Can't they just move your finger onto the phone - especially as you mention when you fall asleep, which is something I never thought about? It seems like it has only a slight improvement over facial recognition.
hmm... you sure seem to enjoy proprietary stuff and to be well trained in MS concepts although.
Hah! I mostly enjoy just doing what I want to do and not having to fight the OS every step of the way. FWIW I run almost exclusively open source software on my desktop wherever possible (looking at my list of applications open at the moment I have Firefox (my primary browser), VLC, Launchy and Notepad++:)
Don't get me wrong - I would love to see more en masse migration to Linux on the desktop. But every time I've tried (and I make a concerted effort every few years) I just run into a laundry list of problems. There are only a few things I keep Windows around for now - games + some Adobe products.
I'm sorry but if you are serious about security and long-term stability (decades) then Windows isn't the way.
Are there any Linux-based desktop-focused distributions that have the longevity of Windows?
I am still running my 2004 version of SecureCRT and my 1999 version of Multiedit (less often). I just copy their directories between computers and have done since I bought these way back when.
I tend to run my Windows OSs until literally the day they stop maintaining them (I liked to stress test the development teams I worked with by being the one person in the office that wasn't running the latest & greatest so could always compatibility test things) and have always been thoroughly impressed with its long-term stability and backwards compatibility above all else.
By comparison I maintain a Mint Linux VM in VirtualBox and it is such an exercise in frustration. Every dist-upgrade I do seems to break something minor.
I think it's too big an ask to say they should just be using some text-based interface. There are significant productivity advantages with modern networked software. It should be obvious now that the price of using any such system is vigilance when it comes to updates.
If you buy a copy of Windows the day it comes out and turn on automatic updates you are going to be as safe as possible and you can be extremely confident that your software will keep working thanks to MSs vigorous attempts to ensure backwards compatibility (generally) - and if you break the cost of that Windows license down over the lifespan of modern hardware you'll probably come out ahead - Windows 10 apparently will EOL in 2025, which is a pretty good run.
I'm not an MS fanboy by any means (almost everything I do outside of my desktop is on Linux) but I still think it's near I can SSH to one of my servers using a copy of SecureCRT I bought 13+ years ago.
I screwed up the amount; it was supposed to be £120b per the linked reference. That'll teach me to try to battle Slashdot's unicode support with the pound sign.
Let's look at single payer insurance. California has 39 million residents. They figured single payer costs of $400 billion/yr. That is twice California's current total yearly revenue.
For reference - the UK NHS budget is £120m (USD$153m) for 65m people.
I can definitely see a US single payer programme costing way more per capita for many years (possibly decades) as the "old way of doing things" is unwound though.
Since the federal government already borrows $4 out of ever $10 it spends just where do you see the money to pay for a single payer system coming from?
I mean the obvious place is from the budget of the Department of Defense, right?! Most of the Americans I know (I lived in Ohio for two years) would happily stop exporting shrapnel and high explosives to the middle east if it meant they could get more efficient healthcare services.
If they want people to even pretend to take anything they have to say seriously I feel like their only option is to make a report and fake "leak" it so it feels like we got something out of them that they didn't want. I certainly don't trust this agency to tell me anything and I can't imagine many other technical people do either.
But if I read it in on the Intercept from a leaked PDF that sends someone to jail I might!
Well, they got what, three extra page loads from you writing that, so it will just reinforce their page impression count & thus make it seem like it's a good idea to keep writing this stuff:)
I browse Slashdot via RSS and refuse to click on [what seem to me to be] flamebait articles.
I actually thought this would be kind of interesting which is why I'm here but (as usual) it degenerated into left vs right bullshit as everyone pushes their respective extreme agendas.
Smartphones need an activity light (i.e., the little light that shows the camera is active/recording) like fucking yesterday. Every time I'm doing something on my phone I have no idea if the fucker is watching me back.
Awesome post. Really interesting to hear (again) how much ass Norway is kicking in doing cool stuff.
The thing about the starting ovens, etc, I discovered actually has a term here in the UK - TV pickup, referring to the fact that when there's a TV commercial break for something that many people are watching, there is a big spike in usage because everyone goes and turns on their kettles or whatever.
It's interesting (to me, anyway) thinking about how simply that effect could be mitigated with even a tiny amount of battery storage in a large number of homes to act as a local buffer for demand like that.
They would have set the fucking things off in the bathroom, not tried to do so while sitting in their fucking seat where people could see them.
If you're sending a feckless incompetent terrorist to do something you know they'll probably fuck up, it's probably better to have them fuck up in plain sight. Even if they fuck up people won't remember their incompetence - they'll just remember the scary part (someone tried to blow up a plane again and the security had no idea).
First, the Android phone basics. The Essential Phone costs $699 with top-of-the-line specs and features. As you can see above, it prominently features an edge-to-edge display that one-ups even the Samsung Galaxy S8 by bringing it all the way to the the top of the phone, wrapping around the front-facing selfie camera.
For me, the "Android phone basics" are:
- what version of Android does it ship with? - how often will it be updated?
The rest of that stuff is just phone basics.
Overall though it sounds interesting and I like the idea of more competition in the Android space. But I will simply not buy an Android phone that does not run an Android software update schedule that is on par with what Google do with the Nexus/Pixel series.
So now we're having to calculate if the risk of something really bad happening onboard due to an electronic device's battery kept in the cargo hold catching fire is higher than the risk of terrorists having explosives in their laptops.
And the risk of terrorists having something that just simply starts a fire in a laptop that is in checked luggage - which is presumably much much easier than getting an actual bomb on board - knowing that there will be a bunch of other laptops in there that will catch fire as well.
No.... Why does a "wrong outlet" exist that will accept a USB cable or A/C device without the appropriate over-current fuses or safety protection to prevent a fire?
Indeed. And presumably if this is a working hypothesis, it would be simple to test - find the same "wrong outlet" type and plug in a bunch of iPhones and see if it catches fire.
I really really want to believe that the engineers designing a cockpit wouldn't have a socket like that without the correct safety stuff. I am not an electrical engineer so not sure how hard it is to implement?
Nah. I don't think Chrome won. I think we - the users - won, at least for now. I wrote a while back about "Forgetting Firefox", the premise being that Firefox has succeeded in it's objective to 'preserve choice and innovation on the Internet'. I often wonder if the success caught them by surprise and they didn't have a follow up plan:)
The good news is that the web is ruled primarily by open source. Arguably the Chrome ecosystem has its problems (privacy issues, Chrome-specific web features, etc), but at its core it is OSS and I think we have a much more standards-based web now; Microsoft's attempt to dominate with IE were basically stopped in their tracks and we all owe a huge debt to Mozilla for making that happen.
But - as everyone (including me) has pointed out in like every FF story for the last few years - from our perspective Mozilla has done nothing but play catchup with Chrome. Electrolysis is great but pointless interface changes like Australis, etc, has left a lot of people dissatisfied.
I think Firefox could have shifted happily into maintenance mode years ago with efforts focused solely on performance and bugfixes (I've experienced bugs that I've looked up and found they were logged almost a decade ago and are still unfixed).
I'm not sure what is going to happen when they change the extension engine but I do know that if the extensions I use every day in my workflow stop working, I have no more reason to use Firefox. I understand the reasons they want to make these changes, but it's seems like a simple truth that the (small) remaining user base of Firefox is probably there because of momentum from the extension ecosystem, and if that vanishes... well, where will they go?
I love Mozilla & Firefox & it is still my browser. But I'm not sure for how much longer.
In self checkout, I end up doing all the work that the cashier used to. Checking out quickly and professionally is a service I'm willing to pay extra for, I don't care about self checkout even if makes the prices a whopping 1% lower.
Well then the market will sort this out, right? Stores that offer the human experience with the extra 1% on top of the prices will still exist because people like you will continue to buy there!
And that's fine, that's what competition is there for. I massively prefer the automated checkouts because I tend to do small shops and I can usually process the items faster than the person on the checkout, who is motived to work (in the immortal words of Office Space) just hard enough to get fired.
Or, you can keep going back. And they'll keep abusing you.
I like going back over and over to close the website immediately, so that their stats show that more users bounce after a very short period of time, which hopefully they correlate to the addition of autoplaying video.
I suspect I'm an edge case though and most people happily sit there and soak it up.
Slashdot Mirror
These apps tells me how to get where I'm going on an actual ride sharing service, the London Underground
Can't they just move your finger onto the phone - especially as you mention when you fall asleep, which is something I never thought about? It seems like it has only a slight improvement over facial recognition.
hmm... you sure seem to enjoy proprietary stuff and to be well trained in MS concepts although.
Hah! I mostly enjoy just doing what I want to do and not having to fight the OS every step of the way. FWIW I run almost exclusively open source software on my desktop wherever possible (looking at my list of applications open at the moment I have Firefox (my primary browser), VLC, Launchy and Notepad++ :)
Don't get me wrong - I would love to see more en masse migration to Linux on the desktop. But every time I've tried (and I make a concerted effort every few years) I just run into a laundry list of problems. There are only a few things I keep Windows around for now - games + some Adobe products.
I'm sorry but if you are serious about security and long-term stability (decades) then Windows isn't the way.
Are there any Linux-based desktop-focused distributions that have the longevity of Windows?
I am still running my 2004 version of SecureCRT and my 1999 version of Multiedit (less often). I just copy their directories between computers and have done since I bought these way back when.
I tend to run my Windows OSs until literally the day they stop maintaining them (I liked to stress test the development teams I worked with by being the one person in the office that wasn't running the latest & greatest so could always compatibility test things) and have always been thoroughly impressed with its long-term stability and backwards compatibility above all else.
By comparison I maintain a Mint Linux VM in VirtualBox and it is such an exercise in frustration. Every dist-upgrade I do seems to break something minor.
I think it's too big an ask to say they should just be using some text-based interface. There are significant productivity advantages with modern networked software. It should be obvious now that the price of using any such system is vigilance when it comes to updates.
If you buy a copy of Windows the day it comes out and turn on automatic updates you are going to be as safe as possible and you can be extremely confident that your software will keep working thanks to MSs vigorous attempts to ensure backwards compatibility (generally) - and if you break the cost of that Windows license down over the lifespan of modern hardware you'll probably come out ahead - Windows 10 apparently will EOL in 2025, which is a pretty good run.
I'm not an MS fanboy by any means (almost everything I do outside of my desktop is on Linux) but I still think it's near I can SSH to one of my servers using a copy of SecureCRT I bought 13+ years ago.
Yep I typo'ed, sorry :( See my other comments but the correct figure (in the link) is 120b.
I screwed up the amount; it was supposed to be £120b per the linked reference. That'll teach me to try to battle Slashdot's unicode support with the pound sign.
Shit! I did. I got frustrated trying to get the pound symbol working on Slashdot and ended up editing it a bunch of times before finally giving up.
Please mod parent up - I wasn't trying to dissemble, 120m is obviously way way way too small.
Let's look at single payer insurance. California has 39 million residents. They figured single payer costs of $400 billion/yr. That is twice California's current total yearly revenue.
For reference - the UK NHS budget is £120m (USD$153m) for 65m people.
I can definitely see a US single payer programme costing way more per capita for many years (possibly decades) as the "old way of doing things" is unwound though.
Since the federal government already borrows $4 out of ever $10 it spends just where do you see the money to pay for a single payer system coming from?
I mean the obvious place is from the budget of the Department of Defense, right?! Most of the Americans I know (I lived in Ohio for two years) would happily stop exporting shrapnel and high explosives to the middle east if it meant they could get more efficient healthcare services.
It's almost like trying to summarise complicated political, social and economic views as either "left" or "right" is a bad idea
Cognitive dissonance is a hell of a drug.
If they want people to even pretend to take anything they have to say seriously I feel like their only option is to make a report and fake "leak" it so it feels like we got something out of them that they didn't want. I certainly don't trust this agency to tell me anything and I can't imagine many other technical people do either.
But if I read it in on the Intercept from a leaked PDF that sends someone to jail I might!
Well, they got what, three extra page loads from you writing that, so it will just reinforce their page impression count & thus make it seem like it's a good idea to keep writing this stuff :)
I browse Slashdot via RSS and refuse to click on [what seem to me to be] flamebait articles.
I actually thought this would be kind of interesting which is why I'm here but (as usual) it degenerated into left vs right bullshit as everyone pushes their respective extreme agendas.
Smartphones need an activity light (i.e., the little light that shows the camera is active/recording) like fucking yesterday. Every time I'm doing something on my phone I have no idea if the fucker is watching me back.
Awesome post. Really interesting to hear (again) how much ass Norway is kicking in doing cool stuff.
The thing about the starting ovens, etc, I discovered actually has a term here in the UK - TV pickup, referring to the fact that when there's a TV commercial break for something that many people are watching, there is a big spike in usage because everyone goes and turns on their kettles or whatever.
It's interesting (to me, anyway) thinking about how simply that effect could be mitigated with even a tiny amount of battery storage in a large number of homes to act as a local buffer for demand like that.
I completely agree but I'd note:
They would have set the fucking things off in the bathroom, not tried to do so while sitting in their fucking seat where people could see them.
If you're sending a feckless incompetent terrorist to do something you know they'll probably fuck up, it's probably better to have them fuck up in plain sight. Even if they fuck up people won't remember their incompetence - they'll just remember the scary part (someone tried to blow up a plane again and the security had no idea).
I've realized it's just safer to not discuss my password policy.
This is why I don't bitch about my banks online
Australia was bombed in WW2, just for the record.
The article starts with:
First, the Android phone basics. The Essential Phone costs $699 with top-of-the-line specs and features. As you can see above, it prominently features an edge-to-edge display that one-ups even the Samsung Galaxy S8 by bringing it all the way to the the top of the phone, wrapping around the front-facing selfie camera.
For me, the "Android phone basics" are:
- what version of Android does it ship with?
- how often will it be updated?
The rest of that stuff is just phone basics.
Overall though it sounds interesting and I like the idea of more competition in the Android space. But I will simply not buy an Android phone that does not run an Android software update schedule that is on par with what Google do with the Nexus/Pixel series.
So now we're having to calculate if the risk of something really bad happening onboard due to an electronic device's battery kept in the cargo hold catching fire is higher than the risk of terrorists having explosives in their laptops.
And the risk of terrorists having something that just simply starts a fire in a laptop that is in checked luggage - which is presumably much much easier than getting an actual bomb on board - knowing that there will be a bunch of other laptops in there that will catch fire as well.
No.... Why does a "wrong outlet" exist that will accept a USB cable or A/C device without the appropriate over-current fuses or safety protection to prevent a fire?
Indeed. And presumably if this is a working hypothesis, it would be simple to test - find the same "wrong outlet" type and plug in a bunch of iPhones and see if it catches fire.
I really really want to believe that the engineers designing a cockpit wouldn't have a socket like that without the correct safety stuff. I am not an electrical engineer so not sure how hard it is to implement?
I have seen precisely one POS terminal that read a chip as fast as a swipe. It's possible. Unfortunately I don't recall where.
literally everywhere in Europe & Australia maybe :D
It is staggeringly rare to see swipe at all now.
Nah. I don't think Chrome won. I think we - the users - won, at least for now. I wrote a while back about "Forgetting Firefox", the premise being that Firefox has succeeded in it's objective to 'preserve choice and innovation on the Internet'. I often wonder if the success caught them by surprise and they didn't have a follow up plan :)
The good news is that the web is ruled primarily by open source. Arguably the Chrome ecosystem has its problems (privacy issues, Chrome-specific web features, etc), but at its core it is OSS and I think we have a much more standards-based web now; Microsoft's attempt to dominate with IE were basically stopped in their tracks and we all owe a huge debt to Mozilla for making that happen.
But - as everyone (including me) has pointed out in like every FF story for the last few years - from our perspective Mozilla has done nothing but play catchup with Chrome. Electrolysis is great but pointless interface changes like Australis, etc, has left a lot of people dissatisfied.
I think Firefox could have shifted happily into maintenance mode years ago with efforts focused solely on performance and bugfixes (I've experienced bugs that I've looked up and found they were logged almost a decade ago and are still unfixed).
I'm not sure what is going to happen when they change the extension engine but I do know that if the extensions I use every day in my workflow stop working, I have no more reason to use Firefox. I understand the reasons they want to make these changes, but it's seems like a simple truth that the (small) remaining user base of Firefox is probably there because of momentum from the extension ecosystem, and if that vanishes... well, where will they go?
I love Mozilla & Firefox & it is still my browser. But I'm not sure for how much longer.
In self checkout, I end up doing all the work that the cashier used to. Checking out quickly and professionally is a service I'm willing to pay extra for, I don't care about self checkout even if makes the prices a whopping 1% lower.
Well then the market will sort this out, right? Stores that offer the human experience with the extra 1% on top of the prices will still exist because people like you will continue to buy there!
And that's fine, that's what competition is there for. I massively prefer the automated checkouts because I tend to do small shops and I can usually process the items faster than the person on the checkout, who is motived to work (in the immortal words of Office Space) just hard enough to get fired.
Watching Uber (and many of the other p2p companies) re-derive regulatory fixes for common problems from first principles is a fun pastime!
Or, you can keep going back. And they'll keep abusing you.
I like going back over and over to close the website immediately, so that their stats show that more users bounce after a very short period of time, which hopefully they correlate to the addition of autoplaying video.
I suspect I'm an edge case though and most people happily sit there and soak it up.