there's a huge gender imbalance in nursing and primary education as well; when will society get around to 'fixing' that?
They are being fixed. There are programs by nurse's unions on hiring more male nurses, and there are programs for teachers as well in increasing the number of male teachers teaching elementary school.
Don't assume that because you don't know about it it's not a big deal. There are programs for increasing the proportion of females in trades (construction, welding, etc) run by various trades organizations, and plenty of pilot groups also aimed at increasing the gross under representation of women in the cockpit. (Funny enough, the same complaints show up as well when special women-only events aimed at getting girls interested in aviation.). Oh yeah, many of these organizations are also trying to get under-represented minorities in as well.
And yes, all these groups recognize it's not just diversity that's a good thing, but having people to "stick together". Male nurses are very valuable when dealing with obstinate male patients who are sexist, for example. As are older doctors for those patients who cannot fathom being treated by a doctor who's younger than their kids.
"Those businesses lose out because people say 'Unless I can book this online I'm not going to book,'"
And if I were a business owner I would say fine! We don't need your pretentious ass darkening our doorway. The punter likely would be more bother than they are worth.
And likely, those people are going to be flakes anyways.
Restaurants are finding that online bookings are terrible for business - they're finding people would book a reservation and never show up (which costs the business money since that table cannot be used for a walk-in paying customer). Turns out people (ab)use online reservation systems to make 3-5 restaurant reservations so they have a choice of where to go for dinner. Of course, they never cancel the unused reservations.
In the end, it means terrible policies for the rest of us - some restaurants now require a credit card to hold the reservation, and will charge no-show fees if you don't cancel. Or they reduce the number of reservations they allow to reduce the number of no-shows occupying tables and denying the table to walk-ins or people who actually use reservations. Or we end up like the airlines where reserved tables are overbooked.
Chances are people who actually call in and talk to them will actually show up.
>> Sony isn't quite ready to jump from consoles to cloud-based gaming
Why would they jump? If they can capture the market of people who want "games that work even if the Internet is down" and "games that don't glitch out if it's raining" and "games that work even if gamecompany takes the online version down" then that's a pretty big market.
Except Sony ALREADY does cloud based gaming. It's called Playstation Now. It's how Sony does "backwards compatibility" with the PS4.
In fact, until the weekend, Microsoft was pretty much the only one not offering a cloud-based gaming option. (Nintendo does it for some games on Switch in Japan).
I recall reading that some early body cameras were designed to continuously record into a 30-60s buffer, and then when the camera is set to 'record' it dumps the buffer and then appends in real time. Whether this actually happens or is better or worse is up for debate.
I think technology should've improved to the point where we can get a day's worth of recordings. The unit records immediately once taken off the charger and stops at the end of the shift being placed back on the charger.
To make life easier, you can timestamp events - when the weapon is drawn a mark is made on the recording. Likewise more markers can be made - either manually pushing a button (e.g., arriving at a scene), as well as "off duty" and "on duty" markers to indicate when the cop went on a break (or the bathroom) and when they returned.
The markers are informative - the unit is always recording, but markers can be made to quickly index the videos. The raw recording is protected and only releasable through a court order (alongside the timestamps) but snippets can be made available freely
Fun fact, Infiniti infotainment displays for late model G-series as well as early Q50s had their polarization filters oriented such that if wore polarized sun glasses your displays would be nearly black (unless you tilted your head of course...). Thankfully someone finally got the memo and fixed it--for my 2018 Q50 at least.
Pilots are required to have non-polarized sunglasses for the same reason - many avionics displays have the same issue - they will blank out with polarized sunglasses. And it doesn't matter the plane - be it a 737, A320, or a dinky Cessna, or whatever - all have examples of not working with polarized sunglasses.
But only because the telecom companies let them, and the government has done nothing to ban the practice.
Spoofing should be illegal unless the company doing the spoofing owns both numbers.
That this is mostly an American+Canadian problem. The practice is illegal in most other countries.
Spoofing may not be illegal, but scamming still is. And "other countries' have plenty of scams still. In fact, there are the old "microsoft tech support scam", the "refund scam" which is especially popular in the UK and plenty more.
To be honest, I can't tell you if the number is spoofed - you can say the number is for the Canada Revenue Agency, but on my phone, I see a bunch of digits. I don't' recognize the number, so spoof or not, I can't tell. (Do you know the number of the IRS without looking it up?)
The tax scam is pretty useless - when you're a family of 3 taxpayers, the message that says "we have discovered an irregularity in your tax filing" is a scam - WHOSE tax filing was bad? "Your" could mean any one of three taxpayers, and you know the government isn't that bad at identifying someone.
The refund scam and tech support scams are still rampant elsewhere in the world. Even if you eliminate spoofed numbers, you'll just be talking about a different set of scams.
As for spoofing, there are valid reasons for it - there are often more numbers than lines at a business, so being able to return the proper DID number (or main line number) is useful instead of a completely useless line identifier. VoIP would collapse if they couldn't spoof - VoIP providers would return a random phone number to called parties who would probably not answer your phone call because they don't recognize the phone number.
What should happen is providers do filtering of the number - if you're going to spoof, the number you spoof will only be of what you actually have. Similar to how source IP filtering works but for phone numbers. This pretty much leaves legitimate entities to spoof.
It would be a lot simpler to install a prompting screen at the back of the hall, and give an aimable mirror that can be plugged into the back of the seat ahead and that the patron could simply aim at the prompting screen.
A simple, low tech solution that will always work because it is so simple.
You may think you're joking, but actually, that's the system used by movie theatres to offer captioning for the hard of hearing - the back wall of a theatre is basically a large scrolling LED display with the captions and you wear special glasses that let you see it. It's not as bright as the projectors so you don't really see the light it projects, but it's large and big and generally near the projection window.
If a journalist on TV can view these security camera streams, imagine what a more determined person can do. In fact, they monitored the streams for several weeks until they could positively identify the house and confront the homeowner.
They then hired a pentesting company to hack someone who converted to all their high tech stuff, including being able to control their front door lock, take over their Nest cameras (and able to even get Alexa to do stuff for them).
Costco got into a fine mess last year when a South Korean golf ball supplier sold them surplus golf balls and Costco resold them under the Kirkland label at $29 for two dozen. The golf industry got turned upside when golfers realizaed that the Costco golf balls were better than the more expensive premium golf balls.
Well, I'm sure Costco didn't plan on that - all Costco did was buy golf balls from a little-known supplier in the US, and package and sell them under the Kirkland brand.
It just happened that the Koreans were making better balls than everyone else, but because they weren't known, it took Costco to make them known.
Shopping house brands is good - you can get some real savings over the brand name product, and depending on who actually makes the house brand, it might even be the premium product. The only reason they're cheaper is well, everyone knows the premium brand.
I buy Walmart branded stuff quite a few times - it often tastes the same but costs a lot less (a family size bag of chips for under $1 is nice over spending $3 for the normal branded stuff). Granted, it's not always good so I'd test them by buying one bag first and seeing if it's worth it. If it's awful, I don't buy any more and stick with the regular stuff. If it's good, I'd probably switch.
If Microsoft provide a layer that implements those important Google Play Services APIs then at least there will be an alternative to Google Android. It's still a bit baffling that the FOSS community hasn't stepped up to this, AOSP was a great base for an open and free mobile operating system but much like desktop Linux it seems the FOSS solution is destined to be a late-to-the-game, also-ran mess of NIH syndrome solutions that maybe a tiny percentage of devotees will use.
The problem is that "framework" stuff is generally "boring" and "not my itch" type development. FOSS is great for "scratch my itch" projects, but the boring infrastructure projects generally have to be subsidized by someone else
It's one of those unfortunate realities - unless the FOSS development is sponsored by a company, generally only the "exciting" stuff gets done
By 2005, the strategies were very obviously not working. Yet they did have a very recognizable brand. Some private investors thought they could salvage the company by more effective management. That's where the LA Times article picks up the story. Unfortunately for the private investors, 2005 was a very bad time to invest in struggling brick and mortar retailer with no signifocant online presence. That's the year Amazon introduced Amazon Prime, with free two-day shipping. The next year, Amazon launched Fulfillment by Amazon, which had thousands of retailers selling through Amazon.com. Amazon beat Toys R Us handily.
Wrong.
The problem was Bain Capital and a leveraged buy out that added the $6.2B in debt buying itself out. (For those who don't know, a leveraged buy out is where you use an asset as leverage to get a loan. IN this case, Bain Capital needed $6B to buy TRU. So what asset did they use? Well, TRU! Thus they bought TRU using a loan backed by the company itself. ).
They had an online presence. In fact, they were among the first stores to actually have a website, and while it's not as slick as Amazon was, they were holding their own.
2005 might have been a bad time, but they weathered through it, which means it's not the financial crisis that did them in. It's the debt - $6.2B is a lot of debt that corporate raiders added to them. They struggled, but their cashflow was enough to pay off their obligations, until 2015-2016 when they didn't make enough money to cover their obligations. Things spiraled from there.
"Private investors" my ass. It was Bain Capital and leveraged buy outs that did them in. Their numbers reflect this. You only call it "private investors" as a way to dodge the truth of the "investment".
Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target were all competitors, and yet they still managed. The only reason right now they can think of revival is after Bain Capital left and got the real investors screwed over. But once they got paid out, hey, no more crushing debt. Then again, those investors pretty much should've known they were buying into a Bain Capital investment.
Anyhow, it's all screwy, because you know who else owns the name? A bunch of financial investors in Canada who bought over the Canadian operations and still run it today. And you can bet they likely want their share of the US operations (TRU Canada loaned TRU corporate a bunch of money that actually put TRU Canada in trouble in 2015-2016 because TRU corporate defaulted. Except TRU Canada came out of it thanks to good revenue).
You don't have to call people "managers" for that, in California at least. Here, if you're classified "salaried/exempt", the company is exempt from paying you for overtime even though you're not a manager in title or in fact. Interestingly, you still get paid by the hour if you put in fewer than 40 hours per week.
It's probably not for salary/exempt people specifically, but more for non-union people. Unions are funny things, and for the most part, if you have a company, there will be both workers in the union and workers not in the union. The people not in the union (excluded and generally prohibited from joining the union) are management. So if you're classified as a "manager" you can't join the union, even if you're doing exactly the same thing the union guy is doing. (It also means if the union goes on strike, as management, you cover their duties as manager).
That's how it generally goes - they may have classed the non-union employees as managers to keep them from getting ideas and joining the union
The thing is after you automate the task, you are no longer the one producing the results. The computer is. Companies don't pay you for results, they pay you because your effort is worth more to them then what they are paying you for. The guy automated a task, he got paid for his work to automate that task. But being he wasn't doing anything after that, his contributions had ended.
The task may be automated, but one still needs to monitor the automation. There's no completely unmonitored automatic system out there because crap happens. Perhaps once in a while a data point comes in that corrupts the input file and makes screwy results, so you need to either fix the automation, fix the results of the automation, or manually enter the data.
Also, unless your job is to write the automation system, most likely it's to do the work, and you automated the boring parts of it, leaving you with more time to do other work. It's an important distinction because if you're let go, showing someone the automation won't help when the bird dropping hits the passive air propulsion unit. Hell, sometimes what happens is no one understands the automation, and because you left, no one understands how to do the work manually, so the end result is "we don't do things this way because it breaks this process...".
At the same time, the codecs used for video compression have improved, meaning most TV show episodes are about half the size as compared to 2011. The cap-friendly size back then was 350 MB for a typical 40 minute episode, now it's around 200 MB for 40 minutes.
Only if you like crap quality.
I notice that a half hour episode at decent quality with h.264 (and 1080i) is around 500MB nowadays and hour long episodes I generally go for the 800-1.2GB encodes with quality and surround sound.
YouTube video uploads by proper creators are similarly large - often more so since they minimally compress it so a 30 minute YouTube video can consume 2-3GB, and even more if they do 4K.
Quality demands have gone up and sites like YouTube reencode anyways so you want to preserve as much quality by doing as little compression as possible.
And yes, h.264 still powers most video sites since MPEG-LA was wise enough to see that the "free" license works wonders. h.265 licensing is screwy because of a few greedy people who want to charge for the "free" streaming currently using h.264. (h.264 rose to prominence because of the cheap licensing, while greedy folks for h.265 have pretty much killed its chances of taking over the web anytime soon).
Greed is likely to ensure that h.265 remains a niche instead of taking over from h.264, and the web will be a mix of h.264 and upcoming AV1.
However, it is also possible to completely disable the Intel Management Engine . . . in other words, "Disabled" mode. This is the mode that government agencies run in. They don't want to leave their own backdoor open.
This is the mode I would like to be able to set myself . . . or let the manufacturer do it for me . . . but they won't . . . take a guess why not . . . ?
Because users care about stuff like low power mode and suspend/sleep ability.
Intel ME is used to actually boot the processor and perform power management (because well, you can use it to remotely control power to the computer, so it already has the ability to change processor speeds and voltage settings).
Chances are "Disabled" mode isn't truly disabled - more like "enough to boot the processor and then spin" which will boot the processor, lock it at max normal frequency and power setting and then leave it at that with no way to alter it (because it requires ME firmware to do that and the ME subsystem is doing a "while (1);" spin, doing nothing).
Fine for government computers where the policy is to shut down your computer at the end of the day and sleep/hibernate is disabled. No need ME firmware to write to the register that tells the power supply to turn off.
Yes, devices came with thick, detailed manuals back then. People also typically didn't read those manuals. The vast majority of people either just stumbled their way through "figuring it out" or avoided the product entirely as being overly complicated.
These days, more work has gone into product design to make things intuitive so that people can just "figure it out" easier rather than providing the manual that will go unused anyways. At most things will typically come with a "Quick Start Guide" to give you the most basic of instructions to get the device up and going - and for the most part that's what the market wants.
Those manuals cost money - both to print and to pay someone to write in the first place. Offer the same product on the shelves - one without a manual and one that costs $5 extra that includes it. I'd wager quite a few dollars that the one without the manual will outsell the one that includes it 20 to 1.
Those points and one more - writing a printed manual took a lot of time. You're looking at a good 6 months of advance writing to get it all done and printed so it can be put in the box by shipping time.
For the ultra thick reference manuals, it can take years to write.
And a simple change in the software can render the whole thing completely obsolete and require re-writing to contain the latest changes. Just a single firmware update can add new options that render the manual dead and require printing a new version to explain the new options.
Given the number of people who actually read the manual front to back, effort is best concentrated on making the UI usable, adding context-aware help documents (i.e., online manuals, online help) and other tools to provide you with just the bit of knowledge you need.
Any generic knowledge can often be provided by a generic book or course on the topic - using a word processor, spreadsheet or other generic office program, for example.
The reason we had manuals in the 80s was that was the only way to spreading information around - without easy access to online services providing manuals, FAQs, community boards, etc, often the only information you had was whatever documentation came with the device. And nothing sucked worse when you take your expensive new toys home only to find out you are missing the Foo 2000 adapter cable when you're setting it up, something you only knew when you tried to hook everything up.
It also meant software updates were rare - sometimes when you sent in the registration cards you'd get back a floppy disk with a note saying it contains several essential fixes for issues they discovered, but that was often the only update you got. Maybe if you wrote them about a problem you had, in 2-4 weeks you'd get another update.
You just know people will file DMCA takedowns for their content archived on Wayback, breaking the links yet again.
Because people are petty and obsessed with controlling their content even though they're not making money from it anymore and they would have otherwise forgotten about it completely.
Except the Internet Archive is a recognized library, which means they actually have powers to ignore DMCA takedowns. In fact, as a library they get a lot of exceptions to the DMCA. It's why they host a lot of copyrighted material for free
Actually, the percentage is higher, but it also includes a shockingly high percentage of people in the upper-middle class. Most people are inept at handling their own finances, and that's partially to blame on our education system. We don't teach our young how to live on their own...it should be a requirement for HS graduation.
That's what Home Economics class is for in high school. Not sure if your school made it mandatory or not, but its sole purpose is to prepare yourself with basic "adulting" (as it's called today) skills like how to use a kitchen and cook something, how to handle basic tasks like sewing and such, etc. And the basics of money.
The problem is illiteracy - too many people are functionally illiterate, and too many people can't do basic arithmetic. Subsequently, too many people are financially illiterate and cannot handle basic financial transactions. Or even calculate change given a total and money. This is what perpetuates many financial scams (not just the tax scams, but investment scams and all sorts of "get rich quick": schemes).
Even worse, we celebrate the fact that we intentionally are deficient in basic skills. We distrust people who know a bit more, even though knowledge is easy to obtain. Even if it's a basic skill.
And that's what's really wrong with the US - we've developed the attitude that intelligence is bad - to know stuff is bad.
The extra checks for the "swatting concerns" flag should be the default checks the cops do before responding. For a medical emergency for instance there's no need for an armed response. If there's a threat of violence the one thing you don't want to do right off is an armed, forced entry, you start by doing recon on the target to figure out what's currently going on before deciding on tactics which if it's a false call will give plenty of opportunity to establish that there's no current apparent threat of violence (and if it's for real, it gives you an idea where and what the threats are without startling the bad guys into doing something you don't want them doing like taking hostages).
Except swatting calls aren't typically "I see a guy holding an AR-15 at some woman in the window". They're more like "A guy with a several AR-15s and shotguns just ran into a house and is I can hear shots, WHY AREN'T YOU SENDING ANYONE OVER OMG A BULLET JUST HIT MY HOUSE!".
There's not time to sit down and investigate because from the report on the phone, it sounds like every second matters and lives are at stake. If there's a lull in the shooting, that usually just means the shooter is reloading.
Perhaps the police should just sit around at the next crazed gunman shooting up a mall or a school to determine if it's a false report? If you think a mass shooting at a school warrants a SWAT response, the swatters on the phone will make it seem like it's happening at the house, too.
If you want to take multiple 911 calls, well, the criminal behind it wouldn't hesitate to make multiple false reports.
This will continue to happen unless you either get rid of SWAT teams, decide that every call will have recon first, even though someone is hunting through a school, mall or other area and shooting people, or other measure. Because whatever method will bring out the SWAT team will be used.
About the only way otherwise is to simply require all 911 calls to have full information provided - VoIP providers must send to 911 centers the subscriber information, billing information, IP address information (and IP geolocation) as well as GPS location of the interface unit itself, and if none of those details match the 911 center's area, then the call should be treated with suspicion. Else that VoIP provider cannot make a call to emergency services. Problem is, though, that 911 centers are not equipped to handle this information as of yet.
Hopefully Apple builds in some kind of ability for the facial recognition system to be told to require an additional password (or other credentials) if a user looks at it in a certain way or that it requires a certain facial expression in order to unlock.
Already exists. It's called "SOS mode" and you enable it by pressing the sleep/wake button 5 times rapidly. This turns off biometric authentication and requires the PIN or passcode to unlock.
Anyhow, the thing to note is that there was a warrant to search the phone, so even a passcode is useless - to claim "forgetfulness" is to generate a contempt of court finding, which basically ends up being an unlimited amount of jail time as seen by several people so far.
FaceID only made it less of an issue for everyone involved.
There's also an "attentiveness" setting - where FaceID will not unlock unless the user is paying attention to the phone, so looking away may be enough to simply deny access. But again, denying access against the warranty is unfortunately tantamount to being imprisoned for life.
Leaving the choice up to the Internet, or even just Netflix subscribers isn't going to result in the best storylines, or even the storylines that necessarily reflect what actual people want to see.
No, it will result in storylines Netflix subscribers want to see.
This is an important point - Netflix is not creating content randomly - they are creating content that appeals to their subscribers. Doing this they hope to retain subscribers to their service, like other subscription TV channels like HBO do.
This it is vitally important for Netflix to ensure the programming reflects what their subscribers want, and having them vote seems like an ideal way to do it. The alternative is they use a marketing department to figure out what the demographic of Netflix subscribers likes so they can concentrate on creating content towards them.
Don't forget that it is very hard to come up with new disruptive technologies regularly. The iPhone and iPad were more or less logical enhancements of the iPod at the time they were released. What scares me more is that Apple discontinues all the fine equipment and technologies that made their Macs and iDevices work so well: the Aiports, Time Machine, Mac Mini, AirTunes... That compared with their stubborn refusal to let their users determine where they keep their data will backfire one day. After all, Google jumped into the space Apple left with this stuff.
Airports are dead because WiFi APs are everywhere. Apple probably kept them until the hardware became obsolete and EOL'd. But the gist is that Airport was great in the beginning because WiFi devices were so hard to get. But these days, even walking into a Best Buy will have you seeing dozens of different WiFi capable devices and routers, and it's a hard value proposition to pay Apple $200+ for WiFI when you can pick up a nice Asus router or such for $150 with all the same features.
Time Machine and Mac Mini are still around - plenty of third party devices support backing up to Time Machine (most NAS appliances, for example). Mac Mini is around, but it's limited to what chips Intel makes with compatible footprints (it's why the i7 modle sucks - Intel only makes a few mobile processors with compatible i5 and i7 footprints. Usually you have to redesign for the i7 model.
AirTunes is around, it's called AirPlay now and Apple introduced AirPlay 2 to allow multiple devices to access the stream.
Apple only really dropped monitors and WiFi devices off their product list, mostly because the competition has provided viable alternatives for cheaper and better. There was a time when the 30" Apple Cinema Display was the monitor people drooled over, but now you can get 4K displays with more pixels for far less than what the 30" display cost.
I have no idea why someone decided heroin wasnt strong enough and had to come up with something 100x stronger and 10,000 times stronger. Does it matter that you had to take 2cc of a substance instead of 0.2cc? IMO the mad scientist that made _that_ stuff should bear some responsibility.
Why was there melamine in milk? Because the answer to both questions is the same - the product is adulterated to make more profits.
In the milk case, the Chinese farmers watered down the milk, but you can tell when you do this (since stuff like milk proteins get diluted). So to prevent this from being easily measured, they added melamine to the milk. Thus they could make 1L of milk turn into 2L and get nearly twice the money.
Same with heroin and the like - the drugs are cut with other stuff to make more of it. But you can tell because the high you get isn't so high. So they discovered fentanyl which could be added dot reproduce the high despite all the cutting. The stuff from China is simply stronger so you can sell mostly filler material as full grade heroin.
Itâ(TM)s only the source for the two ancient versions mentioned - 1.25 and 2.0. Itâ(TM)s been a while (obviously), but I donâ(TM)t think MS-DOS got interesting until 3.x... and the final release was 8.0.
1.25 is interesting because it's the first release of MS-DOS, which at the time was cloning CP/M. MS-DOS 1 basically cloned all the CP/M interfaces. In fact, after 16-bit CP/M was released for 8086 processors, Microsoft released a tool that you could run on your CP/M source code and have it work on MS-DOS.
MS-DOS 2 added a pile of enhancements that kept CP/M compatibility layers of MS-DOS 1, but made significant changes and improvements if you decided to kick CP/M to the curb and embrace MS-DOS. Everything you are familiar with MS-DOS pretty much started from 2.0 onwards.
3.0 was exciting because it added support for loadable device drivers and this enabled you to do a whole bunch of interesting things, like replace built-in device drivers.
Note that the CP/M compatibility mode remained in all versions of DOS, though it was probably little used - there were a number of hacks needed to handle the limitations of CP/M (e.g., the lack of directories). And there was some creativity because some things not in CP/M reused the CPM area when you were in MS-DOS mode.
Some interesting things in the CP/M area included file descriptor blocks for the first two files on the command line (MS-DOS was forced to implicitly open then files and fill in the data structures - there were various MS-DOS calls that could be used to manipulate the data structures which is how you did file access in CP/M. MS-DOS 2 added more "traditional" file handling operations (including things like "open", "close", "read", "write" and "seek" operations) but these were MS-DOS only.
Also, thought USP for apple was that it cared about your privacy, whatever happened to that?
Well, all it is the default search engine used for the iOS browser. For that, Apple realizes the only real solution is Google for many reasons - it practically is the only search engine out there. After all look at how many Bing jokes there are everytime search engines are brought up.
So Google pays Apple a huge lump of money every year to be the default search engine - you can choose to have Bing or DuckDuckGo as well in the options. And Apple realizes that iOS users are typically more valuable to advertisers than Android or other platform users are. Enough so that every time Apple does something privacy related, it sends chills down advertisers spines.
Google knows this too - and they also know that if the default went to Bing, that'll send a huge amount of valuable traffic to Microsoft. Even if half the users switched it back manually that's still a large chunk.
And it's also a case of usability and practicality versus privacy - people Google for stuff, forcing them to use Apple Search (if it existed) would just be a lousy experience overall (or say, if they used Bing), so Apple pretty much has to relent on this point. If Google doesn't want to pay up, they'll approach Microsoft, and if not, they'll probably ask if DuckDuckGo and handle the potential traffic and make that the default. And Google wouldn't want that - exposing people to DuckDuckGo would be bad for Google. You get just as good results as Google, after all. But now the layman now knows about them.
Slashdot Mirror
They are being fixed. There are programs by nurse's unions on hiring more male nurses, and there are programs for teachers as well in increasing the number of male teachers teaching elementary school.
Don't assume that because you don't know about it it's not a big deal. There are programs for increasing the proportion of females in trades (construction, welding, etc) run by various trades organizations, and plenty of pilot groups also aimed at increasing the gross under representation of women in the cockpit. (Funny enough, the same complaints show up as well when special women-only events aimed at getting girls interested in aviation.). Oh yeah, many of these organizations are also trying to get under-represented minorities in as well.
And yes, all these groups recognize it's not just diversity that's a good thing, but having people to "stick together". Male nurses are very valuable when dealing with obstinate male patients who are sexist, for example. As are older doctors for those patients who cannot fathom being treated by a doctor who's younger than their kids.
And likely, those people are going to be flakes anyways.
Restaurants are finding that online bookings are terrible for business - they're finding people would book a reservation and never show up (which costs the business money since that table cannot be used for a walk-in paying customer). Turns out people (ab)use online reservation systems to make 3-5 restaurant reservations so they have a choice of where to go for dinner. Of course, they never cancel the unused reservations.
In the end, it means terrible policies for the rest of us - some restaurants now require a credit card to hold the reservation, and will charge no-show fees if you don't cancel. Or they reduce the number of reservations they allow to reduce the number of no-shows occupying tables and denying the table to walk-ins or people who actually use reservations. Or we end up like the airlines where reserved tables are overbooked.
Chances are people who actually call in and talk to them will actually show up.
Except Sony ALREADY does cloud based gaming. It's called Playstation Now. It's how Sony does "backwards compatibility" with the PS4.
In fact, until the weekend, Microsoft was pretty much the only one not offering a cloud-based gaming option. (Nintendo does it for some games on Switch in Japan).
I think technology should've improved to the point where we can get a day's worth of recordings. The unit records immediately once taken off the charger and stops at the end of the shift being placed back on the charger.
To make life easier, you can timestamp events - when the weapon is drawn a mark is made on the recording. Likewise more markers can be made - either manually pushing a button (e.g., arriving at a scene), as well as "off duty" and "on duty" markers to indicate when the cop went on a break (or the bathroom) and when they returned.
The markers are informative - the unit is always recording, but markers can be made to quickly index the videos. The raw recording is protected and only releasable through a court order (alongside the timestamps) but snippets can be made available freely
Pilots are required to have non-polarized sunglasses for the same reason - many avionics displays have the same issue - they will blank out with polarized sunglasses. And it doesn't matter the plane - be it a 737, A320, or a dinky Cessna, or whatever - all have examples of not working with polarized sunglasses.
Spoofing may not be illegal, but scamming still is. And "other countries' have plenty of scams still. In fact, there are the old "microsoft tech support scam", the "refund scam" which is especially popular in the UK and plenty more.
To be honest, I can't tell you if the number is spoofed - you can say the number is for the Canada Revenue Agency, but on my phone, I see a bunch of digits. I don't' recognize the number, so spoof or not, I can't tell. (Do you know the number of the IRS without looking it up?)
The tax scam is pretty useless - when you're a family of 3 taxpayers, the message that says "we have discovered an irregularity in your tax filing" is a scam - WHOSE tax filing was bad? "Your" could mean any one of three taxpayers, and you know the government isn't that bad at identifying someone.
The refund scam and tech support scams are still rampant elsewhere in the world. Even if you eliminate spoofed numbers, you'll just be talking about a different set of scams.
As for spoofing, there are valid reasons for it - there are often more numbers than lines at a business, so being able to return the proper DID number (or main line number) is useful instead of a completely useless line identifier. VoIP would collapse if they couldn't spoof - VoIP providers would return a random phone number to called parties who would probably not answer your phone call because they don't recognize the phone number.
What should happen is providers do filtering of the number - if you're going to spoof, the number you spoof will only be of what you actually have. Similar to how source IP filtering works but for phone numbers. This pretty much leaves legitimate entities to spoof.
You may think you're joking, but actually, that's the system used by movie theatres to offer captioning for the hard of hearing - the back wall of a theatre is basically a large scrolling LED display with the captions and you wear special glasses that let you see it. It's not as bright as the projectors so you don't really see the light it projects, but it's large and big and generally near the projection window.
Why? The IoT crowd may want it too, to avoid having incidents like security cameras being available to be viewed by all.
https://www.cbc.ca/marketplace...
If a journalist on TV can view these security camera streams, imagine what a more determined person can do. In fact, they monitored the streams for several weeks until they could positively identify the house and confront the homeowner.
They then hired a pentesting company to hack someone who converted to all their high tech stuff, including being able to control their front door lock, take over their Nest cameras (and able to even get Alexa to do stuff for them).
Well, I'm sure Costco didn't plan on that - all Costco did was buy golf balls from a little-known supplier in the US, and package and sell them under the Kirkland brand.
It just happened that the Koreans were making better balls than everyone else, but because they weren't known, it took Costco to make them known.
Shopping house brands is good - you can get some real savings over the brand name product, and depending on who actually makes the house brand, it might even be the premium product. The only reason they're cheaper is well, everyone knows the premium brand.
I buy Walmart branded stuff quite a few times - it often tastes the same but costs a lot less (a family size bag of chips for under $1 is nice over spending $3 for the normal branded stuff). Granted, it's not always good so I'd test them by buying one bag first and seeing if it's worth it. If it's awful, I don't buy any more and stick with the regular stuff. If it's good, I'd probably switch.
The problem is that "framework" stuff is generally "boring" and "not my itch" type development. FOSS is great for "scratch my itch" projects, but the boring infrastructure projects generally have to be subsidized by someone else
It's one of those unfortunate realities - unless the FOSS development is sponsored by a company, generally only the "exciting" stuff gets done
Ironically, that might end up to be Microsoft.
Wrong.
The problem was Bain Capital and a leveraged buy out that added the $6.2B in debt buying itself out. (For those who don't know, a leveraged buy out is where you use an asset as leverage to get a loan. IN this case, Bain Capital needed $6B to buy TRU. So what asset did they use? Well, TRU! Thus they bought TRU using a loan backed by the company itself. ).
They had an online presence. In fact, they were among the first stores to actually have a website, and while it's not as slick as Amazon was, they were holding their own.
2005 might have been a bad time, but they weathered through it, which means it's not the financial crisis that did them in. It's the debt - $6.2B is a lot of debt that corporate raiders added to them. They struggled, but their cashflow was enough to pay off their obligations, until 2015-2016 when they didn't make enough money to cover their obligations. Things spiraled from there.
"Private investors" my ass. It was Bain Capital and leveraged buy outs that did them in. Their numbers reflect this. You only call it "private investors" as a way to dodge the truth of the "investment".
Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target were all competitors, and yet they still managed. The only reason right now they can think of revival is after Bain Capital left and got the real investors screwed over. But once they got paid out, hey, no more crushing debt. Then again, those investors pretty much should've known they were buying into a Bain Capital investment.
Anyhow, it's all screwy, because you know who else owns the name? A bunch of financial investors in Canada who bought over the Canadian operations and still run it today. And you can bet they likely want their share of the US operations (TRU Canada loaned TRU corporate a bunch of money that actually put TRU Canada in trouble in 2015-2016 because TRU corporate defaulted. Except TRU Canada came out of it thanks to good revenue).
It's probably not for salary/exempt people specifically, but more for non-union people. Unions are funny things, and for the most part, if you have a company, there will be both workers in the union and workers not in the union. The people not in the union (excluded and generally prohibited from joining the union) are management. So if you're classified as a "manager" you can't join the union, even if you're doing exactly the same thing the union guy is doing. (It also means if the union goes on strike, as management, you cover their duties as manager).
That's how it generally goes - they may have classed the non-union employees as managers to keep them from getting ideas and joining the union
The task may be automated, but one still needs to monitor the automation. There's no completely unmonitored automatic system out there because crap happens. Perhaps once in a while a data point comes in that corrupts the input file and makes screwy results, so you need to either fix the automation, fix the results of the automation, or manually enter the data.
Also, unless your job is to write the automation system, most likely it's to do the work, and you automated the boring parts of it, leaving you with more time to do other work. It's an important distinction because if you're let go, showing someone the automation won't help when the bird dropping hits the passive air propulsion unit. Hell, sometimes what happens is no one understands the automation, and because you left, no one understands how to do the work manually, so the end result is "we don't do things this way because it breaks this process...".
Only if you like crap quality.
I notice that a half hour episode at decent quality with h.264 (and 1080i) is around 500MB nowadays and hour long episodes I generally go for the 800-1.2GB encodes with quality and surround sound.
YouTube video uploads by proper creators are similarly large - often more so since they minimally compress it so a 30 minute YouTube video can consume 2-3GB, and even more if they do 4K.
Quality demands have gone up and sites like YouTube reencode anyways so you want to preserve as much quality by doing as little compression as possible.
And yes, h.264 still powers most video sites since MPEG-LA was wise enough to see that the "free" license works wonders. h.265 licensing is screwy because of a few greedy people who want to charge for the "free" streaming currently using h.264. (h.264 rose to prominence because of the cheap licensing, while greedy folks for h.265 have pretty much killed its chances of taking over the web anytime soon).
Greed is likely to ensure that h.265 remains a niche instead of taking over from h.264, and the web will be a mix of h.264 and upcoming AV1.
Because users care about stuff like low power mode and suspend/sleep ability.
Intel ME is used to actually boot the processor and perform power management (because well, you can use it to remotely control power to the computer, so it already has the ability to change processor speeds and voltage settings).
Chances are "Disabled" mode isn't truly disabled - more like "enough to boot the processor and then spin" which will boot the processor, lock it at max normal frequency and power setting and then leave it at that with no way to alter it (because it requires ME firmware to do that and the ME subsystem is doing a "while (1);" spin, doing nothing).
Fine for government computers where the policy is to shut down your computer at the end of the day and sleep/hibernate is disabled. No need ME firmware to write to the register that tells the power supply to turn off.
Those points and one more - writing a printed manual took a lot of time. You're looking at a good 6 months of advance writing to get it all done and printed so it can be put in the box by shipping time.
For the ultra thick reference manuals, it can take years to write.
And a simple change in the software can render the whole thing completely obsolete and require re-writing to contain the latest changes. Just a single firmware update can add new options that render the manual dead and require printing a new version to explain the new options.
Given the number of people who actually read the manual front to back, effort is best concentrated on making the UI usable, adding context-aware help documents (i.e., online manuals, online help) and other tools to provide you with just the bit of knowledge you need.
Any generic knowledge can often be provided by a generic book or course on the topic - using a word processor, spreadsheet or other generic office program, for example.
The reason we had manuals in the 80s was that was the only way to spreading information around - without easy access to online services providing manuals, FAQs, community boards, etc, often the only information you had was whatever documentation came with the device. And nothing sucked worse when you take your expensive new toys home only to find out you are missing the Foo 2000 adapter cable when you're setting it up, something you only knew when you tried to hook everything up.
It also meant software updates were rare - sometimes when you sent in the registration cards you'd get back a floppy disk with a note saying it contains several essential fixes for issues they discovered, but that was often the only update you got. Maybe if you wrote them about a problem you had, in 2-4 weeks you'd get another update.
Except the Internet Archive is a recognized library, which means they actually have powers to ignore DMCA takedowns. In fact, as a library they get a lot of exceptions to the DMCA. It's why they host a lot of copyrighted material for free
It's one of he few positives of the DMCA.
That's what Home Economics class is for in high school. Not sure if your school made it mandatory or not, but its sole purpose is to prepare yourself with basic "adulting" (as it's called today) skills like how to use a kitchen and cook something, how to handle basic tasks like sewing and such, etc. And the basics of money.
The problem is illiteracy - too many people are functionally illiterate, and too many people can't do basic arithmetic. Subsequently, too many people are financially illiterate and cannot handle basic financial transactions. Or even calculate change given a total and money. This is what perpetuates many financial scams (not just the tax scams, but investment scams and all sorts of "get rich quick": schemes).
Even worse, we celebrate the fact that we intentionally are deficient in basic skills. We distrust people who know a bit more, even though knowledge is easy to obtain. Even if it's a basic skill.
And that's what's really wrong with the US - we've developed the attitude that intelligence is bad - to know stuff is bad.
Except swatting calls aren't typically "I see a guy holding an AR-15 at some woman in the window". They're more like "A guy with a several AR-15s and shotguns just ran into a house and is I can hear shots, WHY AREN'T YOU SENDING ANYONE OVER OMG A BULLET JUST HIT MY HOUSE!".
There's not time to sit down and investigate because from the report on the phone, it sounds like every second matters and lives are at stake. If there's a lull in the shooting, that usually just means the shooter is reloading.
Perhaps the police should just sit around at the next crazed gunman shooting up a mall or a school to determine if it's a false report? If you think a mass shooting at a school warrants a SWAT response, the swatters on the phone will make it seem like it's happening at the house, too.
If you want to take multiple 911 calls, well, the criminal behind it wouldn't hesitate to make multiple false reports.
This will continue to happen unless you either get rid of SWAT teams, decide that every call will have recon first, even though someone is hunting through a school, mall or other area and shooting people, or other measure. Because whatever method will bring out the SWAT team will be used.
About the only way otherwise is to simply require all 911 calls to have full information provided - VoIP providers must send to 911 centers the subscriber information, billing information, IP address information (and IP geolocation) as well as GPS location of the interface unit itself, and if none of those details match the 911 center's area, then the call should be treated with suspicion. Else that VoIP provider cannot make a call to emergency services. Problem is, though, that 911 centers are not equipped to handle this information as of yet.
Already exists. It's called "SOS mode" and you enable it by pressing the sleep/wake button 5 times rapidly. This turns off biometric authentication and requires the PIN or passcode to unlock.
Anyhow, the thing to note is that there was a warrant to search the phone, so even a passcode is useless - to claim "forgetfulness" is to generate a contempt of court finding, which basically ends up being an unlimited amount of jail time as seen by several people so far.
FaceID only made it less of an issue for everyone involved.
There's also an "attentiveness" setting - where FaceID will not unlock unless the user is paying attention to the phone, so looking away may be enough to simply deny access. But again, denying access against the warranty is unfortunately tantamount to being imprisoned for life.
No, it will result in storylines Netflix subscribers want to see.
This is an important point - Netflix is not creating content randomly - they are creating content that appeals to their subscribers. Doing this they hope to retain subscribers to their service, like other subscription TV channels like HBO do.
This it is vitally important for Netflix to ensure the programming reflects what their subscribers want, and having them vote seems like an ideal way to do it. The alternative is they use a marketing department to figure out what the demographic of Netflix subscribers likes so they can concentrate on creating content towards them.
Airports are dead because WiFi APs are everywhere. Apple probably kept them until the hardware became obsolete and EOL'd. But the gist is that Airport was great in the beginning because WiFi devices were so hard to get. But these days, even walking into a Best Buy will have you seeing dozens of different WiFi capable devices and routers, and it's a hard value proposition to pay Apple $200+ for WiFI when you can pick up a nice Asus router or such for $150 with all the same features.
Time Machine and Mac Mini are still around - plenty of third party devices support backing up to Time Machine (most NAS appliances, for example). Mac Mini is around, but it's limited to what chips Intel makes with compatible footprints (it's why the i7 modle sucks - Intel only makes a few mobile processors with compatible i5 and i7 footprints. Usually you have to redesign for the i7 model.
AirTunes is around, it's called AirPlay now and Apple introduced AirPlay 2 to allow multiple devices to access the stream.
Apple only really dropped monitors and WiFi devices off their product list, mostly because the competition has provided viable alternatives for cheaper and better. There was a time when the 30" Apple Cinema Display was the monitor people drooled over, but now you can get 4K displays with more pixels for far less than what the 30" display cost.
Why was there melamine in milk? Because the answer to both questions is the same - the product is adulterated to make more profits.
In the milk case, the Chinese farmers watered down the milk, but you can tell when you do this (since stuff like milk proteins get diluted). So to prevent this from being easily measured, they added melamine to the milk. Thus they could make 1L of milk turn into 2L and get nearly twice the money.
Same with heroin and the like - the drugs are cut with other stuff to make more of it. But you can tell because the high you get isn't so high. So they discovered fentanyl which could be added dot reproduce the high despite all the cutting. The stuff from China is simply stronger so you can sell mostly filler material as full grade heroin.
1.25 is interesting because it's the first release of MS-DOS, which at the time was cloning CP/M. MS-DOS 1 basically cloned all the CP/M interfaces. In fact, after 16-bit CP/M was released for 8086 processors, Microsoft released a tool that you could run on your CP/M source code and have it work on MS-DOS.
MS-DOS 2 added a pile of enhancements that kept CP/M compatibility layers of MS-DOS 1, but made significant changes and improvements if you decided to kick CP/M to the curb and embrace MS-DOS. Everything you are familiar with MS-DOS pretty much started from 2.0 onwards.
3.0 was exciting because it added support for loadable device drivers and this enabled you to do a whole bunch of interesting things, like replace built-in device drivers.
Note that the CP/M compatibility mode remained in all versions of DOS, though it was probably little used - there were a number of hacks needed to handle the limitations of CP/M (e.g., the lack of directories). And there was some creativity because some things not in CP/M reused the CPM area when you were in MS-DOS mode.
Some interesting things in the CP/M area included file descriptor blocks for the first two files on the command line (MS-DOS was forced to implicitly open then files and fill in the data structures - there were various MS-DOS calls that could be used to manipulate the data structures which is how you did file access in CP/M. MS-DOS 2 added more "traditional" file handling operations (including things like "open", "close", "read", "write" and "seek" operations) but these were MS-DOS only.
Well, all it is the default search engine used for the iOS browser. For that, Apple realizes the only real solution is Google for many reasons - it practically is the only search engine out there. After all look at how many Bing jokes there are everytime search engines are brought up.
So Google pays Apple a huge lump of money every year to be the default search engine - you can choose to have Bing or DuckDuckGo as well in the options. And Apple realizes that iOS users are typically more valuable to advertisers than Android or other platform users are. Enough so that every time Apple does something privacy related, it sends chills down advertisers spines.
Google knows this too - and they also know that if the default went to Bing, that'll send a huge amount of valuable traffic to Microsoft. Even if half the users switched it back manually that's still a large chunk.
And it's also a case of usability and practicality versus privacy - people Google for stuff, forcing them to use Apple Search (if it existed) would just be a lousy experience overall (or say, if they used Bing), so Apple pretty much has to relent on this point. If Google doesn't want to pay up, they'll approach Microsoft, and if not, they'll probably ask if DuckDuckGo and handle the potential traffic and make that the default. And Google wouldn't want that - exposing people to DuckDuckGo would be bad for Google. You get just as good results as Google, after all. But now the layman now knows about them.