I was thinking about this being a problem a while back - how to deal with building something from source and knowing I was getting the same output that the developers wanted me to have. Coincidentally about the same time, this article popped on Slashdot and introduced me to Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust - a great read and something that really opened my eyes (in that wide-open-because-of-terror kind of way).
Also from that thread came this email from one of the Tor developers talking about their deterministic build process to do the same thing.
I think this is a problem that would be really great to solve as soon as possible. I very much hope that once we start seeing more reproducible builds we don't suddenly find out that certain compilers have been compromised long ago.
I was thinking about this being a problem a while back - how to deal with building something from source and knowing I was getting the same output that the developers wanted me to have. Coincidentally about the same time, a href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/06/20/1548228/are-you-sure-this-is-the-source-code">this article popped on Slashdot and introduced me to Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust - a great read and something that really opened my eyes (in that wide-open-because-of-terror kind of way).
Also from that thread came this email from one of the Tor developers talking about their deterministic build process to do the same thing.
I think this is a problem that would be really great to solve as soon as possible. I very much hope that once we start seeing more reproducible builds we don't suddenly find out that certain compilers have been compromised long ago.
A few years ago I decided the only thing I cared about in my mess of digital stuff was my photo collection so went through the same thing.
So far what I'm doing is maintaining a bunch of separate backups of my photo collection. I have a "master" copy at home on my desktop PC. I recently put this in a Dropbox folder too, so the local copy is also automagically backed up online (I know Dropbox isn't everyone's cup of tea; I don't like the non-encrypted nature of it but for me it's a good balance of features & services).
I then have a separate external USB drive that I keep for backups. I have another one of these drives at my parents (that I update when I'm there every few months). I have another one in my office which I update less often.
BUT, that is only part of it - I've been worried about subtle disk failure screwing up my files. So a while back I wrote some scripts to store hashes of all the files and stuff them into a database. Every few months I run scripts to compare the actual contents of my file stores against "known good" hashes.
On two occasions I've found a bunch of photos that had been silently corrupted (once on my "master" and once on one of the backups). I almost certainly wouldn't have noticed.
I've also started to think about using par2 files to add another layer of redundancy; it's kinda trivial to script but it'd add a bit of storage overhead. For now though I'm kinda happy with what I've got - as long as I check the backups every few months against the known good setup, I can be confident in my storage.
Amazes me that every time gamergate comes up, someone talks about how amazed they are that noone "gets it", but they're still unable, or deliberately unwilling, to articulate what "it" actually is.
Yep, doesn't work for everyone. We live in a cool area so going out for us is walking outside; I'm on a sabbatical so am "working" from home and my partner walks to her job. So we're much better off than if we owned a car simply because our "base driving rate" is pretty close to zero anyway.
Would be totally different if we needed to drive to work regularly.
They don't want their car to drive off, pick up someone who has sex in it or their kid vomits or a pet shits, etc. Efficiency is all well and good but reality is people are disgusting and we generally want to keep to ourselves because of it.
I would have thought this would be a huge problem, but after using car2go for about a year, there is only one time where I've had a mess on the interior - some weird sticky stuff spilt on the passenger seat (which, luckily, I saw before I sat in it) - I suspect it was some takeout sauce spilled out from a container or something.
In many other rides though the cars have been spotless. Generally (anecdotally obviously) the system of simply saying whether the car is clean or not from the previous driver seems to work to keep out bad actors in the system. Having to have your credit card details on file probably helps too.
Overall though car2go is great; we don't own a car here so we use it all the time now.
Step 1: wait for Uber to come to town Step 2: let them build some momentum and drop some cash investing in scaling up Step 3: act outraged when cab companies complain and promise to shut them down Step 4: drop a lot of fines on them to absorb even more of that phat US VC cash Step 5: repeat step 4 until the taxi companies, Uber or citizens force your hand into either legitimising them or actually banning them.
This seems to be the tactic of my home town (Brisbane, Australia). Last I saw we'd fined Uber $1.7m, all while pretending they can't be stopped and letting them operate (they just announced they're hiring more staff).
They'll have to provide a better licensing framework at some point - where I am now in Columbus, OH they seem to have a great one - but in the meantime it seems their plan is just to keep fining them to see if they're going to blink first.
As a Brisbaner I love the idea of us taking all that money. As someone that actually wants to go to places though and not be at the mercy of the taxi companies, I hope they negotiate soon and build a framework that takes into account this new age we live in.
I'm an Australian currently spending a lot of time in Ohio (Columbus); I worked here last year and am now holidaying here for a few months before moving on.
I don't own a car but almost everyone I know does, so it's been interesting observing how cars work here. Certainly Teslas are rare - I've seen three unique ones in the wild here, one of which I was pretty sure was a demo one from the Tesla store being out on a test drive. (The third one I saw literally yesterday, so until then it would have just been two.)
One thing I've noticed in Ohio is there are a lot of people that drive Hondas. Like, way more than I expected to see in the US, assuming many people would be driving US-made cars. I was surprised by this - until I discovered there's a Honda factory nearby. This seems to be a Big Deal for many locals.
Coming from Australia I've also been interested in how people deal with the weather. We live close to downtown in apartments; almost everyone in this area seems to be stuck with an outside carpark largely exposed to the elements. No idea how hard it would be to convince our landlords to put in an external charging point but suspect it would be tricky.
A bit further out though, many people seem to have proper garages attached to their houses. I would imagine for these people an EV is a much more realistic proposition; the garages are usually all wired anyway (for light and/or heat). I've read batteries don't work as efficiently in the cold so there is that to deal with too, especially if you don't have covered parking at the other end (many of the car parks around here are not covered).
There is a dedicated Tesla EV charging bay at Easton (the big local megamall thing). Looking at the Tesla map there are some supercharger stations here already and a few more planned. I imagine things will change a bit once the charging infrastructure becomes a bit more common.
Again, this works in the US with big suburbs where everyone has a parking lot with an electric outlet. In other countries (like good old Europe), where most people live in apartments and there is just no way you can plug your car at night, it doesn't work. It is just impossible until you can refill your car in 5 minutes like with gasoline...
FWIW I was in Norway several years ago and saw an EV charging point just on the sidewalk in the middle of the city (photo - I think it was Oslo).
My recollection is this was an early experimental programme and they were free to use for the presumably very few people that had EVs at the time.
This was the first time I'd seen anything like this (I'm Australian) and I was struck by the simplicity of it - literally just a random pole stuck into the street. I've not looked into it but I'm guessing building those things is not significantly expensive because most of the important infrastructure they need to deliver the electricity is already in place.
I've since been to France a couple times and seen similar things there, although I believe they were dedicated ones for a car sharing scheme that happened to use electric cars. But again, these things were just plonked into the middle of the city with seemingly little effort or disruption.
Awesome, thanks for the info! Those sound like improvements worth holding off for. Be interesting to see what prices they'll start at & how they compare to existing A/C units.
Thanks for the explanation. When we talk about "more efficient", how much are we talking about here? The article link mentions "5% or more of the power loss occurs" but as it's a Google Translate, not sure if it's talking about the same thing.
Does it basically mean these DC A/C units are 5% more efficient?
The morals of this is never, ever use spreadsheets program for non-trivial work.
This is only really a valid conclusion if you compare it against the lost billing rate of other solutions though. I have seen organisations that would happily allow billing stuff to fall through the cracks with specialised software simply because it was easier than trying to fight the software for certain situations.
I can imagine that someone with Excel might end up saving more money for that reason, although I certainly agree the average complicated spreadsheet probably has a lot of errors.
Thank you for neatly summarising exactly how I feel about Gamergate. I wasn't sure if I was an idiot and was just missing the point, but I felt a staggering amount of the commentary I read on it was/clearly/ trying to take a position - but I could never understand/what/ position!
I'm not sure what Firefox or Chrome have to do with the discussion (or why you feel the need to be abusive towards me). Perhaps you are thinking of the other Slashdot thread that popped up a few hours later about Firefox blocking Flash?
Technically competent users are at less risk of Flash exploits, of course. But they are not the problem. Non-technical people take their cues from what their technical friends do and say; my point is that without us continuing to do the work that Apple started it's just going to take forever to get rid of it.
It's clear that as long as Flash exists it will continue to be a major vector for security-related problems. Entirely the point of the Facebook bloke that started this entire thread, of course. I am merely saying that we should do what we can to hasten its demise and encourage others to do the same. But I guess I'm not so helplessly dependent on a handful of sites that continue to use Flash as some people might be.
The writing is on the wall for Flash. Everyone knows it. It has been ever since Apple gave them the epic finger.
The only question is how quickly people abandon it. If you're a nerd - the precise person that I was addressing in my comment and the precise person I expect to be reading comments on Slashdot - I feel you have a/duty/ to lead the charge.
Uninstall Flash. Tell Pandora why you can no longer use their service. Find a competing service that offers HTML5 or some other mechanism.
I've never used Pandora; I stream radio for my music discovery (via a good ole fashioned mp3 stream that I can play in a wide variety of software). Certainly I don't get people that are married to Pandora that hard - but if you're an actual nerd - you have options.
Uninstall Flash. Just stop using it. Encourage your friends to do the same.
I uninstalled it a couple months ago. I no longer have to worry about updating it or being exposed to the vast amount of vulnerabilities - it should be clear to everyone by now that it is a/major/ vector for infection.
Only a few times have I hit content that still requires Flash - usually sites that have an old Flash video player. Most big sites or sites using modern players happily support HTML5 video. Those that don't I can live without. (Bonus: far less irritating animated ads. For now.)
But make sure you provide feedback to sites that still have Flash - let them know you can't use the site properly. Fortunately - largely thanks to Apple's refusal to allow Flash in iOS - there are fewer and fewer of these today.
I feel like most technical people - the people who you really want filing bug reports - know that big open source projects are something of a blackhole for bug reports.
I think Firefox especially has an uphill battle at the moment - threads like this demonstrate that users clearly think that most dev effort at Mozilla is focused on new features rather than bug fixes.
The thought of going to the effort of battling Bugzilla, logging a bug report only to see it languishing (or WONTFIXed) for months or years is certainly a strong motivator not to bother.
And nobody has a drachma press - it takes longer to set up a press for mass production of a new currency than one might think.
That is a fascinating point. If they were serious about their stance one would imagine that, in the background, they would have been readying their drachma-printing equipment, to a) actually be ready in case the worst-case happens and they leave the Euro, and b) to/show/ they're ready to everyone else in the EU to help clarify how serious they are.
I don't recall seeing anything about this anywhere and a cursory search doesn't show anything obvious (e.g., Greek Finance Minister making a V for Victory sign over a printing press).
So whilst undoubtably there will be many further spending crises in advanced nations, democracy is not the problem - it just means a society has to learn to control their borrowing impulses as a group.
I would add to this that democratic societies - i.e., the citizens living in democracies - also need to get much much better at holding politicians to account for how they decide they spend their money.
The profligate wastes of government are nothing new, but - especially in the US - citizens in general seem to feel almost completely disenfranchised. They can vote, but almost every single conversation I see indicates that they feel that their vote is worthless and that it won't change anything.
This is terribly sad for a nation that holds itself up as the flagship of democracy. I am from Australia (though living in the USA for the last 18 months) and while it is not so bad in Aus, I can see the same sort of apathy starting to form.
Citizens need to become better at looking past the smoke and mirror show and holding their elected officials accountable, especially when they preach one thing and do something different.
I don't know. I'm all for exoskeletons... in the military and otherwise. But telling me it teaches people how to shoot in the military seems like a solution to a problem that we already have a better solution for... no?
Well, that's the only question that matters - is the exoskeleton solution better than having a human train you?
That question can only be answered by building it and trying it out over a series of tests, comparing it against the baseline of having a human yell at you to stand up straight or whatever.
I have often wondered if something like this could exist for skiiing - I've been skiing maybe 5 times now and I'm starting to get the hang of it, but every time I get a lesson I'm frustrated by the instructor saying "oh, just do this with your body", because I can't figure out how to map what they're doing or saying onto my body.
Sure, if I took a bunch more lessons (and if they screamed at me like a drill sergeant) I'd probably figure out it - but having some exoskeleton thing that "guided" me into the right actions seems like it could be really useful.
The other question though is - even if the exoskeleton solution is better, is the cost worth it? Assuming it's more expensive - if only improves outcomes by 10% in one key metric, but costs 50% more, does that work out? What if the outcome goes up to 80%?!
I know there area lot of smart people at Google so the constant trainwreck that is Hangouts is baffling to me.
Never have I encountered a piece of chat software that is so confusing to so many people. I have been using chat software for a long time and am a tech-savvy person but I struggle understanding Hangouts. My relatives, who are scattered all over the world and are quite tech savvy, have been communicating amongst each other online for years with a variety of technologies from ICQ to MSN to Skype to GTalk, all struggle with Hangouts.
I know it's popular to bash UI/UX people on Slashdot and it's something I've never been comfortable with - UI/UX is an important part of software and I've worked with some phenomenal people. But it's like the Hangout team have decided to ignore all the previous years of the chat application design paradigms and have gone out of their way to overcomplicate the interfaces.
I am just perplexed at how hard it is to tell if people are online or offline in the Android app. The default views simply DO NOT SHOW this information - only a "last seen" timer. I assume this is intentional to try to make you just send messages anyway to get you using it like it's an SMS service, but fuck me if you want to actually have a chat with someone knowing whether they're online or away is important.
Some other specific gripes: - I/hate/ how hard it is to sign out of Hangouts on Android. You have to go into some obscure sub-menu. They clearly want it running all the time. - On one of the rare occasions I had it running on my phone yesterday, I sent a message to my partner (overseas from me atm) to see if she wanted a chat. My wifi dropped at the same time, and Hangouts reported the message wasn't sent; I had to go out so just left. But it WAS sent, and my partner sat around swearing at me for asking to chat and then vanishing. - When someone tries to voice call me it seems to ring in Google Talk in Gmail, but does not always answer reliably. I note they are in the process of removing the old Google Talk from Gmail and replacing it with Hangouts. - When trying to call someone from Google Talk in Gmail it does not seem to reliably call them. - Message delivery seems flaky - it is not uncommon for me to find out messages never arrived. (Though this seems to be almost exclusively when one end of the conversation is in the Android app).
I would LOVE a good, simple, cross-platform chat application at the moment. My friends and relatives have fragmented across a billion platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
What, 'about:config' and set 'javascript.enabled' to 'false' is too difficult?
Possibly the bit where most of the websites in the world stop working
I was thinking about this being a problem a while back - how to deal with building something from source and knowing I was getting the same output that the developers wanted me to have. Coincidentally about the same time, this article popped on Slashdot and introduced me to Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust - a great read and something that really opened my eyes (in that wide-open-because-of-terror kind of way).
Also from that thread came this email from one of the Tor developers talking about their deterministic build process to do the same thing.
I think this is a problem that would be really great to solve as soon as possible. I very much hope that once we start seeing more reproducible builds we don't suddenly find out that certain compilers have been compromised long ago.
I was thinking about this being a problem a while back - how to deal with building something from source and knowing I was getting the same output that the developers wanted me to have. Coincidentally about the same time, a href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/06/20/1548228/are-you-sure-this-is-the-source-code">this article popped on Slashdot and introduced me to Ken Thompson's article Reflections on Trusting Trust - a great read and something that really opened my eyes (in that wide-open-because-of-terror kind of way).
Also from that thread came this email from one of the Tor developers talking about their deterministic build process to do the same thing.
I think this is a problem that would be really great to solve as soon as possible. I very much hope that once we start seeing more reproducible builds we don't suddenly find out that certain compilers have been compromised long ago.
A few years ago I decided the only thing I cared about in my mess of digital stuff was my photo collection so went through the same thing.
So far what I'm doing is maintaining a bunch of separate backups of my photo collection. I have a "master" copy at home on my desktop PC. I recently put this in a Dropbox folder too, so the local copy is also automagically backed up online (I know Dropbox isn't everyone's cup of tea; I don't like the non-encrypted nature of it but for me it's a good balance of features & services).
I then have a separate external USB drive that I keep for backups. I have another one of these drives at my parents (that I update when I'm there every few months). I have another one in my office which I update less often.
BUT, that is only part of it - I've been worried about subtle disk failure screwing up my files. So a while back I wrote some scripts to store hashes of all the files and stuff them into a database. Every few months I run scripts to compare the actual contents of my file stores against "known good" hashes.
On two occasions I've found a bunch of photos that had been silently corrupted (once on my "master" and once on one of the backups). I almost certainly wouldn't have noticed.
I've also started to think about using par2 files to add another layer of redundancy; it's kinda trivial to script but it'd add a bit of storage overhead. For now though I'm kinda happy with what I've got - as long as I check the backups every few months against the known good setup, I can be confident in my storage.
Amazes me that every time gamergate comes up, someone talks about how amazed they are that noone "gets it", but they're still unable, or deliberately unwilling, to articulate what "it" actually is.
.. in articles like this to link to the Vimeo short movie?
Yep, doesn't work for everyone. We live in a cool area so going out for us is walking outside; I'm on a sabbatical so am "working" from home and my partner walks to her job. So we're much better off than if we owned a car simply because our "base driving rate" is pretty close to zero anyway.
Would be totally different if we needed to drive to work regularly.
They don't want their car to drive off, pick up someone who has sex in it or their kid vomits or a pet shits, etc. Efficiency is all well and good but reality is people are disgusting and we generally want to keep to ourselves because of it.
I would have thought this would be a huge problem, but after using car2go for about a year, there is only one time where I've had a mess on the interior - some weird sticky stuff spilt on the passenger seat (which, luckily, I saw before I sat in it) - I suspect it was some takeout sauce spilled out from a container or something.
In many other rides though the cars have been spotless. Generally (anecdotally obviously) the system of simply saying whether the car is clean or not from the previous driver seems to work to keep out bad actors in the system. Having to have your credit card details on file probably helps too.
Overall though car2go is great; we don't own a car here so we use it all the time now.
Step 1: wait for Uber to come to town
Step 2: let them build some momentum and drop some cash investing in scaling up
Step 3: act outraged when cab companies complain and promise to shut them down
Step 4: drop a lot of fines on them to absorb even more of that phat US VC cash
Step 5: repeat step 4 until the taxi companies, Uber or citizens force your hand into either legitimising them or actually banning them.
This seems to be the tactic of my home town (Brisbane, Australia). Last I saw we'd fined Uber $1.7m, all while pretending they can't be stopped and letting them operate (they just announced they're hiring more staff).
They'll have to provide a better licensing framework at some point - where I am now in Columbus, OH they seem to have a great one - but in the meantime it seems their plan is just to keep fining them to see if they're going to blink first.
As a Brisbaner I love the idea of us taking all that money. As someone that actually wants to go to places though and not be at the mercy of the taxi companies, I hope they negotiate soon and build a framework that takes into account this new age we live in.
I mentioned this on Twitter and got the following response from MEGA's support:
"@trawg Please disregard the statement. We will be reacting with true facts later today."
I'm an Australian currently spending a lot of time in Ohio (Columbus); I worked here last year and am now holidaying here for a few months before moving on.
I don't own a car but almost everyone I know does, so it's been interesting observing how cars work here. Certainly Teslas are rare - I've seen three unique ones in the wild here, one of which I was pretty sure was a demo one from the Tesla store being out on a test drive. (The third one I saw literally yesterday, so until then it would have just been two.)
One thing I've noticed in Ohio is there are a lot of people that drive Hondas. Like, way more than I expected to see in the US, assuming many people would be driving US-made cars. I was surprised by this - until I discovered there's a Honda factory nearby. This seems to be a Big Deal for many locals.
Coming from Australia I've also been interested in how people deal with the weather. We live close to downtown in apartments; almost everyone in this area seems to be stuck with an outside carpark largely exposed to the elements. No idea how hard it would be to convince our landlords to put in an external charging point but suspect it would be tricky.
A bit further out though, many people seem to have proper garages attached to their houses. I would imagine for these people an EV is a much more realistic proposition; the garages are usually all wired anyway (for light and/or heat). I've read batteries don't work as efficiently in the cold so there is that to deal with too, especially if you don't have covered parking at the other end (many of the car parks around here are not covered).
There is a dedicated Tesla EV charging bay at Easton (the big local megamall thing). Looking at the Tesla map there are some supercharger stations here already and a few more planned. I imagine things will change a bit once the charging infrastructure becomes a bit more common.
Again, this works in the US with big suburbs where everyone has a parking lot with an electric outlet. In other countries (like good old Europe), where most people live in apartments and there is just no way you can plug your car at night, it doesn't work. It is just impossible until you can refill your car in 5 minutes like with gasoline...
FWIW I was in Norway several years ago and saw an EV charging point just on the sidewalk in the middle of the city (photo - I think it was Oslo).
My recollection is this was an early experimental programme and they were free to use for the presumably very few people that had EVs at the time.
This was the first time I'd seen anything like this (I'm Australian) and I was struck by the simplicity of it - literally just a random pole stuck into the street. I've not looked into it but I'm guessing building those things is not significantly expensive because most of the important infrastructure they need to deliver the electricity is already in place.
I've since been to France a couple times and seen similar things there, although I believe they were dedicated ones for a car sharing scheme that happened to use electric cars. But again, these things were just plonked into the middle of the city with seemingly little effort or disruption.
Awesome, thanks for the info! Those sound like improvements worth holding off for. Be interesting to see what prices they'll start at & how they compare to existing A/C units.
Thanks for the explanation. When we talk about "more efficient", how much are we talking about here? The article link mentions "5% or more of the power loss occurs" but as it's a Google Translate, not sure if it's talking about the same thing.
Does it basically mean these DC A/C units are 5% more efficient?
The morals of this is never, ever use spreadsheets program for non-trivial work.
This is only really a valid conclusion if you compare it against the lost billing rate of other solutions though. I have seen organisations that would happily allow billing stuff to fall through the cracks with specialised software simply because it was easier than trying to fight the software for certain situations.
I can imagine that someone with Excel might end up saving more money for that reason, although I certainly agree the average complicated spreadsheet probably has a lot of errors.
Thank you for neatly summarising exactly how I feel about Gamergate. I wasn't sure if I was an idiot and was just missing the point, but I felt a staggering amount of the commentary I read on it was /clearly/ trying to take a position - but I could never understand /what/ position!
I'm not sure what Firefox or Chrome have to do with the discussion (or why you feel the need to be abusive towards me). Perhaps you are thinking of the other Slashdot thread that popped up a few hours later about Firefox blocking Flash?
Technically competent users are at less risk of Flash exploits, of course. But they are not the problem. Non-technical people take their cues from what their technical friends do and say; my point is that without us continuing to do the work that Apple started it's just going to take forever to get rid of it.
It's clear that as long as Flash exists it will continue to be a major vector for security-related problems. Entirely the point of the Facebook bloke that started this entire thread, of course. I am merely saying that we should do what we can to hasten its demise and encourage others to do the same. But I guess I'm not so helplessly dependent on a handful of sites that continue to use Flash as some people might be.
The writing is on the wall for Flash. Everyone knows it. It has been ever since Apple gave them the epic finger.
The only question is how quickly people abandon it. If you're a nerd - the precise person that I was addressing in my comment and the precise person I expect to be reading comments on Slashdot - I feel you have a /duty/ to lead the charge.
Uninstall Flash. Tell Pandora why you can no longer use their service. Find a competing service that offers HTML5 or some other mechanism.
I've never used Pandora; I stream radio for my music discovery (via a good ole fashioned mp3 stream that I can play in a wide variety of software). Certainly I don't get people that are married to Pandora that hard - but if you're an actual nerd - you have options.
I have it on good authority that youporn happily supports HTML5 video. Switch to their mobile site. It works perfectly.
Uninstall Flash. Just stop using it. Encourage your friends to do the same.
I uninstalled it a couple months ago. I no longer have to worry about updating it or being exposed to the vast amount of vulnerabilities - it should be clear to everyone by now that it is a /major/ vector for infection.
Only a few times have I hit content that still requires Flash - usually sites that have an old Flash video player. Most big sites or sites using modern players happily support HTML5 video. Those that don't I can live without. (Bonus: far less irritating animated ads. For now.)
But make sure you provide feedback to sites that still have Flash - let them know you can't use the site properly. Fortunately - largely thanks to Apple's refusal to allow Flash in iOS - there are fewer and fewer of these today.
I feel like most technical people - the people who you really want filing bug reports - know that big open source projects are something of a blackhole for bug reports.
I think Firefox especially has an uphill battle at the moment - threads like this demonstrate that users clearly think that most dev effort at Mozilla is focused on new features rather than bug fixes.
The thought of going to the effort of battling Bugzilla, logging a bug report only to see it languishing (or WONTFIXed) for months or years is certainly a strong motivator not to bother.
And nobody has a drachma press - it takes longer to set up a press for mass production of a new currency than one might think.
That is a fascinating point. If they were serious about their stance one would imagine that, in the background, they would have been readying their drachma-printing equipment, to a) actually be ready in case the worst-case happens and they leave the Euro, and b) to /show/ they're ready to everyone else in the EU to help clarify how serious they are.
I don't recall seeing anything about this anywhere and a cursory search doesn't show anything obvious (e.g., Greek Finance Minister making a V for Victory sign over a printing press).
So whilst undoubtably there will be many further spending crises in advanced nations, democracy is not the problem - it just means a society has to learn to control their borrowing impulses as a group.
I would add to this that democratic societies - i.e., the citizens living in democracies - also need to get much much better at holding politicians to account for how they decide they spend their money.
The profligate wastes of government are nothing new, but - especially in the US - citizens in general seem to feel almost completely disenfranchised. They can vote, but almost every single conversation I see indicates that they feel that their vote is worthless and that it won't change anything.
This is terribly sad for a nation that holds itself up as the flagship of democracy. I am from Australia (though living in the USA for the last 18 months) and while it is not so bad in Aus, I can see the same sort of apathy starting to form.
Citizens need to become better at looking past the smoke and mirror show and holding their elected officials accountable, especially when they preach one thing and do something different.
I don't know. I'm all for exoskeletons... in the military and otherwise. But telling me it teaches people how to shoot in the military seems like a solution to a problem that we already have a better solution for... no?
Well, that's the only question that matters - is the exoskeleton solution better than having a human train you?
That question can only be answered by building it and trying it out over a series of tests, comparing it against the baseline of having a human yell at you to stand up straight or whatever.
I have often wondered if something like this could exist for skiiing - I've been skiing maybe 5 times now and I'm starting to get the hang of it, but every time I get a lesson I'm frustrated by the instructor saying "oh, just do this with your body", because I can't figure out how to map what they're doing or saying onto my body.
Sure, if I took a bunch more lessons (and if they screamed at me like a drill sergeant) I'd probably figure out it - but having some exoskeleton thing that "guided" me into the right actions seems like it could be really useful.
The other question though is - even if the exoskeleton solution is better, is the cost worth it? Assuming it's more expensive - if only improves outcomes by 10% in one key metric, but costs 50% more, does that work out? What if the outcome goes up to 80%?!
I know there area lot of smart people at Google so the constant trainwreck that is Hangouts is baffling to me.
Never have I encountered a piece of chat software that is so confusing to so many people. I have been using chat software for a long time and am a tech-savvy person but I struggle understanding Hangouts. My relatives, who are scattered all over the world and are quite tech savvy, have been communicating amongst each other online for years with a variety of technologies from ICQ to MSN to Skype to GTalk, all struggle with Hangouts.
I know it's popular to bash UI/UX people on Slashdot and it's something I've never been comfortable with - UI/UX is an important part of software and I've worked with some phenomenal people. But it's like the Hangout team have decided to ignore all the previous years of the chat application design paradigms and have gone out of their way to overcomplicate the interfaces.
I am just perplexed at how hard it is to tell if people are online or offline in the Android app. The default views simply DO NOT SHOW this information - only a "last seen" timer. I assume this is intentional to try to make you just send messages anyway to get you using it like it's an SMS service, but fuck me if you want to actually have a chat with someone knowing whether they're online or away is important.
Some other specific gripes: /hate/ how hard it is to sign out of Hangouts on Android. You have to go into some obscure sub-menu. They clearly want it running all the time.
- I
- On one of the rare occasions I had it running on my phone yesterday, I sent a message to my partner (overseas from me atm) to see if she wanted a chat. My wifi dropped at the same time, and Hangouts reported the message wasn't sent; I had to go out so just left. But it WAS sent, and my partner sat around swearing at me for asking to chat and then vanishing.
- When someone tries to voice call me it seems to ring in Google Talk in Gmail, but does not always answer reliably. I note they are in the process of removing the old Google Talk from Gmail and replacing it with Hangouts.
- When trying to call someone from Google Talk in Gmail it does not seem to reliably call them.
- Message delivery seems flaky - it is not uncommon for me to find out messages never arrived. (Though this seems to be almost exclusively when one end of the conversation is in the Android app).
I would LOVE a good, simple, cross-platform chat application at the moment. My friends and relatives have fragmented across a billion platforms.