Interesting! Book sounds cool, added to my "hopefully I'll have time to read this one day" list.
The point totally makes sense, but isn't it an easy fix to tie stock option compensation to long term performance? Just make it so the shares don't vest for five years or more so the short-term incentive to pump and dump is removed?
Lots of interesting comments but didn't see this one so though I'd throw it in: Not Invented Here Syndrome.
I've seen this first hand a lot. Manny developers will get a project, review some options for components (e.g. CMS is the classic one) and decide that because that component only needs 99% of requirements, they should roll their own solution, because using that component and modifying it will take to long as they have to learn the extension system or whatever.
As a result they end up writing lots of new untested code. Even with best intentions and good practices, bugs and thus exploits are inevitable. Especially when the focus is on making sure you're avoiding one specific class of problems like SQLi, meaning people tend to focus on check listing that instead of taking a broad, security in depth approach.
Inevitably after a few months it turns out they underestimated the complexity of writing a whole new system from scratch and sacrifices are made, leading to focus on speed and getting it done over security.
(Not really sure if this problem is about "Web developers"; it really seems to be a symptom of software development in general.)
But not the lack of price... so, go ahead and cough up $650 or $850, anyway, because we are giving the public what they want. And to think I am STILL using a Nexus 5 which has at more than half of the above lacking features, and was around HALF the price.
Ditto. I waited for the Pixel announcement before upgrading from my Nexus 4, because I wanted to see if they were going to make something significantly better. The Pixel looks great but not 2x as much as the Nexus 5X I ended up getting.
I wasn't seriously looking at the Pixel 2 (I only got my 5X like a year ago) but was still interested to see if it was going to be worth it. Basically though my take is if I'm going to drop a fortune on a phone, I think I'd rather it be an iPhone at this point - the new neural process & features & camera I think are more appealing to me. And I say that as someone that has had a Nexus One, 4 and now 5X.
It will be hard to leave Android but killing the Nexus line and just cloning iPhone doesn't make me feel inclined to stick with it.
(FYI the reason you can tell they are fakes is they were selling at 25% of actual retail price, before bartering)
haha! It is amaaaaaazing how that trick works though. Like the whole counterfeit market exists because so many people are willing to believe they're getting a great deal and/or are savvy consumers, rather than the person they're dealing with is a scammer trying to defraud them.
Hey dude! Thanks for the reply. First, I would agree that passing legislation is what the government does. But that process is often very time consuming and can be expensive if they need to bring in external counsel (for weird legal issues) or external expert advisers (to understand if what they want is technically possible at all).
As a result there is a strong opportunity cost for everything they do. Every bill they are debating to try to pass is another bill that is not getting worked on. So there is some importance into what they're talking about.
My argument however is mostly that they are/not/ solving the problem - they're kicking the problem down the road by over a decade. They're basically putting the problem on the backburner so that in a few years it becomes the problem of the future government, who - for whatever reason they can justify - can just unwind those laws or change the deadlines or whatever.
So I don't see this legislation as helpful to actually solving the problem, whereas they/can/ pass simple, lower impact legislation that will work literally tomorrow by helping to make the conditions for electric cars a little bit better.
One is to cool the magma, by drilling a grid of holes and pumping water into them. (Use the heated water or steam for electric power plants.)
I really like this idea. There must just be stunning amounts of energy down there that surely could power a significant part of the state. The BBC did an interesting article on this a few months back: http://www.bbc.com/future/stor...
I was already on board the electric car movement but nothing has convinced me more than moving to London and seeing how simply disgusting the air is here. The diesel fumes are everywhere. It is revolting.
Reading about every country's new plans to ban gas/diesel cars by some totally arbitrary date in the future makes me weep thinking of all the lawyer time that is no doubt going into drafting the legislation, all the politicians time going into debating and discussing with it, etc. This is money going down the sink that is not helping a problem that we need to solve now. And we can!@#
If they're going to put their fingers on the scales, why not just stop doing all this shit and put every dollar you'd spend on this kind of legislation and effort into better incentives for electric cars? Build more charging points in the cities and car parks. Tax incentives for the whole supply chain.
Contrast all that with the non-ad link that the search string "procter and gamble" generates, which is simply "http://us.pg.com/".
True BUT! When you click on that link (in most browsers without active defenses) you'll see that the click is intercepted and it fires off a POST request to Google anyway, tracking the click, with a link that looks something like:
https://www.google.co.uk/gen_2... string]&s=2&v=2&pv=0.[random number]&me=54:[random number],V,0,0,0,0:6834,h,1,52,i:49,h,1,52,o:214,h,1,51... [many more bits of data] 1,e,C&zx=[some other number]
That will then redirect you to the destination site.
You won't notice it unless you're really tracking requests - if you mouseover the us.pg.com link it doesn't show the Google tracker. If you inspect the source it just looks like a regular HREF link.
Sounds like a lot of other Slashdot readers already get this, but the votes that matter most are for the people geographically closest to where you live.
This is definitely true on a local and practical level, but it means taking a huge shrug at tax time and ignoring the massive financial implications of federal spending on your pay cheque. What percentage of federal tax dollars goes directly to maintaining the giant military, for example?
Without some say in federal elections you are abrogating your rights in how a huge chunk of your income is spent to those that bother to vote (scary) or whatever politicians randomly fall into positions of responsibility (way scarier).
This definitely sounds like it would be the right attitude for the US if state's rights were returned a little more and there was less federal dollars spent on all the weird shit that they get spent on!
Yup. I realised after seeing the iPhone X specs that its screen resolution is better than that of my 23" desktop monitor. It is amazing how far these things have come.
Every sales commission process should be put in front of a bunch of 15yo video gamers to see how they would game the process to their benefit before it is deployed in the real world.
It'd be a fun project to build a Linux VM that allows you to trivially spoof a bunch of random data to get access to this programme. And distribute it. I think amping up the noise against these things while trying to take advantage of the benefits is probably more effective than flat out boycotting.
Imagine the 'strategic disaster' of the broader Internet and reddit competitors finding out they were working on the innovative new feature of 'video'.
As I write this I have two separate addons installed (currently disabled) that I've had for several years, both of which support taking screenshots of the browser, with slightly different features that made them better in particular circumstances.
(They are Abduction and FireShot if anyone is interested. It's possible I disabled them because they don't support multiprocess but I can't remember; they work fine for screenshots though.)
I don't know how the one they're talking about works but I suspect it's not going to be as feature complete as these. I find it hard to believe this is a hugely requested feature but who knows.
Incidentally, my latest Firefox problem is a simple version upgrade issue. I got the notice that v55 was available. As I usually do I dismissed it - I wait a day or two before upgrades unless there's major security implications.
When I went back to try to upgrade, the update dialog told me there's no update available. Searching for this reveals a zillion people having this problem going back over a decade so it's almost pointless trying to find what is causing it.
I asked them on Twitter & was impressed that I got a reply immediately - turns out there was a significant bug in v55 for users with an apostrophe in their (Windows) profile path. They sent me this pastebin as evidence.
During this time the website still says v55 is the latest version. I couldn't find public notice about this issue. I spent an hour or two trying to diagnose & figure it out so I find it annoying that they didn't make some other obvious public statement that v55 had been "pulled" from the updater while they fixed this bug.
I moved to Ohio from Australia a few years back and was pretty sure we'd need a car. But I worked from home and my partner was happy with the 30min walk to her work (something which blew the mind of almost every American we talked to). Even in the winter it was feasible for her.
We used Uber quite regularly to get around. The local buses were pretty average - mostly because they stopped like every 150m, wtf, Americans really hate walking!). But aside from being slow they were perfectly serviceable. They even added a free route up and down the main street - which was awesome, except it came online towards the end of our stay there.
The thing that made the biggest difference though wasn't Uber or Lyft, it was Car2go. The city did a great job of making Car2go available - we had free parking near us so could just dump the car anywhere, and of course could always pick one up.
I am now in London where haha as if you would own a car here - public transport is awesome. Whether or not cities have a Car2go-esque system in place will definitely play a role in my next move.
Would you pay an extra $2000 to shave 3 hours off a trans-Atlantic flight?
Maybe not a trans-Atlantic flight, although I know many people that travel that route for business that would for sure.
I live in the UK and my family is in Australia. It is a 32+ hour trip, with something like 22 hours in the air (friend of mine just did Melbourne to Cambridge and it's a 39 hour trip).
Halving the flight time means I can go see my family more often. I would cheerfully pay twice as much to cut 10-12 hours off the flight time. The cost of flying home for me is not prohibitive but the time - both in terms of the sheer flight time and also the recovery time for spending so long in the air, which seems to get longer the older I get) - most definitely is.
I live in the UK and my family is in Australia. A quicker flight is top on the list of my priorities. It is a 32+ hour trip, with something like 22 hours in the air (friend of mine just did Melbourne to Cambridge and it's a 39 hour trip.
Halving the flight time means I can go see my family more often. I would cheerfully pay twice as much to cut 10-12 hours off the flight time.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting! Book sounds cool, added to my "hopefully I'll have time to read this one day" list.
The point totally makes sense, but isn't it an easy fix to tie stock option compensation to long term performance? Just make it so the shares don't vest for five years or more so the short-term incentive to pump and dump is removed?
Lots of interesting comments but didn't see this one so though I'd throw it in: Not Invented Here Syndrome.
I've seen this first hand a lot. Manny developers will get a project, review some options for components (e.g. CMS is the classic one) and decide that because that component only needs 99% of requirements, they should roll their own solution, because using that component and modifying it will take to long as they have to learn the extension system or whatever.
As a result they end up writing lots of new untested code. Even with best intentions and good practices, bugs and thus exploits are inevitable. Especially when the focus is on making sure you're avoiding one specific class of problems like SQLi, meaning people tend to focus on check listing that instead of taking a broad, security in depth approach.
Inevitably after a few months it turns out they underestimated the complexity of writing a whole new system from scratch and sacrifices are made, leading to focus on speed and getting it done over security.
(Not really sure if this problem is about "Web developers"; it really seems to be a symptom of software development in general.)
But not the lack of price... so, go ahead and cough up $650 or $850, anyway, because we are giving the public what they want. And to think I am STILL using a Nexus 5 which has at more than half of the above lacking features, and was around HALF the price.
Ditto. I waited for the Pixel announcement before upgrading from my Nexus 4, because I wanted to see if they were going to make something significantly better. The Pixel looks great but not 2x as much as the Nexus 5X I ended up getting.
I wasn't seriously looking at the Pixel 2 (I only got my 5X like a year ago) but was still interested to see if it was going to be worth it. Basically though my take is if I'm going to drop a fortune on a phone, I think I'd rather it be an iPhone at this point - the new neural process & features & camera I think are more appealing to me. And I say that as someone that has had a Nexus One, 4 and now 5X.
It will be hard to leave Android but killing the Nexus line and just cloning iPhone doesn't make me feel inclined to stick with it.
(FYI the reason you can tell they are fakes is they were selling at 25% of actual retail price, before bartering)
haha! It is amaaaaaazing how that trick works though. Like the whole counterfeit market exists because so many people are willing to believe they're getting a great deal and/or are savvy consumers, rather than the person they're dealing with is a scammer trying to defraud them.
Hey dude! Thanks for the reply. First, I would agree that passing legislation is what the government does. But that process is often very time consuming and can be expensive if they need to bring in external counsel (for weird legal issues) or external expert advisers (to understand if what they want is technically possible at all).
As a result there is a strong opportunity cost for everything they do. Every bill they are debating to try to pass is another bill that is not getting worked on. So there is some importance into what they're talking about.
My argument however is mostly that they are /not/ solving the problem - they're kicking the problem down the road by over a decade. They're basically putting the problem on the backburner so that in a few years it becomes the problem of the future government, who - for whatever reason they can justify - can just unwind those laws or change the deadlines or whatever.
So I don't see this legislation as helpful to actually solving the problem, whereas they /can/ pass simple, lower impact legislation that will work literally tomorrow by helping to make the conditions for electric cars a little bit better.
I guess the fact that in many places they have a monopoly on Internet services?
One is to cool the magma, by drilling a grid of holes and pumping water into them. (Use the heated water or steam for electric power plants.)
I really like this idea. There must just be stunning amounts of energy down there that surely could power a significant part of the state. The BBC did an interesting article on this a few months back: http://www.bbc.com/future/stor...
:(
I was already on board the electric car movement but nothing has convinced me more than moving to London and seeing how simply disgusting the air is here. The diesel fumes are everywhere. It is revolting.
Reading about every country's new plans to ban gas/diesel cars by some totally arbitrary date in the future makes me weep thinking of all the lawyer time that is no doubt going into drafting the legislation, all the politicians time going into debating and discussing with it, etc. This is money going down the sink that is not helping a problem that we need to solve now. And we can!@#
If they're going to put their fingers on the scales, why not just stop doing all this shit and put every dollar you'd spend on this kind of legislation and effort into better incentives for electric cars? Build more charging points in the cities and car parks. Tax incentives for the whole supply chain.
Jesus mate. Wait until you hear what the FCC has told American broadcasters they can and can't say. You'll be fucking livid!
Camera in your bedroom?
My bedroom routinely has two smartphones and thus four cameras in it (front + back on both).
Contrast all that with the non-ad link that the search string "procter and gamble" generates, which is simply "http://us.pg.com/".
True BUT! When you click on that link (in most browsers without active defenses) you'll see that the click is intercepted and it fires off a POST request to Google anyway, tracking the click, with a link that looks something like:
https://www.google.co.uk/gen_2... string]&s=2&v=2&pv=0.[random number]&me=54:[random number],V,0,0,0,0:6834,h,1,52,i:49,h,1,52,o:214,h,1,51... [many more bits of data] 1,e,C&zx=[some other number]
That will then redirect you to the destination site.
You won't notice it unless you're really tracking requests - if you mouseover the us.pg.com link it doesn't show the Google tracker. If you inspect the source it just looks like a regular HREF link.
Sounds like a lot of other Slashdot readers already get this, but the votes that matter most are for the people geographically closest to where you live.
This is definitely true on a local and practical level, but it means taking a huge shrug at tax time and ignoring the massive financial implications of federal spending on your pay cheque. What percentage of federal tax dollars goes directly to maintaining the giant military, for example?
Without some say in federal elections you are abrogating your rights in how a huge chunk of your income is spent to those that bother to vote (scary) or whatever politicians randomly fall into positions of responsibility (way scarier).
This definitely sounds like it would be the right attitude for the US if state's rights were returned a little more and there was less federal dollars spent on all the weird shit that they get spent on!
Yup. I realised after seeing the iPhone X specs that its screen resolution is better than that of my 23" desktop monitor. It is amazing how far these things have come.
Every sales commission process should be put in front of a bunch of 15yo video gamers to see how they would game the process to their benefit before it is deployed in the real world.
It'd be a fun project to build a Linux VM that allows you to trivially spoof a bunch of random data to get access to this programme. And distribute it. I think amping up the noise against these things while trying to take advantage of the benefits is probably more effective than flat out boycotting.
Imagine the 'strategic disaster' of the broader Internet and reddit competitors finding out they were working on the innovative new feature of 'video'.
It was fine when all the IRS did wrong was screw conservative non-profits... no one got fired or punished.
Making the tax collector a political weapon was not a problem for Obama.
haha yeh I too remember that 8 year period under Obama where not a single American complained about taxes, ever
you idiot
people shitting in the open on sidewalks,
Sounds like San Francisco!
As I write this I have two separate addons installed (currently disabled) that I've had for several years, both of which support taking screenshots of the browser, with slightly different features that made them better in particular circumstances.
(They are Abduction and FireShot if anyone is interested. It's possible I disabled them because they don't support multiprocess but I can't remember; they work fine for screenshots though.)
I don't know how the one they're talking about works but I suspect it's not going to be as feature complete as these. I find it hard to believe this is a hugely requested feature but who knows.
Incidentally, my latest Firefox problem is a simple version upgrade issue. I got the notice that v55 was available. As I usually do I dismissed it - I wait a day or two before upgrades unless there's major security implications.
When I went back to try to upgrade, the update dialog told me there's no update available. Searching for this reveals a zillion people having this problem going back over a decade so it's almost pointless trying to find what is causing it.
I asked them on Twitter & was impressed that I got a reply immediately - turns out there was a significant bug in v55 for users with an apostrophe in their (Windows) profile path. They sent me this pastebin as evidence.
During this time the website still says v55 is the latest version. I couldn't find public notice about this issue. I spent an hour or two trying to diagnose & figure it out so I find it annoying that they didn't make some other obvious public statement that v55 had been "pulled" from the updater while they fixed this bug.
I moved to Ohio from Australia a few years back and was pretty sure we'd need a car. But I worked from home and my partner was happy with the 30min walk to her work (something which blew the mind of almost every American we talked to). Even in the winter it was feasible for her.
We used Uber quite regularly to get around. The local buses were pretty average - mostly because they stopped like every 150m, wtf, Americans really hate walking!). But aside from being slow they were perfectly serviceable. They even added a free route up and down the main street - which was awesome, except it came online towards the end of our stay there.
The thing that made the biggest difference though wasn't Uber or Lyft, it was Car2go. The city did a great job of making Car2go available - we had free parking near us so could just dump the car anywhere, and of course could always pick one up.
I am now in London where haha as if you would own a car here - public transport is awesome. Whether or not cities have a Car2go-esque system in place will definitely play a role in my next move.
... if it means I never have to watch a smoker flick their butts into the street ever again.
Would you pay an extra $2000 to shave 3 hours off a trans-Atlantic flight?
Maybe not a trans-Atlantic flight, although I know many people that travel that route for business that would for sure.
I live in the UK and my family is in Australia. It is a 32+ hour trip, with something like 22 hours in the air (friend of mine just did Melbourne to Cambridge and it's a 39 hour trip).
Halving the flight time means I can go see my family more often. I would cheerfully pay twice as much to cut 10-12 hours off the flight time. The cost of flying home for me is not prohibitive but the time - both in terms of the sheer flight time and also the recovery time for spending so long in the air, which seems to get longer the older I get) - most definitely is.
I live in the UK and my family is in Australia. A quicker flight is top on the list of my priorities. It is a 32+ hour trip, with something like 22 hours in the air (friend of mine just did Melbourne to Cambridge and it's a 39 hour trip.
Halving the flight time means I can go see my family more often. I would cheerfully pay twice as much to cut 10-12 hours off the flight time.