But downsizing and reorganization are large(ish)-scale endeavors, and you can't as much pinpoint bad weed (e.g. individual bad employees) as much as clear mediocre plots (e.g. below avg. teams yet with valuable pros in them). This is a bad thing for everyone, as there is liability companies aren't willing to go through to single out bad professionals.
I have seen first-hand very good professionals leave (emigrate even) because the company went on a bad hiring spree that benefited nobody but unemployment rates and workforce numbers.
I don't know if you mean limited as in legally, but I guess that's why employers everywhere try to build a large professional network - you get the perks of inside info under the table. Now, most people will say that's not fair game, but is that any different than asking around your friends what's the best mechanic for your particular needs and budget?
Discrimination can only be an excuse so far. If there is to be any legislation about burning or praising past employees, it should relate to the granularity of the subject - things sexual preference, religion "physiological schedules" (read: long bath breaks) are sacred, but nonetheless, skill, effort and value ratings are as valid and ethically sound between companies, as they are inside the same company. They can and should be made public, and all the employer needs is to inform the employee and request acceptance of it. It's a meritocracy for a reason and society works on merits.
It does take away one of the biggest assets we have on the quitting economy - clean start and/or progression through job-switch. But you can always switch industries or cities. IT is versatile. Then again we all would get a great benefit from it - seamless, balanced and actually just progression - no more freshly-made, out of company team-lead or Whatever VP with 0 experience and merit for the job.
As to your final question, I can give a pretty straight forward yet long answer: because of a mix of 1. employers/managers wanting to maximize opex vs revenue, by just throwing cheap labour to the problem (IT's way of throwing money at the problem); and 2. because the HR teams/companies (i.e. recruiters) are so blindly incompetent by wanting them recruitment commission, they mostly have 0 filtering other than an IT degree check.
Companies should have 1to1 technical interviews and/or ask for past references, and I don't mean ref. letters, but flat out calls to former employers and teachers. Now, many will argue this is abuse, but if I was an employer (not yet had the chance to), I would both use this and like to get called about a past employee. Just not a current one of course and that rules most second jobs. But it does work after the second job change pretty well.
Oh and did I mention Linked In? Recruiters can't use it for shyt... More often than not I have seen usage of that great platform for nothing but sending indiscriminate SPAM. That goes to show how employers are just bad at recruiting. And sometimes they even do this with github accounts that have absolutely no "non-passive" activity (i.e. they spam accounts that have never even forked or committed anything).
it is not only sad, it is actually evil considering some of these people are actually advocating against ecigs - and with it the possibility for others to live a healthier, longer life, just because they can't take an easy way out.
Imagine if when the polio or measles vaccine were invented, random people who got cured without it just went full donkey and said "everybody should just have the will to wait it out and get cured sporadically or out of free will, LIKE ME (mimimimimi)". Addictions are just another disease, like obesity, alcoholism or hell, even kleptomania. That's why the WHO treats them as epidemics (well not the last one, it's not that widely spread). It's about time people found a cure, and there is no room for naysayers in our evolved society about this.
A-ha! But you know, smokers and non-smokers alike dread vapor more than they dread cig butts. I am an ecig user and casual smoker, and being both I have come to notice some people will not like either. As long as the ecig/cig user has the respect he needs for others, he can have any habits he wants without messing with others' freedoms.
That's very good advice, but as many people know, it doesnt work on everyone. The good thing about ecigs is that they do not discriminate - they work on motivated, demotivated, lack of self-esteem or not people. And they DO work as seen on many many studies.
Ecigs are, for many, the only way they can attack the habit head on. Like for many it is going to a doctor. Some people don't even have the creativity of thinking about cold-turkey strategies like you did. I commend you for it, but do not extrapolate your case universally - that is what science is for and it's been long-proven cold turkey isn't for everyone. And ecigs are, scientifically, getting proof that they indeed are for everyone.
Motivation is key, and telling yourself years and years of non-smoking are a whole different victory is your prerogative. I look at your statement and I immediately think about the AA medal system, and how effective it is. Good for you.
But the formal definition of quitting is as soon as the chemical addiction stops, and that's some months after (not sure if 3, but should be close). So you see, the study is very relevant. Sure there is a latent, deeply buried feeling that a hit will be good - it happens on any drug, and even non-drugs such as sugar have been proven to be highly addictive to a subconscious, instinctive level, no matter the time without them.
You can brag about cold-turkey-quitting all you want and how long were the years since you did, but the fact of the matter is what kept you going was your own scenario, which probably didn't even have ecigs at the time so they weren't even an option. This study looks at smokers in an indiscriminate way, whatever their responsibilities, pressure or status are, and it sees success with ecigs in a generalized ways, especially in the years ecigs have seen the biggest evolution (which is likely from 2012 onward). Ecigs are now very enjoyable, very accessible, have a lot of variety in taste, size, and features, especially the electronics involved. There are smart chips that allow control of wattage either on the device or on smartphones, and there are even temperature controlled devices. These days ecigs are not only cool - they are good. And I urge any quitter with an urge to going back to smoking to try them out, or any smoker with any intention of quitting. I bet you wont be disappointed.
I am one of these. I basically grab a cig from friends every now and then, and either buy a pack every other week to give back or just pay back with some puffs of my ecig.
90% of the time I put nic on my system these days is, for better or worse, through the use of vapor from an ecig. I have been doing this for the last 3-4 years, never being able to quit consistently because a lot of people I hang out, work or spend the weekend with (upper family) smoke. I can say I have felt a (big) lot better, and every time I smoke 2 or 3 cigs in a row I feel oh-so-much more fatigued, I cough a ton more, and I wake up with a very sore throat. I managed to get back to moderate/intensive running/cycling/swimming consistently ever since I started up ecigs.
They have a policy that refunds are only done to the original purchasing card (note: I am not from the US and this was on Amz UK). I had a warranty return made 1 month before the full warranty ended (details: fitbit dislodged itself from the bracelet, and lucky me, they had no more stock ). Problem: I use virtual prepaid cards, and that card was no longer associated with my account. I am in the process of contacting my bank to get letterhead from it stating the associated refund transfer never reached my account. The bank itself is doing the same thing to the government entity that issues those virtual prepaid cards... Long story short, I am still waiting for the 130 bucks to get to my account, 2 months after the item was returned, and I expect a good 2 more of redtape.
Nice and courteous as they may be, they are completely adamant about changing that policy and refunding me in store credit or to another credit card.
Since companies like to consolidate different markets with the same products with minor flavor changes, I don't see them allowing unlocking when the most important market of all (US) requires it indirectly (by the aforementioned complexity of making specific channel/power output locks instead of flat out firmware lock).
So I believe our best hopes reside in non-US-centric crowdsourced solutions for open routers, compatible with existing solutions or even packaging their own open software solution in the product. Other than that, you can only rely on aftermarket old routers, or hacked/jailbroken stuff that is sure to pop in the wild, and is gonna bring along their own set of problems, namely accidental like software bugs, or intentionally evil like trojans, SMS/MMS auto-senders (in the case of 3g/4g routers), backdoors and spyware of all sorts.
Much like the "right to repair" or DRM to, router lockdown is gonna be a major problem for the average tinkerer that likes his leverage to do what he wants with his property. It's a disadvantage of a capitalist society that puts corporate interest ahead of individual rights, even when these interests are brought forth by the FCC (much like net neutrality is now a good thing for the federal government... who do they think they are fooling with that one).
Even when they need a 200'ish page ball of mud to veil it from genpop, and an under the table paycheck to whoever is in charge.
Even internet trolls are better than telecom operators these days, ethically and moral-wise. What has the world come to. At least in the last century, all a company needed to make a buck was some dodgy catchy marketing, and a stupid enough target consumer group. Now they will attack core rights indiscriminately for that investor relations briefing. Innovation and capitalism cannot be senselessly name-dropped at will, and it's time someone sets the guidelines for such a problem in developed societies such as he US, before full-fledged leftism comes back with a vengeance.
...but I'd sure as hell like to have an easy-access, nicely detailed list of funding parties for this research, along with the head researchers background, with their past work clear and conclusions accessible.
I like my research unbiased and authorship transparent. That also applies to headlines around the subject - I see none of that in this post.
Or did everyone already forget, now that it's silly season, that big sugar is a large research patron?
website white/blacklisting; corporate VPN setup, maintenance and wide deployment; machine (hard and and software) assignment, maintenance, violation-management and whatnot; support system setup provisioning and maintenance (ERPs, accounting, time-tracking...); version-control/website/applicational/db/issue-tracking hosting setup, maintenance and management; and the most common and cumbersome of all - wired and wireless network management for internal, external, transient and development usage. Good luck with that last one, it includes hardware selection, spatial placement, load-balancing, QoS'ing, virtual-network arrangement, and the not-so-odd hardware incompatibility.
The list goes on, but I think that bunch will get you started out pretty fairly.
...which I can't really turn off on managed @work machines. I will get anything from 3 to 20 freezes per week, each lasting around 1min or more, which when looking at a side screen's top output all I see is a 100% spike on "unattended-upgrades" process. And yes this is on an SSD machine so I doubt it's disk access.
But on second thought, my biggest gripe these last 2 years has been BDPROCHOT flags on my Lenovo U41 laptop, and I believe I'm not alone on this one. It seems most Lenovo's consumer-grade Intel ULV laptops (any Core-I that ends with no HQ) ship with a firmware-based, trigger-happy BDPROCHOT flag. The flag turns on constantly, even when nothing around the CPU or the cooling solution is remotely close to 1/3 max temp. This is another one of Lenovo's long-standing signature fuck-ups to low-level and consumer-proof the shit out of their bad BAD warranty and "marketing" policies. Another example is that infamous BIOS-based insta-installed crapware on newly installed Windows on first boot.
It's been 3 BIOS updates and Lenovo still considers my CPU cores should be ULTRA THROTTLED to 8x multipliers (i.e. 500mhz per core!!!) every time the GPU wakes, such as for playing the most basic vid clip that the GPU natively decodes, or any use of OGL or D3D API calls.
Throttlestop's BDPROCHOT spoofing has been the only single way to mitigate this, but TS is understandably a half-baked enthusiast app that cannot be minimized to tray and has a weirdly justified expiration date that forces update, basically meaning the laptop will become useless when the dev stops support. Furthermore I have yet to find a solution on *nix machines to fully disable BDPROCHOT flags forcing 8x multiplier.
well, they did save some cash while Prime lasted on whatever they needed right? I guess it's getting back to them.
The only real issue is if Prime forces stores to close in scenarios where they eventually don't open again, such as because of moving on to more stable revenue, as they couldn't afford the luxury of opening seasonaly (not by the year seasons, but by Amazon's willingness to NOT ship seasons...). This is an obvious problem because Amazon has the scale to afford doing this repeatedly - I know it has happened in amazon UK, where they decided to offer free shipping to overseas on minimum value orders, stopped, then started back, then stopped again, and the scale in Europe is much smaller. The result was a lot of local shops simply stopped selling (one notable example is the used gaming industry, which stopped accepting non-regionally marked tax seals, but the market went away because of C2C platforms such as ebay, and the biggest shop chain around simply defaulted; now people still shop on Amazon uk, but the price can be as high as it was before, in local shops, and the local gvnm't is the biggest loser since taxation of that product moved country).
The search for the best analog interface is the wild goose chase of the digital age. It's like those guys that still want to play with them old arcade pads for cool points and dress it up as "oh, it's more responsive". True responsiveness will come when I think about the milk I forgot and my Prime subscription, and 1min later that drone is flying. Sans Alexa involved in the matter.
No time for cords, goggles or super high end GPUs when all the signals I need can be Tx/Rx'd from a 5G tower directly to my neocortex.
I believe we all still think about the dangers of ubiquitous and unlimited information/communication (or at least have someone dear with that opinion, whom we attempt to understand).
I always try to tell myself (and others) that the "AFK", physical, "real world" society we live in is no different than phenomenons like TV, mass media or the internet. This applies equally to whatever mean we use to access it, like the www, because in a way or another, it will be biased (notorious examples are Google/Apple on mobile, or gov'ts, ISPs or even registrars for the web in general).
The major differences that exist in, say, the interactions between 2 human in a room, and 2 billion in a social network or an online game is, well scale obviously, "speed" (or whatever you wanna call the lack of spatial placement no longer having meaning, which makes us all ultra fast communicating), and most of all, the dynamics of that scale and "speed". The dynamics might be the only single thing that has a positive OR negative effect on the interactions, when compared to the 1st scenario, but I believe that, as limited, nature-bred animals we are, these dynamics are what eventually make us human and not irrational beings as opposed to amoebas.
That second guy in a room can be a paid troll. He can be your father. He can be a feminist, a humanist or a neonazi. As much as he can be the best person to talk about any given subject in an assertive, informed way. You never know anyone's opinion, sometimes you don't even know yours until the time comes to act upon it.
You shouldn't really lose your sleep over what you can no longer prevent. The guy made the iphone, but the past is the past, and we no longer need an Einstein to tell us that. If you wanna trouble your mind with the effect of information overload, do it on your radius of action, to those around you you can actually have a positive influence about it (not only your real friends and family, but anyone who takes any shit from you). It's not 100% gonna be useful for everyone, but it sure can't hurt to share some wisdom om how to cope with the modern times.
I thought the blockchain was public. I'm not particularly knowledgeable of the process specifics or the computing power necessary for it, but if "valuation vs actual worth" is so important, I'm sure someone could simply set up a shop that tracks the amounts, type, frequency of transactions, among other stats of the currency simply by polling the blockchain and other publicly available records.
And then, with the simple motto of supply and demand, one could estimate the worth at a very trusty rate, maybe even better than what there is today for companies (which trade based on the stock market, investor relation publications, speculation, government influence such as central banks...). I'd say it's a lot better to track the worth of something so simple, so public, so transparent as Bitcoin than it is to track companies that abuse omission, legal loopholes, in and out of their base nations.
well, technically the measure was put in place back in the 40's (50's?), and only recently reverted ISPs to Title I, so you can't say Title II is tyranny, it's just businesses wanting to reverse policy, because, well, businessess are driven by investment, and that investment took into account policing under the old Title. Now they can't make the money they were expected to from robbing small internet startups, by cap'ing their sheer productive power unless they buy the fast lane. Oh, and of course, user-bound throttling, which is actually the worse as it blocks the individual and not organizations.
But yes, you got it right on the UK dept. (not England alone btw) - they are imposing a lot of restriction themselves (the govm't) like what the ISPs are doing here, but when you really look at it, they're actually not hampering small startups nor individual user rights as much, since they are targetting mostly adult content and piracy outlets by fully blocking them whenever possible (e.g. parental controls ON by default, or pirate sites completely filtered at the backbone level, not the ISP). Technically they are still going against some basic rights, but they do seem to have the posture of a real people-representing entity that the govm't should be. I personally don't like what they do, but you really can't compare it to what the FCC is trying to give away for free to financially-bound parties.
I don't know if you suddenly turned into irony, if it was irony from your first comment, or if it still is honest obliviousness to whatever you're saying being the actual problems of current currencies (and the "solutions" eventually found to "counter" the problems).
Slashdot Mirror
But downsizing and reorganization are large(ish)-scale endeavors, and you can't as much pinpoint bad weed (e.g. individual bad employees) as much as clear mediocre plots (e.g. below avg. teams yet with valuable pros in them). This is a bad thing for everyone, as there is liability companies aren't willing to go through to single out bad professionals.
I have seen first-hand very good professionals leave (emigrate even) because the company went on a bad hiring spree that benefited nobody but unemployment rates and workforce numbers.
I don't know if you mean limited as in legally, but I guess that's why employers everywhere try to build a large professional network - you get the perks of inside info under the table. Now, most people will say that's not fair game, but is that any different than asking around your friends what's the best mechanic for your particular needs and budget?
Discrimination can only be an excuse so far. If there is to be any legislation about burning or praising past employees, it should relate to the granularity of the subject - things sexual preference, religion "physiological schedules" (read: long bath breaks) are sacred, but nonetheless, skill, effort and value ratings are as valid and ethically sound between companies, as they are inside the same company. They can and should be made public, and all the employer needs is to inform the employee and request acceptance of it. It's a meritocracy for a reason and society works on merits.
It does take away one of the biggest assets we have on the quitting economy - clean start and/or progression through job-switch. But you can always switch industries or cities. IT is versatile. Then again we all would get a great benefit from it - seamless, balanced and actually just progression - no more freshly-made, out of company team-lead or Whatever VP with 0 experience and merit for the job.
I mostly see your point and agree.
As to your final question, I can give a pretty straight forward yet long answer: because of a mix of 1. employers/managers wanting to maximize opex vs revenue, by just throwing cheap labour to the problem (IT's way of throwing money at the problem); and 2. because the HR teams/companies (i.e. recruiters) are so blindly incompetent by wanting them recruitment commission, they mostly have 0 filtering other than an IT degree check.
Companies should have 1to1 technical interviews and/or ask for past references, and I don't mean ref. letters, but flat out calls to former employers and teachers. Now, many will argue this is abuse, but if I was an employer (not yet had the chance to), I would both use this and like to get called about a past employee. Just not a current one of course and that rules most second jobs. But it does work after the second job change pretty well.
Oh and did I mention Linked In? Recruiters can't use it for shyt... More often than not I have seen usage of that great platform for nothing but sending indiscriminate SPAM. That goes to show how employers are just bad at recruiting. And sometimes they even do this with github accounts that have absolutely no "non-passive" activity (i.e. they spam accounts that have never even forked or committed anything).
But he was ousted now, so it makes sense in the NOW of things. Man I laughed so hard
Man, you're just evil!
*makes an office request for a white BIC ball pen*
it is not only sad, it is actually evil considering some of these people are actually advocating against ecigs - and with it the possibility for others to live a healthier, longer life, just because they can't take an easy way out.
Imagine if when the polio or measles vaccine were invented, random people who got cured without it just went full donkey and said "everybody should just have the will to wait it out and get cured sporadically or out of free will, LIKE ME (mimimimimi)". Addictions are just another disease, like obesity, alcoholism or hell, even kleptomania. That's why the WHO treats them as epidemics (well not the last one, it's not that widely spread). It's about time people found a cure, and there is no room for naysayers in our evolved society about this.
A-ha! But you know, smokers and non-smokers alike dread vapor more than they dread cig butts. I am an ecig user and casual smoker, and being both I have come to notice some people will not like either. As long as the ecig/cig user has the respect he needs for others, he can have any habits he wants without messing with others' freedoms.
That's very good advice, but as many people know, it doesnt work on everyone. The good thing about ecigs is that they do not discriminate - they work on motivated, demotivated, lack of self-esteem or not people. And they DO work as seen on many many studies.
Ecigs are, for many, the only way they can attack the habit head on. Like for many it is going to a doctor. Some people don't even have the creativity of thinking about cold-turkey strategies like you did. I commend you for it, but do not extrapolate your case universally - that is what science is for and it's been long-proven cold turkey isn't for everyone. And ecigs are, scientifically, getting proof that they indeed are for everyone.
Oh wait so you'd rather give money to Big Tobacco? LOL
Motivation is key, and telling yourself years and years of non-smoking are a whole different victory is your prerogative. I look at your statement and I immediately think about the AA medal system, and how effective it is. Good for you.
But the formal definition of quitting is as soon as the chemical addiction stops, and that's some months after (not sure if 3, but should be close). So you see, the study is very relevant. Sure there is a latent, deeply buried feeling that a hit will be good - it happens on any drug, and even non-drugs such as sugar have been proven to be highly addictive to a subconscious, instinctive level, no matter the time without them.
You can brag about cold-turkey-quitting all you want and how long were the years since you did, but the fact of the matter is what kept you going was your own scenario, which probably didn't even have ecigs at the time so they weren't even an option. This study looks at smokers in an indiscriminate way, whatever their responsibilities, pressure or status are, and it sees success with ecigs in a generalized ways, especially in the years ecigs have seen the biggest evolution (which is likely from 2012 onward). Ecigs are now very enjoyable, very accessible, have a lot of variety in taste, size, and features, especially the electronics involved. There are smart chips that allow control of wattage either on the device or on smartphones, and there are even temperature controlled devices. These days ecigs are not only cool - they are good. And I urge any quitter with an urge to going back to smoking to try them out, or any smoker with any intention of quitting. I bet you wont be disappointed.
I am one of these. I basically grab a cig from friends every now and then, and either buy a pack every other week to give back or just pay back with some puffs of my ecig.
90% of the time I put nic on my system these days is, for better or worse, through the use of vapor from an ecig. I have been doing this for the last 3-4 years, never being able to quit consistently because a lot of people I hang out, work or spend the weekend with (upper family) smoke. I can say I have felt a (big) lot better, and every time I smoke 2 or 3 cigs in a row I feel oh-so-much more fatigued, I cough a ton more, and I wake up with a very sore throat. I managed to get back to moderate/intensive running/cycling/swimming consistently ever since I started up ecigs.
Not always top notch.
They have a policy that refunds are only done to the original purchasing card (note: I am not from the US and this was on Amz UK).
I had a warranty return made 1 month before the full warranty ended (details: fitbit dislodged itself from the bracelet, and lucky me, they had no more stock ). Problem: I use virtual prepaid cards, and that card was no longer associated with my account. I am in the process of contacting my bank to get letterhead from it stating the associated refund transfer never reached my account. The bank itself is doing the same thing to the government entity that issues those virtual prepaid cards... Long story short, I am still waiting for the 130 bucks to get to my account, 2 months after the item was returned, and I expect a good 2 more of redtape.
Nice and courteous as they may be, they are completely adamant about changing that policy and refunding me in store credit or to another credit card.
Since companies like to consolidate different markets with the same products with minor flavor changes, I don't see them allowing unlocking when the most important market of all (US) requires it indirectly (by the aforementioned complexity of making specific channel/power output locks instead of flat out firmware lock).
So I believe our best hopes reside in non-US-centric crowdsourced solutions for open routers, compatible with existing solutions or even packaging their own open software solution in the product. Other than that, you can only rely on aftermarket old routers, or hacked/jailbroken stuff that is sure to pop in the wild, and is gonna bring along their own set of problems, namely accidental like software bugs, or intentionally evil like trojans, SMS/MMS auto-senders (in the case of 3g/4g routers), backdoors and spyware of all sorts.
Much like the "right to repair" or DRM to, router lockdown is gonna be a major problem for the average tinkerer that likes his leverage to do what he wants with his property. It's a disadvantage of a capitalist society that puts corporate interest ahead of individual rights, even when these interests are brought forth by the FCC (much like net neutrality is now a good thing for the federal government... who do they think they are fooling with that one).
Even when they need a 200'ish page ball of mud to veil it from genpop, and an under the table paycheck to whoever is in charge.
Even internet trolls are better than telecom operators these days, ethically and moral-wise. What has the world come to. At least in the last century, all a company needed to make a buck was some dodgy catchy marketing, and a stupid enough target consumer group. Now they will attack core rights indiscriminately for that investor relations briefing. Innovation and capitalism cannot be senselessly name-dropped at will, and it's time someone sets the guidelines for such a problem in developed societies such as he US, before full-fledged leftism comes back with a vengeance.
...but I'd sure as hell like to have an easy-access, nicely detailed list of funding parties for this research, along with the head researchers background, with their past work clear and conclusions accessible.
I like my research unbiased and authorship transparent. That also applies to headlines around the subject - I see none of that in this post.
Or did everyone already forget, now that it's silly season, that big sugar is a large research patron?
I love the way that the ITsec industry is a shame-economy one. Improvement by mudding
website white/blacklisting; corporate VPN setup, maintenance and wide deployment; machine (hard and and software) assignment, maintenance, violation-management and whatnot; support system setup provisioning and maintenance (ERPs, accounting, time-tracking...); version-control/website/applicational/db/issue-tracking hosting setup, maintenance and management; and the most common and cumbersome of all - wired and wireless network management for internal, external, transient and development usage. Good luck with that last one, it includes hardware selection, spatial placement, load-balancing, QoS'ing, virtual-network arrangement, and the not-so-odd hardware incompatibility.
The list goes on, but I think that bunch will get you started out pretty fairly.
...which I can't really turn off on managed @work machines. I will get anything from 3 to 20 freezes per week, each lasting around 1min or more, which when looking at a side screen's top output all I see is a 100% spike on "unattended-upgrades" process. And yes this is on an SSD machine so I doubt it's disk access.
But on second thought, my biggest gripe these last 2 years has been BDPROCHOT flags on my Lenovo U41 laptop, and I believe I'm not alone on this one. It seems most Lenovo's consumer-grade Intel ULV laptops (any Core-I that ends with no HQ) ship with a firmware-based, trigger-happy BDPROCHOT flag. The flag turns on constantly, even when nothing around the CPU or the cooling solution is remotely close to 1/3 max temp. This is another one of Lenovo's long-standing signature fuck-ups to low-level and consumer-proof the shit out of their bad BAD warranty and "marketing" policies. Another example is that infamous BIOS-based insta-installed crapware on newly installed Windows on first boot.
It's been 3 BIOS updates and Lenovo still considers my CPU cores should be ULTRA THROTTLED to 8x multipliers (i.e. 500mhz per core!!!) every time the GPU wakes, such as for playing the most basic vid clip that the GPU natively decodes, or any use of OGL or D3D API calls.
Throttlestop's BDPROCHOT spoofing has been the only single way to mitigate this, but TS is understandably a half-baked enthusiast app that cannot be minimized to tray and has a weirdly justified expiration date that forces update, basically meaning the laptop will become useless when the dev stops support. Furthermore I have yet to find a solution on *nix machines to fully disable BDPROCHOT flags forcing 8x multiplier.
well, they did save some cash while Prime lasted on whatever they needed right? I guess it's getting back to them.
The only real issue is if Prime forces stores to close in scenarios where they eventually don't open again, such as because of moving on to more stable revenue, as they couldn't afford the luxury of opening seasonaly (not by the year seasons, but by Amazon's willingness to NOT ship seasons...). This is an obvious problem because Amazon has the scale to afford doing this repeatedly - I know it has happened in amazon UK, where they decided to offer free shipping to overseas on minimum value orders, stopped, then started back, then stopped again, and the scale in Europe is much smaller. The result was a lot of local shops simply stopped selling (one notable example is the used gaming industry, which stopped accepting non-regionally marked tax seals, but the market went away because of C2C platforms such as ebay, and the biggest shop chain around simply defaulted; now people still shop on Amazon uk, but the price can be as high as it was before, in local shops, and the local gvnm't is the biggest loser since taxation of that product moved country).
The search for the best analog interface is the wild goose chase of the digital age. It's like those guys that still want to play with them old arcade pads for cool points and dress it up as "oh, it's more responsive". True responsiveness will come when I think about the milk I forgot and my Prime subscription, and 1min later that drone is flying. Sans Alexa involved in the matter.
No time for cords, goggles or super high end GPUs when all the signals I need can be Tx/Rx'd from a 5G tower directly to my neocortex.
I believe we all still think about the dangers of ubiquitous and unlimited information/communication (or at least have someone dear with that opinion, whom we attempt to understand).
I always try to tell myself (and others) that the "AFK", physical, "real world" society we live in is no different than phenomenons like TV, mass media or the internet. This applies equally to whatever mean we use to access it, like the www, because in a way or another, it will be biased (notorious examples are Google/Apple on mobile, or gov'ts, ISPs or even registrars for the web in general).
The major differences that exist in, say, the interactions between 2 human in a room, and 2 billion in a social network or an online game is, well scale obviously, "speed" (or whatever you wanna call the lack of spatial placement no longer having meaning, which makes us all ultra fast communicating), and most of all, the dynamics of that scale and "speed". The dynamics might be the only single thing that has a positive OR negative effect on the interactions, when compared to the 1st scenario, but I believe that, as limited, nature-bred animals we are, these dynamics are what eventually make us human and not irrational beings as opposed to amoebas.
That second guy in a room can be a paid troll. He can be your father. He can be a feminist, a humanist or a neonazi. As much as he can be the best person to talk about any given subject in an assertive, informed way. You never know anyone's opinion, sometimes you don't even know yours until the time comes to act upon it.
You shouldn't really lose your sleep over what you can no longer prevent. The guy made the iphone, but the past is the past, and we no longer need an Einstein to tell us that. If you wanna trouble your mind with the effect of information overload, do it on your radius of action, to those around you you can actually have a positive influence about it (not only your real friends and family, but anyone who takes any shit from you). It's not 100% gonna be useful for everyone, but it sure can't hurt to share some wisdom om how to cope with the modern times.
Good luck selling that to genpop
I thought the blockchain was public. I'm not particularly knowledgeable of the process specifics or the computing power necessary for it, but if "valuation vs actual worth" is so important, I'm sure someone could simply set up a shop that tracks the amounts, type, frequency of transactions, among other stats of the currency simply by polling the blockchain and other publicly available records.
And then, with the simple motto of supply and demand, one could estimate the worth at a very trusty rate, maybe even better than what there is today for companies (which trade based on the stock market, investor relation publications, speculation, government influence such as central banks...). I'd say it's a lot better to track the worth of something so simple, so public, so transparent as Bitcoin than it is to track companies that abuse omission, legal loopholes, in and out of their base nations.
well, technically the measure was put in place back in the 40's (50's?), and only recently reverted ISPs to Title I, so you can't say Title II is tyranny, it's just businesses wanting to reverse policy, because, well, businessess are driven by investment, and that investment took into account policing under the old Title. Now they can't make the money they were expected to from robbing small internet startups, by cap'ing their sheer productive power unless they buy the fast lane. Oh, and of course, user-bound throttling, which is actually the worse as it blocks the individual and not organizations.
But yes, you got it right on the UK dept. (not England alone btw) - they are imposing a lot of restriction themselves (the govm't) like what the ISPs are doing here, but when you really look at it, they're actually not hampering small startups nor individual user rights as much, since they are targetting mostly adult content and piracy outlets by fully blocking them whenever possible (e.g. parental controls ON by default, or pirate sites completely filtered at the backbone level, not the ISP). Technically they are still going against some basic rights, but they do seem to have the posture of a real people-representing entity that the govm't should be. I personally don't like what they do, but you really can't compare it to what the FCC is trying to give away for free to financially-bound parties.
I don't know if you suddenly turned into irony, if it was irony from your first comment, or if it still is honest obliviousness to whatever you're saying being the actual problems of current currencies (and the "solutions" eventually found to "counter" the problems).