The liquidators take liability for disposal, in this case were liquidators appointed, they should be prosecuted for failing to properly dispose of what are by law protected records, especially medical records.
Why? As an employee, you now have a contractual agreement with a defunct company. There is nobody left who is responsible for those records. Maybe the facility was resold to someone in the bankruptcy process, but those records are not their responsibility (they now own the facility, they are not a continuation of the business itself).
This is a general problem with our system. Companies do all sorts of negative things with no provision for cleanup if/when they die. Go out of business with a facility full of unremediated asbestos? Not your problem! Leaking underground fuel tanks? Not your problem!
Beyond that, I was given no instructions on what to do with paper documents (shred them?), and nobody seemed to give two shits about what happened to any remaining assets.
Channel your inner Oliver North and have a shredding party...
Yeah, but shredding large volumes takes a lot of time if you don't have an industrial shredder. In a bankruptcy case, nobody gives two shits about this stuff. What are you going to do, sue them? They aren't going to pay for your time to carefully shred everything, they aren't going to pay for a third-party shredding service to bring a truck on-site. My guess is that if you even call and ask them what to do they'll tell you to quit screwing around and get back to work.
Civilized people are dead at 7:15 AM. What kind of an asshole would demand that you get a kid to school so early?
They're just school kids, why should they matter? Won't they have to deal with inconvenient work times when they grow up? Why should my taxes go to support making it easier for prisoners... err, school children in the first place?
Put another way: Why does anyone expect a project to save $3M on a budget of $1B should benefit any of the users of the system? The root problem is that for optimization purposes, we use cost-center optimization metrics rather than profit-center optimization metrics. We can measure how much we're spending on bussing, so we target that, with no regards to outcomes.
Why do people act like a project would be forced to take in substandard code just because the maintainers aren't allowed to be assholes?
Because we've all worked at companies where substandard code is routine due to a culture of passive-aggressive nonsense.
It's very easy for people to get lazy and for code to just get worse and worse if people are not called out over letting standards slide.
Did the companies deliver substandard code because of passive-aggressive nonsense, or was it because they had hired a bunch of less talented engineers and managers who didn't know how to do it any better, while the original people left because now that the project was successful it wasn't interesting any longer?
Management doesn't ask you to "dumb down" your standards to make people feel better about themselves. They do it because they need those new features to keep the company rolling, so they hired a shit-ton of new people to work on them, and all they know how to measure is whether those new people are delivering code or not. If you explain why their change has problems and they don't understand you and agree, then being an asshole about it isn't going to help, and it certainly isn't going to magically deliver you back to a world where their dumbass feature isn't going to ship for principled reasons.
[Of course, if you're in the wrong, then being an asshole about it also isn't helpful.]
Why do you falsely presume that he'll stop caring solid engineering just because he stops being an assholish aspie? The two are not mutually exclusive in any shape. Instead of being a dick, he can provide constructive criticism and mentoring instead to motivate people to actually want to continue working on the kernel.
Yeah, I agree. I had a point well into my career where I was in a meeting and someone was being an asshole about something, and I realized... fuck, I've been that exact same asshole. I decided at that point to work on it, and I think I improved. Somewhat. [Having kids helped a ton with training me to pause before speaking my mind.]
I think it's perfectly fine to be an asshole when that is appropriate to the situation. Sometimes you have to use strong language to get a point across. The problem is when you're being an asshole without intending to, which can really screw up the tenor of a project. I don't mean "Oh, boo hoo, someone quit because their feelings", I mean "Yeah, we decided to switch platforms because everytime we logged a valid bug with a repro, they were fucking assholes about it."
And, of course, there's always the problem where you're being an asshole by default, which probably means something is seriously wrong and you need to get some help.
Why would any expect Nintendo (or any company) to continue to store your data
Because it's a BACKUP SERVICE. And the way to really make money is to make people pay for retrieval, and to actually have the backups...
I have to say I am *really* happy with Sony precisely because they did this. I had a PS Plus subscription I let lapse accidentally as the CC I didn't realize I had been using had the number changed.
Ha! I had to resort to purchasing prepaid cards from the local supermarket to fund my Playstation account, because they couldn't charge my cards or PayPal. Customer service wanted to know if I was sure I had entered my credit-card information correctly (sure thing, dumbass, I've never used a credit card before, thanks for the tip!). So I think this is a mixed bag, they might intend to do one thing, but then in technical terms they might do an entirely not-what-you-wanted thing.
Now maybe after a year or something, sure, delete the data. But there should be a decent amount of time where people who just made dumb mistakes with auto-pay can restore what they have, and the amount of goodwill a company earns from something like that is incalculable (for some odd reason mentally I give Sony more credit for keeping my saves than having an update fry the filesystem in the first place).
We're talking metadata, here. They could save all the data for all the people for all time and it probably won't add up to a terabyte of data. The biggest reason to delete old data is simply book-keeping - if someone dials back in after ten years unpaid, it's not a question of whether you can still restore their data, it's a question of whether you even want to deal with them, because the upside is really limited.
Certainly not a week or two weeks, I've been on camping trips longer than that. I'd say a year is a minimum, but honestly I'd go with 18 months or even two years. Why? Why not.
There's also a super-crazy notion... maybe just keep the damned things as long as you can successfully connect and use the system they were saved from. That way you don't have to make multiple subtle support decisions.
I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
Maybe going into China won't make things worse for people in China, but I wonder if it will make things worse for Google in the rest of the world.
I was *extremely* awkward and shy in High School/College and *HATED* public speaking. It's still high on my list of things I look for to NOT have as part of my job description. I am seriously bad at this kind of thing, but the fear of it it doesn't control me.
I recently had to give a presentation in a class I took at a local community college. I'm in my late 40's. I spoke too fast, etc, but overall it was SOOO much different from giving presentations when I was in school the first time, mostly because I didn't give a flying f*ck. If I did a great presentation, great! If I gave a horrid presentation, who cares? The grade didn't matter to me, so I could concentrate on the meat of the problem, which was conveying information. It really made a huge difference.
Unfortunately, I don't think forcing the issue really resolves the problem. I mean, it _can_, but the amount of forcing is an order of magnitude greater than we're willing to do. Forcing kids to use open showers after gym isn't going to fix their body shame issues, but forcing them to do it 100x per year will cause them to either learn to deal with it, or to have a nervous breakdown. Likewise, forcing you to do one or two presentations a year isn't going to get anyone over their fear of public speaking, but doing one a week will cause you to develop ways to deal with it. But we aren't going to go there. Instead we'll give them just often enough to put the fear into you, and since you do so few presentations, every one that you do will be super important to your grade.
By this argument, Google Fiber should be self-limiting, because at some point Google not paying and Google also not paying should result in such a huge shortfall that they go out of business. Right?
True enough, but it's also true that incoming students are not well-qualified to figure out whether their education will result in good value for their money. An 18-year-old is taking on loans to pay for school because "everyone" says it's important.
If Americans are too stupid to be qualified to make life decision at 18, then you should call your legislators to raise the legal age to 25.
That's an interesting comment to make from someone who doesn't even know how to login to a website.
True enough, but it's also true that incoming students are not well-qualified to figure out whether their education will result in good value for their money. An 18-year-old is taking on loans to pay for school because "everyone" says it's important. Or an older student is taking on loans to enable a career change because their existing setup isn't working out for them. Meanwhile, the school is like "Oh, yes, you absolutely need this, and here are some people to help pay for it."
If an 18 year old is not well qualified to figure out whether their education will result in good value, then wouldn't it be safe to argue they are not well qualified to figure out the election issues of the day? Sign contracts without consent of a legal guardian? Make medial decisions?
I'm a 48-year-old, and I do not consider myself well-qualified to make election decisions or medical decisions. I do it because someone has to make the decisions. But I do feel somewhat qualified to make decisions about what kinds of education I should be pursuing, mostly because after many years in the workforce, I can see what paid off, what didn't, and what kinds of things were valuable in work.
18 year olds are either responsible enough to be adults or they are not responsible enough to be adults. They cannot play both sides of the fence. If they agreed to the term of the loan, they should be held accountable to the terms. Growing up, the young adult should have had better instruction/guidance on finances and responsibility from an authority figure such as a parent or at a minimum a teacher, however agreeing to the loan was ultimately the young adult's decision.
I'm not arguing about what 18-year-olds should be capable of. I'm stating the observation that how the system is currently setup has them making decisions they are not really qualified to make. There's basically zero chance we're going to build a better 18-year-old, but I think it's completely plausible that we could modify the educational system to dampen the worst effects.
Keep in mind that these students don't just stand up, say "Give me money!", and go to school. There are people and companies on the other side of the ledger who often knowingly take advantage of the students.
AFAICT, most web properties which would even consider using AMP in the first place have never seen a JavaScript tracking framework they didn't like. Oh, LardScript Analytics? Yes, sign me up! I realize that you can't just deliver my 2k of actual content, you need to brand and stuff with headers and footers and links to follow, but do you really need 20MB spread across 350 resources to do it? Get that down to something reasonable like 50k of dynamic stuff and a couple 100k of highly-cacheable stuff, and AMP would be pointless.
Still, easily fixable by adding the "www" when someone clicks on the address bar and solely suppressing when the address bar does not have focus.
It's like the "http://" which is suppressed when using other pieces of the browser, but comes back when you give the omnibox focus.
Just like that suppression, I can't really figure out what the reasoning it. When you have an URL like: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... dicking around with the first 20 or 30 characters only helps so much. I mean, sure, you can elide it because it doesn't really add meaning, but on my laptop or desktop I have 1000+ pixels of horizontal space, so how does it help? On my phone I have much less space, to the point where I can't see much of the URL at all, so messing with those characters _still_ doesn't help much.
I can grant it's a tough problem, people have (misplaced) trust in the URL. They think that if they can't see the full URL, someone's hiding things from them. Unfortunately, someone can hide things from them even when showing the full URL, so...
Rather than selling an "Unlimited, except with usage caps, except for you, except when you use too much YouTube", etc, etc, lawyers ten levels deep, why don't they just have a plan where instead of "Up to X Gbps", you can get "At least X Mbps", where X is determined by what the units need to do their jobs?
When I worked at Google, a lot of people took it as a badge of pride how much email and chat and crap like that that they "managed". A lot of feature proposals for things like gmail are geared towards somehow helping you manage the flood. Basically, the first assumption is that email is good and more is better, and that assumption is probably right at first, but certainly wrong once you can't keep up. Just like it's good for you to directly interact with tens of people in a day, but directly interacting with thousands of people in a day destroys you.
You know what I'd really like to see? I'd like to see a way for my computing systems to realize that a mailing list I'm on is useless, that I never engage with it, or that I engage with it in only negative ways - and then suggest that I unsubscribe from it, or skip it past my inbox to a folder for later. I'd like to be able to tell gmail to hold new content for an hour, so that I can triage what I have without having to deal with new items popping in and distracting me. [You can kinda-sorta fake that by processing using labels.] I'd like to be able to tag a few apps as being useful for a particular project, then as the computer notices I'm using something else, it can ask "Is this helping or hindering your project?", and then I could ask to put that app in a timeout if needed.
Basically, it would be nice if instead of providing tools to magnify my ability to focus on more things, the computer could provide tools to excise irrelevant things from my focus, allowing me to more effectively use what I have.
I am surprised the door locks were on the same network as workstations. Actual traffic isolation would have prevented someone from finding this flaw unless they start tearing holes in their walls.
Is it clear that it was on the same network as workstations? I left Google in 2017, and for many years the internal networks had been heavily segmented. I'd be very surprised if any random RFID node or printer could have communicated directly with my workstation. In fact, I don't think my machines could talk to each other from physically adjacent Ethernet ports without requesting a network change.
Hard to believe anyone can be surprised by this news.
I am the 'computer guy' to a large number of friends, family members, and neighbors. Over the past few years every single person I've helped with their computer problems has used their Microsoft computer for nothing more than email, webbrowsing, pictures, and movies. They used their computers less and less each year with more and more of the tasks listed above on their cellphones.
It makes more sense if you think of a Chromebook as an alternative to a phone, rather than a cut-rate laptop or desktop. It's _way_ easier to multi-task on a Chromebook than on a phone or tablet (OMG, don't even), and for many people that's kind of the end of the story. The billions of users on the Internet are not just like the millions of users in the 90's, scaled up, their needs are different.
I was going to make a lame car/truck analogy, then I realized it wasn't that lame. Not everyone needs a big-ass pickup truck for hauling, some people only need a sub-compact... and some people will go buy the big-ass pickup truck even if they don't need it for virtue-signalling reasons. In fact, once these things get relatively cheap enough, a fair number of people will just buy both options.
These fellas are smoking something. Until Chrome OS can have "native" applications like Windows does, MS doesn't have to worry. Where is Chorome OS' equivalent of Microsoft office?
I have an answer for you: Nothing.
What is Microsoft Office, some sort of teleconferencing system? You can do teleconferencing on Chromebooks, no problem.
Help me out here; people accepted these loans, having access to the terms ahead of time, correct? They were adults, presumably, who made these commitments, right?
Why, then, should we be looking to forgive them for making bad choices? Stupid decisions should be painful, so as to teach people not to do them anymore.
I say this as someone who will be paying off his student loans for at least the next 20 years. I made a remarkably stupid decision and I'll own the consequences.
True enough, but it's also true that incoming students are not well-qualified to figure out whether their education will result in good value for their money. An 18-year-old is taking on loans to pay for school because "everyone" says it's important. Or an older student is taking on loans to enable a career change because their existing setup isn't working out for them. Meanwhile, the school is like "Oh, yes, you absolutely need this, and here are some people to help pay for it."
I'm not saying that students shouldn't get to make these choices, or that they shouldn't have consequences. But we should realize that a completely unregulated market is going to result in a lot of unnecessary inefficiencies and pain, and insofar as schooling benefits society, society should optimize for benefits and against inefficiencies. The trite way to put this is that we don't need a billion people with advanced degrees in Underwater Basketry, but we also don't need a million Registered Nurses or teaching assistants who spend their lives under stress because they are subject to debts they didn't realize they'd never be able to pay off.
I rarely every have file locking problem in Linux systems. Unlike windows Linux was designed to Mimic Unix principals and Unix systems were designed to be multi-user environments. Having multiple Apps accessing the same file is rarely an issue. Especially with one app which job is to write and the other one whose job is to read.
Err, it's actually because Unix doesn't have mandatory locking unless you mount the filesystem specially, and advisory locking only works if you precisely follow a pre-arranged dance. Everything is ad hoc and the majority of programs test to the "good enough" level, rather than worrying about actually-correct operation. Expert Unix programmers routinely screw up locking on Unix. I'd be gobsmacked if I was running an rsync and it hung and I traced it down to a locking issue. That would be seriously amazing.
The flip side of that is that all your update-in-place files have a chance of inconsistent backup state. Mostly only matters for database files, so you script their backup specially, if you care about that sort of thing.
But the very fact that the number of different cryptocurrencies is proliferating tells us that the basic idea does not work. As each currency smashes into its supply limit, people who want to use crypto as money have to invent a new coin, and then teh next new coin, and then the next.
That doesn't follow. People who want to use bitcoin as MONEY have no problem, there's no need to invent a new coin for that. You can use any of these as money just fine, insofar as you can find people to make your transactions. The increasing computational needs of the network don't make it any harder (or easier) to use it as money, as bitcoin aims for a 10-minute block-completion rate.
The reason we're getting so many cryptocurrencies is the same as the reason we get so many log-structured key-value stores. It's not because the existing ones don't do the job, it's because they are (relatively) easy to create and there are no barriers to entry. So technically capable newcomers see the system as it is, and imagine that all of the outstanding issues could be solved with some minor change, without comprehending the systemic issues which caused those issues. So we get another implementation which is slightly different, ad nauseum, but since the barriers to use really aren't technical in the first place, none of them really wins.
As mobile internet speeds have increased and download limits have expanded though, this premise isn't needed anymore.
Have you ever actually read articles on modern websites? The capacities you mention ARE greatly expanded, but when you're downloading 500 resources from a dog's breakfast of servers, your overall experience is degraded. And that is even if you hold everything constant, which is to say you ignore that 90% of those resources exist to serve the content publisher, not the reader.
That said, most homeopaths aren't idiots, they're desperate. Especially in America. We don't guarantee healthcare. Lots of people can't afford it. So they turn to something to give them hope.
But it's mostly desperate people without healthcare looking for hope. Most human being can't live without hope, so they'll take it where ever they can find it. They're easy prey.
This implies that it's because they can't afford "proper" healthcare. I've spent my adult life working with people who's employers provide excellent insurance as a perk, and I can tell you that it's not a problem with affordability. People don't want to go to a doctor and hear that there isn't a pill to solve their problem, real or imagined. They want solutions, and if the medical profession doesn't have the solution they want, they'll find an alternative.
Employers who do this kind of ex post facto version by disparaging employees who quit and (gasp!) get a job somewhere else are just douchey.
Or it means that they aren't able to retain adult HR people. It's easy enough to just say "Different people have different needs in their lives, and it is not our place to share confidential information about ex-employees". Done. You can have the bestest company in the world, doing the most interesting or important work, and people's needs and goals are still going to differ from what the company wants them to do.
Slashdot Mirror
The liquidators take liability for disposal, in this case were liquidators appointed, they should be prosecuted for failing to properly dispose of what are by law protected records, especially medical records.
Why? As an employee, you now have a contractual agreement with a defunct company. There is nobody left who is responsible for those records. Maybe the facility was resold to someone in the bankruptcy process, but those records are not their responsibility (they now own the facility, they are not a continuation of the business itself).
This is a general problem with our system. Companies do all sorts of negative things with no provision for cleanup if/when they die. Go out of business with a facility full of unremediated asbestos? Not your problem! Leaking underground fuel tanks? Not your problem!
Beyond that, I was given no instructions on what to do with paper documents (shred them?), and nobody seemed to give two shits about what happened to any remaining assets.
Channel your inner Oliver North and have a shredding party...
Yeah, but shredding large volumes takes a lot of time if you don't have an industrial shredder. In a bankruptcy case, nobody gives two shits about this stuff. What are you going to do, sue them? They aren't going to pay for your time to carefully shred everything, they aren't going to pay for a third-party shredding service to bring a truck on-site. My guess is that if you even call and ask them what to do they'll tell you to quit screwing around and get back to work.
Civilized people are dead at 7:15 AM. What kind of an asshole would demand that you get a kid to school so early?
They're just school kids, why should they matter? Won't they have to deal with inconvenient work times when they grow up? Why should my taxes go to support making it easier for prisoners ... err, school children in the first place?
Put another way: Why does anyone expect a project to save $3M on a budget of $1B should benefit any of the users of the system? The root problem is that for optimization purposes, we use cost-center optimization metrics rather than profit-center optimization metrics. We can measure how much we're spending on bussing, so we target that, with no regards to outcomes.
Why do people act like a project would be forced to take in substandard code just because the maintainers aren't allowed to be assholes?
Because we've all worked at companies where substandard code is routine due to a culture of passive-aggressive nonsense.
It's very easy for people to get lazy and for code to just get worse and worse if people are not called out over letting standards slide.
Did the companies deliver substandard code because of passive-aggressive nonsense, or was it because they had hired a bunch of less talented engineers and managers who didn't know how to do it any better, while the original people left because now that the project was successful it wasn't interesting any longer?
Management doesn't ask you to "dumb down" your standards to make people feel better about themselves. They do it because they need those new features to keep the company rolling, so they hired a shit-ton of new people to work on them, and all they know how to measure is whether those new people are delivering code or not. If you explain why their change has problems and they don't understand you and agree, then being an asshole about it isn't going to help, and it certainly isn't going to magically deliver you back to a world where their dumbass feature isn't going to ship for principled reasons.
[Of course, if you're in the wrong, then being an asshole about it also isn't helpful.]
Why do you falsely presume that he'll stop caring solid engineering just because he stops being an assholish aspie? The two are not mutually exclusive in any shape. Instead of being a dick, he can provide constructive criticism and mentoring instead to motivate people to actually want to continue working on the kernel.
Yeah, I agree. I had a point well into my career where I was in a meeting and someone was being an asshole about something, and I realized ... fuck, I've been that exact same asshole. I decided at that point to work on it, and I think I improved. Somewhat. [Having kids helped a ton with training me to pause before speaking my mind.]
I think it's perfectly fine to be an asshole when that is appropriate to the situation. Sometimes you have to use strong language to get a point across. The problem is when you're being an asshole without intending to, which can really screw up the tenor of a project. I don't mean "Oh, boo hoo, someone quit because their feelings", I mean "Yeah, we decided to switch platforms because everytime we logged a valid bug with a repro, they were fucking assholes about it."
And, of course, there's always the problem where you're being an asshole by default, which probably means something is seriously wrong and you need to get some help.
Why would any expect Nintendo (or any company) to continue to store your data
Because it's a BACKUP SERVICE. And the way to really make money is to make people pay for retrieval, and to actually have the backups...
I have to say I am *really* happy with Sony precisely because they did this. I had a PS Plus subscription I let lapse accidentally as the CC I didn't realize I had been using had the number changed.
Ha! I had to resort to purchasing prepaid cards from the local supermarket to fund my Playstation account, because they couldn't charge my cards or PayPal. Customer service wanted to know if I was sure I had entered my credit-card information correctly (sure thing, dumbass, I've never used a credit card before, thanks for the tip!). So I think this is a mixed bag, they might intend to do one thing, but then in technical terms they might do an entirely not-what-you-wanted thing.
Now maybe after a year or something, sure, delete the data. But there should be a decent amount of time where people who just made dumb mistakes with auto-pay can restore what they have, and the amount of goodwill a company earns from something like that is incalculable (for some odd reason mentally I give Sony more credit for keeping my saves than having an update fry the filesystem in the first place).
We're talking metadata, here. They could save all the data for all the people for all time and it probably won't add up to a terabyte of data. The biggest reason to delete old data is simply book-keeping - if someone dials back in after ten years unpaid, it's not a question of whether you can still restore their data, it's a question of whether you even want to deal with them, because the upside is really limited.
Certainly not a week or two weeks, I've been on camping trips longer than that. I'd say a year is a minimum, but honestly I'd go with 18 months or even two years. Why? Why not.
There's also a super-crazy notion ... maybe just keep the damned things as long as you can successfully connect and use the system they were saved from. That way you don't have to make multiple subtle support decisions.
I don't care, because anything else that Google could have done would have made no difference, or would have made things worse.
I don't know what Google could do differently to help the cause of human rights in China. I don't see how staying out of the Chinese market could make things worse.
Maybe going into China won't make things worse for people in China, but I wonder if it will make things worse for Google in the rest of the world.
Seriously, just do it.
I was *extremely* awkward and shy in High School/College and *HATED* public speaking. It's still high on my list of things I look for to NOT have as part of my job description. I am seriously bad at this kind of thing, but the fear of it it doesn't control me.
I recently had to give a presentation in a class I took at a local community college. I'm in my late 40's. I spoke too fast, etc, but overall it was SOOO much different from giving presentations when I was in school the first time, mostly because I didn't give a flying f*ck. If I did a great presentation, great! If I gave a horrid presentation, who cares? The grade didn't matter to me, so I could concentrate on the meat of the problem, which was conveying information. It really made a huge difference.
Unfortunately, I don't think forcing the issue really resolves the problem. I mean, it _can_, but the amount of forcing is an order of magnitude greater than we're willing to do. Forcing kids to use open showers after gym isn't going to fix their body shame issues, but forcing them to do it 100x per year will cause them to either learn to deal with it, or to have a nervous breakdown. Likewise, forcing you to do one or two presentations a year isn't going to get anyone over their fear of public speaking, but doing one a week will cause you to develop ways to deal with it. But we aren't going to go there. Instead we'll give them just often enough to put the fear into you, and since you do so few presentations, every one that you do will be super important to your grade.
By this argument, Google Fiber should be self-limiting, because at some point Google not paying and Google also not paying should result in such a huge shortfall that they go out of business. Right?
True enough, but it's also true that incoming students are not well-qualified to figure out whether their education will result in good value for their money. An 18-year-old is taking on loans to pay for school because "everyone" says it's important.
If Americans are too stupid to be qualified to make life decision at 18, then you should call your legislators to raise the legal age to 25.
That's an interesting comment to make from someone who doesn't even know how to login to a website.
True enough, but it's also true that incoming students are not well-qualified to figure out whether their education will result in good value for their money. An 18-year-old is taking on loans to pay for school because "everyone" says it's important. Or an older student is taking on loans to enable a career change because their existing setup isn't working out for them. Meanwhile, the school is like "Oh, yes, you absolutely need this, and here are some people to help pay for it."
If an 18 year old is not well qualified to figure out whether their education will result in good value, then wouldn't it be safe to argue they are not well qualified to figure out the election issues of the day? Sign contracts without consent of a legal guardian? Make medial decisions?
I'm a 48-year-old, and I do not consider myself well-qualified to make election decisions or medical decisions. I do it because someone has to make the decisions. But I do feel somewhat qualified to make decisions about what kinds of education I should be pursuing, mostly because after many years in the workforce, I can see what paid off, what didn't, and what kinds of things were valuable in work.
18 year olds are either responsible enough to be adults or they are not responsible enough to be adults. They cannot play both sides of the fence. If they agreed to the term of the loan, they should be held accountable to the terms. Growing up, the young adult should have had better instruction/guidance on finances and responsibility from an authority figure such as a parent or at a minimum a teacher, however agreeing to the loan was ultimately the young adult's decision.
I'm not arguing about what 18-year-olds should be capable of. I'm stating the observation that how the system is currently setup has them making decisions they are not really qualified to make. There's basically zero chance we're going to build a better 18-year-old, but I think it's completely plausible that we could modify the educational system to dampen the worst effects.
Keep in mind that these students don't just stand up, say "Give me money!", and go to school. There are people and companies on the other side of the ledger who often knowingly take advantage of the students.
AFAICT, most web properties which would even consider using AMP in the first place have never seen a JavaScript tracking framework they didn't like. Oh, LardScript Analytics? Yes, sign me up! I realize that you can't just deliver my 2k of actual content, you need to brand and stuff with headers and footers and links to follow, but do you really need 20MB spread across 350 resources to do it? Get that down to something reasonable like 50k of dynamic stuff and a couple 100k of highly-cacheable stuff, and AMP would be pointless.
https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
Still, easily fixable by adding the "www" when someone clicks on the address bar and solely suppressing when the address bar does not have focus.
It's like the "http://" which is suppressed when using other pieces of the browser, but comes back when you give the omnibox focus.
Just like that suppression, I can't really figure out what the reasoning it. When you have an URL like:
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
dicking around with the first 20 or 30 characters only helps so much. I mean, sure, you can elide it because it doesn't really add meaning, but on my laptop or desktop I have 1000+ pixels of horizontal space, so how does it help? On my phone I have much less space, to the point where I can't see much of the URL at all, so messing with those characters _still_ doesn't help much.
I can grant it's a tough problem, people have (misplaced) trust in the URL. They think that if they can't see the full URL, someone's hiding things from them. Unfortunately, someone can hide things from them even when showing the full URL, so...
Rather than selling an "Unlimited, except with usage caps, except for you, except when you use too much YouTube", etc, etc, lawyers ten levels deep, why don't they just have a plan where instead of "Up to X Gbps", you can get "At least X Mbps", where X is determined by what the units need to do their jobs?
When I worked at Google, a lot of people took it as a badge of pride how much email and chat and crap like that that they "managed". A lot of feature proposals for things like gmail are geared towards somehow helping you manage the flood. Basically, the first assumption is that email is good and more is better, and that assumption is probably right at first, but certainly wrong once you can't keep up. Just like it's good for you to directly interact with tens of people in a day, but directly interacting with thousands of people in a day destroys you.
You know what I'd really like to see? I'd like to see a way for my computing systems to realize that a mailing list I'm on is useless, that I never engage with it, or that I engage with it in only negative ways - and then suggest that I unsubscribe from it, or skip it past my inbox to a folder for later. I'd like to be able to tell gmail to hold new content for an hour, so that I can triage what I have without having to deal with new items popping in and distracting me. [You can kinda-sorta fake that by processing using labels.] I'd like to be able to tag a few apps as being useful for a particular project, then as the computer notices I'm using something else, it can ask "Is this helping or hindering your project?", and then I could ask to put that app in a timeout if needed.
Basically, it would be nice if instead of providing tools to magnify my ability to focus on more things, the computer could provide tools to excise irrelevant things from my focus, allowing me to more effectively use what I have.
I am surprised the door locks were on the same network as workstations. Actual traffic isolation would have prevented someone from finding this flaw unless they start tearing holes in their walls.
Is it clear that it was on the same network as workstations? I left Google in 2017, and for many years the internal networks had been heavily segmented. I'd be very surprised if any random RFID node or printer could have communicated directly with my workstation. In fact, I don't think my machines could talk to each other from physically adjacent Ethernet ports without requesting a network change.
Hard to believe anyone can be surprised by this news.
I am the 'computer guy' to a large number of friends, family members, and neighbors. Over the past few years every single person I've helped with their computer problems has used their Microsoft computer for nothing more than email, webbrowsing, pictures, and movies. They used their computers less and less each year with more and more of the tasks listed above on their cellphones.
It makes more sense if you think of a Chromebook as an alternative to a phone, rather than a cut-rate laptop or desktop. It's _way_ easier to multi-task on a Chromebook than on a phone or tablet (OMG, don't even), and for many people that's kind of the end of the story. The billions of users on the Internet are not just like the millions of users in the 90's, scaled up, their needs are different.
I was going to make a lame car/truck analogy, then I realized it wasn't that lame. Not everyone needs a big-ass pickup truck for hauling, some people only need a sub-compact ... and some people will go buy the big-ass pickup truck even if they don't need it for virtue-signalling reasons. In fact, once these things get relatively cheap enough, a fair number of people will just buy both options.
And that's why Microsoft should be concerned.
These fellas are smoking something. Until Chrome OS can have "native" applications like Windows does, MS doesn't have to worry. Where is Chorome OS' equivalent of Microsoft office?
I have an answer for you: Nothing.
What is Microsoft Office, some sort of teleconferencing system? You can do teleconferencing on Chromebooks, no problem.
Yeah, sure "fish aren't humans" — will the robot (particularly, the software) require much rework to begin killing, say, enemy divers?
"Hey guys! Someone sent us a box of cool Patrick-themed wetsuits! Who wants one?"
Help me out here; people accepted these loans, having access to the terms ahead of time, correct? They were adults, presumably, who made these commitments, right?
Why, then, should we be looking to forgive them for making bad choices? Stupid decisions should be painful, so as to teach people not to do them anymore.
I say this as someone who will be paying off his student loans for at least the next 20 years. I made a remarkably stupid decision and I'll own the consequences.
True enough, but it's also true that incoming students are not well-qualified to figure out whether their education will result in good value for their money. An 18-year-old is taking on loans to pay for school because "everyone" says it's important. Or an older student is taking on loans to enable a career change because their existing setup isn't working out for them. Meanwhile, the school is like "Oh, yes, you absolutely need this, and here are some people to help pay for it."
I'm not saying that students shouldn't get to make these choices, or that they shouldn't have consequences. But we should realize that a completely unregulated market is going to result in a lot of unnecessary inefficiencies and pain, and insofar as schooling benefits society, society should optimize for benefits and against inefficiencies. The trite way to put this is that we don't need a billion people with advanced degrees in Underwater Basketry, but we also don't need a million Registered Nurses or teaching assistants who spend their lives under stress because they are subject to debts they didn't realize they'd never be able to pay off.
I rarely every have file locking problem in Linux systems. Unlike windows Linux was designed to Mimic Unix principals and Unix systems were designed to be multi-user environments. Having multiple Apps accessing the same file is rarely an issue. Especially with one app which job is to write and the other one whose job is to read.
Err, it's actually because Unix doesn't have mandatory locking unless you mount the filesystem specially, and advisory locking only works if you precisely follow a pre-arranged dance. Everything is ad hoc and the majority of programs test to the "good enough" level, rather than worrying about actually-correct operation. Expert Unix programmers routinely screw up locking on Unix. I'd be gobsmacked if I was running an rsync and it hung and I traced it down to a locking issue. That would be seriously amazing.
The flip side of that is that all your update-in-place files have a chance of inconsistent backup state. Mostly only matters for database files, so you script their backup specially, if you care about that sort of thing.
But the very fact that the number of different cryptocurrencies is proliferating tells us that the basic idea does not work. As each currency smashes into its supply limit, people who want to use crypto as money have to invent a new coin, and then teh next new coin, and then the next.
That doesn't follow. People who want to use bitcoin as MONEY have no problem, there's no need to invent a new coin for that. You can use any of these as money just fine, insofar as you can find people to make your transactions. The increasing computational needs of the network don't make it any harder (or easier) to use it as money, as bitcoin aims for a 10-minute block-completion rate.
The reason we're getting so many cryptocurrencies is the same as the reason we get so many log-structured key-value stores. It's not because the existing ones don't do the job, it's because they are (relatively) easy to create and there are no barriers to entry. So technically capable newcomers see the system as it is, and imagine that all of the outstanding issues could be solved with some minor change, without comprehending the systemic issues which caused those issues. So we get another implementation which is slightly different, ad nauseum, but since the barriers to use really aren't technical in the first place, none of them really wins.
As mobile internet speeds have increased and download limits have expanded though, this premise isn't needed anymore.
Have you ever actually read articles on modern websites? The capacities you mention ARE greatly expanded, but when you're downloading 500 resources from a dog's breakfast of servers, your overall experience is degraded. And that is even if you hold everything constant, which is to say you ignore that 90% of those resources exist to serve the content publisher, not the reader.
That said, most homeopaths aren't idiots, they're desperate. Especially in America. We don't guarantee healthcare. Lots of people can't afford it. So they turn to something to give them hope.
But it's mostly desperate people without healthcare looking for hope. Most human being can't live without hope, so they'll take it where ever they can find it. They're easy prey.
This implies that it's because they can't afford "proper" healthcare. I've spent my adult life working with people who's employers provide excellent insurance as a perk, and I can tell you that it's not a problem with affordability. People don't want to go to a doctor and hear that there isn't a pill to solve their problem, real or imagined. They want solutions, and if the medical profession doesn't have the solution they want, they'll find an alternative.
Employers who do this kind of ex post facto version by disparaging employees who quit and (gasp!) get a job somewhere else are just douchey.
Or it means that they aren't able to retain adult HR people. It's easy enough to just say "Different people have different needs in their lives, and it is not our place to share confidential information about ex-employees". Done. You can have the bestest company in the world, doing the most interesting or important work, and people's needs and goals are still going to differ from what the company wants them to do.