In one of the stores which is closing, there as a Best Buy and a Future Shop right across the street. So you shop at one and then go across a crosswalk to the other one.
They've always had mostly the same stock, and at mostly the same price.
I'm told the difference was Future Shop had commissioned (and therefore more annoying) salesman, while Best Buy wasn't on commission. I often found hard to get items were more likely to be stocked at Future Shop instead of Best Buy.
Many of us have always thought it quite stupid that the same chain always had two stores in many places, since nobody thought of them as competing.
So because hillary is found to be lying... i mean in the dark about her email, why are we all of a sudden asking everyone about theirs??
My hope is that people have figured out that all politicians are lying assholes who think the rules don't apply to them.
My fear is this is just a brief trend and reporters will go back to ignoring the fact that politicians are lying assholes who think the rules don't apply to them.
Well, I'll give you my rule zero for optimizing code... don't write shitty code relying on more layers of libraries than you can explain what is happening.
My direct experience says most of the people saying "don't optimize" are the ones who wrote the shittiest code in the first place because they simply assume all libraries are fast and efficient.
By the time you've made that shitty and slow code, it's probably too damned late to try to optimize it.
I cut my teeth writing on bare metal, and libraries which were called over and over.
If you don't start with some consideration of what is efficient, and you just do stupid things which rely too much on the library... no amount of effort later will fix it.
Perhaps "Breach of Contract"? I am SURE, even without looking, that, buried deep down on Google's site, is some document that starts "By using this service, you agree to the following terms and conditions..."
Honestly, it doesn't matter WTF is in Google's ToS if those terms violate the local law.
Google can whine and bitch all they want, but you can't embed something illegal into a contract.
The UK privacy laws always trump Google, no matter what Google wants to claim. Especially since Google has localized versions for most countries they operate in.
They simply can't claim to be exempt from the law. Terms of service are not magical... they couldn't say that you agree to indentured servitude either.
In this case, Google said "fuck it, we don't care if you've opted out".
Though, admittedly, this was partly helped by the fact that Apple incompetently implemented blocking of 3rd part cookies. Basically everybody figured out how to bypass that.
No, I'm not implying anything... I'm flat out saying your "one in a million" and your "one in a trillion" are bullshit numbers you made up on the spot, and therefore pretty much meaningless in terms of describing the likelihood of anything.
Since we haven't had 27,000 years of human flight, saying the chance of two people deciding to crash a plane via a concerted effort is impossible is basically gibberish.
Yes, but they also know you have not got the resources to hire more lawyers than they have.
Basically this is shitting on your workers to keep them in fear of losing their jobs.
I always scratch those sections out in contracts. Unless you pay me 100% of my salary for the period of time I'm not allowed to compete, I'm not signing it.
Crap like this should be illegal. And in many sane places, it actually is.
I'm saying no human endeavor can be made 100% safe, and the more complex set of interlocks people try to design to prevent stuff like this, the more absurd it becomes since you can always construct a scenario in which it fails to protect you.
Fly, don't fly... makes no difference to me. I'll make the same several round trips per year I've been making the last 20 years or so.
But let's not pretend that by tweaking the locking just a little more to stop one scenario we don't create new ones.
People wanted stronger locks, and that's what they got. Now, they're surprised that stronger locks are stronger... duh.
I've long since stopped asking why, and just gotten on with "why not?"
Building a replica of a platform gives you the experience of doing it, the understanding of the process, familiarity with the tools you're using... and possibly some bragging rights among your fellow nerds.
Why pimp out your CPU case with neon? Why put spinners on your rims? Hell, why have cars anything other than black, which should suffice for anybody? Why play video games? Why watch TV?
None of these accomplishes anything other than filling in time or soothing your own need for something you think is cool.
To you, it's opportunity cost. To someone else, it's "why the hell not?" It's something to do they find amusing.
Compared to half the crap you see on YouTube or anywhere else with humans... I don't see this as being worse than anything else.
With all the dumb crap humans do every day, there's at least some coolness to this.
And I'm betting you can identify at least 10 things you do every week which you couldn't answer "why" if pressed on the issue.
If the probability of a suicidal crew member is one in a million, then the probably of two is one in a trillion.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I'm rank the probability you pulled those numbers out of your ass as being 100%.
Honestly, the people in the chain you trust are the ones who can do more damage... from the pilots to the ground crew, to the baggage handlers, they're the ones who can really mess with stuff.
And yet we've seen a bunch of news stories about the baggage handlers being the ones smuggling. Because they're the ones who have access.
And I don't see anybody enacting more security against them either.
One sufficiently motivated guy with the right access can cause all sorts of problems.
The difference between "depressed narcissistic arsehole" and "perfectly normal narcissistic arsehole" isn't as far as you'd think.
Airline pilots are largely convinced of their own superiority to begin with.
Hell, I suspect the C-level of executives in most large corporations gets you your "narcissistic areshole" out of the gate. All the ones I've ever met certainly are.
The bad guys have depressurized the plane, and they're slowly cutting parts from cabin crew to get the code.
The pilot and co-pilot are doing their best to keep from crashing, and can't spend time mucking about with the locking mechanism.
There simply isn't a way you can 100% guarantee this is 100% safe, and you can pretty much always come up with a scenario in which it works against you.
Between bad movies and spy novels, there's just so damned many improbable corner cases that it's just not something you can get right all of the time.
Hell, break the locking mechanism for one of them so that it can't be triggered and the door can't be kept locked.
By the time you covered every corner case, the system becomes unusable.
And, of course, we can construct the scenario in which the co-pilot and one of the cabin crew conspires so that when the pilot has to take a leak it's the two of them in the cockpit, and then they can do the same damned thing.
There's really no way you can 100% prevent this kind of thing.
So, after 9/11 they rushed to put door locks on the damned things.
And, now, to the utter shock and amazement of everybody... someone in the cockpit can lock people out of it. Exactly as they designed it.
I'm stunned, I tell 'ya.
Of course, now when the pilot has to take a leak there is one less cabin crew, which I'm sure you can construct a scenario in which that's not a good idea.
I fully expect that insurance for completely autonomous cars will be less expensive, once self-driving cars are proven.
Again, why would I pay liability insurance to cover the actions taken by a computer?
The only viable business model for fully autonomous cars I can see is essentially as taxis.
The notion that we're all going to trade in our cars and let the computer do all the driving is laughable -- too many people like driving, and there's decades worth of cars out there. The notion that we'd buy a self driving car and then pay to insure it is silly.
As with most things said by futurists, I find myself wondering if this "inevitable future" is anywhere near as inevitable as the people selling it to us want us to believe, or if it's just more marketing of stuff someone wants to sell us.
My take on this is the people making these things claim how awesome and revolutionary they'll be. But I bet the vast majority of people simply don't care.
So, disregarding how the self-driving car decided who it is best to kill in any given situation, for me the biggest problem with self-driving cars is legal liability.
If Google wants to sell autonomous cars, Google should be liable for anything the damned thing does.
And none of this cop out where if the computer doesn't know what to do it just hands back to the human -- because that's pretty much guaranteed to fail since the human won't be able to make the context switch in time (if at all).
As far as I'm concerned, the autonomous car has to be 100% hands off by the user at all times, and the company who makes the damned thing is 100% responsible for what it does.
Why the hell would someone have to pay for insurance for something they don't have control of what it does?
Slashdot Mirror
In one of the stores which is closing, there as a Best Buy and a Future Shop right across the street. So you shop at one and then go across a crosswalk to the other one.
They've always had mostly the same stock, and at mostly the same price.
I'm told the difference was Future Shop had commissioned (and therefore more annoying) salesman, while Best Buy wasn't on commission. I often found hard to get items were more likely to be stocked at Future Shop instead of Best Buy.
Many of us have always thought it quite stupid that the same chain always had two stores in many places, since nobody thought of them as competing.
My hope is that people have figured out that all politicians are lying assholes who think the rules don't apply to them.
My fear is this is just a brief trend and reporters will go back to ignoring the fact that politicians are lying assholes who think the rules don't apply to them.
Why must we keep electing people who are so fucking stupid?
In Soviet Russia, humanity serves inventions!
Well, I'll give you my rule zero for optimizing code ... don't write shitty code relying on more layers of libraries than you can explain what is happening.
My direct experience says most of the people saying "don't optimize" are the ones who wrote the shittiest code in the first place because they simply assume all libraries are fast and efficient.
By the time you've made that shitty and slow code, it's probably too damned late to try to optimize it.
I cut my teeth writing on bare metal, and libraries which were called over and over.
If you don't start with some consideration of what is efficient, and you just do stupid things which rely too much on the library ... no amount of effort later will fix it.
Honestly, it doesn't matter WTF is in Google's ToS if those terms violate the local law.
Google can whine and bitch all they want, but you can't embed something illegal into a contract.
The UK privacy laws always trump Google, no matter what Google wants to claim. Especially since Google has localized versions for most countries they operate in.
They simply can't claim to be exempt from the law. Terms of service are not magical ... they couldn't say that you agree to indentured servitude either.
In this case, Google said "fuck it, we don't care if you've opted out".
Though, admittedly, this was partly helped by the fact that Apple incompetently implemented blocking of 3rd part cookies. Basically everybody figured out how to bypass that.
No, I'm not implying anything ... I'm flat out saying your "one in a million" and your "one in a trillion" are bullshit numbers you made up on the spot, and therefore pretty much meaningless in terms of describing the likelihood of anything.
Since we haven't had 27,000 years of human flight, saying the chance of two people deciding to crash a plane via a concerted effort is impossible is basically gibberish.
It sure as hell isn't a fact or good statistics.
Yes, but they also know you have not got the resources to hire more lawyers than they have.
Basically this is shitting on your workers to keep them in fear of losing their jobs.
I always scratch those sections out in contracts. Unless you pay me 100% of my salary for the period of time I'm not allowed to compete, I'm not signing it.
Crap like this should be illegal. And in many sane places, it actually is.
Snark from an anonymous coward is about as useful and purposeful as any of my examples.
Ergo, by your own logic, you are an idiot.
LOL, no, that's not what I'm saying at all.
I'm saying no human endeavor can be made 100% safe, and the more complex set of interlocks people try to design to prevent stuff like this, the more absurd it becomes since you can always construct a scenario in which it fails to protect you.
Fly, don't fly ... makes no difference to me. I'll make the same several round trips per year I've been making the last 20 years or so.
But let's not pretend that by tweaking the locking just a little more to stop one scenario we don't create new ones.
People wanted stronger locks, and that's what they got. Now, they're surprised that stronger locks are stronger ... duh.
I've long since stopped asking why, and just gotten on with "why not?"
Building a replica of a platform gives you the experience of doing it, the understanding of the process, familiarity with the tools you're using ... and possibly some bragging rights among your fellow nerds.
Why pimp out your CPU case with neon? Why put spinners on your rims? Hell, why have cars anything other than black, which should suffice for anybody? Why play video games? Why watch TV?
None of these accomplishes anything other than filling in time or soothing your own need for something you think is cool.
To you, it's opportunity cost. To someone else, it's "why the hell not?" It's something to do they find amusing.
Compared to half the crap you see on YouTube or anywhere else with humans ... I don't see this as being worse than anything else.
With all the dumb crap humans do every day, there's at least some coolness to this.
And I'm betting you can identify at least 10 things you do every week which you couldn't answer "why" if pressed on the issue.
Gee, and one wonders why people might not be forthcoming with their doctors.
As soon as you say "fuck doctor patient confidentiality" then WTF would you expect people to tell doctors anything for?
So then the next thing you'd say is priests and lawyers should also not have confidentiality, because that would be inconvenient.
Essentially, you are saying "it should be illegal to have secrets from the state".
Think hard about what you're actually saying.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
I'm rank the probability you pulled those numbers out of your ass as being 100%.
Honestly, the people in the chain you trust are the ones who can do more damage ... from the pilots to the ground crew, to the baggage handlers, they're the ones who can really mess with stuff.
And yet we've seen a bunch of news stories about the baggage handlers being the ones smuggling. Because they're the ones who have access.
And I don't see anybody enacting more security against them either.
One sufficiently motivated guy with the right access can cause all sorts of problems.
Know many pilots?
The difference between "depressed narcissistic arsehole" and "perfectly normal narcissistic arsehole" isn't as far as you'd think.
Airline pilots are largely convinced of their own superiority to begin with.
Hell, I suspect the C-level of executives in most large corporations gets you your "narcissistic areshole" out of the gate. All the ones I've ever met certainly are.
OK, smart guy. Let's take it to the absurd.
The bad guys have depressurized the plane, and they're slowly cutting parts from cabin crew to get the code.
The pilot and co-pilot are doing their best to keep from crashing, and can't spend time mucking about with the locking mechanism.
There simply isn't a way you can 100% guarantee this is 100% safe, and you can pretty much always come up with a scenario in which it works against you.
Between bad movies and spy novels, there's just so damned many improbable corner cases that it's just not something you can get right all of the time.
Hell, break the locking mechanism for one of them so that it can't be triggered and the door can't be kept locked.
By the time you covered every corner case, the system becomes unusable.
And, of course, we can construct the scenario in which the co-pilot and one of the cabin crew conspires so that when the pilot has to take a leak it's the two of them in the cockpit, and then they can do the same damned thing.
There's really no way you can 100% prevent this kind of thing.
So, after 9/11 they rushed to put door locks on the damned things.
And, now, to the utter shock and amazement of everybody ... someone in the cockpit can lock people out of it. Exactly as they designed it.
I'm stunned, I tell 'ya.
Of course, now when the pilot has to take a leak there is one less cabin crew, which I'm sure you can construct a scenario in which that's not a good idea.
Government bureaucracy reviews private corporations, implements government bureaucracy?
LOL .. Congratulations, gentlemen, you're exactly what we've come to expect from years of government training.
Gunpowder. Navigation. Paper. Writing. Printing. Silk. The compass. Noodles.
In fact, a staggering list.
And you being incompetent enough to not be able to eat with them means that China didn't achieve much?
Get a life.
What the hell have you invented?
I gotta say, a private corporation like Facebook, flying solar powered communications drones using lasers ... that's more than a little creepy.
Welcome to the dystopian future, kiddies.
Shit's all down hill from here.
Welcome to a world with lawyers and liability laws.Someone is always to blame.
And, as I said, you can bet your ass Google et al are going to try to make sure it's you and not them.
Well, playing spot the fed can still be fun, as would setting up fake hotspots and phishing people.
It's a security conference, which means tons of targets with no clue about security. ;-)
Again, why would I pay liability insurance to cover the actions taken by a computer?
The only viable business model for fully autonomous cars I can see is essentially as taxis.
The notion that we're all going to trade in our cars and let the computer do all the driving is laughable -- too many people like driving, and there's decades worth of cars out there. The notion that we'd buy a self driving car and then pay to insure it is silly.
As with most things said by futurists, I find myself wondering if this "inevitable future" is anywhere near as inevitable as the people selling it to us want us to believe, or if it's just more marketing of stuff someone wants to sell us.
My take on this is the people making these things claim how awesome and revolutionary they'll be. But I bet the vast majority of people simply don't care.
Except they're not the same.
If you have a human driving, you usually know who to blame.
If you have a computer driving, the people who made the computer sure as hell aren't going to take liability.
But you can bet your ass some sleazy lawyer will put it into the EULA that by driving in a Google car you assume all liability.
If they're going to make autonomous cars, they pretty much need to be 100% autonomous, with the humans effectively in the back seat with no controls.
At present, there simply ARE no liability rulings about self-driving cars.
So, disregarding how the self-driving car decided who it is best to kill in any given situation, for me the biggest problem with self-driving cars is legal liability.
If Google wants to sell autonomous cars, Google should be liable for anything the damned thing does.
And none of this cop out where if the computer doesn't know what to do it just hands back to the human -- because that's pretty much guaranteed to fail since the human won't be able to make the context switch in time (if at all).
As far as I'm concerned, the autonomous car has to be 100% hands off by the user at all times, and the company who makes the damned thing is 100% responsible for what it does.
Why the hell would someone have to pay for insurance for something they don't have control of what it does?