It's the statistical analysis that's tripping me up as well. Looking over the experimental setup they've certainly attempted to address the immediate concerns that came to mind. They're also not relying purely on historical records of cancer in this line of rats, having a definite control/zero-exposure group in their own experiment.
My other concern is that rats are *so* *much* *smaller* than humans. I don't know how much human skin attenuates signals at these frequencies to know if, compared to these rats, key organs below the skin would/wouldn't be receiving a still significant amount of the energy. Even if our skin does attenuate this then obviously skin cancer *might* still be a concern
My skim read of the PDF also didn't leave me with an impression of the relative strength of the rats' EM exposure compared to what a human typically would experience (e.g. is this simulating typical human tower exposure, or assuming some proximity to a user device?). There are already the obvious recommendations to use a headset separate from the phone if you use it a LOT.
Indeed there are a lot of different permutations of "hire humans", "fire humans", "keep humans" along with "more/fewer robots".
Whilst this might lead to no humans fired, and even still additional humans hired, with the robots being leveraged only to increase efficiency of that workforce and thus create greater revenue (and presumably profit), it's also possible that, despite hiring more humans still, it would have been even more humans without the robots.
Still, I wouldn't knock them for being at least willing to keep jobs open to humans at this stage.
I do sometimes muse about 10 "hour" days, which would make a work day 3 decimal-hours (d-hours, dours?), 'spare' time another 3, sleep 3, and 1 left over for some slop/leeway. You can bet employers would want 3.5 or even 4 dour work days though.
I also could have mentioned "and it would mean not needing to maintain zoneinfo any more", which is a clusterfuck with various governments deciding to change when/if they do DST on a whim, some crazies wanting to use local solar time (so a continuous change in 'now' across the whole country), and other shenanigans. Although, as mentioned above, you'd probably still end up having to maintain a "local business hours" database for some uses, given it *would* be crazy to base that on local solar time.
This would be the pure 'sensible' solution, yes. You change from needing to know what the offset is in order to cite the correct time to instead needing to know what the offset is in business hours instead, so no absolute difference in necessary mental gymnastics there. You gain being able to say "at 15:30" and everyone knowing what you mean.
Now try to get 7 billion (and counting) human beings to agree on doing that, and do so consistently. In the UK we've been officially decimal and metric for decades, yet even people younger than me (coming up on 46) will still cite weights in "stones and pounds" and small lengths in inches.
The issue with this is that business hours aren't centred around mid-day. I don't think we'll ever have the necessary cultural shift to change *that*, thus shifting timezone to +1 permanently is the best that can be hoped for. As many others have said at least this gets rid of the sleep pattern disturbance of changing the clocks twice a year.
Maybe this AI can finally convinced them to give an option to NOT have the elevation angle of driving cameras try to reset to default after a couple of seconds? Drives me nuts in all their games, e.g. Watchdogs and Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Especially important if driving a taller vehicle.
If only I had mod points today. I checked the comments precisely to make this point if no-one else already had.
Sure, force this company to issue an update to not allow the installation of these plugins in future, but forcing removal of them now, when users (probably?) chose to install the plugins themselves is just an uncalled for, and I would hope illegal, intrusion.
Indeed, my experience of Devuan is that it's just too slow to get updates, even critical security updates. So I've stayed with Debian + sysvinit on servers and "let it do what it wants" Debian with systemd on my home desktop so I can have some experience of it. Applying security updates is more important to me than avoiding systemd at this point, and I detest systemd from the little I've used it.
Yes, this is what I do on the various servers I run. As I said in another post, systemd is only given free rein on my home desktop, precisely so that I gain experience of it, know the gotchas, and the workarounds.
If the state of Debian changes so that this is no longer possible then either I'll switch to Devuan (assuming they're on the ball with security updates by then), or just jump ship to either Free or OpenBSD (assuming a few things work well enough on them).
I did, in fact, configure things to continue using rsyslog alongside journald (keeping the latter so I actually had experience of it). The system in question is my home desktop and is the only one I've allowed systemd to have full rein on, precisely in order to educate myself about it in practice.
My post above was to highlight just some of the issues with just one of the parts of the systemd ecosystem.
You missed the attempt at a recursive DNS resolver - resolverd. This has had bugs, including security concerns, that were long since solved problems in bind and other implementations. IIRC it also hard-codes falling back to Google DNS, which may not be desirable.
Journald makes logging simple and convenient, right?
journald has been known to run out of memory and stop responding.
Due to the design of "oh just connect stdout of the process to journald" if you restart journald it closes all of those file descriptors and you silently lose all further logging from already running processes.
Journald, by design, will only log so much per process, meaning that if it's logged too much since startup/an error you're interested in, you've now lost it.
Why 'they' had to go for demonstrably broken binary logging using a new interface I don't know. They could have just extended the syslog format to make it mandatory to pass along program name and process ID in the message. Then they could have made it "easier" to find the logs by having a per program/facility directory under/var/log and then stuck to simple, plain text logging that the existing *nix tools can search with ease. But, nope, they had to go with this shitfest instead.
And that's only one component of the whole systemd shitfest. On a very simple Debian install I've had it exhibit issues with shutdown, hanging on something that is simple or ignorable.
Sadly I had to abandon using Devuan after a while. The only really supported version is the jessie (Debian old-stable) version, and I'm not sure even that gets timely security updates. Their equivalent of Debian stable (Stretch) is 'ascii' and got next to no updates during the few months I used it. Boot up was both nice and fast (a major systemd selling point) and reliable (unlike systemd). I guess they just need more in the way of human resources so that they can nail down which Debian packages have problematic systemd tentacles involved, then they could pass through other Debian updates as soon as they're available.
The researchers partnered with an unnamed internet-service provider -- in a region they chose not to disclose -- to offer customers who were already prone to piracy an on-demand package for free for 45 days. About 10,000 households participated in the study, and about half were given the free service.... according to research published in Management Science (paywall) last month
And from the one I just linked:
The researchers used a piracy-tracking firm to get a sample of thousands of BitTorrent pirates at the associated ISP. Half of them were offered a free 45-day subscription to a premium TV and movies package, allowing them to watch popular content on demand.
We can do better than that. Any recent UK graduate who took out the loans for going to Uni will be paying it back directly from their wages. You can use a site like https://listentotaxman.com/uk-... to work out what this means for their income.
If I put in 35k without any student loan it comes out to 27,081.48 per year (2,256.79 pcm), after all deductions. For 38k with the 'Plan 1' (higher %age paid back per month) student loan repayments it comes out to 27,301.23 per year (2,275.10 pcm). Note that the amount taken out in loans doesn't affect how much is paid back per month, that's purely based on how much you earn over certain thresholds. And these loans are forgiven after 30 years if not already paid back. It's more like a tax targeted at those who took the loans in return for the education.
So the 'coder' with the degree and loans to pay back just barely makes more money on that median salary. Mostly my point is that it's not like they're netting less due to loan repayments.
Indeed, I'm wondering how this is going to work. Unless you give Credit Karma all the details they can't be sure it's *you* has been hacked. And unless they tell you all the details upon detection you can't be sure they've correctly detected a problem for you. If they mis-identified you then they may just have given you private information about someone else.
As a means of identification isn't the problem, they can be useful to disambiguate same-name, born in same town etc. The problems arise when they get used as a means of authentication/verification of that identification.
"An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard" and yet I can't see a link to that report in this article. Also, having heard about this whole thing elsewhere I know that PewDiePie has most definitely responded already in another video:
Note I'm not in any way, shape, or form defending PewDiePie, despite his thorough apology and admittance of guilt. The fact the n-word came out like that for me points to it being part of his cultural vocabulary.
I use Privacy Badger for this. Cookies can be 100% blocked, allowed but only for the session, or allowed to be stored for future sessions. What's more there's a central repository of knowledge about what settings are necessary in order for sites to work so you don't have to figure it out yourself.
Oh my, that's a lot default blocked entirely here on/.
So this is "run from the.apk file" ? Presumably the advantage is this can be on any storage without faffing with remembering to install it on external SD card with all the issues that can cause... unless of course this suffers the same issues.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the statistical analysis that's tripping me up as well. Looking over the experimental setup they've certainly attempted to address the immediate concerns that came to mind. They're also not relying purely on historical records of cancer in this line of rats, having a definite control/zero-exposure group in their own experiment.
My other concern is that rats are *so* *much* *smaller* than humans. I don't know how much human skin attenuates signals at these frequencies to know if, compared to these rats, key organs below the skin would/wouldn't be receiving a still significant amount of the energy. Even if our skin does attenuate this then obviously skin cancer *might* still be a concern
My skim read of the PDF also didn't leave me with an impression of the relative strength of the rats' EM exposure compared to what a human typically would experience (e.g. is this simulating typical human tower exposure, or assuming some proximity to a user device?). There are already the obvious recommendations to use a headset separate from the phone if you use it a LOT.
Indeed there are a lot of different permutations of "hire humans", "fire humans", "keep humans" along with "more/fewer robots".
Whilst this might lead to no humans fired, and even still additional humans hired, with the robots being leveraged only to increase efficiency of that workforce and thus create greater revenue (and presumably profit), it's also possible that, despite hiring more humans still, it would have been even more humans without the robots.
Still, I wouldn't knock them for being at least willing to keep jobs open to humans at this stage.
I was going to post fast.com if no-one else had.
There's also a list of other tests on https://www.eff.org/testyouris...
I do sometimes muse about 10 "hour" days, which would make a work day 3 decimal-hours (d-hours, dours?), 'spare' time another 3, sleep 3, and 1 left over for some slop/leeway. You can bet employers would want 3.5 or even 4 dour work days though.
I also could have mentioned "and it would mean not needing to maintain zoneinfo any more", which is a clusterfuck with various governments deciding to change when/if they do DST on a whim, some crazies wanting to use local solar time (so a continuous change in 'now' across the whole country), and other shenanigans. Although, as mentioned above, you'd probably still end up having to maintain a "local business hours" database for some uses, given it *would* be crazy to base that on local solar time.
This would be the pure 'sensible' solution, yes. You change from needing to know what the offset is in order to cite the correct time to instead needing to know what the offset is in business hours instead, so no absolute difference in necessary mental gymnastics there. You gain being able to say "at 15:30" and everyone knowing what you mean.
Now try to get 7 billion (and counting) human beings to agree on doing that, and do so consistently. In the UK we've been officially decimal and metric for decades, yet even people younger than me (coming up on 46) will still cite weights in "stones and pounds" and small lengths in inches.
The issue with this is that business hours aren't centred around mid-day. I don't think we'll ever have the necessary cultural shift to change *that*, thus shifting timezone to +1 permanently is the best that can be hoped for. As many others have said at least this gets rid of the sleep pattern disturbance of changing the clocks twice a year.
Maybe this AI can finally convinced them to give an option to NOT have the elevation angle of driving cameras try to reset to default after a couple of seconds? Drives me nuts in all their games, e.g. Watchdogs and Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Especially important if driving a taller vehicle.
If only I had mod points today. I checked the comments precisely to make this point if no-one else already had.
Sure, force this company to issue an update to not allow the installation of these plugins in future, but forcing removal of them now, when users (probably?) chose to install the plugins themselves is just an uncalled for, and I would hope illegal, intrusion.
Indeed, my experience of Devuan is that it's just too slow to get updates, even critical security updates. So I've stayed with Debian + sysvinit on servers and "let it do what it wants" Debian with systemd on my home desktop so I can have some experience of it. Applying security updates is more important to me than avoiding systemd at this point, and I detest systemd from the little I've used it.
Yes, this is what I do on the various servers I run. As I said in another post, systemd is only given free rein on my home desktop, precisely so that I gain experience of it, know the gotchas, and the workarounds.
If the state of Debian changes so that this is no longer possible then either I'll switch to Devuan (assuming they're on the ball with security updates by then), or just jump ship to either Free or OpenBSD (assuming a few things work well enough on them).
I did, in fact, configure things to continue using rsyslog alongside journald (keeping the latter so I actually had experience of it). The system in question is my home desktop and is the only one I've allowed systemd to have full rein on, precisely in order to educate myself about it in practice.
My post above was to highlight just some of the issues with just one of the parts of the systemd ecosystem.
I was going to google and provide you with examples, but really all you need to do is look at the google results: https://www.google.com/search?...
Just that "user starting with a digit" bug alone....
pulseaudio - and yeah it used to not work particularly well, and still likes to occasionally forget the volume levels I had set.
You missed the attempt at a recursive DNS resolver - resolverd. This has had bugs, including security concerns, that were long since solved problems in bind and other implementations. IIRC it also hard-codes falling back to Google DNS, which may not be desirable.
Journald makes logging simple and convenient, right?
journald has been known to run out of memory and stop responding.
Due to the design of "oh just connect stdout of the process to journald" if you restart journald it closes all of those file descriptors and you silently lose all further logging from already running processes.
Journald, by design, will only log so much per process, meaning that if it's logged too much since startup/an error you're interested in, you've now lost it.
Why 'they' had to go for demonstrably broken binary logging using a new interface I don't know. They could have just extended the syslog format to make it mandatory to pass along program name and process ID in the message. Then they could have made it "easier" to find the logs by having a per program/facility directory under /var/log and then stuck to simple, plain text logging that the existing *nix tools can search with ease. But, nope, they had to go with this shitfest instead.
And that's only one component of the whole systemd shitfest. On a very simple Debian install I've had it exhibit issues with shutdown, hanging on something that is simple or ignorable.
Sadly I had to abandon using Devuan after a while. The only really supported version is the jessie (Debian old-stable) version, and I'm not sure even that gets timely security updates. Their equivalent of Debian stable (Stretch) is 'ascii' and got next to no updates during the few months I used it. Boot up was both nice and fast (a major systemd selling point) and reliable (unlike systemd). I guess they just need more in the way of human resources so that they can nail down which Debian packages have problematic systemd tentacles involved, then they could pass through other Debian updates as soon as they're available.
Yes, this one https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
From this article:
And from the one I just linked:
And that one links to https://pubsonline.informs.org... which has a "Management Science" banner on it.
Just what I was thinking, they're hitting a wall on no longer adding much useful value in the newer models.
We can do better than that. Any recent UK graduate who took out the loans for going to Uni will be paying it back directly from their wages. You can use a site like https://listentotaxman.com/uk-... to work out what this means for their income.
If I put in 35k without any student loan it comes out to 27,081.48 per year (2,256.79 pcm), after all deductions. For 38k with the 'Plan 1' (higher %age paid back per month) student loan repayments it comes out to 27,301.23 per year (2,275.10 pcm). Note that the amount taken out in loans doesn't affect how much is paid back per month, that's purely based on how much you earn over certain thresholds. And these loans are forgiven after 30 years if not already paid back. It's more like a tax targeted at those who took the loans in return for the education.
So the 'coder' with the degree and loans to pay back just barely makes more money on that median salary. Mostly my point is that it's not like they're netting less due to loan repayments.
Indeed, I'm wondering how this is going to work. Unless you give Credit Karma all the details they can't be sure it's *you* has been hacked. And unless they tell you all the details upon detection you can't be sure they've correctly detected a problem for you. If they mis-identified you then they may just have given you private information about someone else.
As a means of identification isn't the problem, they can be useful to disambiguate same-name, born in same town etc. The problems arise when they get used as a means of authentication/verification of that identification.
"An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard" and yet I can't see a link to that report in this article. Also, having heard about this whole thing elsewhere I know that PewDiePie has most definitely responded already in another video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLdxuaxaQwc&ab_channel=PewDiePie
Yet another case of poor editing at /.
Note I'm not in any way, shape, or form defending PewDiePie, despite his thorough apology and admittance of guilt. The fact the n-word came out like that for me points to it being part of his cultural vocabulary.
About the only thing of value Oracle has after buying Sun is Java; $7.4 billion for a language they can't really monetize.
It seems Oracle is trying to hand off responsibility for Java as well https://developers.slashdot.or... , although maybe not, at least with respect to security... https://developers.slashdot.or...
I use Privacy Badger for this. Cookies can be 100% blocked, allowed but only for the session, or allowed to be stored for future sessions. What's more there's a central repository of knowledge about what settings are necessary in order for sites to work so you don't have to figure it out yourself.
Oh my, that's a lot default blocked entirely here on /.
So this is "run from the .apk file" ? Presumably the advantage is this can be on any storage without faffing with remembering to install it on external SD card with all the issues that can cause... unless of course this suffers the same issues.