If they don't want people getting off midway through a series of flights, maybe try not pricing an entire trip with multiple legs less than the individual flight to the city in the middle. Their own byzantine pricing system is what led to this result.
It's not always done by airlines for shits and giggles. A lot of airports have frequency requirements for landing slots, so instead of flying completely empty planes on routes to preserve slot allocation (which does happen), they may offer reduced fares to those cities. The airlines may be giving up a revenue premium to generate demand in the other city to help offset the loss that would otherwise occur. This goes for smaller airports as well that may have government subsidies to increase access for smaller markets: to drive up demand in those markets you offer connecting tickets that might be cheaper than flights originating out of a hub.
They are being paid to carry you to the destination. The fact that you did not actually go to the destination doesn't mean you didn't pay for it.
The simple matter is, if airlines are offering a cheaper ticket to a connecting destination that they would had you terminated somewhere, they are needing to drive traffic to that destination for some reason. Skipping out halfway through a connection can also cause increased costs for the airline having to track/reroute bags, etc.
In my experience, it is almost impossible to get bags out of the system except at the endpoints. We've been bumped from flights (or took the buyout) multiple times, and when we asked if we could get access to our bags, were told that that was basically impossible (we could wait four hours, for instance). I'd be surprised if a person doing this checked any bags in the first place.
And then of course in today's climate there's the security/safety angle as well. Say you bail on the last leg and the plane goes down. The airline still thinks you are on board (especially if it was a through flight with no equipment change). If the government finds out you left the flight and there's an accident, you immediately become a target of suspicion.
I mean, true, but that's going to come up one in... a thousand flights? Ten thousand flights? Surely there are bigger fish to fry.
We all love to laugh at the farming industry, we picture rednecks with their pickup trucks, and their guns, just doing heavy labor. However the farming industry is rather high tech, there is a lot more technology that goes on then a lot of silicon valley companies. A lot of the Big Data, AI, Automation and Robotics technology that we are seeing going out to the normal public, have often been implemented in farms for years.
Being that these places need a lot of land to operate, they are often in remote locations, so tools like this article states, is a useful too to farmers to help cordenate their livestock with others.
My family's farm went from natural breeding to all artificial insemination during my childhood, and then my parents took the dairy buyout... that was 30 years ago. They didn't exactly sent out for vials of random semen, you had catalogs of options. Having a "dating app for cows" isn't even a particularly interesting idea, it maybe makes certain things more convenient but it's not a game-changer in any way. Contrast that with human dating apps, where it changes your entire approach to the project.
Recently SNL had a faux game show "Millenial Millions" which seems apropos to your "Generation Me" comment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... I found the clip enjoyable, but honestly, it doesn't feel like funny comedy, more like laugh-else-you'll-cry comedy.
You are more or less correct, no matter what happens life itself will continue by adapting and evolving (you're a bit off on the timescales, the changes will be a lot slower than you seem to think), we humans pose very little threat to the continuation of life in general.
However a secondary or tertiary effect of the changes likely to happen is that humans go extinct. Change is good, change is normal, for the planet as a whole. Not so good for our species in particular.
It is very unlikely that humanity will go extinct. We're the first species who can respond effectively to being endangered.
Though I suppose one could quibble about whether it matters if the population goes from 7.5B to 10M or if it goes to 0M. I mean, humanity survives, but everyone you know and all their descendants are dead.
We're all gonna die!!! Eleventy!!! This may be a genuine problem. Or it may not. There is no way for the average person to know. Breathless headlines touting climatic disaster have become so ubiquitous that my first reaction - and that of many people - is a yawn. Ecologists and climate alarmists have done their causes active harm.
Is it your position that if ecologists and "climate alarmists" didn't exist, that the average person would spend a few hours a week doing their research to understand how the world is progressing in the many ways that will indirectly harm them? If so, have you ever met another person in real life?
The problem isn't that there are two sides, both doing research and trying to figure it out, and one side is "politically correct" and drowns out the other side. The problem is that some people are doing science, and others are aggressively denying that science. They aren't providing research to back up their hypothesis, because they don't even think it's worth doing science in the first place. Their concerns are in different directions, and their goal is not to actually answer questions, it's to be left alone. The problem is that when your actions damage the system everyone depends on, leaving you alone is not viable in the long run.
When you come down to it, "insects are dying in large numbers" is pretty believable because we have entire industries which are devoted to helping people kill insects in large numbers, and we have basically zero industry devoted to protecting insects. So if insects were NOT dying out in large numbers, that would imply that capitalism really isn't working, that these big companies are selling "insecticide placebos". They aren't, they legit work.
Furthermore, a farmer having a problem with corn borers doesn't really directly care about whether killing those corn borers will also kill bees or unrelated moths or other insects. I'm not saying they hate those insects, just that those insects are not their focus. So they'll probably be happy to use a safer alternative to address the corn borers IFF it's of comparable overhead - but they aren't going to make a change without some sort of proof that their current behavior causes problems. Which means that the starting point pretty much always is killing off more insects than intended, simply because it's easier and gets the job done.
If you received fake you can return it. But how many people do that?
I got a fake and tried to engage with the brand. I managed it, but it took them so long that I could no longer return the item... and then the contact at the brand stopped responding, so I get to keep it!
I mean, yes, you could put the onus on Canada's Bell to track down and acquire rights to all of the things on the US services. But why do they have to do that in the first place? Because rights holders decided that they'd make more money selling the same content to a US firm and then to a UK firm and then to a Canadian firm, each paying a premium for "exclusive" rights.
OK, OK, so, yes, the onus is kind of on Bell for participating in the system (I'm sure they defend their exclusive rights against other Canadian streamers).
Phones can be disruptive in class. Also, it is disrespectful to the teacher to be paying attention to a device rather than the teacher. Students should be required to leave their phone turned off and in their locker during the school day. I also think that most kids would benefit from spending at least two weeks a year at a summer camp where no phones or other electronic devices are allowed. I also think that kids under 13 should NOT have a phone. If helicopter parents think that their kids must have a phone before that age, it should be a flip phone without Internet or texting capabilities.
Far too many people of all ages spend far far too much time with their attention glued to a "smart" phone instead of paying attention to the people and events around them!
Did this response set out to prove that cellphones aren't the only cause of poor reading comprehension?
Yea, it's a real shame that science progresses one funeral at a time [Max Planck]. First coffee was bad, then its good, eggs were bad then they were good, milk was bad then good and now bad again depending on who you ask, fat is bad and here recently it is becoming good again. The only minds that are made up about this are the unmade minds.
Science definitely should have the ear of the people, but most of the time the people never check out who is signing the checks. Most of the time, most of the science is mostly wrong. Of course the benefit of decent science is that it will correct for this and change how it researches and its claims when new evidence is presented or something new is learned that might be helpful to learn the truth. But today, its not that anymore, it's all confirmation bias. Evidence that does not support the pursuit is omitted or assailed when presented by the opposition. The opposition... constantly treating people that are looking for the truth as well as though they are opposition. How quaint!
I feel like you're talking about science journalism, here, rather than actual science.
I'll grant that scientists sometimes engage in that as a marketing tool, but I really don't feel like SCIENCE came to me and said "Butter is bad", any more than I feel like DEMOCRACY came to me and said "Guns are good" or "Cardi B is an excellent singer".
Even if SCIENCE did make statements like that, I currently live in a country where a lot of people make arguments about how the world is flat, the earth was created in less than 13.5 billion years (plus or minus), and that vaccinations cause autism and chemtrails and fluoride are mind-control devices. I'm not sure what you expect science to do, here.
One of Newt Gingrich's core strategies for creating a Congress which couldn't work together was to discourage GOP members from fraternizing with the opposition.
This is pretty easy to disprove.
I'm not sure exactly what you're disproving, since the point you go on to make doesn't have any apparent relationship to my posting. I was referring to the stuff discussed in articles like this:
I've not really seen anyone being contentious on this - some people don't think it matters, but I think it's generally accepted that Gingrich wanted to keep members from socializing across the aisle.
Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but I don't think company resources should be used to undermine that company. Why should a company be forced to let employees use company infrastructure against itself? I also think it is stupid for an employee to use company resources for these activities. The company can monitor those resources and find out who in the company needs to get assigned the tasks that no one else would want to do. The whole thing seems a bit silly, although I am a simple minded fool so...
What if the employees are trying to save the company from making a bad decision? Do they have to do that entirely externally to the company?
I worked at Google for a long time, and there were many times when someone used internal communications for completely-inappropriate stuff. But there were many times when such communications were essential to get things sorted out. Unfortunately, there was not a bright line between the different types of communications, mostly because people are people, with all the squishiness that comes along with that (I mean, sometimes people go out in a blaze of misguided glory, sometimes they do the right thing, and sometimes they are just asshats).
One of Newt Gingrich's core strategies for creating a Congress which couldn't work together was to discourage GOP members from fraternizing with the opposition. The idea was that they should spend more time in their home district, not have formal Washington residences, and DEFINITELY not spend any social time with Democrats. This prevents cases where friendships across the aisle develop based on mutual respect - you maybe disagree with someone, but you don't believe them to be a bad person. These days, politicians start from a position that their opponents are simply evil, and thus need not spend any effort trying to understand their opponents' positions.
Distributed working groups can work REALLY well if everyone involved works very hard to interact and keep on the same page as each other. But in my experience this is really hard, and it generally only works if you use this ability as a selection criteria. If you just select a dozen people based on criteria other than their ability to work together remotely, generally things end up a trainwreck, even if everyone in the group is generally awesome. [My experience is based mostly on software-engineering, which is likely far easier to do in a distributed group than politics. The entire POINT of politics is group discussions to figure out the solution, which is exactly the type of thing that works worst with distributed teams.]
In all honesty, I don't even mind the unskippable ones in theory because they are usually very short (or at least can be skipped after a few seconds).
What I truly hate is when they are inserted into the middle of a stream where someone is right in the middle of speaking or what have you. While such breaks are, thankfully, very short, they still completely interrupt the flow of whatever one was watching, to such an extent that I sometimes have to skip back a few seconds right after the commercial and rewatch that part of the video (which doesn't replay the commercial, thankfully).
To be honest, I believe that if Youtube really wants to insist on ads like this being in a video, they should ask the uploader to ensure that there are scene cuts or otherwise suitable places in the video to insert commercials, and youtube can ask where the timing of such spots are when the video is uploaded. If an uploader cannot provide satisfactory locations for commercials to youtube, then the entire video should be blocked from being able to be watched for free until the uploader has modified it to be amenable to this process. Of course, the uploader should be advised that this is the case, as well.
Yes, I'm quite aware of how user-hostile this solution is... that is a design feature, not a bug... because IMV, it is still less hostile than inserting commercials right smack dab in the middle of people saying a sentence.... almost EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME.
I'm an ex-Googler, and what bugs me about this is that Google is the company that claims they are so amazing at machine learning and they can make all the things lovely. They can create natural-sounding assistants to call and schedule a haircut, or suggest responses for emails, etc, but... they can't even figure out where the damned conceptual/scene pauses are in a video? Really?
Honestly, sometimes I almost feel like they actually did write code to figure out the right thing to do, and then programmed it wrong. Like there will be an obvious pause, say for a scene change, and then just after the next person starts saying something it runs an ad. But that just seems too crazy to be true.
Basically, scientists who know VERY WELL that they only UNDERSTAND PART OF FUNCTIONING THE UNIVERSE and HAVE NO IDEA WHATSOEVER WHERE OUR UNIVERSE CAME FROM are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that there can be no such thing as God. WTF? That's about as logical as saying "I have never actually physically travelled to Ethiopia, but I know everything everything there is to know about Ethiopa nevertheless."
No, I think it's more like saying "I have never physically travelled to Ethiopia, but I'm pretty sure it's not populated by two-headed dogpeople with telepathy."
I am absolutely not certain at all that there was no creator. But based on what has been discovered, the creator's scope of action is SEVERELY limited. For instance, we know that someone didn't take a rib from man and create woman, at this point we're pretty sure on that, likewise we're pretty sure the earth wasn't just formed wholesale with everything in place. We can't prove that there wasn't a shadowy actor who made slight nudges to evolution over the course of billions of years to lead amino acids to humanity. Personally, I have nothing against you if you want to believe in a god who made really tiny nudges like that, good on you - but that's not the god most religious people appear to believe in.
AFAICT, this posting and the linked articles are just a collection of assertions about how bad things are and how important this work is, with no actual information about how bad things are and how important this work is. In my experience when someone runs around saying things like this, it actually means that it's NOT that bad, and it's NOT that important, and they're just trying to scare people into moving in whatever direction they haven't been able to convince them to move in using actual data.
Tomorrow morning I expect most of the comments on this thread to be about how SJWs ruin everything
Rightfully so.
These progressives insert themselves into things others have built and destroy them with their narrow-minded extremist politics. They contribute nothing but conflict.
Truth! I can't remember the last time I saw sliced bread, and vaccinations haven't been available for decades! Pretty soon we'll be back to rooms full of women being called "computers". We live in a hellish landscape of continuous dissent, and it is ALL caused by SJWs!
This discussion is very similar to people that look for the star of Bethlehem using computer software. They have certain facts from the bible, and then scour the ancient sky using powerful astronomy software looking for events and things that they think match up with the facts. That's not science, even though it's "backed up by fact", so to speak.
So the star of Bethlehem was basically Oumuamua's launching lasers? Illuminati confirmed!
Tomorrow morning I expect most of the comments on this thread to be about how SJWs ruin everything, and Linux has gone to hell in a handbasket since they stopped letting developers swear, and how the only true communications are insults. What a brave new world!
The free and open internet was great while it lasted.
Did not expect the virtue signalling, SJW, censorship, shadow banning, reporting, account removal, payment processor problems the internet would have.
That side of political control for speech on the internet was something out of Communist nations.
I didn't see that people would actually be getting killed by swatting, that doxing would be a thing, that people would make an avocation out of hounding others to suicide... and yet others would get un-self-consciously self-righteous about virtue signalling and the terrible problem of the scary SJW.
[I mean, seriously, you're virtue signalling by complaining about virtue signalling? No shit?]
Companies need to demand secure software. If it was easy enough for a crook to climb a ladder and get in a second floor window, I would lock the second floor windows and I wouldn't ever install a window without a lock again.
To be fair, often enough it's more like they didn't even know they had second-floor windows, because they had never gone upstairs. Which is not to let them off the hook, the stairs were there, they could have checked.
Of course, this being software, it's like you have a million sets of stairs, some go upstairs, some go downstairs, some are dimensional portals, but the majority of them end in a brick wall or sewer, so checking them is no fun at all.
I dunno, comparing software security to real-life security is like comparing fish to bicycles.
I'm imagining a number of government workers waiting until 5 minutes to the hour, then the Mission Impossible theme kicks in while they log into their CA website to get a new cert issued, and then replace it on the servers exactly at the stroke of midnight! Exciting!
Except, not really. If they let their cert get that old before replacing it, they really need to rethink their policies. There could be any number of reasons why you might not be able to replace the cert in a timely fashion.
If it's 200 on a 1200 appliance, I'll gladly give yoi 1500 to just give me a dumb panel and fuck off.
The claimed margin is only 6%, so I think it's more likely that they're screwing you out of your privacy for an additional $50. Or $10. Or some other trivial and enraging amount.
Back in the early aughts I realized I was the biggest danger to my data and sat down to create a sustainable backup system. At the time, duplicate storage was a bit spendier than I wanted to pay, but it was clear that we weren't far from a point where it would be cheaper than organizing my way to using smaller volumes, so I just committed to backing it all up, and mirroring that twice (I swap on-site and off-site mirrors once a month).
That isn't to say that I don't trim and organize - in the end, keeping backups of things like old VM data just makes it harder to figure out where your actually-important data is. So I make sure my biggest costs relate to valuable data (mostly photos and home videos).
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If they don't want people getting off midway through a series of flights, maybe try not pricing an entire trip with multiple legs less than the individual flight to the city in the middle. Their own byzantine pricing system is what led to this result.
It's not always done by airlines for shits and giggles. A lot of airports have frequency requirements for landing slots, so instead of flying completely empty planes on routes to preserve slot allocation (which does happen), they may offer reduced fares to those cities. The airlines may be giving up a revenue premium to generate demand in the other city to help offset the loss that would otherwise occur. This goes for smaller airports as well that may have government subsidies to increase access for smaller markets: to drive up demand in those markets you offer connecting tickets that might be cheaper than flights originating out of a hub.
They are being paid to carry you to the destination. The fact that you did not actually go to the destination doesn't mean you didn't pay for it.
The simple matter is, if airlines are offering a cheaper ticket to a connecting destination that they would had you terminated somewhere, they are needing to drive traffic to that destination for some reason. Skipping out halfway through a connection can also cause increased costs for the airline having to track/reroute bags, etc.
In my experience, it is almost impossible to get bags out of the system except at the endpoints. We've been bumped from flights (or took the buyout) multiple times, and when we asked if we could get access to our bags, were told that that was basically impossible (we could wait four hours, for instance). I'd be surprised if a person doing this checked any bags in the first place.
And then of course in today's climate there's the security/safety angle as well. Say you bail on the last leg and the plane goes down. The airline still thinks you are on board (especially if it was a through flight with no equipment change). If the government finds out you left the flight and there's an accident, you immediately become a target of suspicion.
I mean, true, but that's going to come up one in ... a thousand flights? Ten thousand flights? Surely there are bigger fish to fry.
We all love to laugh at the farming industry, we picture rednecks with their pickup trucks, and their guns, just doing heavy labor.
However the farming industry is rather high tech, there is a lot more technology that goes on then a lot of silicon valley companies.
A lot of the Big Data, AI, Automation and Robotics technology that we are seeing going out to the normal public, have often been implemented in farms for years.
Being that these places need a lot of land to operate, they are often in remote locations, so tools like this article states, is a useful too to farmers to help cordenate their livestock with others.
My family's farm went from natural breeding to all artificial insemination during my childhood, and then my parents took the dairy buyout ... that was 30 years ago. They didn't exactly sent out for vials of random semen, you had catalogs of options. Having a "dating app for cows" isn't even a particularly interesting idea, it maybe makes certain things more convenient but it's not a game-changer in any way. Contrast that with human dating apps, where it changes your entire approach to the project.
Recently SNL had a faux game show "Millenial Millions" which seems apropos to your "Generation Me" comment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I found the clip enjoyable, but honestly, it doesn't feel like funny comedy, more like laugh-else-you'll-cry comedy.
You are more or less correct, no matter what happens life itself will continue by adapting and evolving (you're a bit off on the timescales, the changes will be a lot slower than you seem to think), we humans pose very little threat to the continuation of life in general.
However a secondary or tertiary effect of the changes likely to happen is that humans go extinct. Change is good, change is normal, for the planet as a whole. Not so good for our species in particular.
It is very unlikely that humanity will go extinct. We're the first species who can respond effectively to being endangered.
Though I suppose one could quibble about whether it matters if the population goes from 7.5B to 10M or if it goes to 0M. I mean, humanity survives, but everyone you know and all their descendants are dead.
We're all gonna die!!! Eleventy!!! This may be a genuine problem. Or it may not. There is no way for the average person to know. Breathless headlines touting climatic disaster have become so ubiquitous that my first reaction - and that of many people - is a yawn. Ecologists and climate alarmists have done their causes active harm.
Is it your position that if ecologists and "climate alarmists" didn't exist, that the average person would spend a few hours a week doing their research to understand how the world is progressing in the many ways that will indirectly harm them? If so, have you ever met another person in real life?
The problem isn't that there are two sides, both doing research and trying to figure it out, and one side is "politically correct" and drowns out the other side. The problem is that some people are doing science, and others are aggressively denying that science. They aren't providing research to back up their hypothesis, because they don't even think it's worth doing science in the first place. Their concerns are in different directions, and their goal is not to actually answer questions, it's to be left alone. The problem is that when your actions damage the system everyone depends on, leaving you alone is not viable in the long run.
When you come down to it, "insects are dying in large numbers" is pretty believable because we have entire industries which are devoted to helping people kill insects in large numbers, and we have basically zero industry devoted to protecting insects. So if insects were NOT dying out in large numbers, that would imply that capitalism really isn't working, that these big companies are selling "insecticide placebos". They aren't, they legit work.
Furthermore, a farmer having a problem with corn borers doesn't really directly care about whether killing those corn borers will also kill bees or unrelated moths or other insects. I'm not saying they hate those insects, just that those insects are not their focus. So they'll probably be happy to use a safer alternative to address the corn borers IFF it's of comparable overhead - but they aren't going to make a change without some sort of proof that their current behavior causes problems. Which means that the starting point pretty much always is killing off more insects than intended, simply because it's easier and gets the job done.
Just throw in 5 copies of jscript and 30 trackers, that'll slow it right down. You know, like every other modern site.
I pine for the days when the slowness was because of _my_ end of the connection. At least that had a straight-forward fix.
If you received fake you can return it. But how many people do that?
I got a fake and tried to engage with the brand. I managed it, but it took them so long that I could no longer return the item ... and then the contact at the brand stopped responding, so I get to keep it!
I mean, yes, you could put the onus on Canada's Bell to track down and acquire rights to all of the things on the US services. But why do they have to do that in the first place? Because rights holders decided that they'd make more money selling the same content to a US firm and then to a UK firm and then to a Canadian firm, each paying a premium for "exclusive" rights.
OK, OK, so, yes, the onus is kind of on Bell for participating in the system (I'm sure they defend their exclusive rights against other Canadian streamers).
Phones can be disruptive in class. Also, it is disrespectful to the teacher to be paying attention to a device rather than the teacher. Students should be required to leave their phone turned off and in their locker during the school day. I also think that most kids would benefit from spending at least two weeks a year at a summer camp where no phones or other electronic devices are allowed. I also think that kids under 13 should NOT have a phone. If helicopter parents think that their kids must have a phone before that age, it should be a flip phone without Internet or texting capabilities.
Far too many people of all ages spend far far too much time with their attention glued to a "smart" phone instead of paying attention to the people and events around them!
Did this response set out to prove that cellphones aren't the only cause of poor reading comprehension?
Yea, it's a real shame that science progresses one funeral at a time [Max Planck]. First coffee was bad, then its good, eggs were bad then they were good, milk was bad then good and now bad again depending on who you ask, fat is bad and here recently it is becoming good again. The only minds that are made up about this are the unmade minds.
Science definitely should have the ear of the people, but most of the time the people never check out who is signing the checks. Most of the time, most of the science is mostly wrong. Of course the benefit of decent science is that it will correct for this and change how it researches and its claims when new evidence is presented or something new is learned that might be helpful to learn the truth. But today, its not that anymore, it's all confirmation bias. Evidence that does not support the pursuit is omitted or assailed when presented by the opposition. The opposition... constantly treating people that are looking for the truth as well as though they are opposition. How quaint!
I feel like you're talking about science journalism, here, rather than actual science.
I'll grant that scientists sometimes engage in that as a marketing tool, but I really don't feel like SCIENCE came to me and said "Butter is bad", any more than I feel like DEMOCRACY came to me and said "Guns are good" or "Cardi B is an excellent singer".
Even if SCIENCE did make statements like that, I currently live in a country where a lot of people make arguments about how the world is flat, the earth was created in less than 13.5 billion years (plus or minus), and that vaccinations cause autism and chemtrails and fluoride are mind-control devices. I'm not sure what you expect science to do, here.
This is pretty easy to disprove.
I'm not sure exactly what you're disproving, since the point you go on to make doesn't have any apparent relationship to my posting. I was referring to the stuff discussed in articles like this:
http://articles.latimes.com/20...
I've not really seen anyone being contentious on this - some people don't think it matters, but I think it's generally accepted that Gingrich wanted to keep members from socializing across the aisle.
Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way, but I don't think company resources should be used to undermine that company. Why should a company be forced to let employees use company infrastructure against itself? I also think it is stupid for an employee to use company resources for these activities. The company can monitor those resources and find out who in the company needs to get assigned the tasks that no one else would want to do. The whole thing seems a bit silly, although I am a simple minded fool so...
What if the employees are trying to save the company from making a bad decision? Do they have to do that entirely externally to the company?
I worked at Google for a long time, and there were many times when someone used internal communications for completely-inappropriate stuff. But there were many times when such communications were essential to get things sorted out. Unfortunately, there was not a bright line between the different types of communications, mostly because people are people, with all the squishiness that comes along with that (I mean, sometimes people go out in a blaze of misguided glory, sometimes they do the right thing, and sometimes they are just asshats).
One of Newt Gingrich's core strategies for creating a Congress which couldn't work together was to discourage GOP members from fraternizing with the opposition. The idea was that they should spend more time in their home district, not have formal Washington residences, and DEFINITELY not spend any social time with Democrats. This prevents cases where friendships across the aisle develop based on mutual respect - you maybe disagree with someone, but you don't believe them to be a bad person. These days, politicians start from a position that their opponents are simply evil, and thus need not spend any effort trying to understand their opponents' positions.
Distributed working groups can work REALLY well if everyone involved works very hard to interact and keep on the same page as each other. But in my experience this is really hard, and it generally only works if you use this ability as a selection criteria. If you just select a dozen people based on criteria other than their ability to work together remotely, generally things end up a trainwreck, even if everyone in the group is generally awesome. [My experience is based mostly on software-engineering, which is likely far easier to do in a distributed group than politics. The entire POINT of politics is group discussions to figure out the solution, which is exactly the type of thing that works worst with distributed teams.]
In all honesty, I don't even mind the unskippable ones in theory because they are usually very short (or at least can be skipped after a few seconds).
What I truly hate is when they are inserted into the middle of a stream where someone is right in the middle of speaking or what have you. While such breaks are, thankfully, very short, they still completely interrupt the flow of whatever one was watching, to such an extent that I sometimes have to skip back a few seconds right after the commercial and rewatch that part of the video (which doesn't replay the commercial, thankfully).
To be honest, I believe that if Youtube really wants to insist on ads like this being in a video, they should ask the uploader to ensure that there are scene cuts or otherwise suitable places in the video to insert commercials, and youtube can ask where the timing of such spots are when the video is uploaded. If an uploader cannot provide satisfactory locations for commercials to youtube, then the entire video should be blocked from being able to be watched for free until the uploader has modified it to be amenable to this process. Of course, the uploader should be advised that this is the case, as well.
Yes, I'm quite aware of how user-hostile this solution is... that is a design feature, not a bug... because IMV, it is still less hostile than inserting commercials right smack dab in the middle of people saying a sentence.... almost EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME.
I'm an ex-Googler, and what bugs me about this is that Google is the company that claims they are so amazing at machine learning and they can make all the things lovely. They can create natural-sounding assistants to call and schedule a haircut, or suggest responses for emails, etc, but ... they can't even figure out where the damned conceptual/scene pauses are in a video? Really?
Honestly, sometimes I almost feel like they actually did write code to figure out the right thing to do, and then programmed it wrong. Like there will be an obvious pause, say for a scene change, and then just after the next person starts saying something it runs an ad. But that just seems too crazy to be true.
Basically, scientists who know VERY WELL that they only UNDERSTAND PART OF FUNCTIONING THE UNIVERSE and HAVE NO IDEA WHATSOEVER WHERE OUR UNIVERSE CAME FROM are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that there can be no such thing as God. WTF? That's about as logical as saying "I have never actually physically travelled to Ethiopia, but I know everything everything there is to know about Ethiopa nevertheless."
No, I think it's more like saying "I have never physically travelled to Ethiopia, but I'm pretty sure it's not populated by two-headed dogpeople with telepathy."
I am absolutely not certain at all that there was no creator. But based on what has been discovered, the creator's scope of action is SEVERELY limited. For instance, we know that someone didn't take a rib from man and create woman, at this point we're pretty sure on that, likewise we're pretty sure the earth wasn't just formed wholesale with everything in place. We can't prove that there wasn't a shadowy actor who made slight nudges to evolution over the course of billions of years to lead amino acids to humanity. Personally, I have nothing against you if you want to believe in a god who made really tiny nudges like that, good on you - but that's not the god most religious people appear to believe in.
AFAICT, this posting and the linked articles are just a collection of assertions about how bad things are and how important this work is, with no actual information about how bad things are and how important this work is. In my experience when someone runs around saying things like this, it actually means that it's NOT that bad, and it's NOT that important, and they're just trying to scare people into moving in whatever direction they haven't been able to convince them to move in using actual data.
Tomorrow morning I expect most of the comments on this thread to be about how SJWs ruin everything
Rightfully so.
These progressives insert themselves into things others have built and destroy them with their narrow-minded extremist politics. They contribute nothing but conflict.
Truth! I can't remember the last time I saw sliced bread, and vaccinations haven't been available for decades! Pretty soon we'll be back to rooms full of women being called "computers". We live in a hellish landscape of continuous dissent, and it is ALL caused by SJWs!
This discussion is very similar to people that look for the star of Bethlehem using computer software. They have certain facts from the bible, and then scour the ancient sky using powerful astronomy software looking for events and things that they think match up with the facts. That's not science, even though it's "backed up by fact", so to speak.
So the star of Bethlehem was basically Oumuamua's launching lasers? Illuminati confirmed!
Tomorrow morning I expect most of the comments on this thread to be about how SJWs ruin everything, and Linux has gone to hell in a handbasket since they stopped letting developers swear, and how the only true communications are insults. What a brave new world!
The free and open internet was great while it lasted.
Did not expect the virtue signalling, SJW, censorship, shadow banning, reporting, account removal, payment processor problems the internet would have.
That side of political control for speech on the internet was something out of Communist nations.
I didn't see that people would actually be getting killed by swatting, that doxing would be a thing, that people would make an avocation out of hounding others to suicide ... and yet others would get un-self-consciously self-righteous about virtue signalling and the terrible problem of the scary SJW.
[I mean, seriously, you're virtue signalling by complaining about virtue signalling? No shit?]
Companies need to demand secure software. If it was easy enough for a crook to climb a ladder and get in a second floor window, I would lock the second floor windows and I wouldn't ever install a window without a lock again.
To be fair, often enough it's more like they didn't even know they had second-floor windows, because they had never gone upstairs. Which is not to let them off the hook, the stairs were there, they could have checked.
Of course, this being software, it's like you have a million sets of stairs, some go upstairs, some go downstairs, some are dimensional portals, but the majority of them end in a brick wall or sewer, so checking them is no fun at all.
I dunno, comparing software security to real-life security is like comparing fish to bicycles.
I'm imagining a number of government workers waiting until 5 minutes to the hour, then the Mission Impossible theme kicks in while they log into their CA website to get a new cert issued, and then replace it on the servers exactly at the stroke of midnight! Exciting!
Except, not really. If they let their cert get that old before replacing it, they really need to rethink their policies. There could be any number of reasons why you might not be able to replace the cert in a timely fashion.
How much money DO thwy make after purchase?
If it's 200 on a 1200 appliance, I'll gladly give yoi 1500 to just give me a dumb panel and fuck off.
The claimed margin is only 6%, so I think it's more likely that they're screwing you out of your privacy for an additional $50. Or $10. Or some other trivial and enraging amount.
Back in the early aughts I realized I was the biggest danger to my data and sat down to create a sustainable backup system. At the time, duplicate storage was a bit spendier than I wanted to pay, but it was clear that we weren't far from a point where it would be cheaper than organizing my way to using smaller volumes, so I just committed to backing it all up, and mirroring that twice (I swap on-site and off-site mirrors once a month).
That isn't to say that I don't trim and organize - in the end, keeping backups of things like old VM data just makes it harder to figure out where your actually-important data is. So I make sure my biggest costs relate to valuable data (mostly photos and home videos).
And how tall does the mountain of machine-made-hamburgers get before the machine realizes nobody has the money to buy them?
A very big change is right on the horizon, but I don't think anybody can even comprehend the consequences.
My solution? \
Human sized hampster wheels to generate the power for the machines. Automation AND green power.
And it solves our obesity problem. You should kickstart this!