(Chrome uses the OS's password manager by default. If you're using gnome-keyring or kwallet (Linux and others), or keychain (Mac) then you can lock/unlock the password access independently of locking the screen or logging in. Even on Windows you can change the login password to be different from the Chrome keyring password).
It's stored encrypted (in a SQLlite database), as well, and needs your password to decrypt. An admin might be able to key-log you or something to get your password, but it's not just as simple as having FS permissions and hence being able to read your passwords.
Gnome/KDE/Mac handle this better, but the Windows method isn't totally broken (and the major flaws are not surprisingly based on the fact that Windows isn't quite as adept at handling multiple user accounts gracefully out of the box, though it's certainly workable).
From the Chrome teams response for this issue, I believe that's what they're doing. If someone is logged into your OS session as you, they can see the passwords. Somebody logged into the same computer, but as a different user, can't see the passwords.
This isn't exactly right; the password store is encrypted with the Windows master password, which is needed to decrypt them. Normally that defaults to your login password (in which case what you said is true), but you can change your login password without changing the encryption password. If you do that, someone who's logged in as you won't be able to decrypt your Chrome passwords.
This also means that if someone steals your machine and then physically resets your login password (or uses admin privs to "become" you) that they won't be able to decrypt your Chrome keyring.
Exactly. Mozilla's email client Thunderbird also uses a Master Password to unlock the view-ability of the stored passwords.
Chrome uses the same core OS key storage that Firefox/Thunderbird does, and encrypts with the same master password--if I save a password in Firefox, it's available in Chrome and vice-versa. Both use kwallet on KDE, gnome-keyring on Gnome platforms, keychain access on the Mac, etc.
You can lock access to view them however the OS does so (e.g. with gnome, either Applications->Settings->Passwords and Keys, and select "Lock passwords", or from the command line, and gnome automatically locks them when your screensaver locks; on KDE it's the "Wallet Manager", I forget which menu it's under; on the Mac it's Utilities->Keychain Access, and click the little lock at the top of the keychain to lock/unlock). All 3 of those systems default to using your login password and automatically unlocking the keychain when you log in, but you can set the password separately (and be prompted to unlock it when you go to use it) if you want.
The problem here is that Windows' password management doesn't offer a reasonable alternative, but that's not Chrome's fault.
For those who insist on saying that chrome's security method is good enough consider this: How many people use separate log-in's for the "Family" computer that stays on most of the time? Not very many I'd imagine, just too much trouble for most to deal with. This means that both other family members as well as house guests can casually access all those passwords in no time.
a) Lock your passwords when you turn over the computer
b) You don't actually need to log in and out all the time to use separate accounts on the communal machine. Mine is usually sitting there logged into a guest account that everyone can use, with a browser running as the guest. I'll also use if I'm just looking something up on IMDB or googling/wiki'ing a quick question or whatever. There's a button on the menubar to "Run browser as..." with options for me and each of my family members, which prompts for the user's password and then runs a browser as them--if I need to check email or pay a bill or something, that browser's got my info but it's not available from the guest account/browser.. That covers the vast majority of cases, you just need to remember to close your browser when you're done with it.
For more complicated stuff, I pop over to VT8, log in, do what I need to do, and pop back. If I'm in the middle of something and someone needs to use the machine briefly, I can lock my terminal and switch back to the guest terminal for a few minutes, then switch back and unlock my screen without really disrupting anything.
From the airport's perspective, there is no difference between a taxi and a rideshare, so claiming that the rideshare is "trespassing" is absurd.
From an airport's perspective there's a big difference: licensed cabs and limos pay a $4 airport fee for each pickup, which results in millions of dollars in revenues for them each year. Every unlicensed cab/limo that picks someone up in their place is money they don't get.
There's nothing "For Free" here. Uber, Lyft, and the like are for-profit companies that charge a fare to drive you around--it's phrased as a "suggested donation", but the way their ratings system works you'll get cut out of the system (unable to use them in the future) if you don't pay. Drivers average about $30/hour, the companies take a percentage (20% for Lyft, not sure about the others).
They're basically unlicensed limo services, though they've been in talks with CPUC to get licensed and bonded and come into compliance with the law.
These aren't shares in that sense. While the donations they suggest are technically not mandatory, if you don't pay them then you're cut out of the system quickly. They're for-profit companies running something closer to a limo service than what anyone would mean by "rideshare". Which is fine with me, the taxi monopolies are ludicrous. But it's not like they're arresting people for carpooling or slugging or something.
Part of the confusion is that these aren't really ride"shares", they're closer to being unlicensed cab companies. Or maybe limo companies--they don't pick up random street fares, you have to put in a request through their apps. Passengers put in online requests and pay the drivers to come and pick them up and drive them somewhere, and while there's not a mandatory fee there is a "suggested fee" given in the app at the end of the ride and the rating system ensures that passengers who don't pay get cut out of the system quickly. The company takes a percentage of each fare (20% is typical).
All of which I'm okay with (taxi monopolies are ridiculous, and the lyft/sidecar/etc market has settled on rates that are about 30% lower than what hack rates are set at), but they're for-profit companies where drivers typically make $30+ an hour. It's not like they're shutting down a "rideshare" in the sense that it sounds like.
All three of these companies have previously been fined by the California Public Utilities Commission and issued cease and desists. But the timing is surprising. CPUC had recently reversed the fines and C&Ds against all three after ensuring that they'd follow some safety regulations going forward--they're in the process of getting their drivers licensed, have agreed to have criminal background checks for all drivers (some of them did that already), and have picked up bond insurance for passengers, etc.
It looked before today like they were in the process of coming into compliance and that CPUC was backing down from a previously confrontational position in light of those concessions. See, for instance, http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57596259-93/uber-lyft-and-sidecar-get-tentative-green-light-in-calif/ They've gone through the same thing in other cities (I know they have at least tentative approval in New York after going through a lot of back and forth to make sure that they're not just bandit cabs that operate by no rules).
This is a joke, right? If Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr leave the Beatles, they aren't allowed to write "Hey Dude" and "I Want to Hold You Man" to the tune of the originals and completely fail to pay John Lennon, George Harrison, and Apple Records. That's exactly what Star Control 2 did, though--it not only failed to reimburse Binary Systems, but also left the other developers out in the cold while pocketing money for work they did.
And, yeah, I know that some of the developers from Binary went to Toys For Bob (I even mentioned one of the most important in my post). They completely screwed everyone else from the original dev team who didn't come with them, though. Which isn't maybe the worst crime in history, but it would make them wildly hypocritical if they try to pursue a similar claim against anyone else--which I'm not saying they've done, but my response was to someone who intimated that such action was on the table. It'd be ludicrous under the circumstances.
The idea that Toys for Bob of all people would pursue a claim of someone ripping them off is pretty rich, given that Star Control was a thinly veiled ripoff of Starflight (which itself has a better claim to "best PC game of all time" than Star Control 2 does). Reiche was even involved in the Starflight development, so it's not like they didn't know exactly what they were doing.
Of course, someone should take odds on whether or not a reboot can come close to doing as well as the orignal (the original #2 that is.. StarCon was a fine but simplistic game and StarCon 3 did not exist. IT DID NOT EXIST I TELL YOU). Still, I'll play a sequel just on the chance it comes close.
The original was Starflight; Star Control II was a graphical facelift with some arcade stuff tacked on, a less interesting story, and much weaker RPG aspects. It's a good game and was a nice refresh, and it's obviously a little less dated looking, but basically everything it did well had been done better in Starflight (which is arguably the best PC game of all time if you adjust for era).
And Pacific Rim and After Earth will be probably be profitable once the international take is tallied, even before DVD and Netflix and other secondary revenues come into play. After Earth's already taken in over $235 million on a $130 million budget, so it's coming up on recouping marketing costs and still has a little juice left (the average movie spends about half its budget again on production costs, but big blockbusters raise that percentage a bit).
Pacific Rim will probably make a fair profit--it's built for the international market in a lot of ways (including an international cast and a director who's been successful and is and respected internationally). It's already essentially broken even on production costs even before opening in China and Japan (where it should make a fair bit of cash), and still probably has $40 million or more of burn left in the US.
That's even without getting into what a "massive flop" is--the Lone Ranger looks like a lock to lose money, but it also doesn't look like it'll be a huge fiasco. More of a moderate disappointment, financially.
You're essentially saying "doctors shouldn't move to small towns, and shouldn't have lives if they do". That's shitty. My dad spent literally half his days on call when he was active, which is very common for any kind of specialist outside of big cities (if you're one of two eye surgeons in the local town, you're on call half the time--you might rarely get called but when you do it can be life-or-death, or at least blindness-or-sight quite frequently).
Saying "go rent a movie instead" is glib. You're right that big flat screens and home surround are changing the calculus for movies, but that just shifts the argument slightly--if other places of public performance took that approach, such doctors could almost never go to the symphony, live theater, etc. The problem isn't the technology, it's the assholes abusing it.
It's not the outgoing calls, it's the incoming. My dad relied on his pager 24/7 3-4 days a week even back in the 70s to let him know when he had to head into the hospital, and it's not uncommon in a small town for doctors to have a similar call schedule these days. Put the theater (and symphony, and theater, and wherever else the same sorts of arguments apply) in a Faraday cage and he spends more than half his life not being able to partake in any public performance. Which might be okay, I don't know, but it's a complicated call.
IMO the best thing to do is just let the market handle it--if "adult" quiet showings make money, they'll do them. If Rocky Horror style shows where people yell and throw stuff at the screen are popular, they'll do those. And while they aren't quite IMAX with 7.1, home theaters have come a long way: high-def with THX surround is leaps and bounds ahead of DVD on Trinitron, let alone the VHS on crappy tubes that people watched in the 80s. And it allows you to set whatever absolute rules you want if the cinema's decisions aren't to your liking.
The information is bad to begin with. If an organization sends out a coupon for tickets to some sporting event, but only to men on their list, then they're going to annoy a lot of men, and miss a lot of sales opportunities from women. (and yes, I'm using an obvious/stereotypical example). The list of products that men never buy (but women do buy), and which women never buy (but men do buy) is exceedingly short: I can't actually think of a single product on the list. If a marketing company is using that identifier as a way to target advertising, they are completely missing the point of collecting data in the first place.
It actually sounds as though you're missing the point of marketing databases. They aren't meant to be absolute; they're inherently statistical attempts to target things at the groups most likely to buy things. The marketers know full well that not everyone they send to will be interested and not everyone they don't send to wouldn't be interested in their product, they're just looking for the biggest bang for the advertising buck. Sure, there are some guys who will pick up Vagisil and some women who will buy Lotrimin Jock Itch, but when it comes down to spending your advertising budget in a way that gets the best ROI that's not who most marketers are going to target--they have no interest in being fair or nondiscriminatory, or even accurate. It's all about making money.
Gender and sex are synonyms in English. The attempt to redefine them in recent years has no historical or etymological basis, and smacks of a 1984-style Newspeak where people attempt to redefine language for political reasons--something like "gender/sex identity" would be a less confusing (and less wrong) way of addressing the matter.
Others have noted that in most databases it shouldn't matter--if you want to store a salutation, store a salutation. Outside of limited contexts (e.g. medical records, where you almost certainly want both and definitely want genetic gender) there really isn't a good reason to ask the question. A lot of places it's used as a lazy shorthand to apply stereotypical inferences, when you'd really be better off asking other questions.
(See, e.g., http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender which notes that the primary definition of "gender" (outside of the linguistic context, which is totally off topic) is "sex". The OED concurs. )
Was this in the US? If so, that's a pretty shocking oversight. FMLA requires that companies over 50 employees grant 12 weeks leave to anyone (within certain restrictions--you have to have been employed there for over a year and work a minimum number of hours) having a child, maternity or paternity; it's not binding on smaller companies, but it's a pretty gross oversight to build an HR system that doesn't account for the fact that the company might grow.
If it were rare and sent once, it could be useful, but the system as currently implemented constantly spams you with updates, the way traditional cut-in warnings on TV do. Once I know that there's a major snowstorm in my area, I don't need impossible-to-turn-off push notifications every hour just telling me that there is still a major snowstorm and here is a routine update.
The only impossible-to-turn-off push notifications are Presidential Alerts (the weather and AMBER alerts can be easily turned off from settings).
Those are beyond rare--there has _never_ been one sent out in the history of the Emergency Alert System/Emergency Broadcast System, not even 9/11 triggered one.
Google's search engine was and it still is the main drive behind the company. But Maps, with their scrollable Ajax tiles pretty much made competing products look like a toy
But Google Maps isn't really a Google innovation--it was conceived by 2 Technologies, who pitched the idea to them. Google certainly recognized the value and ran with it (and acquired them in 2005).
This article must be flamebait. Google didnt invent much, there were dozens of search engines when it came around
There were, but they sucked. And I say this as someone who was at Carnegie Mellon when they came up with Lycos (and had been through webcrawler, and archie and veronica in the pre-http days), and suffered through altavista when it was still at digital.com and plenty of other early efforts.
The idea of using the number of links to a page as an indication of its importance was huge, and it and the rest of PageRank were truly innovative--you went from normally going through 5-10 pages of results and sometimes more to almost always having the thing you were looking for on the first page. Simply the concept of having an "I'm feeling lucky" button was unthinkable in the earlier days.
They were also among the earlier places to recognize that XMLHTTP/XmlHttpRequest wasn't just an Outlook plugin, bringing AJAX into the mainstream (which was hugely significant, and one of the reasons we're not saddled with shitty Flash sites anymore).
Even facebook didnt invent
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap. They've tied together other technologies in ways that people like, built a network, and marketed well, but they've never had anything technically significant.
Forget games, let's talk about work. I was running at 1600x1200 on my 15" CRT in 1997, and it wasn't state of the art. I could very comfortably have multiple 80 column editors or terminals beside each other with nice resolution fonts. LCDs/LEDs are great in a lot of ways, but they were a step backward in resolution (the same terminals or editors leave a bit of overlap on sub-1400 pixel widescreen LCD screens, unless I dial down the fonts to crappier quality).
It'd be awesome to finally get back to 15+ year old technology again on that front.
Please. Institutions are about as humorless and paranoid as it gets. I am surprised the mental health professionals at NASA didn't read the lyrics to that song and conclude that they had to remotely put this guy down.
His version has very bland, sanitized lyrics. There's no "tell my wife I love her very much", no circuit's dead, no "planet earth is blue and there's nothing I can do", basically none of the lyrics that make the original both great and depressing.
It's definitely cool given the circumstances and I'm all about any boost it may give to space exploration, but it's pretty soulless compared to the original, with none of the existential loneliness of the original (probably for exactly the reason you imply).
That's all true, but has nothing to do with what I was discussing.
The post I was replying to implies that there's a new result proving that AES or 3DES is secure (which would have profound implications not only on cryptography but on greater questions of computability) or that there's a version of TLS that uses one time pads or something. I was attempting to get at exactly what was being claimed.
Slashdot Mirror
But having Firefox not show my encrypted passwords if I happen to forgot to lock up the desktop?
Huh?
Edit->Preferences->Security->Saved Passwords->Show Passwords
(Chrome uses the OS's password manager by default. If you're using gnome-keyring or kwallet (Linux and others), or keychain (Mac) then you can lock/unlock the password access independently of locking the screen or logging in. Even on Windows you can change the login password to be different from the Chrome keyring password).
It's stored encrypted (in a SQLlite database), as well, and needs your password to decrypt. An admin might be able to key-log you or something to get your password, but it's not just as simple as having FS permissions and hence being able to read your passwords.
Gnome/KDE/Mac handle this better, but the Windows method isn't totally broken (and the major flaws are not surprisingly based on the fact that Windows isn't quite as adept at handling multiple user accounts gracefully out of the box, though it's certainly workable).
From the Chrome teams response for this issue, I believe that's what they're doing. If someone is logged into your OS session as you, they can see the passwords. Somebody logged into the same computer, but as a different user, can't see the passwords.
This isn't exactly right; the password store is encrypted with the Windows master password, which is needed to decrypt them. Normally that defaults to your login password (in which case what you said is true), but you can change your login password without changing the encryption password. If you do that, someone who's logged in as you won't be able to decrypt your Chrome passwords.
This also means that if someone steals your machine and then physically resets your login password (or uses admin privs to "become" you) that they won't be able to decrypt your Chrome keyring.
Exactly. Mozilla's email client Thunderbird also uses a Master Password to unlock the view-ability of the stored passwords.
Chrome uses the same core OS key storage that Firefox/Thunderbird does, and encrypts with the same master password--if I save a password in Firefox, it's available in Chrome and vice-versa. Both use kwallet on KDE, gnome-keyring on Gnome platforms, keychain access on the Mac, etc.
You can lock access to view them however the OS does so (e.g. with gnome, either Applications->Settings->Passwords and Keys, and select "Lock passwords", or from the command line, and gnome automatically locks them when your screensaver locks; on KDE it's the "Wallet Manager", I forget which menu it's under; on the Mac it's Utilities->Keychain Access, and click the little lock at the top of the keychain to lock/unlock). All 3 of those systems default to using your login password and automatically unlocking the keychain when you log in, but you can set the password separately (and be prompted to unlock it when you go to use it) if you want.
The problem here is that Windows' password management doesn't offer a reasonable alternative, but that's not Chrome's fault.
For those who insist on saying that chrome's security method is good enough consider this: How many people use separate log-in's for the "Family" computer that stays on most of the time? Not very many I'd imagine, just too much trouble for most to deal with. This means that both other family members as well as house guests can casually access all those passwords in no time.
a) Lock your passwords when you turn over the computer
b) You don't actually need to log in and out all the time to use separate accounts on the communal machine. Mine is usually sitting there logged into a guest account that everyone can use, with a browser running as the guest. I'll also use if I'm just looking something up on IMDB or googling/wiki'ing a quick question or whatever. There's a button on the menubar to "Run browser as..." with options for me and each of my family members, which prompts for the user's password and then runs a browser as them--if I need to check email or pay a bill or something, that browser's got my info but it's not available from the guest account/browser.. That covers the vast majority of cases, you just need to remember to close your browser when you're done with it.
For more complicated stuff, I pop over to VT8, log in, do what I need to do, and pop back. If I'm in the middle of something and someone needs to use the machine briefly, I can lock my terminal and switch back to the guest terminal for a few minutes, then switch back and unlock my screen without really disrupting anything.
From the airport's perspective, there is no difference between a taxi and a rideshare, so claiming that the rideshare is "trespassing" is absurd.
From an airport's perspective there's a big difference: licensed cabs and limos pay a $4 airport fee for each pickup, which results in millions of dollars in revenues for them each year. Every unlicensed cab/limo that picks someone up in their place is money they don't get.
There's nothing "For Free" here. Uber, Lyft, and the like are for-profit companies that charge a fare to drive you around--it's phrased as a "suggested donation", but the way their ratings system works you'll get cut out of the system (unable to use them in the future) if you don't pay. Drivers average about $30/hour, the companies take a percentage (20% for Lyft, not sure about the others).
They're basically unlicensed limo services, though they've been in talks with CPUC to get licensed and bonded and come into compliance with the law.
These aren't shares in that sense. While the donations they suggest are technically not mandatory, if you don't pay them then you're cut out of the system quickly. They're for-profit companies running something closer to a limo service than what anyone would mean by "rideshare". Which is fine with me, the taxi monopolies are ludicrous. But it's not like they're arresting people for carpooling or slugging or something.
Part of the confusion is that these aren't really ride"shares", they're closer to being unlicensed cab companies. Or maybe limo companies--they don't pick up random street fares, you have to put in a request through their apps. Passengers put in online requests and pay the drivers to come and pick them up and drive them somewhere, and while there's not a mandatory fee there is a "suggested fee" given in the app at the end of the ride and the rating system ensures that passengers who don't pay get cut out of the system quickly. The company takes a percentage of each fare (20% is typical).
All of which I'm okay with (taxi monopolies are ridiculous, and the lyft/sidecar/etc market has settled on rates that are about 30% lower than what hack rates are set at), but they're for-profit companies where drivers typically make $30+ an hour. It's not like they're shutting down a "rideshare" in the sense that it sounds like.
All three of these companies have previously been fined by the California Public Utilities Commission and issued cease and desists. But the timing is surprising. CPUC had recently reversed the fines and C&Ds against all three after ensuring that they'd follow some safety regulations going forward--they're in the process of getting their drivers licensed, have agreed to have criminal background checks for all drivers (some of them did that already), and have picked up bond insurance for passengers, etc.
It looked before today like they were in the process of coming into compliance and that CPUC was backing down from a previously confrontational position in light of those concessions. See, for instance, http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57596259-93/uber-lyft-and-sidecar-get-tentative-green-light-in-calif/ They've gone through the same thing in other cities (I know they have at least tentative approval in New York after going through a lot of back and forth to make sure that they're not just bandit cabs that operate by no rules).
Thanks for the FTL mention, I'm not a fan of real-time strategies in general but if I get a hankering for one I'll check it out.
This is a joke, right? If Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr leave the Beatles, they aren't allowed to write "Hey Dude" and "I Want to Hold You Man" to the tune of the originals and completely fail to pay John Lennon, George Harrison, and Apple Records. That's exactly what Star Control 2 did, though--it not only failed to reimburse Binary Systems, but also left the other developers out in the cold while pocketing money for work they did.
And, yeah, I know that some of the developers from Binary went to Toys For Bob (I even mentioned one of the most important in my post). They completely screwed everyone else from the original dev team who didn't come with them, though. Which isn't maybe the worst crime in history, but it would make them wildly hypocritical if they try to pursue a similar claim against anyone else--which I'm not saying they've done, but my response was to someone who intimated that such action was on the table. It'd be ludicrous under the circumstances.
Unless they work with Toys for Bob, they can't reference anything in Star Control 1 or 2 because Toys for Bob retains the copyright for the characters and story.
http://www.incgamers.com/2013/07/open-source-star-control-2-team-express-doubts-over-atari-ip-sale
The idea that Toys for Bob of all people would pursue a claim of someone ripping them off is pretty rich, given that Star Control was a thinly veiled ripoff of Starflight (which itself has a better claim to "best PC game of all time" than Star Control 2 does). Reiche was even involved in the Starflight development, so it's not like they didn't know exactly what they were doing.
Of course, someone should take odds on whether or not a reboot can come close to doing as well as the orignal (the original #2 that is.. StarCon was a fine but simplistic game and StarCon 3 did not exist. IT DID NOT EXIST I TELL YOU). Still, I'll play a sequel just on the chance it comes close.
The original was Starflight; Star Control II was a graphical facelift with some arcade stuff tacked on, a less interesting story, and much weaker RPG aspects. It's a good game and was a nice refresh, and it's obviously a little less dated looking, but basically everything it did well had been done better in Starflight (which is arguably the best PC game of all time if you adjust for era).
And Pacific Rim and After Earth will be probably be profitable once the international take is tallied, even before DVD and Netflix and other secondary revenues come into play. After Earth's already taken in over $235 million on a $130 million budget, so it's coming up on recouping marketing costs and still has a little juice left (the average movie spends about half its budget again on production costs, but big blockbusters raise that percentage a bit).
Pacific Rim will probably make a fair profit--it's built for the international market in a lot of ways (including an international cast and a director who's been successful and is and respected internationally). It's already essentially broken even on production costs even before opening in China and Japan (where it should make a fair bit of cash), and still probably has $40 million or more of burn left in the US.
That's even without getting into what a "massive flop" is--the Lone Ranger looks like a lock to lose money, but it also doesn't look like it'll be a huge fiasco. More of a moderate disappointment, financially.
You're essentially saying "doctors shouldn't move to small towns, and shouldn't have lives if they do". That's shitty. My dad spent literally half his days on call when he was active, which is very common for any kind of specialist outside of big cities (if you're one of two eye surgeons in the local town, you're on call half the time--you might rarely get called but when you do it can be life-or-death, or at least blindness-or-sight quite frequently).
Saying "go rent a movie instead" is glib. You're right that big flat screens and home surround are changing the calculus for movies, but that just shifts the argument slightly--if other places of public performance took that approach, such doctors could almost never go to the symphony, live theater, etc. The problem isn't the technology, it's the assholes abusing it.
It's not the outgoing calls, it's the incoming. My dad relied on his pager 24/7 3-4 days a week even back in the 70s to let him know when he had to head into the hospital, and it's not uncommon in a small town for doctors to have a similar call schedule these days. Put the theater (and symphony, and theater, and wherever else the same sorts of arguments apply) in a Faraday cage and he spends more than half his life not being able to partake in any public performance. Which might be okay, I don't know, but it's a complicated call.
IMO the best thing to do is just let the market handle it--if "adult" quiet showings make money, they'll do them. If Rocky Horror style shows where people yell and throw stuff at the screen are popular, they'll do those. And while they aren't quite IMAX with 7.1, home theaters have come a long way: high-def with THX surround is leaps and bounds ahead of DVD on Trinitron, let alone the VHS on crappy tubes that people watched in the 80s. And it allows you to set whatever absolute rules you want if the cinema's decisions aren't to your liking.
The information is bad to begin with. If an organization sends out a coupon for tickets to some sporting event, but only to men on their list, then they're going to annoy a lot of men, and miss a lot of sales opportunities from women. (and yes, I'm using an obvious/stereotypical example). The list of products that men never buy (but women do buy), and which women never buy (but men do buy) is exceedingly short: I can't actually think of a single product on the list. If a marketing company is using that identifier as a way to target advertising, they are completely missing the point of collecting data in the first place.
It actually sounds as though you're missing the point of marketing databases. They aren't meant to be absolute; they're inherently statistical attempts to target things at the groups most likely to buy things. The marketers know full well that not everyone they send to will be interested and not everyone they don't send to wouldn't be interested in their product, they're just looking for the biggest bang for the advertising buck. Sure, there are some guys who will pick up Vagisil and some women who will buy Lotrimin Jock Itch, but when it comes down to spending your advertising budget in a way that gets the best ROI that's not who most marketers are going to target--they have no interest in being fair or nondiscriminatory, or even accurate. It's all about making money.
Gender and sex are synonyms in English. The attempt to redefine them in recent years has no historical or etymological basis, and smacks of a 1984-style Newspeak where people attempt to redefine language for political reasons--something like "gender/sex identity" would be a less confusing (and less wrong) way of addressing the matter.
Others have noted that in most databases it shouldn't matter--if you want to store a salutation, store a salutation. Outside of limited contexts (e.g. medical records, where you almost certainly want both and definitely want genetic gender) there really isn't a good reason to ask the question. A lot of places it's used as a lazy shorthand to apply stereotypical inferences, when you'd really be better off asking other questions.
(See, e.g., http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gender which notes that the primary definition of "gender" (outside of the linguistic context, which is totally off topic) is "sex". The OED concurs. )
Was this in the US? If so, that's a pretty shocking oversight. FMLA requires that companies over 50 employees grant 12 weeks leave to anyone (within certain restrictions--you have to have been employed there for over a year and work a minimum number of hours) having a child, maternity or paternity; it's not binding on smaller companies, but it's a pretty gross oversight to build an HR system that doesn't account for the fact that the company might grow.
If it were rare and sent once, it could be useful, but the system as currently implemented constantly spams you with updates, the way traditional cut-in warnings on TV do. Once I know that there's a major snowstorm in my area, I don't need impossible-to-turn-off push notifications every hour just telling me that there is still a major snowstorm and here is a routine update.
The only impossible-to-turn-off push notifications are Presidential Alerts (the weather and AMBER alerts can be easily turned off from settings).
Those are beyond rare--there has _never_ been one sent out in the history of the Emergency Alert System/Emergency Broadcast System, not even 9/11 triggered one.
Google's search engine was and it still is the main drive behind the company. But Maps, with their scrollable Ajax tiles pretty much made competing products look like a toy
But Google Maps isn't really a Google innovation--it was conceived by 2 Technologies, who pitched the idea to them. Google certainly recognized the value and ran with it (and acquired them in 2005).
This article must be flamebait. Google didnt invent much, there were dozens of search engines when it came around
There were, but they sucked. And I say this as someone who was at Carnegie Mellon when they came up with Lycos (and had been through webcrawler, and archie and veronica in the pre-http days), and suffered through altavista when it was still at digital.com and plenty of other early efforts.
The idea of using the number of links to a page as an indication of its importance was huge, and it and the rest of PageRank were truly innovative--you went from normally going through 5-10 pages of results and sometimes more to almost always having the thing you were looking for on the first page. Simply the concept of having an "I'm feeling lucky" button was unthinkable in the earlier days.
They were also among the earlier places to recognize that XMLHTTP/XmlHttpRequest wasn't just an Outlook plugin, bringing AJAX into the mainstream (which was hugely significant, and one of the reasons we're not saddled with shitty Flash sites anymore).
Even facebook didnt invent
They're the obvious outlier here, they haven't invented crap. They've tied together other technologies in ways that people like, built a network, and marketed well, but they've never had anything technically significant.
That page only has comments going back to December for me. My complete posting history goes back over a decade.
Forget games, let's talk about work. I was running at 1600x1200 on my 15" CRT in 1997, and it wasn't state of the art. I could very comfortably have multiple 80 column editors or terminals beside each other with nice resolution fonts. LCDs/LEDs are great in a lot of ways, but they were a step backward in resolution (the same terminals or editors leave a bit of overlap on sub-1400 pixel widescreen LCD screens, unless I dial down the fonts to crappier quality).
It'd be awesome to finally get back to 15+ year old technology again on that front.
Please. Institutions are about as humorless and paranoid as it gets. I am surprised the mental health professionals at NASA didn't read the lyrics to that song and conclude that they had to remotely put this guy down.
His version has very bland, sanitized lyrics. There's no "tell my wife I love her very much", no circuit's dead, no "planet earth is blue and there's nothing I can do", basically none of the lyrics that make the original both great and depressing.
It's definitely cool given the circumstances and I'm all about any boost it may give to space exploration, but it's pretty soulless compared to the original, with none of the existential loneliness of the original (probably for exactly the reason you imply).
That's all true, but has nothing to do with what I was discussing.
The post I was replying to implies that there's a new result proving that AES or 3DES is secure (which would have profound implications not only on cryptography but on greater questions of computability) or that there's a version of TLS that uses one time pads or something. I was attempting to get at exactly what was being claimed.