No they aren't. But when we have multiple cases of experts doing non-expert things in one big row combined with incredible unluckiness I'm still questioning if they are an expert.
To be clear this security expert: a) left a laptop in his car b) left it in plain view / didn't know someone knew he left his laptop in his car c) left the car unlocked d) had no encryption on his laptop e) actually got his laptop stolen (which by extension makes people wonder if he's the unluckiest man in the world, or if he's done this more often and just got hit by probabilities)
Any one of those things is dumb, any 2 or 3 things probably as well. But this case shows an epic pattern of failure for an "expert" to make.
The Calgary Sun said he was a "computer expert". You don't believe everything you read in any of the numerous Canadian city "Sun" newspapers. For all we know, the reporter asked him if he was familiar with computers, he answered yes, and they ran with it.
I once owned a truck that I bought with just an ignition key (GM, so two keys needed). I never did bother to remove the glove box lock and pay the $50 the locksmith wanted to create a new key which would work for the door.
For eight years, I never once locked the truck. I parked it numerous times overnight in some rather dubious locations (dive bar parking lots, for example) and no-one ever took a single thing from inside that vehicle.
I also own a convertible. You never lock a convertible; thieves will just knife the top to get in. So as of today it's been about seven years without ever being locked.
Now, I wouldn't leave a laptop, or anything tempting like a shopping bag with new items in it, on the front seat. For some reason people do get inside and rifle through it; change disappears from time to time. Now, the trunk isn't big, but it works just fine, and that's where valuables go if I leave it unattended.
More likely is that the laptop got converted for cash at a pawn shop and later bought in good faith, which means he's humiliated a poor girl who had nothing to do with the theft.
Without knowing the time scales involved, that seems very unlikely. Unless he waited weeks to do this.
Also, pretty sure all the savvy thieves use Craigslist these days, not pawn shops. But either way, the chances of a buyer pouncing very quickly is pretty low unless he was selling at a very steep discount.
The "more likely" claim really makes me pause.... why would you say this? Does this have something to do with the alleged thief being female?
Nobody in Canada uses Craigslist much. Kijiji rules that space.
More likely is that the laptop got converted for cash at a pawn shop and later bought in good faith, which means he's humiliated a poor girl who had nothing to do with the theft.
In which case the pawn shop owner would be in trouble. Many locales have laws to make it harder to fence stolen property; if she bought it off of Craig's List cheap it would be hard to make a good faith argument.
In Canada you need to provide Photo ID to pawn anything, the Pawn Shop must record the information related to the transaction, and that record is submitted electronically to Police once a week, where it is checked against police reports of theft. Plus, it's a common sight to see detectives visiting all the Pawn Shops in the city; it's a routine part of their duty.
This took place in Canada. In Quebec, Ontario, and any other province with a provincial police presence, you report federal crimes to either the local or provincial police - not directly to the RCMP (feds), except where the feds have jurisdiction (airports, etc).
Context matters - and in this case, the context is that it's not in the USA.
You must be from Ontario; people there like to speak for all of Canada, despite not knowing a thing about anywhere outside of Ontario. The list of "any other province with a provincial police" would be the two you cited and Newfoundland.
In the other seven provinces and two territories that comprise Canada, you can either form and fund your own local police (whether rural or urban), or you can contract with the RCMP to provide local policing. (Not having one or the other is not an option).
For example in the province of British Columbia, municipal forces are the rarity, not the norm. Outside of the City of Vancouver, chances are you will be dealing with RCMP everywhere you go. In Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, even Rural Municipalities may have their own local police force.
However, in every province and territory of Canada, including Ontario, Quebec, and Newfoundland, it is the RCMP whom are charged with dealing with cyber crime. So you may still contact them should the theft of a laptop result in certain crime(s) that are not simply the original crime of theft.
Specifically, in this particular case, the computer owner is in Calgary, Alberta. Calgary has a municipal police force.
Advertisers who choose quality over lowest common denominator? Never going to happen. If that industry had any... and I mean any... ethics, there would not be late night ads for copper pots on TV. Or anywhere. There would be no way to get fake Viagra; you'd have to get the real thing from a real pharmacy with a real prescription from a real doctor. And the web would not have driven people into ad blockers in the first place.
Let's not forget, Hosts files have been around for... I don't even remember when I installed one for the first time, but it was around the time you could get broadband instead of dialup for the first time. So let's say 25 years. Probably longer, but I can only talk of my own experience.
Yet, few people actually installed them. It was the banal drivel wallpapering every website on the planet that drove ordinary people to seek out simple browser add-ons that kill ads. And it was the demand for those plugins that got developers to build them in the first place. The industry has no-one to blame but themselves.
And now we get this "it wasn't us, it was the other guy" plea from them to please let them serve us ads. Pretty please. We're sorry.
Well, they're sorry all right, but not in the meaning they intended.
It's not about list prices, it's about actually selling the product at price $XX.
In Canada you have to offer and sell the product at some price that will form the basis of a regular price. It has nothing to do with MSRP, which is a legal construct, not an actual price.
If you have product A that you price at $19.99 you have to show you actually sold inventory at $19.99 and that you offered the product for sale and actually made sales for the majority of the time (eg more than 183 days a year, for example) the product was available. You could then offer the product for (say) $17.95 and call it a Sale or discounted price.
SEARS Canada (a somewhat different company than SEARS-Roebuck) was famously fined because they had too many sales, almost continuously, on certain products so that it was deemed that the Sale prices were effectively the actual regular prices. It's a False Advertising issue, not an MSRP issue.
I don't know whether the new Macbook Pro is a good computer or a bad computer; I've never seen one and won't be replacing my current laptop for quite a while yet.
But, I do have some expertise in a few other fields. And I have to say that with regard to non-computer equipment I know like the back of my hand that Consumer Reports evaluates... well... they haven't a clue. They recommend junk and hate excellent product. I don't know why, but they do.
So, whether they love the new Macbook Pro or hate it, or lay somewhere in between, is irrelevant to me. They have shown themselves to earn near-zero credibility in my books. Which leaves me with coming to my own conclusions, and I'm OK with that.
If you live in Canada, you already are:). It drives the US nuts that we can (or used to be able to?) burn copies of CDs for free for friends & family, for research etc.
In Canada, you cannot, and never have been legally able to, burn CDs for friends and family.
The Copyright was (prior to it's last revision, which is what you are referring to) clear; you could only make copies of music yourself for your own use. Distribution in any form, which includes making a "mix tape" and giving it to your mother, is illegal and always has been in Canada.
Two decades after the original artist's/etc demise would be fair. Perpetual copyright doesn't protect dead originators, and to make copyright perpetual changes it dramatically.
Maybe reconsider perpetual compensation? a perpetual right to prevent modification and ensure attribution, but to be paid forever? How do we reconcile this?
And corporations need to be a different case.
Music copyrights have nothing to do with the artist, therefore there is no correlation with the artist's lifetime. All music copyrights are owned by the Label (and RIAA member, if in the USA) which, as a corp[oration, has a theoretically infinite lifetime.
Passing the copyrights to the Label is a condition of every record contract. As an artist, either you are published, have a record release and have zero copyrights, or your are unpublished, unreleased, unknown and own them all, but no-one cares. There is such a thing as the Independent record release, which is an attempt to retain the copyrights by the artist(s), but you won't find those CDs for sale in most retailers or available as digital files on most mainstream download sites.
Organized Crime has long infiltrated the Waste Management industry. This is hardly news; when it comes to recycling (where companies are paid to dispose of whatever) it seems obvious that you can collect the cash and dispose of nothing = profit, especially since the fees are set up in the first place to guarantee profits if you actually do dispose of the waste properly.
The "Mob" has been caught disposing of Dioxins by putting a quart here, a quart there, in tankers of gasoline, which is then distributed to stations across a region (NorthEast US, Montreal, etc) so that your wife and daughter can pump them into their subcompacts and burn it away, obviously being exposed to a Cancer risk while doing so. What makes anyone think a little lead from a CRT is going to give them pause?
'And with ten or fifteen open tabs it eventually becomes sluggish as hell.'
I don't think that's the standard use case for testing, nor should it be. What the hell are you doing with that many tabs open.
"Unfortunately, modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart them. Which takes ages if you have a hundred of tabs."
Again, good lord. Hundreds of tabs? What are you even doing.
As to refresh, I think that's become a user expectation that you see the most recent information when you pull up a tab. Having to manually do it isn't something a standard user is going to do.
Maybe what you're looking for is to have 'power user' settings in the browser, so you can keep your hundred tabs open.
I normally have perhaps 30~40 pages live (I don't like tabs, I prefer new windows) when surfing in an ordinary fashion. From time to time, I might even get up to a hundred. My browser does work fine, or to put it another way, roughly the same as when there are only one or two pages open.
What am I doing? Simple... I refuse to be interrupted by crap. So when I am reading a news story (for example) I stay on that news story page and read the whole thing, then close the window (or tab, if you prefer). And if there is a phrase or event mentioned on that news page, I copy and paste into a new browser window to search that term and have it ready to refer to next, or later, or whenever.
Similarly when I'm researching a topic, I stay on the page I'm reading, and again will probably have a number of new pages rendered and ready for when I am good and ready to read them, in their entirety, as topics, phrases, pdf's, links, etc come into the picture.
Honestly I can't understand why someone would NOT have dozens of pages open at the same time. What do you do... jump to a new page and leave the one you were supposedly interested in reading?
I'm no Climate Change denier, but I find it alarming that the media and politicians are still using the wrong language to describe Climate Change issues. The Earth is on a natural cycle of a warming trend. The IPCC is prohibited from considering Climate Cycles in their data or reports on Climate Change... they can only consider manmade causes. Yet if every human "did the right thing for the planet"... which means all the billions of us commit suicide, tonight, at midnight, to stop manmade contributions, the planet will still warm over the next century, and Greenhouse Gases will still rise, because that is the point in the natural temperature cycles we are currently in.
However, almost every day I hear totally inappropriate language to describe Climate Change issues. For example, Canada has just adopted a Carbon Price solution. The nation represents about a percent and a half of the world's Carbon emissions, so there will be no remedial effect on the planet itself; it's a "Leadership Position" and is a small step in the right direction (as it will reduce Carbon emissions somewhat, by taxing them).
But I heard the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau say, when announcing the accord with the Provinces, that this position will "fix"... yes, that is his exact word... Climate Change. Pure, unadulterated bullshit. There is no fix. Period. There is only mitigation, there is only taking 20 years to emit what we are currently emitting in 10, or some such similar result.
I am dismayed to talk to people who think we can stop Global Warming. We can't. That horse left the barn... well, it left thousands of years ago when the current natural trend was established, and the mere existence of humans on this planet doomed us to acceleration of the natural trend. Plain and simple.
- old tube AM radio to take apart (I was 5 years old and had already been passionate about electricity and electronics for the previous 3 years or so)
I have to warn against this advice. Many US-made "Old Tube Radios" were manufactured with a primitive power system (not transformer coupled) and a "Hot Chassis". They employ a 2-prong AC plug (not a modern 3-prong plug) and since polarized sockets were not used at the time, the plug is unpolarized (can be inserted either way). This type of construction is cheaper and is therefore quite commonly found.
Depending on how you insert the AC plug, the chassis is either hot when the radio is on, or hot when the radio is off. Either way, touching the chassis when it is hot results in electrocution. And yes, many died as a result of touching the chassis of these radios.
Not only is an old tube radio a bad gift for a child, it's a bad gift for an adult, if the idea is to teach them about the electronics contained within. Only a trained technician should ever touch such a radio if it is plugged into the wall, and in many cases if it is not (as capacitors can store a charge).
Because of a serious safety issue, I felt compelled to chime in. No offence intended; the post has the right idea.
"... First, the amount of time spent watching stuff is a poor metric by itself. What you really want to know is the amount of enjoyment people get out of the service. Admittedly that is very hard to measure accurately, which is why they want to use "hours spent watching" as a more easily determinable value. However they shouldn't forget that the map is not the territory...."
Ah, but you are not a TV Programming executive. You see, the single most important metric to anyone providing content is the amount of time you spend watching. Nothing... and I mean nothing... else matters. Because that is the metric they can earn advertising revenue from, and that is the metric they can present to the Board to show revenue potential and revenue trends.
Now, there is the obvious problem... subscriber base goes hand in hand with viewership hours for this to fully flesh out.
But that is the problem of Sales, not Programming.
Maybe that's a fucked up way of running a company, but no-one ever got a media company to change by pointing out their ridiculous view of the world or their place in it.
<quote><p>Besides, the windows phone UI is ugly as hell. You basically have to be a Microsoft fan to actually want to use it.</p></quote>
<p>I disagree. I wasn't a Microsoft fan when I switched to Windows Phone in late 2012 (hated Windows XP, skipped Vista, was forced to use 7). But the somewhat denser UI allowed me to break out of the tap in, tap in, tap in, back, back, back cycle that I was seemingly stuck in on iOS.
</p><p>Plus I liked the tiles: resizable, repositionable, and they contained information.</p></quote>
You "hated" WindowsXP? Quite possibly the only thing Microsoft did right over the last 20 years... and you "hated" it?
I read the article carefully, and I didn't see an answer to my question. It says that the "cost will double". But it doesn't say the cost of what.
If it's the assembly cost, that is only about 3% of the cost of an iPhone. The majority of the parts that go into making an iPhone are not China sourced (although a certain amount is from China, but the largest % of parts comes from Germany, and no, China isn't no2 on the list either).
What is missing is the infrastructure that surrounds the China assembly plants. The cost of Labor isn't the issue. (China and Mexico have almost identical labor costs, for example).
That's something that every Mining Engineer could tell you. There are plenty of places in the world with rich mineral or oil deposits, but the infrastructure to exploit those deposits doesn't exist, or more properly exists in the places they are actively mining and pumping today.
That's the kind of thing that takes years to develop... it took China a decade to do it, and they were highly motivated and had state sponsorship. The US once had it, but it has withered away and would have to be re-established.
Apple has built computers in the US, in Ireland, and other "first world" nations in the past, and they assemble iMacs in Texas today.
I took a test to see if I could spot fake reviews. The examples were not easy... most were two paragraphs or so and the language was not from a non-native speaker of English. My score was 40 / 40, or 100%.
I was surprised; I expected to be fooled a few times. But that's not the point.
Even though I am apparently skilled at it, it was not easy; I can see how most people would have trouble spotting many of the examples I was asked to determine.
Fake or insincere reviews, blog posts, and forum posts are everywhere. That is not news.
Where the problem exists is there are also sincere reviews, blog posts, and forum posts. It's not enough to pick out the fakes, you have to be able to correctly identify the genuine ones as well.
It's not important which you get right, it's important you get most of them right. Exactly how much is hard to say, but I would say it has to be at least 80% of the time or reviews / blogs / posts are not useful to you.
Why don't laptop screens come in a 9x12-ish format? Because they are built to accommodate the keyboard, not the screen. Why do most people who own a rotatable desktop monitor still view it in landscape mode? Because all the software including the OS is built to work in the landscape form factor. Why are tablets popular? Because after a total rewrite of the OS and all apps, they actually work in a vertical orientation.
Paper is simply shaped the right way for reading. It is also more convenient to work with. I know the desktop metaphor works reasonably well, it just doesn't work as well as a real world stack of documents made of paper.
You can write on it. Being able to write on a computer screen has been available for 20 years, yet few people who have the capability actually use it, and very few people have the capability in the first place. The only exception seems to be graphic artists, and we all know they are not "normal" people.
The paperless office is a pipe dream, and always has been.
What digital devices are good for, however, is storage. There is no way any computer user would have had the same number of documents stored in their home or pocket if there was no digital device to hold it. The house would sink into the earth under the weight of it all.
I still use and buy books, I still use and work with paper documents. Yet I have... I dunno... thousands of books worth of documents stored on Hard Drives and backups. The ratio of paper documents to digital documents is enormous.
Not me, personally. I don't do the things Amazon is suing people (or businesses) for. But...
You typically need to sue in a US court if you want to get any reasonable settlement that covers your effort and costs. If Amazon wins the lawsuit, and the loser doesn't pay the judgement, then Amazon can seize all their US assets.
And if the offshore vendor doesn't have any US assets?
It is not the absence or presence of a clutch pedal that determines if a transmission is "Automatic" or "Manual". The terms are somewhat ambiguous, as they describe a shift by user input when the true difference is how the transmission operates.
The first transmissions... they were not called "manual" at the time... were all clutch-actuated sliding-gear types with a mainshaft and countershaft. Later an improvement was the Constant Mesh type, which still utilized the mainshaft and countershaft arrangement, but reduced the tendency to "grind" the gears.
Some might consider the addition of synchromesh shift mechanisms as another improvement, but dog-shift transmissions with user-operated clutches are still used, in particular in motorcycles and in four wheel racing. In every example the consistent characteristic is the mainshaft and countershaft with gears arrangement. Although until recently all these types utilized a manual (foot or hand operated) clutch, the presence of either does not define the type. Electronic aids can substitute for the manually operated clutch.
The "Automatic" transmission is a marketing term to describe the Hydraulic Shift Transmission type. This uses Planetary Gears and Hydraulic Valves to perform the shifting of ratios. Again, these transmissions utilize a hydraulic link to the engine, in the form of a Torque Converter, but the presence of the Torque Converter, like the presence of the user-operated clutch, does not define the type.
Torque-converters, conventional clutch and pressure plate mechanisms, and centrifugal clutches are all possible methods of connecting the engine to the transmission. The absence or presence of user operated clutch is merely a feature of how the motor and ratio shift mechanism connect, just as the absence or presence of Computer Control does not define the type. It is the hydraulic valve operated planetary gear set, or the mainshaft/countershaft with sliding gears that define the two types... the "Automatic" and "Manual" to use the typical terms, respectively.
A "Dual Clutch Transmission" that is computer controlled but does not have a user-operated clutch pedal is none the less a "manual" transmission if it utilizes a mainshaft and countershaft with sliding gears and dog engagement.
Similarly, a hydraulic valve and planetary gear transmission that is computer controlled is an "Automatic" transmission type.
The number should be 100% whom understand that you have to monitor the vehicle and be willing at any moment to (re)take control. Tesla is selling a couple hundred cars a month into Germany. Does Tesla Motors feel that there being 5 drivers every month who think you can push a button and then go on the Autobahn while watching a DVD and eating breakfast is OK?
This is a big deal. It should be zero drivers thinking that way. And I mean ZERO. This is not vindication for Tesla, it's indicative of how they are thinking about this all wrong.
Like any good Criminal, they study Human Nature and know it inside out.
The Election was late-breaking news and people were hungry for tidbits of information. That means many (not all, of course) normally wary and aware recipients of the eMail would have fallen for it, despite probably knowing better the other 364 days of the year.
The results may have played a role in the uptake, but it would have worked regardless of who won, as long as it was reasonably close, and that would include the state results only in some races, regardless of the Presidential race.
Just good planning by the hackers. In retrospect's perfect 20:20 vision, it's obvious but on Election Day, maybe not so much.
Hopefully it won't be forgotten, although the odds in my opinion are against it, but next time around maybe these organizations should warn their staff a day or three before the first Tuesday in November. It's a near perfect "setup", as the crime movies would say.
Slashdot Mirror
No they aren't. But when we have multiple cases of experts doing non-expert things in one big row combined with incredible unluckiness I'm still questioning if they are an expert.
To be clear this security expert:
a) left a laptop in his car
b) left it in plain view / didn't know someone knew he left his laptop in his car
c) left the car unlocked
d) had no encryption on his laptop
e) actually got his laptop stolen (which by extension makes people wonder if he's the unluckiest man in the world, or if he's done this more often and just got hit by probabilities)
Any one of those things is dumb, any 2 or 3 things probably as well. But this case shows an epic pattern of failure for an "expert" to make.
The Calgary Sun said he was a "computer expert". You don't believe everything you read in any of the numerous Canadian city "Sun" newspapers. For all we know, the reporter asked him if he was familiar with computers, he answered yes, and they ran with it.
I once owned a truck that I bought with just an ignition key (GM, so two keys needed). I never did bother to remove the glove box lock and pay the $50 the locksmith wanted to create a new key which would work for the door.
For eight years, I never once locked the truck. I parked it numerous times overnight in some rather dubious locations (dive bar parking lots, for example) and no-one ever took a single thing from inside that vehicle.
I also own a convertible. You never lock a convertible; thieves will just knife the top to get in. So as of today it's been about seven years without ever being locked.
Now, I wouldn't leave a laptop, or anything tempting like a shopping bag with new items in it, on the front seat. For some reason people do get inside and rifle through it; change disappears from time to time. Now, the trunk isn't big, but it works just fine, and that's where valuables go if I leave it unattended.
More likely is that the laptop got converted for cash at a pawn shop and later bought in good faith, which means he's humiliated a poor girl who had nothing to do with the theft.
Without knowing the time scales involved, that seems very unlikely. Unless he waited weeks to do this.
Also, pretty sure all the savvy thieves use Craigslist these days, not pawn shops. But either way, the chances of a buyer pouncing very quickly is pretty low unless he was selling at a very steep discount.
The "more likely" claim really makes me pause.... why would you say this? Does this have something to do with the alleged thief being female?
Nobody in Canada uses Craigslist much. Kijiji rules that space.
More likely is that the laptop got converted for cash at a pawn shop and later bought in good faith, which means he's humiliated a poor girl who had nothing to do with the theft.
In which case the pawn shop owner would be in trouble. Many locales have laws to make it harder to fence stolen property; if she bought it off of Craig's List cheap it would be hard to make a good faith argument.
In Canada you need to provide Photo ID to pawn anything, the Pawn Shop must record the information related to the transaction, and that record is submitted electronically to Police once a week, where it is checked against police reports of theft. Plus, it's a common sight to see detectives visiting all the Pawn Shops in the city; it's a routine part of their duty.
This took place in Canada. In Quebec, Ontario, and any other province with a provincial police presence, you report federal crimes to either the local or provincial police - not directly to the RCMP (feds), except where the feds have jurisdiction (airports, etc).
Context matters - and in this case, the context is that it's not in the USA.
You must be from Ontario; people there like to speak for all of Canada, despite not knowing a thing about anywhere outside of Ontario. The list of "any other province with a provincial police" would be the two you cited and Newfoundland.
In the other seven provinces and two territories that comprise Canada, you can either form and fund your own local police (whether rural or urban), or you can contract with the RCMP to provide local policing. (Not having one or the other is not an option).
For example in the province of British Columbia, municipal forces are the rarity, not the norm. Outside of the City of Vancouver, chances are you will be dealing with RCMP everywhere you go. In Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, even Rural Municipalities may have their own local police force.
However, in every province and territory of Canada, including Ontario, Quebec, and Newfoundland, it is the RCMP whom are charged with dealing with cyber crime. So you may still contact them should the theft of a laptop result in certain crime(s) that are not simply the original crime of theft.
Specifically, in this particular case, the computer owner is in Calgary, Alberta. Calgary has a municipal police force.
Advertisers who choose quality over lowest common denominator? Never going to happen. If that industry had any ... and I mean any ... ethics, there would not be late night ads for copper pots on TV. Or anywhere. There would be no way to get fake Viagra; you'd have to get the real thing from a real pharmacy with a real prescription from a real doctor. And the web would not have driven people into ad blockers in the first place.
Let's not forget, Hosts files have been around for ... I don't even remember when I installed one for the first time, but it was around the time you could get broadband instead of dialup for the first time. So let's say 25 years. Probably longer, but I can only talk of my own experience.
Yet, few people actually installed them. It was the banal drivel wallpapering every website on the planet that drove ordinary people to seek out simple browser add-ons that kill ads. And it was the demand for those plugins that got developers to build them in the first place. The industry has no-one to blame but themselves.
And now we get this "it wasn't us, it was the other guy" plea from them to please let them serve us ads. Pretty please. We're sorry.
Well, they're sorry all right, but not in the meaning they intended.
It's not about list prices, it's about actually selling the product at price $XX.
In Canada you have to offer and sell the product at some price that will form the basis of a regular price. It has nothing to do with MSRP, which is a legal construct, not an actual price.
If you have product A that you price at $19.99 you have to show you actually sold inventory at $19.99 and that you offered the product for sale and actually made sales for the majority of the time (eg more than 183 days a year, for example) the product was available. You could then offer the product for (say) $17.95 and call it a Sale or discounted price.
SEARS Canada (a somewhat different company than SEARS-Roebuck) was famously fined because they had too many sales, almost continuously, on certain products so that it was deemed that the Sale prices were effectively the actual regular prices. It's a False Advertising issue, not an MSRP issue.
I don't know whether the new Macbook Pro is a good computer or a bad computer; I've never seen one and won't be replacing my current laptop for quite a while yet.
But, I do have some expertise in a few other fields. And I have to say that with regard to non-computer equipment I know like the back of my hand that Consumer Reports evaluates ... well ... they haven't a clue. They recommend junk and hate excellent product. I don't know why, but they do.
So, whether they love the new Macbook Pro or hate it, or lay somewhere in between, is irrelevant to me. They have shown themselves to earn near-zero credibility in my books. Which leaves me with coming to my own conclusions, and I'm OK with that.
"It wasn't rocket science. It was three days of hard work."
Best News Quote of 2016, hands down. Or 2013. Or sometime. Still the best.
If you live in Canada, you already are :). It drives the US nuts that we can (or used to be able to?) burn copies of CDs for free for friends & family, for research etc.
Apparently lots of torrent sites are partially-based in Canada as well. http://iipdigital.usembassy.go...
In Canada, you cannot, and never have been legally able to, burn CDs for friends and family.
The Copyright was (prior to it's last revision, which is what you are referring to) clear; you could only make copies of music yourself for your own use. Distribution in any form, which includes making a "mix tape" and giving it to your mother, is illegal and always has been in Canada.
Two decades after the original artist's/etc demise would be fair. Perpetual copyright doesn't protect dead originators, and to make copyright perpetual changes it dramatically.
Maybe reconsider perpetual compensation? a perpetual right to prevent modification and ensure attribution, but to be paid forever? How do we reconcile this?
And corporations need to be a different case.
Music copyrights have nothing to do with the artist, therefore there is no correlation with the artist's lifetime. All music copyrights are owned by the Label (and RIAA member, if in the USA) which, as a corp[oration, has a theoretically infinite lifetime.
Passing the copyrights to the Label is a condition of every record contract. As an artist, either you are published, have a record release and have zero copyrights, or your are unpublished, unreleased, unknown and own them all, but no-one cares. There is such a thing as the Independent record release, which is an attempt to retain the copyrights by the artist(s), but you won't find those CDs for sale in most retailers or available as digital files on most mainstream download sites.
Organized Crime has long infiltrated the Waste Management industry. This is hardly news; when it comes to recycling (where companies are paid to dispose of whatever) it seems obvious that you can collect the cash and dispose of nothing = profit, especially since the fees are set up in the first place to guarantee profits if you actually do dispose of the waste properly.
The "Mob" has been caught disposing of Dioxins by putting a quart here, a quart there, in tankers of gasoline, which is then distributed to stations across a region (NorthEast US, Montreal, etc) so that your wife and daughter can pump them into their subcompacts and burn it away, obviously being exposed to a Cancer risk while doing so. What makes anyone think a little lead from a CRT is going to give them pause?
'And with ten or fifteen open tabs it eventually becomes sluggish as hell.'
I don't think that's the standard use case for testing, nor should it be. What the hell are you doing with that many tabs open.
"Unfortunately, modern browsers are so stupid that they reload all the tabs when you restart them. Which takes ages if you have a hundred of tabs."
Again, good lord. Hundreds of tabs? What are you even doing.
As to refresh, I think that's become a user expectation that you see the most recent information when you pull up a tab. Having to manually do it isn't something a standard user is going to do.
Maybe what you're looking for is to have 'power user' settings in the browser, so you can keep your hundred tabs open.
I normally have perhaps 30~40 pages live (I don't like tabs, I prefer new windows) when surfing in an ordinary fashion. From time to time, I might even get up to a hundred. My browser does work fine, or to put it another way, roughly the same as when there are only one or two pages open.
What am I doing? Simple ... I refuse to be interrupted by crap. So when I am reading a news story (for example) I stay on that news story page and read the whole thing, then close the window (or tab, if you prefer). And if there is a phrase or event mentioned on that news page, I copy and paste into a new browser window to search that term and have it ready to refer to next, or later, or whenever.
Similarly when I'm researching a topic, I stay on the page I'm reading, and again will probably have a number of new pages rendered and ready for when I am good and ready to read them, in their entirety, as topics, phrases, pdf's, links, etc come into the picture.
Honestly I can't understand why someone would NOT have dozens of pages open at the same time. What do you do ... jump to a new page and leave the one you were supposedly interested in reading?
Stop thinking like a Geek. Your LED scheme is only useful to someone who would update his devices in the first place.
You need to think like a grandmother in rural BumFuck with a 6th grade education.
Light is on, any color: Something is wrong. Push button. Go back to Soap Opera.
Light is off. Nothing is wrong. Go back to Soap Opera.
I'm no Climate Change denier, but I find it alarming that the media and politicians are still using the wrong language to describe Climate Change issues. The Earth is on a natural cycle of a warming trend. The IPCC is prohibited from considering Climate Cycles in their data or reports on Climate Change ... they can only consider manmade causes. Yet if every human "did the right thing for the planet" ... which means all the billions of us commit suicide, tonight, at midnight, to stop manmade contributions, the planet will still warm over the next century, and Greenhouse Gases will still rise, because that is the point in the natural temperature cycles we are currently in.
However, almost every day I hear totally inappropriate language to describe Climate Change issues. For example, Canada has just adopted a Carbon Price solution. The nation represents about a percent and a half of the world's Carbon emissions, so there will be no remedial effect on the planet itself; it's a "Leadership Position" and is a small step in the right direction (as it will reduce Carbon emissions somewhat, by taxing them).
But I heard the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau say, when announcing the accord with the Provinces, that this position will "fix" ... yes, that is his exact word ... Climate Change. Pure, unadulterated bullshit. There is no fix. Period. There is only mitigation, there is only taking 20 years to emit what we are currently emitting in 10, or some such similar result.
I am dismayed to talk to people who think we can stop Global Warming. We can't. That horse left the barn ... well, it left thousands of years ago when the current natural trend was established, and the mere existence of humans on this planet doomed us to acceleration of the natural trend. Plain and simple.
- old tube AM radio to take apart (I was 5 years old and had already been passionate about electricity and electronics for the previous 3 years or so)
I have to warn against this advice. Many US-made "Old Tube Radios" were manufactured with a primitive power system (not transformer coupled) and a "Hot Chassis". They employ a 2-prong AC plug (not a modern 3-prong plug) and since polarized sockets were not used at the time, the plug is unpolarized (can be inserted either way). This type of construction is cheaper and is therefore quite commonly found. Depending on how you insert the AC plug, the chassis is either hot when the radio is on, or hot when the radio is off. Either way, touching the chassis when it is hot results in electrocution. And yes, many died as a result of touching the chassis of these radios. Not only is an old tube radio a bad gift for a child, it's a bad gift for an adult, if the idea is to teach them about the electronics contained within. Only a trained technician should ever touch such a radio if it is plugged into the wall, and in many cases if it is not (as capacitors can store a charge). Because of a serious safety issue, I felt compelled to chime in. No offence intended; the post has the right idea.
" ... ..."
... and I mean nothing ... else matters. Because that is the metric they can earn advertising revenue from, and that is the metric they can present to the Board to show revenue potential and revenue trends.
... subscriber base goes hand in hand with viewership hours for this to fully flesh out.
First, the amount of time spent watching stuff is a poor metric by itself. What you really want to know is the amount of enjoyment people get out of the service. Admittedly that is very hard to measure accurately, which is why they want to use "hours spent watching" as a more easily determinable value. However they shouldn't forget that the map is not the territory.
Ah, but you are not a TV Programming executive. You see, the single most important metric to anyone providing content is the amount of time you spend watching. Nothing
Now, there is the obvious problem
But that is the problem of Sales, not Programming.
Maybe that's a fucked up way of running a company, but no-one ever got a media company to change by pointing out their ridiculous view of the world or their place in it.
<quote><p>Besides, the windows phone UI is ugly as hell. You basically have to be a Microsoft fan to actually want to use it.</p></quote>
<p>I disagree. I wasn't a Microsoft fan when I switched to Windows Phone in late 2012 (hated Windows XP, skipped Vista, was forced to use 7). But the somewhat denser UI allowed me to break out of the tap in, tap in, tap in, back, back, back cycle that I was seemingly stuck in on iOS.
</p><p>Plus I liked the tiles: resizable, repositionable, and they contained information.</p></quote>
You "hated" WindowsXP? Quite possibly the only thing Microsoft did right over the last 20 years
I read the article carefully, and I didn't see an answer to my question.
... it took China a decade to do it, and they were highly motivated and had state sponsorship. The US once had it, but it has withered away and would have to be re-established.
It says that the "cost will double". But it doesn't say the cost of what.
If it's the assembly cost, that is only about 3% of the cost of an iPhone. The majority of the parts that go into making an iPhone are not China sourced (although a certain amount is from China, but the largest % of parts comes from Germany, and no, China isn't no2 on the list either).
What is missing is the infrastructure that surrounds the China assembly plants. The cost of Labor isn't the issue. (China and Mexico have almost identical labor costs, for example).
That's something that every Mining Engineer could tell you. There are plenty of places in the world with rich mineral or oil deposits, but the infrastructure to exploit those deposits doesn't exist, or more properly exists in the places they are actively mining and pumping today.
That's the kind of thing that takes years to develop
Apple has built computers in the US, in Ireland, and other "first world" nations in the past, and they assemble iMacs in Texas today.
I took a test to see if I could spot fake reviews. The examples were not easy ... most were two paragraphs or so and the language was not from a non-native speaker of English. My score was 40 / 40, or 100%.
I was surprised; I expected to be fooled a few times. But that's not the point.
Even though I am apparently skilled at it, it was not easy; I can see how most people would have trouble spotting many of the examples I was asked to determine.
Fake or insincere reviews, blog posts, and forum posts are everywhere. That is not news.
Where the problem exists is there are also sincere reviews, blog posts, and forum posts. It's not enough to pick out the fakes, you have to be able to correctly identify the genuine ones as well.
It's not important which you get right, it's important you get most of them right. Exactly how much is hard to say, but I would say it has to be at least 80% of the time or reviews / blogs / posts are not useful to you.
The typical computer is the wrong size.
... I dunno ... thousands of books worth of documents stored on Hard Drives and backups. The ratio of paper documents to digital documents is enormous.
Why don't laptop screens come in a 9x12-ish format? Because they are built to accommodate the keyboard, not the screen.
Why do most people who own a rotatable desktop monitor still view it in landscape mode? Because all the software including the OS is built to work in the landscape form factor. Why are tablets popular? Because after a total rewrite of the OS and all apps, they actually work in a vertical orientation.
Paper is simply shaped the right way for reading. It is also more convenient to work with. I know the desktop metaphor works reasonably well, it just doesn't work as well as a real world stack of documents made of paper.
You can write on it. Being able to write on a computer screen has been available for 20 years, yet few people who have the capability actually use it, and very few people have the capability in the first place. The only exception seems to be graphic artists, and we all know they are not "normal" people.
The paperless office is a pipe dream, and always has been.
What digital devices are good for, however, is storage. There is no way any computer user would have had the same number of documents stored in their home or pocket if there was no digital device to hold it. The house would sink into the earth under the weight of it all.
I still use and buy books, I still use and work with paper documents. Yet I have
Not me, personally. I don't do the things Amazon is suing people (or businesses) for. But ...
You typically need to sue in a US court if you want to get any reasonable settlement that covers your effort and costs. If Amazon wins the lawsuit, and the loser doesn't pay the judgement, then Amazon can seize all their US assets.
And if the offshore vendor doesn't have any US assets?
Ummmm
Lawsuit: Fail
It is not the absence or presence of a clutch pedal that determines if a transmission is "Automatic" or "Manual". The terms are somewhat ambiguous, as they describe a shift by user input when the true difference is how the transmission operates.
... they were not called "manual" at the time ... were all clutch-actuated sliding-gear types with a mainshaft and countershaft. Later an improvement was the Constant Mesh type, which still utilized the mainshaft and countershaft arrangement, but reduced the tendency to "grind" the gears.
... the "Automatic" and "Manual" to use the typical terms, respectively.
The first transmissions
Some might consider the addition of synchromesh shift mechanisms as another improvement, but dog-shift transmissions with user-operated clutches are still used, in particular in motorcycles and in four wheel racing. In every example the consistent characteristic is the mainshaft and countershaft with gears arrangement. Although until recently all these types utilized a manual (foot or hand operated) clutch, the presence of either does not define the type. Electronic aids can substitute for the manually operated clutch.
The "Automatic" transmission is a marketing term to describe the Hydraulic Shift Transmission type. This uses Planetary Gears and Hydraulic Valves to perform the shifting of ratios. Again, these transmissions utilize a hydraulic link to the engine, in the form of a Torque Converter, but the presence of the Torque Converter, like the presence of the user-operated clutch, does not define the type.
Torque-converters, conventional clutch and pressure plate mechanisms, and centrifugal clutches are all possible methods of connecting the engine to the transmission. The absence or presence of user operated clutch is merely a feature of how the motor and ratio shift mechanism connect, just as the absence or presence of Computer Control does not define the type. It is the hydraulic valve operated planetary gear set, or the mainshaft/countershaft with sliding gears that define the two types
A "Dual Clutch Transmission" that is computer controlled but does not have a user-operated clutch pedal is none the less a "manual" transmission if it utilizes a mainshaft and countershaft with sliding gears and dog engagement.
Similarly, a hydraulic valve and planetary gear transmission that is computer controlled is an "Automatic" transmission type.
The number should be 100% whom understand that you have to monitor the vehicle and be willing at any moment to (re)take control. Tesla is selling a couple hundred cars a month into Germany. Does Tesla Motors feel that there being 5 drivers every month who think you can push a button and then go on the Autobahn while watching a DVD and eating breakfast is OK?
This is a big deal. It should be zero drivers thinking that way. And I mean ZERO. This is not vindication for Tesla, it's indicative of how they are thinking about this all wrong.
Like any good Criminal, they study Human Nature and know it inside out.
The Election was late-breaking news and people were hungry for tidbits of information. That means many (not all, of course) normally wary and aware recipients of the eMail would have fallen for it, despite probably knowing better the other 364 days of the year.
The results may have played a role in the uptake, but it would have worked regardless of who won, as long as it was reasonably close, and that would include the state results only in some races, regardless of the Presidential race.
Just good planning by the hackers. In retrospect's perfect 20:20 vision, it's obvious but on Election Day, maybe not so much.
Hopefully it won't be forgotten, although the odds in my opinion are against it, but next time around maybe these organizations should warn their staff a day or three before the first Tuesday in November. It's a near perfect "setup", as the crime movies would say.