Why would a particular implementation of ordering transport online suddenly make it something completely different?
As far as I can tell, because Uber wants it to be.
Which, also as far as I can tell, is a complete lie as the company seems to think they stepped in unicorn poop and can now make up their own definitions and decide what laws apply to them.
There is no defensible reason for humans to go to the moon.
Define, "defensible". Because I think you're full of it.
Living on the surface of an alien planet under hostile conditions is a pretty tricky affair. Maintaining a presence on the 'dark' side of the moon so you can have even better astronomy is pretty cool. A staging area to look at working towards more of space is something we don't have now. Because we fucking well can has always been a marvelous idea.
The problems we need to solve for Mars? We can wok on those problems before having to solve a 2 year travel time with no escape plan.
So when you say "no defensible reason" I say bullshit. There's plenty we could do on the moon which actually is of value, and is entirely defensible. And which actually helps us learn about what we'd do on the surface of Mars. Or any other planetary surface.
Many of us have been hackers and hobbyists, and have been attracted to and reveled in the process of patching, updating, compiling, fixing, tweaking, and otherwise fondling technology just because it is there. I am most definitely among them.
However, many of us have aged, bought out own basements, acquired some friends and other hobbies, ventured into the outdoors in daylight and everything... and subsequently decided we have far better things to do with our lives.
For most of us, time comes when patching and updating just becomes a chore.. and what we really want is a product which works out of the box instead of building it from a kit. And the less we have to fsck with it, the better.
Many moons ago I'd stay up late to patch my OS and recompile everything. Now I find I simply don't give a damn.
I'm not judging if you still call yourself a hacker. Likewise, don't expect me to be impressed either.
If you aren't testing it from day 1 regardless of deployment, you are still the incompetent. Stay in the kiddie pool. I pity whoever you work for if you pretend to be their expert.
Wow, you're an AC, so I assume you're an asshole, a moron, or both.
Real companies with real business needs and real aversion to risk need to manage their risk by not continuously doing regression testing on someone else's shit, and have better things to do than that.
You don't grab random pieces and throw it into your production environment. You grab stuff and start deploying through your lab, and then your other environments. But you don't play beta tester for your vendors. Ever.
Sorry, but if you think a day one roll-out to a real machine doing real business critical work is a sane idea, then I suggest it's you who should stay in the kiddie pool.
For those of us who have been involved in change management for regulated industries where "absolutely must work" is mandatory, "new" means "not trusted". It's that simple.
An OS update? No way unless it's been around a while... because we've all seen far too many things which introduce new bugs to do that.
But, hey, you can tell your mom you had a good day in the basement if it makes you feel better about yourself. But don't act like we should give a damn what an AC tells us about change management.
Exactly. Self cars need to be 100% self driving, or they're utterly useless.
You can't have a failure mode where it says "OK, meat sock, I have no idea what to do, it's your turn and you have 0.7 seconds to react". That will simply not work.
That would be idiotic and dangerous, and mean that self-driving cars are mostly here but have huge gaps in what they can do.
But it should be like a cab, with the passengers being exactly that... passengers.
To me, a self-driving car remains a proof of concept if there is ever a mode in which the user needs to take over, the user even has control they could use, or if the user pays for liability insurance as a "driver".
If Google wants to have self-driving cars, they should be like taxi cabs, and they should have their own liability. This hybrid model is doomed to fail.
Do they really think anybody is going to have a "high level knowledge of the technology"? There's no way in hell Google is going to let anybody product engineers know any of the details, so unless they mean "the computer, it does the driving bits" there isn't a damned thing people will know.
And the sitting there pretending to drive? Well, that's what happens when clueless lawmakers try to pass laws about technology they don't remotely understand.
But, whatever, the flying^Wself-driving car isn't something which will catch on in any meaningful sense of the word... people aren't going to buy these because they don't care, or because the benefits will be very limited.
Like so many things the futurists tell us are coming Real Soon Now, the world isn't going to be re-tooled to account for this, and they will have to coexist with human drivers for a VERY long time to come. But if they think society is going to spend billions and billions of dollars changing the existing infrastructure to suit their pipedream, they're delusional.
But, hey, that's what futurists are for. Telling us about stuff which sounds cool but which are otherwise not likely to happen as claimed.
Unless you enjoy doing that kind of support for free, tell them they're on their own.
My parents live quite far from me. I told them flat out I can't be support for their computer because I have no way to see it, and I don't know WTF they did to it.
But why people keep letting themselves get sucked into the black hole of supporting technology for friends and family I will never know. There's no limit to how much you can get dragged into that crap.
You know, this has nothing to do with personality... it has to do with change management and how risk averse your organization is, as well as how important the system is.
Many of us will have worked in IT environments with very low threshold for risk and breakage. Which means we don't apply a change unless it has been verified elsewhere... most regulated industries are (or should be) sufficiently risk averse that they have no choice but to be extra cautious.
I've worked in enough industries with a low enough risk threshold that I can't imagine doing anything but.
For people who work in IT, this has nothing do with personality.... except that guy who works in a regulated/risk averse industry and still does stupid and risky things thinking "what could possibly go wrong?".
"That guy" tends to get taken off projects involving important systems really fast, because stupidity and risk taking where you've been told there is no room for risk leads to bad outcomes.
But I've worked with "that guy" who would make ad hoc changes on a running Prod system without telling anybody. And, when he inevitably broke something, he got told in no uncertain terms to stay the hell away from the machines.
For some of us, not taking risks is in the job description.
However, we may end up in those jobs because we were already risk averse.
Let the suckers and adventurers be the beta testers.
Don't run the crap which is most likely to be causing you security problems in the first place -- I've never been impacted by a Flash zero day exploit because I don't run it.
Many years of being around computers has taught me that I have no intention of putting up with the drama of beta testing for companies who do a lousy job of QA.
I've seen WAY too many things which are broken on day 1, or even worse, which introduce new broken on day 1 that it takes some time to identify.
There isn't an OS vendor on the planet I'd accept a fresh release from and install on the first day.
If you do this stuff as a hobby, have fun with it. The rest of us don't have the time or the inclination to consider upgrading the OS to be a hobby.
This might bet the point at which Apple without Jobs falters.
You can't introduce the "revolutionary" new product and not have the killer use-case for it. You can't release "teh smartwatch" and have no idea of WTF people will use it for.
Wow, the ability to see my text messages without looking at my phone? Nope, not compelling.
The smartwatch has always felt like a gimmick with little utility for most people.
And this got cemented when they were selling the gold plated "gee but I'm a rich asshole" version. I'm pretty sure I've never heard a single person who could finish the sentence "I want a smart watch because..." with anything substantive.
Android or Apple, I don't see any value in splashing out for something which they still are hoping someone will create the thing which makes it useful.
Sorry, no. Increasingly mobile consumer electronics are just vehicles for ads, analytics, and giving up my privacy... and any app which makes use of this is more of the same. Some of us are moving to less digital crap in our lives, and not more.
This falls firmly in the camp of no defined purpose, no benefit, and not getting my money.
I would actually be interested to know what the logic is here: the hacker clearly doesn't like AM
I figure there's really only two plausible scenarios here:
1) It's the usual band of clowns and morons doing this for fun, in which case the demands are random crap which don't mean anything
2) The hackers will attempt to claim they represent a religious point of view and wish to clean up the world.
The only commonality with the sites is that they are there to enable some behavior which some asshole who isn't affected thinks is immoral.
Maybe it's Islamic State taking a break from raping their captured sex slaves to tell us how immoral we all are. Or it's some other band of morons looking for attention and this has nothing to do with anything.
This isn't an understanding, it's an assumption made by us to try to put some parameters in place around what we'd look for.
The reality is, we have no idea what to expect.
We also have no idea how many (if any) there could be, how they'd be distributed, and how far away they could be... remember, it could take centuries to ever hear a signal originating from far enough away.
Nobody said it's a perfect solution, and there's no guarantee it will work.
If you don't listen you'll simply never know. But, really, nobody can say for certain that any of what you say is true... it's just a supposition, and a term in Drake's equation for which there is no real answer, just guesses.
So you listen anyway, and see what you can learn. You know, actual science.
You know, sometimes businesses give you shitty service. In which case nobody is holding their reputation hostage, they've have earned a lousy reputation through bad service.
Usually when I travel I look into reviews. When I do travel I mostly rent from owner-rented condos and the like. Give me a great, clean place to stay and I'll give you a good review. Give me a lousy place to stay, not so much.
The trick with travel reviews is you have to read enough of them to understand them, and you also have to get a sense of what to expect for where you're going.
I've seen some reviews for places which after a while you go "OK, some people don't understand the differences between their home and where they're going". So some reviews will complain about stupid things because they don't know any better (I've seen reviews complaining the voltage was 220v or that there were lizards around... and this means someone didn't understand they were going to a tropical country different from their own. I've even seen people complain about rain, like that's under anyone's control.).
I've seen other reviews about rude or lazy staff, or unclean conditions, and I take note of those.
But, really, having read a lot of TripAdvisor reviews, the majority of them are written by real people who have actually been there.
If you give crap service and get a bad review, you don't get to play the victim card. Despite all of this bullshit happening where companies sue because of bad reviews, telling the truth about an actual experiences is legal and not libelous, despite the morons who want it to be otherwise.
Facebook wants everybody to run their application so they can mine all your fucking data.
The don't give a crap about 3rd part clients, they care about ads and analytics.
Seriously, stop expecting benevolence from Facebook. They're greedy bastards, nothing more. They're not going to do a damned thing which doesn't maximize their bottom line.
Look, American law enforcement has become an enforcement arm for copyright and defending business interests.
DHS is now responsible for monitoring for copyright infringement, and the customs agents are responsible for doing search and seizure.
They're doing their job... defending the oligarchy they now work for.
If you haven't been paying attention to the fact that the US government is literally doing IP enforcement on behalf of the copyright cartel, you've not been paying attention.
Hell, US foreign policy/trade policy is both written by, and in the service of, the copyright cartel.
Don't you know the US government works for multinational corporations now to ensure maximizing corporate profits?
I really wish I was joking, but I'm not.
This is hardly the first time US agencies have expended lots of resources to protect copyright... Kim.com for instance. It sure as hell won't be the last.
Yea, I know you people get off on bashing the creationist ideology, but it's not all ignorance and folly. There are actually some pretty intelligent folk who think about these questions and have come up with reasonable answers for most of them, plus they have some answers for questions you are not asking because you haven't spent the time to think about stuff much.
What you are describing is sophistry, and not science.
Just because people go to extraordinary lengths to justify their religion, doesn't make any of it true.
So step down off the high horse and try and engage, without bashing and name calling... You will likely get further with people if you don't offend them right off the bat.
No. By insisting we engage means we've given in to the position that these silly beliefs have any basis in science, and aren't just some hand waving crap.
Not happening.
If someone truly believes the Earth is 6000 years old, then I'd prefer to get offending them out of the way right off the bat. Because there is no reasoned and intelligent conversation which can ensue.
You're entitled to your own opinions, but you're sure as hell not entitled to your own facts.
Engaging in that level of stupid, because it implies reason, evidence, and logic are in effect.
You jest (I hope), but I've actually seen some of the crap the young-Earth creationists cite against geological evidence.
It literally boils down, as an example, to "rocks are hard, how could they get all bendy in geological formations". It's the fucking Wookie Defense make by drooling idiots who then think they've won the argument but in fact have reinforced they're drooling idiots.
The sheer drivel of crap intended to be cited by people who don't comprehend science to refute science is utterly mind boggling.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I can tell, because Uber wants it to be.
Which, also as far as I can tell, is a complete lie as the company seems to think they stepped in unicorn poop and can now make up their own definitions and decide what laws apply to them.
Define, "defensible". Because I think you're full of it.
Living on the surface of an alien planet under hostile conditions is a pretty tricky affair. Maintaining a presence on the 'dark' side of the moon so you can have even better astronomy is pretty cool. A staging area to look at working towards more of space is something we don't have now. Because we fucking well can has always been a marvelous idea.
The problems we need to solve for Mars? We can wok on those problems before having to solve a 2 year travel time with no escape plan.
So when you say "no defensible reason" I say bullshit. There's plenty we could do on the moon which actually is of value, and is entirely defensible. And which actually helps us learn about what we'd do on the surface of Mars. Or any other planetary surface.
Many of us have been hackers and hobbyists, and have been attracted to and reveled in the process of patching, updating, compiling, fixing, tweaking, and otherwise fondling technology just because it is there. I am most definitely among them.
However, many of us have aged, bought out own basements, acquired some friends and other hobbies, ventured into the outdoors in daylight and everything ... and subsequently decided we have far better things to do with our lives.
For most of us, time comes when patching and updating just becomes a chore .. and what we really want is a product which works out of the box instead of building it from a kit. And the less we have to fsck with it, the better.
Many moons ago I'd stay up late to patch my OS and recompile everything. Now I find I simply don't give a damn.
I'm not judging if you still call yourself a hacker. Likewise, don't expect me to be impressed either.
Wow, you're an AC, so I assume you're an asshole, a moron, or both.
Real companies with real business needs and real aversion to risk need to manage their risk by not continuously doing regression testing on someone else's shit, and have better things to do than that.
You don't grab random pieces and throw it into your production environment. You grab stuff and start deploying through your lab, and then your other environments. But you don't play beta tester for your vendors. Ever.
Sorry, but if you think a day one roll-out to a real machine doing real business critical work is a sane idea, then I suggest it's you who should stay in the kiddie pool.
For those of us who have been involved in change management for regulated industries where "absolutely must work" is mandatory, "new" means "not trusted". It's that simple.
An OS update? No way unless it's been around a while ... because we've all seen far too many things which introduce new bugs to do that.
But, hey, you can tell your mom you had a good day in the basement if it makes you feel better about yourself. But don't act like we should give a damn what an AC tells us about change management.
Exactly. Self cars need to be 100% self driving, or they're utterly useless.
You can't have a failure mode where it says "OK, meat sock, I have no idea what to do, it's your turn and you have 0.7 seconds to react". That will simply not work.
That would be idiotic and dangerous, and mean that self-driving cars are mostly here but have huge gaps in what they can do.
But it should be like a cab, with the passengers being exactly that ... passengers.
To me, a self-driving car remains a proof of concept if there is ever a mode in which the user needs to take over, the user even has control they could use, or if the user pays for liability insurance as a "driver".
If Google wants to have self-driving cars, they should be like taxi cabs, and they should have their own liability. This hybrid model is doomed to fail.
Do they really think anybody is going to have a "high level knowledge of the technology"? There's no way in hell Google is going to let anybody product engineers know any of the details, so unless they mean "the computer, it does the driving bits" there isn't a damned thing people will know.
And the sitting there pretending to drive? Well, that's what happens when clueless lawmakers try to pass laws about technology they don't remotely understand.
But, whatever, the flying^Wself-driving car isn't something which will catch on in any meaningful sense of the word ... people aren't going to buy these because they don't care, or because the benefits will be very limited.
Like so many things the futurists tell us are coming Real Soon Now, the world isn't going to be re-tooled to account for this, and they will have to coexist with human drivers for a VERY long time to come. But if they think society is going to spend billions and billions of dollars changing the existing infrastructure to suit their pipedream, they're delusional.
But, hey, that's what futurists are for. Telling us about stuff which sounds cool but which are otherwise not likely to happen as claimed.
You know what ... just say no.
Unless you enjoy doing that kind of support for free, tell them they're on their own.
My parents live quite far from me. I told them flat out I can't be support for their computer because I have no way to see it, and I don't know WTF they did to it.
But why people keep letting themselves get sucked into the black hole of supporting technology for friends and family I will never know. There's no limit to how much you can get dragged into that crap.
You know, this has nothing to do with personality ... it has to do with change management and how risk averse your organization is, as well as how important the system is.
Many of us will have worked in IT environments with very low threshold for risk and breakage. Which means we don't apply a change unless it has been verified elsewhere ... most regulated industries are (or should be) sufficiently risk averse that they have no choice but to be extra cautious.
I've worked in enough industries with a low enough risk threshold that I can't imagine doing anything but.
For people who work in IT, this has nothing do with personality .... except that guy who works in a regulated/risk averse industry and still does stupid and risky things thinking "what could possibly go wrong?".
"That guy" tends to get taken off projects involving important systems really fast, because stupidity and risk taking where you've been told there is no room for risk leads to bad outcomes.
But I've worked with "that guy" who would make ad hoc changes on a running Prod system without telling anybody. And, when he inevitably broke something, he got told in no uncertain terms to stay the hell away from the machines.
For some of us, not taking risks is in the job description.
However, we may end up in those jobs because we were already risk averse.
Let the suckers and adventurers be the beta testers.
Don't run the crap which is most likely to be causing you security problems in the first place -- I've never been impacted by a Flash zero day exploit because I don't run it.
Many years of being around computers has taught me that I have no intention of putting up with the drama of beta testing for companies who do a lousy job of QA.
I've seen WAY too many things which are broken on day 1, or even worse, which introduce new broken on day 1 that it takes some time to identify.
There isn't an OS vendor on the planet I'd accept a fresh release from and install on the first day.
If you do this stuff as a hobby, have fun with it. The rest of us don't have the time or the inclination to consider upgrading the OS to be a hobby.
Nobody but you said "useful replacement", and certainly not in the context that it worked with other XMMP based chat stuff.
Facebook is making a replacement beneficial for them.
People not using their platform need not apply. Facebook doesn't care about them.
Why, a smaller screen, a wrist strap, and a device you have no idea what to do with but which you can try to brag to your friends about.
My guess is for a VERY large majority of people the smartwatch doesn't offer much of anything other than bragging rights.
This might bet the point at which Apple without Jobs falters.
You can't introduce the "revolutionary" new product and not have the killer use-case for it. You can't release "teh smartwatch" and have no idea of WTF people will use it for.
Wow, the ability to see my text messages without looking at my phone? Nope, not compelling.
The smartwatch has always felt like a gimmick with little utility for most people.
And this got cemented when they were selling the gold plated "gee but I'm a rich asshole" version. I'm pretty sure I've never heard a single person who could finish the sentence "I want a smart watch because ..." with anything substantive.
Android or Apple, I don't see any value in splashing out for something which they still are hoping someone will create the thing which makes it useful.
Sorry, no. Increasingly mobile consumer electronics are just vehicles for ads, analytics, and giving up my privacy ... and any app which makes use of this is more of the same. Some of us are moving to less digital crap in our lives, and not more.
This falls firmly in the camp of no defined purpose, no benefit, and not getting my money.
I figure there's really only two plausible scenarios here:
1) It's the usual band of clowns and morons doing this for fun, in which case the demands are random crap which don't mean anything
2) The hackers will attempt to claim they represent a religious point of view and wish to clean up the world.
The only commonality with the sites is that they are there to enable some behavior which some asshole who isn't affected thinks is immoral.
Maybe it's Islamic State taking a break from raping their captured sex slaves to tell us how immoral we all are. Or it's some other band of morons looking for attention and this has nothing to do with anything.
This isn't an understanding, it's an assumption made by us to try to put some parameters in place around what we'd look for.
The reality is, we have no idea what to expect.
We also have no idea how many (if any) there could be, how they'd be distributed, and how far away they could be ... remember, it could take centuries to ever hear a signal originating from far enough away.
Nobody said it's a perfect solution, and there's no guarantee it will work.
If you don't listen you'll simply never know. But, really, nobody can say for certain that any of what you say is true ... it's just a supposition, and a term in Drake's equation for which there is no real answer, just guesses.
So you listen anyway, and see what you can learn. You know, actual science.
You know, sometimes businesses give you shitty service. In which case nobody is holding their reputation hostage, they've have earned a lousy reputation through bad service.
Usually when I travel I look into reviews. When I do travel I mostly rent from owner-rented condos and the like. Give me a great, clean place to stay and I'll give you a good review. Give me a lousy place to stay, not so much.
The trick with travel reviews is you have to read enough of them to understand them, and you also have to get a sense of what to expect for where you're going.
I've seen some reviews for places which after a while you go "OK, some people don't understand the differences between their home and where they're going". So some reviews will complain about stupid things because they don't know any better (I've seen reviews complaining the voltage was 220v or that there were lizards around ... and this means someone didn't understand they were going to a tropical country different from their own. I've even seen people complain about rain, like that's under anyone's control.).
I've seen other reviews about rude or lazy staff, or unclean conditions, and I take note of those.
But, really, having read a lot of TripAdvisor reviews, the majority of them are written by real people who have actually been there.
If you give crap service and get a bad review, you don't get to play the victim card. Despite all of this bullshit happening where companies sue because of bad reviews, telling the truth about an actual experiences is legal and not libelous, despite the morons who want it to be otherwise.
And I would say any application whose functionality can be replaced with the web page should be uninstalled.
The app is just there to scrape your contacts and serve you ads.
Why give them access to that crap? I would no sooner trust Facebook with access to my phone that Zuckerfuck would allow me access to his wallet.
Stop treating Facebook as trustworthy. They're not. They're an ad and analytics company.
Who says they intend it to be useful replacement?
Facebook wants everybody to run their application so they can mine all your fucking data.
The don't give a crap about 3rd part clients, they care about ads and analytics.
Seriously, stop expecting benevolence from Facebook. They're greedy bastards, nothing more. They're not going to do a damned thing which doesn't maximize their bottom line.
Well, Hollywood is getting a great ROI.
Look, American law enforcement has become an enforcement arm for copyright and defending business interests.
DHS is now responsible for monitoring for copyright infringement, and the customs agents are responsible for doing search and seizure.
They're doing their job ... defending the oligarchy they now work for.
If you haven't been paying attention to the fact that the US government is literally doing IP enforcement on behalf of the copyright cartel, you've not been paying attention.
Hell, US foreign policy/trade policy is both written by, and in the service of, the copyright cartel.
Don't you know the US government works for multinational corporations now to ensure maximizing corporate profits?
I really wish I was joking, but I'm not.
This is hardly the first time US agencies have expended lots of resources to protect copyright ... Kim.com for instance. It sure as hell won't be the last.
I remember it as more like "Step 4. Wait 37 minutes for it to fail, Step 5. Try again."
I certainly do NOT miss loading stuff from cassette tape.
WTF are you talking about? A 5.5" screen running at 1920x1080?
That's pretty much standard these days.
Honestly, I see people carrying around giant Samsung 7" phablets all the time.
Is there still a company called Commodore which owns this stuff? I assumed it was long since dead and gone.
Honestly, sell it as an app .. I'm sure you don't need a custom Android to emulate a frigging C64 on a modern smart phone.
At least, I sure as hell hope a 1.7 GHz "octa-core" processor is up to that task. I mean, we're talking 35+ year old technology for crying out loud.
What you are describing is sophistry, and not science.
Just because people go to extraordinary lengths to justify their religion, doesn't make any of it true.
No. By insisting we engage means we've given in to the position that these silly beliefs have any basis in science, and aren't just some hand waving crap.
Not happening.
If someone truly believes the Earth is 6000 years old, then I'd prefer to get offending them out of the way right off the bat. Because there is no reasoned and intelligent conversation which can ensue.
You're entitled to your own opinions, but you're sure as hell not entitled to your own facts.
Engaging in that level of stupid, because it implies reason, evidence, and logic are in effect.
Why yes, yes I am ... my bad.
Don't forget Keith Richards.
You jest (I hope), but I've actually seen some of the crap the young-Earth creationists cite against geological evidence.
It literally boils down, as an example, to "rocks are hard, how could they get all bendy in geological formations". It's the fucking Wookie Defense make by drooling idiots who then think they've won the argument but in fact have reinforced they're drooling idiots.
The sheer drivel of crap intended to be cited by people who don't comprehend science to refute science is utterly mind boggling.