If you're not getting funding from Facebook, how much time and money are you going to spend studying their upcoming products?
This is the universal problem with "independent" testing. Same problem for food, drugs, cars, etc. We require manufacturers to test their products, then doubt the results because they paid for it.
The difference between say 1 kg iron ball and 25000 kg iron ball is zero wrt terminal velocity.
Is that true? I remember enough college physics to believe it's one of those counter-intuitive things, but don't feel like tracking down the right formulas to confirm.
I've got eclectic taste in music, and I appreciate performance art, but I just don't get her at all. I don't understand the energy in her audiences. I feel like I'm watching a foreign comedian and I see that the audience appreciates the act but I don't know the language.
The systemic problem here is that it shouldn't be possible for a false call to the police to put someone's life at risk.
I've got a teenage daughter who likes exploring abandoned buildings. (There are whole websites dedicated to this, and we're thinking about taking a trip to go on some of the tours at that link.) A couple of years ago she and a friend were picked up by the police as they were leaving one.
When I went in to pick her up, an officer gave her a lecture about how dangerous it could be. "We could show up and think there are drug dealers or gang members in there and you could get shot."
Hold on there! You're telling a teenager that something is dangerous, and it's not the drug dealers or gang members she should be worried about, but the police? On the one hand, thanks for the honesty. But Jesus Tap-dancing Christ don't you think that indicates a problem?
Way back in the before times, I had a Blackberry provided by my employer. It was on Verizon. The device had GPS hardware built in, and Google Maps was already a thing. But as soon as I activated with Verizon, they remotely disabled the GPS. For an additional $4.95/month I could have "Blackberry Navigation", which was a worse implementation of Google Maps.
At some point, you have to draw a line and say "we will not pay for that" because it is too expensive for the benefits gained. In many cases this will determine who lives and who dies. Thus "Death Panels" was a valid description of the group of bureaucrats who where going to decide what got covered by Obamcare and what didn't, though it was inflammatory in it's choice of words..
I'll take one step down this rabbit hole.
To the extent that you're right, those "panels" have always existed. What's different is that it's insurance companies looking at their bottom line who have been running them. What changed with the Affordable Care Act was that it was elected representatives and appointed regulators making those decisions.
But you have to admit, this alarmist view is often used to win arguments... Used by climate change zealots advocating things like carbon emission caps, used by politicians to justify their social program of the day ("Don't kill Grandma!", "Oh the children will starve without this help!"). Why is it invalid here and not there?
Actually, climate change zealots usually say we're going to kill everyone. The ones claiming their opponents want to kill grandma are the death panel folks, and the "think of the children" trope is usually talking about drugs. So which side of the political aisle does that put people on?*
So you are advocating we make food more expensive then? Give up on the efficiency gains we've made in the production of food...
Testing makes food more expensive. We do that, because the alternative is outbreaks of deadly diseases.
Can I assume you work in technology? I'll try an example from your world. QA makes code more expensive. But we do it anyway, because the alternative is sometimes things fail. The question is how much testing is enough?
Why not just admit that you want people to die of starvation... Because that's what fixing your perceived "problem" is going to accomplish in the long run.
The long run is exactly the problem. Monocultures are great in the short run. In the long term they're susceptible to catastrophic collapse. AKA famine. Food that's a little more expensive doesn't kill nearly as many people as when there's no food at all.
Oh, and by the way... telling someone "you want people to die" is a childish way to try to get a rise out of them and win a point via attrition.
Perhaps we should just let it go to extremes and allow for some states that have vastly different rules and let people vote with their feet. Don't like the socialist state of Delaware? Move to the unfettered free market state of Kansas.
Those most likely to be on the wrong end of those extremes are least likely to have the resources to move.
People complain every time there's a summary that leaves out key details. This one includes the model numbers. Thought it only right to give praise where due.
We have HUGE monocultures in our farming operations and it's part of what makes that trip to the grocery store possible because we have efficient, large scale, farming processes to create the cheap and abundant supply of food.
Just so it's clear, making food more expensive to produce does little to you and me but increase the grocery budget, but in some parts of the world even modest increases in food costs is catastrophic to the poor and helpless who WILL starve because they cannot afford to pay...
People in Zaire aren't eating wheat grown in Kansas. Or if they are, we're solving the wrong problem.
Food production should be sufficiently local that we don't all have to do it the same way. Concentrating food production to huge monocultures makes us susceptible to catastrophic failure.
Regarding the absurd "asymmetric" anti-prostitution laws in Sweden: If there was any honesty in those who want to criminalize prostitution, they would apply the same logic to many other professions: So eating in a restaurant where a trafficked worker cooked your meal would be illegal. Being helped by some trafficked nurse would be criminalized. Having your garden shack built by a company who brings trafficked workers to your site would make you a criminal.
Nope. When you hire a prostitute you are paying them. When you eat in a restaurant, the owner is paying the cook. Same for the other examples. You could try arguing that you paid a pimp and the pimp paid the sex worker.
37deg is easy to remember and it's marked on any body-thermometer. I just checked, body temperature is 98.6 in Fahrenheit, which is also probably marked on a thermometer.
Random fact: Average body temperature was first calculated in Germany, and reported as 37 degrees C, with error bars. In the U.S. they did a strict conversion and dropped the error bars. And it turns out the original measurement wasn't that great to begin with.
It is easier to divide a circle into basic fractional parts.
A lot of the issues with dividing a foot by 2, 3, 4 & 6 can be hand-waved away as not being that big a deal. But triangles are pretty central to a lot of physical properties. The ability to evenly divide a circle by multiples of 3 is incredibly useful. I'm guessing that's why I've never heard anyone arguing to metric-ify radian measurements.
I used to work for a (thinly) publicly traded penny-stock company, every year near Christmas its value would tank, usually to around 30-50% of where it was in the October-November time frame.
Just in time to fuck over employees waiting for their bonus.
Suspense through stupidity (the admiral not telling Poe the plan, so he would almost get his friends killed), and the entire dead-end infiltration plotline seemed like, after the script was written, someone demanded a mini-Rogue One inserted into the middle.
So much this.
Stylistically, the thing that bugged me was nearly every line was delivered like it was supposed to be the big quote everyone was going to be repeating the next day. Not everything can be, "Search your feelings. You know it to be true."
As if benefit analysis was EVER a consideration for DHS or TSA... I would love to see the benefit analysis of confiscating people's nail clippers from carry on luggage.
They won't refuse to hire her -- they'll just ignore her resume before she ever gets called for an interview based on background check data. It's only grounds for her to sue if she knows about the policy. Company's excuse would be they never got the resume.
You don't get permission to run the background check until after the job offer. If the offer is then rescinded on the basis of the background check, the applicant has a legal right to a copy of the report and a formal dispute process with whoever did the check.
We see no end of criminality in the handling of the Federal government's electronic documents and no end to the incompetence and deliberate neglect in maintaining recoverable backups.
Malice (deliberate neglect) and incompetence are completely different problems, likely to have different solutions. I don't see how either of those is fixed by outsourcing, though.
If the problem is govt workers can't secure systems, you need to trust govt workers to source a supplier who can, and monitor them more effectively at arms length than they did when it was in-house.
If the problem is govt workers won't secure systems, you need to find/create an oversight process that works better on geographically remote third parties than the existing process for in-house systems.
So I guess at a high enough level they're the same problem after all. You need to trust your people, or you need to trust your process. If you choose trusting the process, you have to trust the people who design the process. And remember kids, trust is not transitive. Just because Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Chuck doesn't mean Alice can trust Chuck.
At this point, the only thing I can hope for is that the RIAA and MPAA start going around suing ISPs after Net Neutrality is abolished. If Net Neutrality doesn't exist then the ISPs are no longer a common carrier under the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Which will be their explanation of why they had no choice but to cut off all these sites and protocols.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're not getting funding from Facebook, how much time and money are you going to spend studying their upcoming products?
This is the universal problem with "independent" testing. Same problem for food, drugs, cars, etc. We require manufacturers to test their products, then doubt the results because they paid for it.
The difference between say 1 kg iron ball and 25000 kg iron ball is zero wrt terminal velocity.
Is that true? I remember enough college physics to believe it's one of those counter-intuitive things, but don't feel like tracking down the right formulas to confirm.
Björk had the best use of a Tesla coil
I've got eclectic taste in music, and I appreciate performance art, but I just don't get her at all. I don't understand the energy in her audiences. I feel like I'm watching a foreign comedian and I see that the audience appreciates the act but I don't know the language.
The systemic problem here is that it shouldn't be possible for a false call to the police to put someone's life at risk.
I've got a teenage daughter who likes exploring abandoned buildings. (There are whole websites dedicated to this, and we're thinking about taking a trip to go on some of the tours at that link.) A couple of years ago she and a friend were picked up by the police as they were leaving one.
When I went in to pick her up, an officer gave her a lecture about how dangerous it could be. "We could show up and think there are drug dealers or gang members in there and you could get shot."
Hold on there! You're telling a teenager that something is dangerous, and it's not the drug dealers or gang members she should be worried about, but the police? On the one hand, thanks for the honesty. But Jesus Tap-dancing Christ don't you think that indicates a problem?
VIN numbers exist for a reason.
The same reason we have PIN numbers for our ATM machines. To drive pedants insane.
Way back in the before times, I had a Blackberry provided by my employer. It was on Verizon. The device had GPS hardware built in, and Google Maps was already a thing. But as soon as I activated with Verizon, they remotely disabled the GPS. For an additional $4.95/month I could have "Blackberry Navigation", which was a worse implementation of Google Maps.
No, thanks. As a user, I would trust Google far more than the shitty media conglomerates and their shitty websites.
Google is a shitty media conglomerate.
You do know that ... right?
At some point, you have to draw a line and say "we will not pay for that" because it is too expensive for the benefits gained. In many cases this will determine who lives and who dies. Thus "Death Panels" was a valid description of the group of bureaucrats who where going to decide what got covered by Obamcare and what didn't, though it was inflammatory in it's choice of words..
I'll take one step down this rabbit hole.
To the extent that you're right, those "panels" have always existed. What's different is that it's insurance companies looking at their bottom line who have been running them. What changed with the Affordable Care Act was that it was elected representatives and appointed regulators making those decisions.
But you have to admit, this alarmist view is often used to win arguments... Used by climate change zealots advocating things like carbon emission caps, used by politicians to justify their social program of the day ("Don't kill Grandma!", "Oh the children will starve without this help!"). Why is it invalid here and not there?
Actually, climate change zealots usually say we're going to kill everyone. The ones claiming their opponents want to kill grandma are the death panel folks, and the "think of the children" trope is usually talking about drugs. So which side of the political aisle does that put people on?*
* Ad hominem FTW.
So you are advocating we make food more expensive then? Give up on the efficiency gains we've made in the production of food...
Testing makes food more expensive. We do that, because the alternative is outbreaks of deadly diseases.
Can I assume you work in technology? I'll try an example from your world. QA makes code more expensive. But we do it anyway, because the alternative is sometimes things fail. The question is how much testing is enough?
Why not just admit that you want people to die of starvation... Because that's what fixing your perceived "problem" is going to accomplish in the long run.
The long run is exactly the problem. Monocultures are great in the short run. In the long term they're susceptible to catastrophic collapse. AKA famine. Food that's a little more expensive doesn't kill nearly as many people as when there's no food at all.
Oh, and by the way ... telling someone "you want people to die" is a childish way to try to get a rise out of them and win a point via attrition.
Perhaps we should just let it go to extremes and allow for some states that have vastly different rules and let people vote with their feet. Don't like the socialist state of Delaware? Move to the unfettered free market state of Kansas.
Those most likely to be on the wrong end of those extremes are least likely to have the resources to move.
People complain every time there's a summary that leaves out key details. This one includes the model numbers. Thought it only right to give praise where due.
We have HUGE monocultures in our farming operations and it's part of what makes that trip to the grocery store possible because we have efficient, large scale, farming processes to create the cheap and abundant supply of food.
Yes, and I'm saying that's the problem.
Just so it's clear, making food more expensive to produce does little to you and me but increase the grocery budget, but in some parts of the world even modest increases in food costs is catastrophic to the poor and helpless who WILL starve because they cannot afford to pay...
People in Zaire aren't eating wheat grown in Kansas. Or if they are, we're solving the wrong problem.
Food production should be sufficiently local that we don't all have to do it the same way. Concentrating food production to huge monocultures makes us susceptible to catastrophic failure.
Regarding the absurd "asymmetric" anti-prostitution laws in Sweden: If there was any honesty in those who want to criminalize prostitution, they would apply the same logic to many other professions: So eating in a restaurant where a trafficked worker cooked your meal would be illegal. Being helped by some trafficked nurse would be criminalized. Having your garden shack built by a company who brings trafficked workers to your site would make you a criminal.
Nope. When you hire a prostitute you are paying them. When you eat in a restaurant, the owner is paying the cook. Same for the other examples. You could try arguing that you paid a pimp and the pimp paid the sex worker.
37deg is easy to remember and it's marked on any body-thermometer. I just checked, body temperature is 98.6 in Fahrenheit, which is also probably marked on a thermometer.
Random fact: Average body temperature was first calculated in Germany, and reported as 37 degrees C, with error bars. In the U.S. they did a strict conversion and dropped the error bars. And it turns out the original measurement wasn't that great to begin with.
It is easier to divide a circle into basic fractional parts.
A lot of the issues with dividing a foot by 2, 3, 4 & 6 can be hand-waved away as not being that big a deal. But triangles are pretty central to a lot of physical properties. The ability to evenly divide a circle by multiples of 3 is incredibly useful. I'm guessing that's why I've never heard anyone arguing to metric-ify radian measurements.
I used to work for a (thinly) publicly traded penny-stock company, every year near Christmas its value would tank, usually to around 30-50% of where it was in the October-November time frame.
Just in time to fuck over employees waiting for their bonus.
Suspense through stupidity (the admiral not telling Poe the plan, so he would almost get his friends killed), and the entire dead-end infiltration plotline seemed like, after the script was written, someone demanded a mini-Rogue One inserted into the middle.
So much this.
Stylistically, the thing that bugged me was nearly every line was delivered like it was supposed to be the big quote everyone was going to be repeating the next day. Not everything can be, "Search your feelings. You know it to be true."
Someone give that man some mod points.
As if benefit analysis was EVER a consideration for DHS or TSA... I would love to see the benefit analysis of confiscating people's nail clippers from carry on luggage.
Not funny ... True.
They won't refuse to hire her -- they'll just ignore her resume before she ever gets called for an interview based on background check data. It's only grounds for her to sue if she knows about the policy. Company's excuse would be they never got the resume.
You don't get permission to run the background check until after the job offer. If the offer is then rescinded on the basis of the background check, the applicant has a legal right to a copy of the report and a formal dispute process with whoever did the check.
We see no end of criminality in the handling of the Federal government's electronic documents and no end to the incompetence and deliberate neglect in maintaining recoverable backups.
Malice (deliberate neglect) and incompetence are completely different problems, likely to have different solutions. I don't see how either of those is fixed by outsourcing, though.
If the problem is govt workers can't secure systems, you need to trust govt workers to source a supplier who can, and monitor them more effectively at arms length than they did when it was in-house.
If the problem is govt workers won't secure systems, you need to find/create an oversight process that works better on geographically remote third parties than the existing process for in-house systems.
So I guess at a high enough level they're the same problem after all. You need to trust your people, or you need to trust your process. If you choose trusting the process, you have to trust the people who design the process. And remember kids, trust is not transitive. Just because Alice trusts Bob and Bob trusts Chuck doesn't mean Alice can trust Chuck.
At this point, the only thing I can hope for is that the RIAA and MPAA start going around suing ISPs after Net Neutrality is abolished. If Net Neutrality doesn't exist then the ISPs are no longer a common carrier under the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Which will be their explanation of why they had no choice but to cut off all these sites and protocols.
In this case, the entire article is only twice the size of the very short story summary here.
That wasn't an article. That was the introduction to a video. The video was the point of the link.