago I filed a complaint about a car dealership I was having trouble with. They "investigated" and found the dealer not at fault. Which would be fine, except I looked up the history on those kind of complaints - and there wasn't even one case in which they found for the customer. It's kind of like the FBI investigating itself for shooting incidents - in all cases they found themselves not at fault.
You are responsible for what you can do. Of course you're not responsible for the firmware, but you have a responsibility to update it if it needs it. Balance the benefits WU gives you versus the risk in shutting it off for the average mouth breather; you can't save everyone but the chance of a compromise through WU is much lower than the risk of running an un-patched Windows machine. Leaving WU in its default state is the responsible thing to do, and that's the kind of responsibility I'm talking about. I don't expect the average consumer to be able to find and patch zero-days, but I DO expect them to know enough to not click on "punch the monkey" ads on the web, to know enough to install an anti-malware program, to know enough not to open attachments from people you don't know, to not run pirated software downloaded from some site in Elbonia, and to generally not be a fucking idiot. This is a perfectly reasonable set of expectations. The people who cause issues for others are the ones who don't do all that, who click on every banner ad in sight like a crack-addicted monkey hitting a lever, who send money to Nigerian princes, and are generally stupid enough to make people wonder how they tie their shoes. These are also the people who buy the shiny without knowing anything about how it works.
And how about not buying the fucking fridge if that's the way you feel about it? Nobody's got a gun to your head (that I know about, anyway)
No, it's your fault for bringing a device into your house that has the potential to be compromised and spread misery to others without knowing enough about how to maintain its security through patches and other available upgrades. If you can't determine if that device is secure enough, don't buy it. If the manufacturers see that security is important to their customers (in other words, bad security is starting to cost them money, which is the most important thing, forget that 'quality' or 'security' shit) they will clean up their act.
Of course, this is free-market fantasy. Idiots will keep buying the shiny without any understanding of the implications. But I disagree that you're totally not at fault or not responsible for keeping your shit up-to-date with patches etc. If you turn off Windows Update, and you get infected with malware, guess what? You're partially at fault for disabling the manufacturer's provided security.
Most for-profit companies are trading long term sustainability for short term profits.
FTFY. The phenomenon is not limited to advertising networks.
Also, anyone that tries to make me feel bad about using an ad blocker is trying to tell me that they have a right to shove ads into my eyeballs. They can go fuck themselves with a chainsaw; my eyes, my rules. I am not obligated to punch your monkey.
Like the saying goes, "Rich people didn't get rich by spending their money." Anyone who's worked in some sort of service-industry capacity (hotel workers, bank cashiers, restaurant servers) will tell you that the cheapest, most over-entitled, spoiled brat customers are the rich. I probably tip better than most billionaires. The rich want everything for free and will pitch holy hell if you don't give it to them. They think that just because they have a lot of money that the rules don't apply to them.. and the sad thing is, they're right.
That giant sucking sound you hear is a bunch of idiot HR drones using this article to justify firing 90% of their coders. "Hey, these guys do all this awesome stuff by themselves, our coders must just be lazy goldbrickers." Anything to fire people.
It's not about productivity, it's about drinking the Kool-Aid. If your employer artificially forces work relationships (by encouraging "collaboration", which is usually two coders complaining about their manager), then you're less likely to complain about something ("we're all in this together") that you really should be complaining about. They would rather have a worker bee at 20% capacity than an independent thinker at 100%.
Requiring additional documentation that has never needed to be provided before is pretty much the definition of "making it harder to vote". Election fraud is not the problem you think it is. The problem that Voter ID laws etc. is meant to solve is "too many brown people voting."
Not entirely, no. Support candidates that agree with you. Volunteer on a campaign. Run for office yourself. Fight efforts to make it harder to vote. Volunteer on election day. Something other than "post on irrelevant topics on Slashdot whining about the big bad gubmint."
The topic has nothing to do with the government. It's really getting old seeing you anti-government types hijack every discussion you can talking about how the government sucks. Maybe you should do something about it instead of just bitching.
Which is why I used "more secure" instead of "secure" above; I realize that security is hard. However, security is almost certainly hurt when you cut development time because the suits don't give a fuck about security.
If you are rich, or an illegal they ignore the regulation.
Strictly speaking, if you have better lawyers, you can ignore the regulation. As far as illegals go, the cost of enforcing the regulation is prohibitive at this point. Deporting 12 million people would cost billions of dollars, not to mention the damage to the US economy if that labor pool goes away. I agree that they're breaking the law, but you have to face the fact that there are practical concerns here and the money has to come from somewhere.
Is Clinton in jail for not following classified document handing? No.
Uh, maybe you want to wait for the investigation to be completed, for her to be tried and convicted, before you bitch that she's not in jail? Everyone gets their day in court, even if you don't like their politics.
If you illegally come into the country will you be taken to jail and then deported for breaking the law? No.
Yes, you're not wrong, but how do you pay for that?
That woman had third-degree burns to her lap (including lady bits) that required some amputation and a weeks' stay in a hospital. It was proven that McDonalds was aware that there was a problem, but refused to do anything about it. They paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements (with gag orders, naturally) to people who had been hurt previously, but refused to lower the holding temperature on their coffee makers, which was tens of degrees hotter than industry standards. Their argument was that people don't drink the coffee right away and they didn't want it to get cold. You can probably thank all those over-entitled assholes (who think they're special snowflakes because they haven't died yet) who want their free "SENIOR COFFEE" when they go through the drive-thru and raise holy hell if you get it wrong or it goes cold on them because they're idiots and don't realize that warm liquids lose heat to the environment over time. (Speaking from experience.)
It was a clear case of corporate negligence. It was not some woman faking injury to get a big payday.
It's all kind of baffling. We have decades of experience that tells us that writing secure software is very difficult and that patching insecure software is expensive, inefficient, and largely ineffective.
I disagree, to me it's pretty clear what is going on here. The folks who make budgeting and resource planning decisions haven't the vaguest clue what is involved in writing software, let alone best security practices. All they see is developers that cost money.
The lead/principal/architect (whoever the head geek is) requests enough time to develop software that he/she considers reasonably secure. The suits freak out. The head geek is asked to quantify the expense. The suits see all this time spent making the software more secure. They ask the head geek to quantify the risk in terms of what is likely to happen if that time is not spent.
So here's the problem: Spending the time to make more secure software is DEFINITELY going to increase costs right now. Quantifying costs due to security problems once the product is in the wild is difficult at best and impossible at worst. So it's a matter of what is DEFINITELY going to cost money now and what MIGHT cost money in the future. The suits tell the head geek that if there are problems after it ships they'll release a patch. The head geek reminds the suits that security problems are much cheaper to fix before release than after. The suits ignore him and get a bonus for keeping expenses low, by skimping on development time.
The fact that you can't predict security problems with any reasonable degree of accuracy is the issue. The suits don't like spending money on something that MIGHT happen. Remember, this is an industry that at one time determined it was cheaper to let people die than fix a problem.
Good luck getting that set up. You won't be able to hear yourself think over the howls of the end users (some of which are C-level executives) that that policy will generate. Especially with the text-only policy.
The problem is there, the solution is known and technically possible, but you won't fix it, because it would inconvenience the end users.
The true problem in this situation is that people are stupid. You'll never get that fossil in A/R who really uses the optical drive tray as a cup holder, to understand that sometimes you shouldn't click something in an email. It's beyond their ability (or willingness) to comprehend.
Some companies do many of these over the course of a day. If there are CFO-level wire transfers (using amount as a criteria), and the CFO isn't available (sick, vacation, in transit, etc) should the business grind to a halt? Someone (or a few someones) will need to have that ability, in order to avoid a bus factor of 1 on the entire business.
Let's take a look at the 8 "infuriating" things wrong with the Apple Watch, according to HuffPo:
1) I had no trouble buying one. There are a lot of options; surprise! With more options comes more complexity! 2) My setup time consisted of running the Apple Watch app on my phone. That was it. Minutes. 3) This just in: A watch can get dinged up on your wrist. In other news, water is wet. 4)... obviously if you drop it on concrete the face will break, just like the screen on your phone would. You don't have to be any more careful than you are with your phone. 5) I have not experienced any degradation in my iPhone's battery life. But, I also don't have a basis for a scientific comparison; qualitatively it doesn't feel like a problem. 6) If it won't charge, it's clearly bad hardware, and you can exchange it. Bad hardware happens, unfortunately, this is why there are return policies. 7) I have to agree a (little) bit with this one, it's not clear how stuff is intended to be used sometimes. But once you get used to it, it's no problem. Still, that's a black eye for Apple; ease-of-use is one of their primary selling points. 8) I've experienced the issue described. I have not had the issue with my watch's app screen.
Clearly it's not the smoothest rollout Apple's ever had, but it's not the disaster that people are making it out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
The BBB is a rubber-stamp. All you need to do to display the BBB logo in your ads or claim you are "BBB Approved" is to send them a check.
A little while ago I filed a complaint about a car dealership I was having trouble with. They "investigated" and found the dealer not at fault. Which would be fine, except I looked up the history on those kind of complaints - and there wasn't even one case in which they found for the customer. It's kind of like the FBI investigating itself for shooting incidents - in all cases they found themselves not at fault.
You are responsible for what you can do. Of course you're not responsible for the firmware, but you have a responsibility to update it if it needs it. Balance the benefits WU gives you versus the risk in shutting it off for the average mouth breather; you can't save everyone but the chance of a compromise through WU is much lower than the risk of running an un-patched Windows machine. Leaving WU in its default state is the responsible thing to do, and that's the kind of responsibility I'm talking about. I don't expect the average consumer to be able to find and patch zero-days, but I DO expect them to know enough to not click on "punch the monkey" ads on the web, to know enough to install an anti-malware program, to know enough not to open attachments from people you don't know, to not run pirated software downloaded from some site in Elbonia, and to generally not be a fucking idiot. This is a perfectly reasonable set of expectations. The people who cause issues for others are the ones who don't do all that, who click on every banner ad in sight like a crack-addicted monkey hitting a lever, who send money to Nigerian princes, and are generally stupid enough to make people wonder how they tie their shoes. These are also the people who buy the shiny without knowing anything about how it works.
And how about not buying the fucking fridge if that's the way you feel about it? Nobody's got a gun to your head (that I know about, anyway)
No, it's your fault for bringing a device into your house that has the potential to be compromised and spread misery to others without knowing enough about how to maintain its security through patches and other available upgrades. If you can't determine if that device is secure enough, don't buy it. If the manufacturers see that security is important to their customers (in other words, bad security is starting to cost them money, which is the most important thing, forget that 'quality' or 'security' shit) they will clean up their act.
Of course, this is free-market fantasy. Idiots will keep buying the shiny without any understanding of the implications. But I disagree that you're totally not at fault or not responsible for keeping your shit up-to-date with patches etc. If you turn off Windows Update, and you get infected with malware, guess what? You're partially at fault for disabling the manufacturer's provided security.
You assholes never miss a chance to inject your political ideology into a discussion where it's not relevant, do you.
I can do that too:
"It looks like healthcare IT has the same attitude towards its quality that George W Bush had towards 9-11."
FTFY. The phenomenon is not limited to advertising networks.
Also, anyone that tries to make me feel bad about using an ad blocker is trying to tell me that they have a right to shove ads into my eyeballs. They can go fuck themselves with a chainsaw; my eyes, my rules. I am not obligated to punch your monkey.
Measuring productivity is hard. Butt-in-seat time is easy.
Like the saying goes, "Rich people didn't get rich by spending their money." Anyone who's worked in some sort of service-industry capacity (hotel workers, bank cashiers, restaurant servers) will tell you that the cheapest, most over-entitled, spoiled brat customers are the rich. I probably tip better than most billionaires. The rich want everything for free and will pitch holy hell if you don't give it to them. They think that just because they have a lot of money that the rules don't apply to them.. and the sad thing is, they're right.
That giant sucking sound you hear is a bunch of idiot HR drones using this article to justify firing 90% of their coders. "Hey, these guys do all this awesome stuff by themselves, our coders must just be lazy goldbrickers." Anything to fire people.
It's not about productivity, it's about drinking the Kool-Aid. If your employer artificially forces work relationships (by encouraging "collaboration", which is usually two coders complaining about their manager), then you're less likely to complain about something ("we're all in this together") that you really should be complaining about. They would rather have a worker bee at 20% capacity than an independent thinker at 100%.
Requiring additional documentation that has never needed to be provided before is pretty much the definition of "making it harder to vote". Election fraud is not the problem you think it is. The problem that Voter ID laws etc. is meant to solve is "too many brown people voting."
GP asked a question. I answered it.
I think you're looking to attack the person, not the message.
Not entirely, no. Support candidates that agree with you. Volunteer on a campaign. Run for office yourself. Fight efforts to make it harder to vote. Volunteer on election day. Something other than "post on irrelevant topics on Slashdot whining about the big bad gubmint."
Yes. It's off topic. If the topic were how government was impeding Comcast's efforts to do this, then that would be on-topic. But it's not.
Wow, you've bought into the dogma so hard that you can't even see what you're doing. Get help.
The topic has nothing to do with the government. It's really getting old seeing you anti-government types hijack every discussion you can talking about how the government sucks. Maybe you should do something about it instead of just bitching.
Which is why I used "more secure" instead of "secure" above; I realize that security is hard. However, security is almost certainly hurt when you cut development time because the suits don't give a fuck about security.
Strictly speaking, if you have better lawyers, you can ignore the regulation. As far as illegals go, the cost of enforcing the regulation is prohibitive at this point. Deporting 12 million people would cost billions of dollars, not to mention the damage to the US economy if that labor pool goes away. I agree that they're breaking the law, but you have to face the fact that there are practical concerns here and the money has to come from somewhere.
Uh, maybe you want to wait for the investigation to be completed, for her to be tried and convicted, before you bitch that she's not in jail? Everyone gets their day in court, even if you don't like their politics.
Yes, you're not wrong, but how do you pay for that?
I saw that you linked to the article, but figured that GP wouldn't click on a link that would tend to prove his position incorrect.
That woman had third-degree burns to her lap (including lady bits) that required some amputation and a weeks' stay in a hospital. It was proven that McDonalds was aware that there was a problem, but refused to do anything about it. They paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlements (with gag orders, naturally) to people who had been hurt previously, but refused to lower the holding temperature on their coffee makers, which was tens of degrees hotter than industry standards. Their argument was that people don't drink the coffee right away and they didn't want it to get cold. You can probably thank all those over-entitled assholes (who think they're special snowflakes because they haven't died yet) who want their free "SENIOR COFFEE" when they go through the drive-thru and raise holy hell if you get it wrong or it goes cold on them because they're idiots and don't realize that warm liquids lose heat to the environment over time. (Speaking from experience.)
It was a clear case of corporate negligence. It was not some woman faking injury to get a big payday.
I disagree, to me it's pretty clear what is going on here. The folks who make budgeting and resource planning decisions haven't the vaguest clue what is involved in writing software, let alone best security practices. All they see is developers that cost money.
The lead/principal/architect (whoever the head geek is) requests enough time to develop software that he/she considers reasonably secure. The suits freak out. The head geek is asked to quantify the expense. The suits see all this time spent making the software more secure. They ask the head geek to quantify the risk in terms of what is likely to happen if that time is not spent.
So here's the problem: Spending the time to make more secure software is DEFINITELY going to increase costs right now. Quantifying costs due to security problems once the product is in the wild is difficult at best and impossible at worst. So it's a matter of what is DEFINITELY going to cost money now and what MIGHT cost money in the future. The suits tell the head geek that if there are problems after it ships they'll release a patch. The head geek reminds the suits that security problems are much cheaper to fix before release than after. The suits ignore him and get a bonus for keeping expenses low, by skimping on development time.
The fact that you can't predict security problems with any reasonable degree of accuracy is the issue. The suits don't like spending money on something that MIGHT happen. Remember, this is an industry that at one time determined it was cheaper to let people die than fix a problem.
I'm pretty sure that the fact that Tim Cook is gay is not remarkable enough to significantly distract Apple's customer base.
"gay-supporting"
This has what to do with anything?
Good luck getting that set up. You won't be able to hear yourself think over the howls of the end users (some of which are C-level executives) that that policy will generate. Especially with the text-only policy.
The problem is there, the solution is known and technically possible, but you won't fix it, because it would inconvenience the end users.
The true problem in this situation is that people are stupid. You'll never get that fossil in A/R who really uses the optical drive tray as a cup holder, to understand that sometimes you shouldn't click something in an email. It's beyond their ability (or willingness) to comprehend.
Some companies do many of these over the course of a day. If there are CFO-level wire transfers (using amount as a criteria), and the CFO isn't available (sick, vacation, in transit, etc) should the business grind to a halt? Someone (or a few someones) will need to have that ability, in order to avoid a bus factor of 1 on the entire business.
Let's take a look at the 8 "infuriating" things wrong with the Apple Watch, according to HuffPo:
1) I had no trouble buying one. There are a lot of options; surprise! With more options comes more complexity! ... obviously if you drop it on concrete the face will break, just like the screen on your phone would. You don't have to be any more careful than you are with your phone.
2) My setup time consisted of running the Apple Watch app on my phone. That was it. Minutes.
3) This just in: A watch can get dinged up on your wrist. In other news, water is wet.
4)
5) I have not experienced any degradation in my iPhone's battery life. But, I also don't have a basis for a scientific comparison; qualitatively it doesn't feel like a problem.
6) If it won't charge, it's clearly bad hardware, and you can exchange it. Bad hardware happens, unfortunately, this is why there are return policies.
7) I have to agree a (little) bit with this one, it's not clear how stuff is intended to be used sometimes. But once you get used to it, it's no problem. Still, that's a black eye for Apple; ease-of-use is one of their primary selling points.
8) I've experienced the issue described. I have not had the issue with my watch's app screen.
Clearly it's not the smoothest rollout Apple's ever had, but it's not the disaster that people are making it out to be.