The only problem I have and would suggest is that you should not use MIT people to represent all Ph.D. people
You'll note that I didn't. The poster I was replying to was specifically mentioning MIT -- and since MIT tends to be a place where they actually build things, I consider them not really representative.
But my general experience with people with PhDs is that, a fair fraction of them are bordering on being idiots when it comes to day to day things. Several of them I would have to assume were complete morons except for that I know about their academic qualifications.
Bollaert's site, which is no longer operational, had featured over 10,000 sexually explicit photos, and he charged women up to $350 each to remove their photos, officials said
So basically he was running an extortion racket?
At the end of the day, you're posting intimate pictures of someone without their permission and without a model release, so I don't have a lot of sympathy for this guy. If the rest of the porn industry needs to keep model releases and the like on file, why wouldn't he?
I remember a friend and I bought the full version of Doom at a shareware vending machine at a local mall. We brought our own floppies and a two rolls of loonies to pay for it.
Wow. I don't remember vending machines like that at all.
I do, however, remember loading programs off cassette tape.:-P
You're dreaming if you think that smart people are inept at interacting with the physical world in any way different than the regular population.
And, I see you fail at reading the entire comment:
I'm not saying ALL PhD grads, but I'm saying enough to be statistically significant.
I've known many PhD holders who can do all sorts of cool things. But I've also know my fair share who were effectively idiots outside of the realm of the theoretical.
And, no, I wasn't kidding about the one who couldn't successfully operate a revolving door. I've actually seen this, and every time he tried he'd get stuck in it. It was mind boggling.
Do I believe that understanding the physics of how to drive a truck corresponds to actually being able to do so? Not at all. Do I believe there are plenty of who people who can? Absolutely.
I've know a few PhDs who could barely dress and groom themselves, and while they were brilliant in their field -- were little above the moron level when it came to some day to day tasks.
Seriously, I've known people who supposedly have a Masters in CS who have never coded (how that is possible I don't know), and seen university professors with PhDs who hadn't coded in 20 years and had a purely theoretical understanding of it.
At MIT people actually build stuff, so I'd expect better results. But in a lot of other places, a PhD doesn't always translate into any real world knowledge. And, in some fields, a PhD just means you stuck it out with the full knowledge that you'd only ever be employable in academia.
Disqus has been blocked at my firewall for some time.
Not because of this, but because I was seeing it on so damned many sites it's not funny. Which means I didn't trust it to be anything good for me.
There's so much shit on the internet these days that if you're not using cookie/script/beacon blockers you're just handing over your information to a company for profit.
I believe every hacker on the planet should be working to release the private details of every company executive (and their families) involved in this stuff. If our personal information is a commodity, then don't act like yours is any different. Assholes.
Much like Zuckerfuck fiercely protects his privacy while undermining ours, you don't get to choose that your privacy is more important than mine.
Given the same level of truck driving education, i daresay the PhD grad would likely do better, because of more likeliness that he better understands driving physics.
Except we've all seen evidence of PhDs having an awesome theoretical grasp of something, and absolutely zero practical grasp of something.
I'm betting you can find people who can write you the equations, but not actually perform the task because they don't have the coordination or motor skills.
I'm not convinced what you say is true, because I've seen a fair few people with a PhD who could barely operate a revolving door. Because, in some cases, the more you understand the underlying physics, the less you've ever done anything involving them and live in your own little bubble.
My guess, take 10 high school students who enrolled in shop, and 10 PhD grads, give them each a month of training -- and you'll find a bias towards the high school students being pretty good, and the PhD grads being terrifying. I'm not saying ALL PhD grads, but I'm saying enough to be statistically significant.
I've been looking at some of these in-car infotainment systems for the last couple of years thinking they'd be as bad as a smartphone.
I've always thought the push to the connected car would be more of a distraction, and not something I'd personally want to be operating while driving the car.
Cadillac recently was running a commercial saying essentially "our car has more buttons than yours" because of the digital console. And my first thoughts were "great, I'd never find anything".
I'm on the wrong side of 40, but for me I still like physical buttons in well known places that I don't need to look away from the road to operate. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you actually tested people, even the ones who believe they can operate this while driving would be proven wrong.
Humans are terrible at doing more than one thing at a time, despite what they like to believe. Adding more crap like this into a car is likely just going to make that worse.
For years, privacy advocates have raised concerns about the use of commercial tracking tools to identify and target consumers with advertisements. The online ad industry has said its practices are innocuous and benefit consumers by serving them ads that are more likely to be of interest to them.
No, the advertising industry wants to target ads to us to benefit themselves, and in the process they've made everything we do tracked, monitored, cataloged, and neatly bundled up for sale to someone else.
And since I am not willing to provide them with this, I feel no compunction about blocking cookies, beacons, analytics, and a host of other things.
For website owners who rely on this, too fucking bad. Because your precious content isn't worth trading my privacy for, and I do not give a damn. It's like going to an Italian Restaurant and being told that Vinnie here also needs to get a cut.
I don't believe Google is really interested in stopping collecting user information. They may want to limit what the government can access, and they want to give the appearance of fighting for the consumer. But the big companies like Google who have really made this widespread have a huge financial interest in continuing this practice.
Once you have things like Ghostery and the like installed, and realize just how much crap is on every web page, it's astounding. Hell, right now, on Slashdot I've blocked "Google Analytics", "Google AdWords Converter", a "Scorecard Research" beacon, and whatever the hell "Janrain" is, and something called rpxnow.com -- and Slashdot isn't the "worst" site I've seen. But absolutely none of those sites is entitled to (or is actually receiving) any of my information.
Fuck the lot of them. I've more or less determined the internet is a place where 80% of the big players can't be trusted, so as much as possible, I just deny them the information they want in the first place.
Because, let's face it, doubleclick.com and the like have been douchebags for better part of 15 years. Why would we assume that would ever change?
A buddy of mine was once consulting for a firm whose new "CTO" argued with him, vehemently insisting that Bill Gates invented TCP/IP...
Wow, then as CTO, that's an epic fail. Time was you needed 3rd party software to use TCP/IP on Windows, and Microsoft was very late to the game in supporting it.
I'm sure that company has made some really awesome decisions with this clown at the helm. I'm betting small shop with limited technical breadth?
The head of delivery for the UK's Department for Work and Pensions' flagship welfare reform project, Universal Credit, has said that the department didn't adopt open source and web-based technologies at the beginning of the project because 'such things weren't available' two and a half years ago.
Then either they needed something highly specific, or this guy isn't qualified to evaluate technology.
I wouldn't stick an employee with a slow half-top and expect them to be productive.
In my experience, a lot of companies buy whatever they can get a bulk price on and which someone in purchasing deems "good enough".
Resulting in employees with slow machines on which they're expected to be productive.
Hell, at an old job they bought a crap-load of new Dell boxes, and the native aspect ratio of the monitor was a non-standard thing in which a circle was drawn as an oval because the monitor was optimized for watching movies at 720p, but not for actually being a monitor (it's native aspect ratio was oblong pixels). Oh, and the machines came with 4GB of RAM, the OS they came with could only see 3GB of RAM, and it wasn't possible to install a newer OS on it because there were no drivers available.
In short, never underestimate how crappy of a machine companies will buy for their employees if it saves them a few bucks. Because many of them do it all the time.
This. Content consumption =/= content creation. Sadly, the nuisance is missed to many in this supposedly nerd realm that slashdot is supposed to be.
First all, it's 'nuance'. (Though, an argument could be made for nuisance too)
But, the reality is, the overwhelming majority of non-nerds using the interwebs are purely doing content consumption, and that's all they ever will do. And, even as a nerd, a huge fraction of what I do outside of work is perfectly fine on a tablet.
Which means the overwhelming majority of people do not require or perform content creation, and those devices do exactly what they need them to.
Something else this supposedly nerdy realm fails to grasp. Just because we can't use it to build new things doesn't mean the people buying them will ever feel limited. In fact, most of them would roll their eyes at us.
My mother in law does 95% (or more) of everything she will ever need a computer for on her Nexus 7 tablet. For most people, that's all they'll ever need.
I can tell from your requirements that you really don't do anything useful with your browser except read news websites.
The rest of us who use web browsers to watch youtube videos, do any online shopping, or online banking will need something from this century.
So, you don't do anything useful either then?
For most web-sites, I'm willing to interact with them at a level of Lynx. For some of them I'm willing to grant permissions for some of this stuff (all of the blockers allow site based permissions). For many many sites, if I would need to enable anything to view it... the back button solves that.
Most of the crap web sites have on them is so heavily geared towards tracking and analytics companies, treating them as untrusted until you're damn sure you want to is a good idea.
If I need to allow Google Analytics to look at the content of your web site, then the content of your web site is shit.
Technically true, but as I mentioned in another post, the City of London police are one of the major authorities behind international money laundering laws.
And if police are going to start doing such things with no real legal basis, then the police deserve neither our respect nor our cooperation.
Because they've essentially become corrupt thugs who will do anything to achieve their own ends.
Once the police become simply the tools of corporations, they've lost their legitimacy.
Exactly. You need to have a 'value add' for your end user.
No, you just have to convince them how awesome it is, or stop giving them other options.
This is just more corporate greed cramming stuff down our throats which mostly benefits them.
As they exist, 'markets' have nothing to do with consumer choice, but what the corporations are telling we're getting whether we want it or not. The invisible hand has the world collectively by the balls, and doesn't give a damn about what we want.
1. Say you will put more things on the internet 2.??? 3.??? 4. PROFIT!!!!
1. Say you will put more things on the internet 2. Collect information about everything everybody does and lock them in with EULAs 3. Analyze and sell, and enjoy that you've convinced people to 'buy' things they don't technically 'own'. Share with law enforcement as needed. 4. PROFIT!!!!
Who wins with the Internet of Things? Corporations and Governments. If you're not a hobbyist, why do you need a *BSD-powered toaster?
Not the consumer.
See, once these things have a digital component, your toaster isn't technically "yours", but is covered under a 'licensing agreement' which says the data about how you use your toaster is theirs, and removing/disabling this is illegal.
I don't see any benefit for the consumer, and I see a lot of downsides.
When the DMCA applies to your toaster and the like, you don't own anything and your information becomes the property of someone else. It's just more scope creep of corporations more or less asserting control and ownership of the things we buy for their own ends, and giving us zero in return.
And then you quickly find there are no devices which don't have this shit in it, and it's a criminal offense to remove it since that would be violating the 'rights' of the companies who sold it to you.
Behold, the dystopian future is upon us. The corporations have all the power, cut our jobs, and leave us beholden to them.
Applications and services that support AllJoyn can communicate "regardless of manufacturer or operating system and without the need for Internet access,"
Wow, what could possibly go wrong with that? Devices which will communicate whether you want them to or not, and with all of that information in the hands of greedy assholes.
This internet of things is a bloody stupid idea to me, and I see precisely zero benefit in having it. Especially if it means everything now becomes a tool for the marketing bastards.
This isn't enhancing our experience with these things, just making them tools for someone else to exploit.
Civil rights have been under attack in Britain for a long time.
And Britain is welcome to fuck with their own civil rights.
When they start feeling like they have the authority and jurisdiction to affect the broader global internet, that's the point at which people need to start referring them to Arvell v Pressdram and reminding them of where exactly their legal authority ends.
And the City of London has legal authority for an exceedingly small area, and precisely ZERO international authority.
Anybody being bullied into doing this is an idiot.
Do these people not realize they have zero jurisdiction outside of their own country?
If a police department in a foreign country is trying to exert pressure on you, the response is to tell them to go fuck themselves and come back when they have legal standing.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll note that I didn't. The poster I was replying to was specifically mentioning MIT -- and since MIT tends to be a place where they actually build things, I consider them not really representative.
But my general experience with people with PhDs is that, a fair fraction of them are bordering on being idiots when it comes to day to day things. Several of them I would have to assume were complete morons except for that I know about their academic qualifications.
So basically he was running an extortion racket?
At the end of the day, you're posting intimate pictures of someone without their permission and without a model release, so I don't have a lot of sympathy for this guy. If the rest of the porn industry needs to keep model releases and the like on file, why wouldn't he?
LOL ... yup, that's about what I remember. ;-)
Wow. I don't remember vending machines like that at all.
I do, however, remember loading programs off cassette tape. :-P
I'm like Bruce Banner in the Avengers ... My secret is that I'm always angry. ;-)
And, I see you fail at reading the entire comment:
I've known many PhD holders who can do all sorts of cool things. But I've also know my fair share who were effectively idiots outside of the realm of the theoretical.
And, no, I wasn't kidding about the one who couldn't successfully operate a revolving door. I've actually seen this, and every time he tried he'd get stuck in it. It was mind boggling.
Do I believe that understanding the physics of how to drive a truck corresponds to actually being able to do so? Not at all. Do I believe there are plenty of who people who can? Absolutely.
I've know a few PhDs who could barely dress and groom themselves, and while they were brilliant in their field -- were little above the moron level when it came to some day to day tasks.
It's like that old Far Side cartoon about the school for the gifted.
Seriously, I've known people who supposedly have a Masters in CS who have never coded (how that is possible I don't know), and seen university professors with PhDs who hadn't coded in 20 years and had a purely theoretical understanding of it.
At MIT people actually build stuff, so I'd expect better results. But in a lot of other places, a PhD doesn't always translate into any real world knowledge. And, in some fields, a PhD just means you stuck it out with the full knowledge that you'd only ever be employable in academia.
Disqus has been blocked at my firewall for some time.
Not because of this, but because I was seeing it on so damned many sites it's not funny. Which means I didn't trust it to be anything good for me.
There's so much shit on the internet these days that if you're not using cookie/script/beacon blockers you're just handing over your information to a company for profit.
I believe every hacker on the planet should be working to release the private details of every company executive (and their families) involved in this stuff. If our personal information is a commodity, then don't act like yours is any different. Assholes.
Much like Zuckerfuck fiercely protects his privacy while undermining ours, you don't get to choose that your privacy is more important than mine.
Except we've all seen evidence of PhDs having an awesome theoretical grasp of something, and absolutely zero practical grasp of something.
I'm betting you can find people who can write you the equations, but not actually perform the task because they don't have the coordination or motor skills.
I'm not convinced what you say is true, because I've seen a fair few people with a PhD who could barely operate a revolving door. Because, in some cases, the more you understand the underlying physics, the less you've ever done anything involving them and live in your own little bubble.
My guess, take 10 high school students who enrolled in shop, and 10 PhD grads, give them each a month of training -- and you'll find a bias towards the high school students being pretty good, and the PhD grads being terrifying. I'm not saying ALL PhD grads, but I'm saying enough to be statistically significant.
I've been looking at some of these in-car infotainment systems for the last couple of years thinking they'd be as bad as a smartphone.
I've always thought the push to the connected car would be more of a distraction, and not something I'd personally want to be operating while driving the car.
Cadillac recently was running a commercial saying essentially "our car has more buttons than yours" because of the digital console. And my first thoughts were "great, I'd never find anything".
I'm on the wrong side of 40, but for me I still like physical buttons in well known places that I don't need to look away from the road to operate. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you actually tested people, even the ones who believe they can operate this while driving would be proven wrong.
Humans are terrible at doing more than one thing at a time, despite what they like to believe. Adding more crap like this into a car is likely just going to make that worse.
Wow. Unqualified to be CTO, AND more interested in his own ends than what's a good choice for the company.
A stellar combination.
No, the advertising industry wants to target ads to us to benefit themselves, and in the process they've made everything we do tracked, monitored, cataloged, and neatly bundled up for sale to someone else.
And since I am not willing to provide them with this, I feel no compunction about blocking cookies, beacons, analytics, and a host of other things.
For website owners who rely on this, too fucking bad. Because your precious content isn't worth trading my privacy for, and I do not give a damn. It's like going to an Italian Restaurant and being told that Vinnie here also needs to get a cut.
I don't believe Google is really interested in stopping collecting user information. They may want to limit what the government can access, and they want to give the appearance of fighting for the consumer. But the big companies like Google who have really made this widespread have a huge financial interest in continuing this practice.
Once you have things like Ghostery and the like installed, and realize just how much crap is on every web page, it's astounding. Hell, right now, on Slashdot I've blocked "Google Analytics", "Google AdWords Converter", a "Scorecard Research" beacon, and whatever the hell "Janrain" is, and something called rpxnow.com -- and Slashdot isn't the "worst" site I've seen. But absolutely none of those sites is entitled to (or is actually receiving) any of my information.
Fuck the lot of them. I've more or less determined the internet is a place where 80% of the big players can't be trusted, so as much as possible, I just deny them the information they want in the first place.
Because, let's face it, doubleclick.com and the like have been douchebags for better part of 15 years. Why would we assume that would ever change?
Wow, then as CTO, that's an epic fail. Time was you needed 3rd party software to use TCP/IP on Windows, and Microsoft was very late to the game in supporting it.
I'm sure that company has made some really awesome decisions with this clown at the helm. I'm betting small shop with limited technical breadth?
In this case, it was shitty Dell machines running Windows. Shitty HP machines running Windows also become a common choice.
Then either they needed something highly specific, or this guy isn't qualified to evaluate technology.
In my experience, a lot of companies buy whatever they can get a bulk price on and which someone in purchasing deems "good enough".
Resulting in employees with slow machines on which they're expected to be productive.
Hell, at an old job they bought a crap-load of new Dell boxes, and the native aspect ratio of the monitor was a non-standard thing in which a circle was drawn as an oval because the monitor was optimized for watching movies at 720p, but not for actually being a monitor (it's native aspect ratio was oblong pixels). Oh, and the machines came with 4GB of RAM, the OS they came with could only see 3GB of RAM, and it wasn't possible to install a newer OS on it because there were no drivers available.
In short, never underestimate how crappy of a machine companies will buy for their employees if it saves them a few bucks. Because many of them do it all the time.
First all, it's 'nuance'. (Though, an argument could be made for nuisance too)
But, the reality is, the overwhelming majority of non-nerds using the interwebs are purely doing content consumption, and that's all they ever will do. And, even as a nerd, a huge fraction of what I do outside of work is perfectly fine on a tablet.
Which means the overwhelming majority of people do not require or perform content creation, and those devices do exactly what they need them to.
Something else this supposedly nerdy realm fails to grasp. Just because we can't use it to build new things doesn't mean the people buying them will ever feel limited. In fact, most of them would roll their eyes at us.
My mother in law does 95% (or more) of everything she will ever need a computer for on her Nexus 7 tablet. For most people, that's all they'll ever need.
So, you don't do anything useful either then?
For most web-sites, I'm willing to interact with them at a level of Lynx. For some of them I'm willing to grant permissions for some of this stuff (all of the blockers allow site based permissions). For many many sites, if I would need to enable anything to view it ... the back button solves that.
Most of the crap web sites have on them is so heavily geared towards tracking and analytics companies, treating them as untrusted until you're damn sure you want to is a good idea.
If I need to allow Google Analytics to look at the content of your web site, then the content of your web site is shit.
And if police are going to start doing such things with no real legal basis, then the police deserve neither our respect nor our cooperation.
Because they've essentially become corrupt thugs who will do anything to achieve their own ends.
Once the police become simply the tools of corporations, they've lost their legitimacy.
Fuck that, you fucking fuck. ;-)
No, you just have to convince them how awesome it is, or stop giving them other options.
This is just more corporate greed cramming stuff down our throats which mostly benefits them.
As they exist, 'markets' have nothing to do with consumer choice, but what the corporations are telling we're getting whether we want it or not. The invisible hand has the world collectively by the balls, and doesn't give a damn about what we want.
1. Say you will put more things on the internet
2. Collect information about everything everybody does and lock them in with EULAs
3. Analyze and sell, and enjoy that you've convinced people to 'buy' things they don't technically 'own'. Share with law enforcement as needed.
4. PROFIT!!!!
Not the consumer.
See, once these things have a digital component, your toaster isn't technically "yours", but is covered under a 'licensing agreement' which says the data about how you use your toaster is theirs, and removing/disabling this is illegal.
I don't see any benefit for the consumer, and I see a lot of downsides.
When the DMCA applies to your toaster and the like, you don't own anything and your information becomes the property of someone else. It's just more scope creep of corporations more or less asserting control and ownership of the things we buy for their own ends, and giving us zero in return.
And then you quickly find there are no devices which don't have this shit in it, and it's a criminal offense to remove it since that would be violating the 'rights' of the companies who sold it to you.
Behold, the dystopian future is upon us. The corporations have all the power, cut our jobs, and leave us beholden to them.
Wow, what could possibly go wrong with that? Devices which will communicate whether you want them to or not, and with all of that information in the hands of greedy assholes.
This internet of things is a bloody stupid idea to me, and I see precisely zero benefit in having it. Especially if it means everything now becomes a tool for the marketing bastards.
This isn't enhancing our experience with these things, just making them tools for someone else to exploit.
And Britain is welcome to fuck with their own civil rights.
When they start feeling like they have the authority and jurisdiction to affect the broader global internet, that's the point at which people need to start referring them to Arvell v Pressdram and reminding them of where exactly their legal authority ends.
And the City of London has legal authority for an exceedingly small area, and precisely ZERO international authority.
Anybody being bullied into doing this is an idiot.
Do these people not realize they have zero jurisdiction outside of their own country?
If a police department in a foreign country is trying to exert pressure on you, the response is to tell them to go fuck themselves and come back when they have legal standing.