It will be a wireless connection and it won't be a point to point connection as far as I know. A satellite will broadcast its information to everyone in that 'cell'. And it that regard it should qualitatively work like any wireless network that sends to multiple clients at the same time. Here every additional participant's information becomes noise to you.
Don't expect too much if you're interested in gaming.
The law is a proposal which has been rejected so often that it entered the last and final chance a proposal gets in EU legislature. However the article here makes it sound like it was to be ratified this week. There was even a different article on/. about this a few days ago. https://slashdot.org/story/19/...
Most likely the Parliament and Council would disagree again, won't find a compromise both are happy with and the proposal fails. Then it'd be off the tables for some time, because the Council most certainly will be back at it with a slightly differently worded proposal.
Anyway, the Parliament listening to public opinion once in a while is being attributed to the stink caused by EU citizens, who generally dislike the idea. So keep it up.
It's one of the thousand cuts, yes. But if you single that out as one of the main reasons, it does make a statement about one's priorities.
And those would be a focus on political BS in this case, I think. Something that has been plaguing and deteriorated the quality of this site for quite some time. I don't like that.
To be honest, I didn't really like any of the movies as a whole. With all the money, time, and today's technology they got at their disposal they ought to have done a much better job.
Finn was the one character I liked in TFA.
He had a dramatic past. He was part of 'the bad guys'. He didn't like it there. He did something on his own to change things and got out. He joined the resistance. And he kept fighting until he was wounded critically (?).
That is a pretty solid character development that made Finn interesting, although it certainly could be better.
I did not appreciate that much what they did to him in TLJ. They were making him mostly a coward who just wanted to get away from things, abandoning his comrades in arms in the process. To keep himself together and rooted in reality he needed a better half because he couldn't do it on his own.
Here I interpreted his self-sacrifice as a suicide attempt. Another way to escape a situation he didn't want to be in. However not by fighting for a chance to change things (hero's death), but by essentially giving up through suicide. Essentially a soldier with PTSD who tried to quit service in yet another military but is forced by the circumstances to keep fighting. It is reasonable that someone like that needs some external help. But for the sake of the story, eventually Finn should find some solid ground and then start to pull his own weight again.
This is how I see things anyway. Doesn't mean that it is the only possibility. I can only be more certain after I've seen the next movie.
My point is that you can emphasize with whatever as long as the characters and plots are solid. If we can see beyond species, maybe we can see beyond gender? A difficult thought concept?
A strong female character can work. See Alien or Terminator. Weak male characters can work. Although here I can't name any specific movies, because most of them have proper character development.
In general all 'good' characters have both flaws/weaknesses and strengths. Sometimes there are no real strengths to begin with and they only emerge later through plot development where the character fights to overcome obstacles or dies.
That's where the new Star Wars are lacking in my opinion. You've got your Mary Sue type characters, who are just too powerful and with to few flaws, which happen to be female characters. Then you've got incompetent characters who just suck at pretty much everything on the side of the 'bad guys', who happen to be male.
Imagine general Holdo being a male character. An old aristocrat who looks down on hot-shot Poe because he doesn't like his boorish behaviour and tactics. So he pulls rank to keep Poe down. I can tell you that the audience would have disliked that character.
And through that 'reductio ad SJW'-filter you again could say that this is the SJW way to depict how the patriarchy puts down the common man.
Can you aspire to be a toy? A car? A robot? A feeling?
Not really, but Disney Pixar made it work somehow in their respective animated movies.
Have you seen Short Circuit or E.T?
How do they manage that? My hypothesis is that they probably know how to write characters and plots the audience can identify with no matter what the characters are specifically.
I don't think it necessarily did kill the possibilities. The bad writing and production did.
You can have a good story with strong female characters and weak male characters. It just has to be a good story with a solid plot.
Search your feelings. You will know it to be true.
Reductio ad SJW is about as good as an argument as claiming that men were responsible for all bad things that happened in history, because it was always men who were the leaders.
Well, if they criticized that, then they'd actually made a good point. There's tons of stuff that you may not like there.
But if you see post that focus on the SJW aspect, you pretty much know that they just jumped on the bandwagon and don't really have a lot of points on their own. I think it really says a lot about the person's own preoccupation with gender bullshit.
To use an analogy: It's kind of like saying that midi-chlorians ruined the prequels.
Yes, it was a stupid idea. They should not have done it that way. But is that really the main thing you should focus on when levering criticism towards those movies? Would the movies have been better if they did it different? Would Episode 7 and 8 have been better if they changed the gender roles?
Personally I do not think so. Gaping plot holes would still be there. Illogical character actions would still be there. Inconsistencies and or retconning would still be there.
If you're afraid that someone may get access to your fingerprint and uses it without your authorization, know that a finger print is easy to obtain if someone intended to do so. Whenever you touch a smooth surface with your finger, it leaves a good enough print that someone can take using something as simple as scotch tape.
It is so easy that a digitalized fingerprint it is not suited for anything that is supposed to be secure.
It only makes sense to use your finger as a lock mechanism for mundane stuff you still don't want everyone to access on the fly.
Think of a chain link fence some people put around their gardens or whatever. There you also have a door that is locked with something as simple as a padlock.
It's not at all secure and can easily be broken into by using simple tools. But it does serve some purpose to deter some trespassers and stop them from just taking stuff that lies around your garden.
Of course the more sensitive stuff you probably won't put into your garden in the first place. For that you may have a locker/safe.
Unfortunately system access levels do not appear to be a concept all people can wrap their heads around.
Black and white think and nirvana fallacy is so much more convenient.
Because biometric locks are convenient and fast. Is that so difficult to understand?
You can use your finger to unlock something while you don't even look at it. While a more secure password with a decent enough length and a wide range of characters and require a lot more attention to be entered correctly. That is something most people won't like for all the mundane and other non critical stuff they do on their phones.
Someone can be quite up front about wanting to sacrifice your first born to the Bloodgod and state that in their contract you have to sign.
Unfortunately for them, if the terms of that contract violate local law the contract is void.
Exactly this is what is going on here.
If you don't get the product you agreed to when you ordered for the price you agreed to, because they substituted it for something else or want more money than you initially agreed upon, the contract can be voided. And if there's the equivalent of a class action lawsuit brought up against such practices, the judicial and executive system may shut those practices down.
They can bring the Dash Button back if they removed that part and simply don't deliver anything if the wanted articles aren't available.
Just yesterday, I was fixing a computer of an acquaintance whose HDD started to make weird clacking noises and would not boot their Windows 7 Pro any more.
Ordered an SSD, downloaded the latest Win 7 Pro 64 image and created a bootable usb drive. Installation of hard and software went without any issues. Fortunately the new install would recognize the old drive. So I ran ProduKey which found the old key.
Activation would not work. I called the helpline (which is usual here in Germany for activating OEM Windows, therefore I've lost count of how often I've done this), followed the robocall instructions. It said the key was invalid and let me talk with a technician. The technician with the funny accent then told me that the key was blacklisted and that I should contact the system vendor and hang up.
Now I know for a fact that their licence was genuine, because we found the original key later. Well, thanks for nothing Microsoft helpline.
Fortunately acquiring a new, genuine OEM key costs only something like 5€.
Educators don't have an easy job in our country.
Parents and politicians basically expect them to treat every child like it was their own in their stressful jobs (especially with younger children). Given all that the pay they receive is lousy. And it doesn't help to attract more people to this profession. This is part of a more generalized problem we have with caregivers and nurses.
Unless you get to college grade eduction, where students are participating out of their own volition, I've seen a couple of teachers burn out and quit their jobs because of mental issues (anecdotal). Fortunately for me, I got a low stress job in academia and the students and interns in our lab are usually very cooperative.
"We" nerds, or at least a subset of us, have been blaming parenting also on the parents for some time, if I remember correctly.
I think one of the main problems is that blaming the parents for not spending enough time looking after their children is not something many people who have children themselves want to hear.
A lot of people don't want others to tell them how to raise their kids. And let's face it, most people don't handle criticism well, but are prone to shift the blame to some scapegoat.
This parent behaviour is understandable to some degree. If nobody can stay at home any more since the single parent or both you have to work, maybe even more than one job in this economy, there isn't a lot of time left to watch after your kids.
Here in Germany a for example people rather call for daycare centres where they can put their children in, or they want higher child support (which is paid by the state in Germany), so they can keep up the living standards they are used to while staying at home. The latter is almost the most reasonable thing.
Hence politicians also don't like to blame the parents, who are their constituents. They try to come off a family friendly and rather propose solution like censorship, education being shoehorned into the entertainment, and other forms of 'protection'. You know, things that tackle the symptoms instead of looking for the cause.
And there I thought that mentioning methods "like bio leaching" was implying that you should not just dump those things anywhere.
There are microorganisms which can reduce arsenades from arsenites found in inorganic compounds. Apparently this is already a growing problem in India, where bacteria leaches arsenic from the soil into their ground water, which then contaminates large areas and other organisms with arsenic.
As far as gallium arsenide goes, I'm aware of some bacteria that can leach gallium from the compound, possibly exposing the arsenic to the environment.
All perfectly natural bacteria and quite possibly not the end of this since their metabolisms are highly flexible.
Bottom line: Don't dump your electronics just anywhere. Don't burn your electronics. Bring them to a facility that is capable of adequate disposal/recycling.
There are alternatives to arsenic doped semiconductors. Only for applications like high performance photovoltaics those gallium arsenide junctions appear to be indispensable. And those appliances are more likely to orbit Earth or go further into space than being put on roofs.
There's also lead free solder. Various countries like California or other organizations like the EU have strong regulations for lead in consumer products. Of course just banning something does not make it go away. But if your electronic parts are manufactured in one of those places, odds are that they won't contain lead.
If you import them from Asia for example or get your hands on something that was manufactured in the 2000's or even before that, it may be a different story.
Furthermore the EU Commission did their own risk assessment of LEDs in 2011. They used various LEDs bought in the US. If the tests they conducted are trustworthy, they found no arsenic and lead in white LEDs, which are most commonly used to replace CFLs, light bulbs, or other electrical light sources.
Other than that we have to keep in mind how those semi conductors in LEDs are isolated from their environment.
Your usual LED and high power LED has their semiconductor parts encased in epoxy often with silica mixed in. COB modules, which can be seen as high power LEDs also mix some phosphorus into that.
These cases are pretty durable and should not easily break or degrade on their own. Especially if we consider how easy a fluorescent lamp can break and release (a small amount of) mercury in its environment.
That's true and good but LED bulbs aren't exactly devoid of toxic materials. They often contain lead, arsenic, and other materials that need to be properly handled when disposing of them. Safer than CFLs in most cases but not anything you want to go around licking if you get my point.
Not a lot of surprises there.
Arsenic is often used for semiconductor doping (for GaAs junctions) because of its electron properties. Lead is used for soldering, which you'll find, surprise surprise, in pretty much all electronic and electric devices.
But the (un)scientificamerican article is about the same kind of stupid like people claiming that flu vaccines contain Thiomersal which contains mercury and will lead to authism. You could also say that table salt is comprises of chlorine and sodium. Both of which are caustic and a serious health hazard when they're on their own. But when you have them forming an ionic bond and result in what we call table salt, they become something different.
Suffice to say that this arsenic is in pretty solid from inside of the semiconductors. It won't escape them easily.
Unless you grind those LEDs up and then spread them around in the environment or eat them, and or use other methods to extract those elements like bio leaching , these substances in LEDs ought to be of no big concern.
The choice to become a zombie or not is yours; regardless of whether you own and use such a phone or not.
Personally I know plenty of people who don't pull out their smartphone at every occasion they may get bored. And pretty much all of them are Millennials (if that term is even appropriate for people outside of the US). Anyway, most of them owned a cellphone in middle school already.
A smartphone is basically a hand-held personal computer with a terrible (but under the circumstances practical) user interface, that can also take photos and record videos with sound. If you do not become a zombie when you sit in front of your PC at home, odds are that you can manage that with a smartphone as well.
Only if you don't think you can pull that off when given the possibility to be constantly exposed to a computer, staying away from it might be the rational choice.
Slashdot Mirror
If you see SJW shit everywhere, maybe the problem is you.
No, it's the void the alien space craft from the X-Files movie left.
It will be a wireless connection and it won't be a point to point connection as far as I know. A satellite will broadcast its information to everyone in that 'cell'. And it that regard it should qualitatively work like any wireless network that sends to multiple clients at the same time. Here every additional participant's information becomes noise to you.
Don't expect too much if you're interested in gaming.
The law is a proposal which has been rejected so often that it entered the last and final chance a proposal gets in EU legislature. However the article here makes it sound like it was to be ratified this week. There was even a different article on /. about this a few days ago. https://slashdot.org/story/19/...
Most likely the Parliament and Council would disagree again, won't find a compromise both are happy with and the proposal fails. Then it'd be off the tables for some time, because the Council most certainly will be back at it with a slightly differently worded proposal.
Anyway, the Parliament listening to public opinion once in a while is being attributed to the stink caused by EU citizens, who generally dislike the idea. So keep it up.
Fair point.
I'll find a better analogy.
It's one of the thousand cuts, yes. But if you single that out as one of the main reasons, it does make a statement about one's priorities.
And those would be a focus on political BS in this case, I think. Something that has been plaguing and deteriorated the quality of this site for quite some time. I don't like that.
To be honest, I didn't really like any of the movies as a whole. With all the money, time, and today's technology they got at their disposal they ought to have done a much better job.
Finn was the one character I liked in TFA.
He had a dramatic past. He was part of 'the bad guys'. He didn't like it there. He did something on his own to change things and got out. He joined the resistance. And he kept fighting until he was wounded critically (?).
That is a pretty solid character development that made Finn interesting, although it certainly could be better.
I did not appreciate that much what they did to him in TLJ. They were making him mostly a coward who just wanted to get away from things, abandoning his comrades in arms in the process. To keep himself together and rooted in reality he needed a better half because he couldn't do it on his own.
Here I interpreted his self-sacrifice as a suicide attempt. Another way to escape a situation he didn't want to be in. However not by fighting for a chance to change things (hero's death), but by essentially giving up through suicide. Essentially a soldier with PTSD who tried to quit service in yet another military but is forced by the circumstances to keep fighting.
It is reasonable that someone like that needs some external help. But for the sake of the story, eventually Finn should find some solid ground and then start to pull his own weight again.
This is how I see things anyway. Doesn't mean that it is the only possibility. I can only be more certain after I've seen the next movie.
My point is that you can emphasize with whatever as long as the characters and plots are solid. If we can see beyond species, maybe we can see beyond gender? A difficult thought concept?
A strong female character can work. See Alien or Terminator. Weak male characters can work. Although here I can't name any specific movies, because most of them have proper character development.
In general all 'good' characters have both flaws/weaknesses and strengths. Sometimes there are no real strengths to begin with and they only emerge later through plot development where the character fights to overcome obstacles or dies.
That's where the new Star Wars are lacking in my opinion. You've got your Mary Sue type characters, who are just too powerful and with to few flaws, which happen to be female characters. Then you've got incompetent characters who just suck at pretty much everything on the side of the 'bad guys', who happen to be male.
Imagine general Holdo being a male character. An old aristocrat who looks down on hot-shot Poe because he doesn't like his boorish behaviour and tactics. So he pulls rank to keep Poe down. I can tell you that the audience would have disliked that character.
And through that 'reductio ad SJW'-filter you again could say that this is the SJW way to depict how the patriarchy puts down the common man.
Can you aspire to be a toy? A car? A robot? A feeling?
Not really, but Disney Pixar made it work somehow in their respective animated movies.
Have you seen Short Circuit or E.T?
How do they manage that? My hypothesis is that they probably know how to write characters and plots the audience can identify with no matter what the characters are specifically.
I don't think it necessarily did kill the possibilities. The bad writing and production did.
You can have a good story with strong female characters and weak male characters. It just has to be a good story with a solid plot.
Search your feelings. You will know it to be true.
Reductio ad SJW is about as good as an argument as claiming that men were responsible for all bad things that happened in history, because it was always men who were the leaders.
Well, if they criticized that, then they'd actually made a good point. There's tons of stuff that you may not like there.
But if you see post that focus on the SJW aspect, you pretty much know that they just jumped on the bandwagon and don't really have a lot of points on their own. I think it really says a lot about the person's own preoccupation with gender bullshit.
To use an analogy: It's kind of like saying that midi-chlorians ruined the prequels.
Yes, it was a stupid idea. They should not have done it that way. But is that really the main thing you should focus on when levering criticism towards those movies? Would the movies have been better if they did it different? Would Episode 7 and 8 have been better if they changed the gender roles?
Personally I do not think so. Gaping plot holes would still be there. Illogical character actions would still be there. Inconsistencies and or retconning would still be there.
What else can you use it for?
If you're afraid that someone may get access to your fingerprint and uses it without your authorization, know that a finger print is easy to obtain if someone intended to do so. Whenever you touch a smooth surface with your finger, it leaves a good enough print that someone can take using something as simple as scotch tape. It is so easy that a digitalized fingerprint it is not suited for anything that is supposed to be secure.
It only makes sense to use your finger as a lock mechanism for mundane stuff you still don't want everyone to access on the fly.
Think of a chain link fence some people put around their gardens or whatever. There you also have a door that is locked with something as simple as a padlock.
It's not at all secure and can easily be broken into by using simple tools. But it does serve some purpose to deter some trespassers and stop them from just taking stuff that lies around your garden.
Of course the more sensitive stuff you probably won't put into your garden in the first place. For that you may have a locker/safe.
Unfortunately system access levels do not appear to be a concept all people can wrap their heads around.
Black and white think and nirvana fallacy is so much more convenient.
Because biometric locks are convenient and fast. Is that so difficult to understand?
You can use your finger to unlock something while you don't even look at it. While a more secure password with a decent enough length and a wide range of characters and require a lot more attention to be entered correctly. That is something most people won't like for all the mundane and other non critical stuff they do on their phones.
Someone can be quite up front about wanting to sacrifice your first born to the Bloodgod and state that in their contract you have to sign.
Unfortunately for them, if the terms of that contract violate local law the contract is void.
Exactly this is what is going on here.
If you don't get the product you agreed to when you ordered for the price you agreed to, because they substituted it for something else or want more money than you initially agreed upon, the contract can be voided. And if there's the equivalent of a class action lawsuit brought up against such practices, the judicial and executive system may shut those practices down.
They can bring the Dash Button back if they removed that part and simply don't deliver anything if the wanted articles aren't available.
Just yesterday, I was fixing a computer of an acquaintance whose HDD started to make weird clacking noises and would not boot their Windows 7 Pro any more.
Ordered an SSD, downloaded the latest Win 7 Pro 64 image and created a bootable usb drive. Installation of hard and software went without any issues. Fortunately the new install would recognize the old drive. So I ran ProduKey which found the old key.
Activation would not work. I called the helpline (which is usual here in Germany for activating OEM Windows, therefore I've lost count of how often I've done this), followed the robocall instructions. It said the key was invalid and let me talk with a technician. The technician with the funny accent then told me that the key was blacklisted and that I should contact the system vendor and hang up.
Now I know for a fact that their licence was genuine, because we found the original key later. Well, thanks for nothing Microsoft helpline.
Fortunately acquiring a new, genuine OEM key costs only something like 5€.
At this point it would be cheaper for companies to just go Wild West with our data and pay the tiny fine (if any) after they're caught.
That is what they have been doing, as far as I can see.
Educators don't have an easy job in our country.
Parents and politicians basically expect them to treat every child like it was their own in their stressful jobs (especially with younger children).
Given all that the pay they receive is lousy. And it doesn't help to attract more people to this profession. This is part of a more generalized problem we have with caregivers and nurses.
Unless you get to college grade eduction, where students are participating out of their own volition, I've seen a couple of teachers burn out and quit their jobs because of mental issues (anecdotal).
Fortunately for me, I got a low stress job in academia and the students and interns in our lab are usually very cooperative.
"We" nerds, or at least a subset of us, have been blaming parenting also on the parents for some time, if I remember correctly.
I think one of the main problems is that blaming the parents for not spending enough time looking after their children is not something many people who have children themselves want to hear.
A lot of people don't want others to tell them how to raise their kids. And let's face it, most people don't handle criticism well, but are prone to shift the blame to some scapegoat.
This parent behaviour is understandable to some degree. If nobody can stay at home any more since the single parent or both you have to work, maybe even more than one job in this economy, there isn't a lot of time left to watch after your kids.
Here in Germany a for example people rather call for daycare centres where they can put their children in, or they want higher child support (which is paid by the state in Germany), so they can keep up the living standards they are used to while staying at home. The latter is almost the most reasonable thing.
Hence politicians also don't like to blame the parents, who are their constituents. They try to come off a family friendly and rather propose solution like censorship, education being shoehorned into the entertainment, and other forms of 'protection'. You know, things that tackle the symptoms instead of looking for the cause.
They've been the target of cyber attacks in the past. The prominent ones among the AfD also uses twitter extensively.
It's very doubtful that their own actions prevented them from having their informations leaked.
Of course this is totally a competition. And that explosion was totally a retaliatory act.
Disclaimer: I'm being sarcastic.
And there I thought that mentioning methods "like bio leaching" was implying that you should not just dump those things anywhere.
There are microorganisms which can reduce arsenades from arsenites found in inorganic compounds. Apparently this is already a growing problem in India, where bacteria leaches arsenic from the soil into their ground water, which then contaminates large areas and other organisms with arsenic.
As far as gallium arsenide goes, I'm aware of some bacteria that can leach gallium from the compound, possibly exposing the arsenic to the environment.
All perfectly natural bacteria and quite possibly not the end of this since their metabolisms are highly flexible.
Bottom line: Don't dump your electronics just anywhere. Don't burn your electronics. Bring them to a facility that is capable of adequate disposal/recycling.
Just some additional things for clarification.
There are alternatives to arsenic doped semiconductors. Only for applications like high performance photovoltaics those gallium arsenide junctions appear to be indispensable. And those appliances are more likely to orbit Earth or go further into space than being put on roofs.
There's also lead free solder. Various countries like California or other organizations like the EU have strong regulations for lead in consumer products. Of course just banning something does not make it go away. But if your electronic parts are manufactured in one of those places, odds are that they won't contain lead.
If you import them from Asia for example or get your hands on something that was manufactured in the 2000's or even before that, it may be a different story.
Furthermore the EU Commission did their own risk assessment of LEDs in 2011. They used various LEDs bought in the US. If the tests they conducted are trustworthy, they found no arsenic and lead in white LEDs, which are most commonly used to replace CFLs, light bulbs, or other electrical light sources.
Other than that we have to keep in mind how those semi conductors in LEDs are isolated from their environment.
Your usual LED and high power LED has their semiconductor parts encased in epoxy often with silica mixed in. COB modules, which can be seen as high power LEDs also mix some phosphorus into that.
These cases are pretty durable and should not easily break or degrade on their own. Especially if we consider how easy a fluorescent lamp can break and release (a small amount of) mercury in its environment.
That's true and good but LED bulbs aren't exactly devoid of toxic materials. They often contain lead, arsenic, and other materials that need to be properly handled when disposing of them. Safer than CFLs in most cases but not anything you want to go around licking if you get my point.
Not a lot of surprises there.
Arsenic is often used for semiconductor doping (for GaAs junctions) because of its electron properties. Lead is used for soldering, which you'll find, surprise surprise, in pretty much all electronic and electric devices.
But the (un)scientificamerican article is about the same kind of stupid like people claiming that flu vaccines contain Thiomersal which contains mercury and will lead to authism. You could also say that table salt is comprises of chlorine and sodium. Both of which are caustic and a serious health hazard when they're on their own. But when you have them forming an ionic bond and result in what we call table salt, they become something different.
Suffice to say that this arsenic is in pretty solid from inside of the semiconductors. It won't escape them easily.
Unless you grind those LEDs up and then spread them around in the environment or eat them, and or use other methods to extract those elements like bio leaching , these substances in LEDs ought to be of no big concern.
The choice to become a zombie or not is yours; regardless of whether you own and use such a phone or not.
Personally I know plenty of people who don't pull out their smartphone at every occasion they may get bored. And pretty much all of them are Millennials (if that term is even appropriate for people outside of the US). Anyway, most of them owned a cellphone in middle school already.
A smartphone is basically a hand-held personal computer with a terrible (but under the circumstances practical) user interface, that can also take photos and record videos with sound. If you do not become a zombie when you sit in front of your PC at home, odds are that you can manage that with a smartphone as well.
Only if you don't think you can pull that off when given the possibility to be constantly exposed to a computer, staying away from it might be the rational choice.