These guys are still wanting to prove that their infrastructure cost is exponentially proportional to the data people spend. The problem: it's exactly the opposite - technology keeps improving in ways that copper, fiber, wireless and whatever transmit more data for the same amount of cash. Exponentially more. They somehow want to keep maximizing profits by spending pennies on their infrastructure, while the clients who pay more every year for a service that's supposed to have more max throughput. They somehow thought client needs would stay the same and that those extra megabits attracted more clients to their more expensive services just because they want that peace of mind. Guess what: clients want flat rates but they will use the bandwidth more because services on the web keep providing better content with more detail (read: more data), and paying for that content is already enough, they don't want their data plan to also go up, because in all honesty, it doesn't have to! Why would I pay 10 more bucks for 1gb/s when my 100mb/s is good enough for my 4k netflix plan (which I also pay for)? This is their problem. They aren't able to scale profit as their investors expected thus they can't grow financially, because they have to keep looking at their 100mb/s clients pay 30 bucks (example) when last year they only used a third of that bandwidth on 1080p, and now they stream 4k. They have that gb/s plan nobody will pay 100 dollars for because they can't convince individuals it's better (because it isn't for their needs), and they can't cut that 4k streaming on the 100mb/s plans because that is not neutral. In sum: they can't make money exponentially. So they do the only thing a good company does - they lobby politicians for ways of turning their flawed, net-biased logic into law that can be used to make the user cough up more bucks for a service they DO NOT provide. It's hypocrisy in its finest.
until confirmation is out, you cannot be sure. But I put my money on also being part. One main perk of using a tech company for your services is they handle security. It is usually a requirement for the deal. Sometimes it might be the other way around but that depends on ATT's initial intentions (e.g. saving IT costs or keeping user data contained to themselves)... It also depends on privacy policies ATT may have made you abide to. If you want advanced details about a possible leak, you should probably read them agreements.
We have gotten to a point where bureaucracy is hampering basic human traits like originality, creativity or even technological progress. I'm kinda picturing what it would have been like if a guy in the stone age discovered a fire starting method, but then some form of authority came along and said "nuh-uh, that thing is dangerous, it's hot yet we cannot stop it with sheer will, and it spreads around like, huh, fire. Come back to me when it has been socially accepted to be safe, but you CAN'T introduce it to society:'-( . Who knows, you might not even be alive by then but at least you didn't die from a blaze. Hopefully."
I guess it's a scale problem. We need to get to them exoplantes STAT.
It might not be totally silent, but eventually if you have one of recent Sammy phones, you get persistent notifications that will not go away until you update "Samsung Apps" (it's own app store). A single press of that button and the app immediately installs without any sort of permission usage description or whatever. Maybe they don't do it over plain http, but they can still do what they want server side.
And about this particular case, I wouldn't jump all my guns, because I doubt the source can prove all his claims: code that performs all these tasks can download an apk but is it actually using an install command on it? It can just be using some form of upgrade like what is available in vanilla Android, which would prevent a lot of bad things happening such as different validation keys. Also, the apks themselves might have to be signed by the company before even running the command, preventing anyone without this private key from doing so to modified apks. All in all I believe explanations are in order, but this only goes to show the big problem that is buying ANY platform that does not provide the source of the underlying OS and preinstalled, privilleged services on the device, including but not restricted to: Sammy, Xiaomi, HTC, Apple, Huawei, Nokia, Lenovo, Motorola, Siemens, Lg, Sony, Archos, even Google. And from any country. The user simply doesn't know what's going on, but he does place his trust in the closed source by signing privacy and end-user agreements, so there's that. Unless you're buying something like a CM supported device and/or install it on your phone, there's not much you should be amazed about. It's not hacking, it's power abuse, but you do give it to them.
For instance, I would love to see someone explain me the difference of Google itself spicing up a random Play Store apk into something the user is not expecting. What is the difference? It might even be something that fails to pass Google's validation and enters their store contaminating whoever gets their curated software. There have always been viruses in Play and we all know it, it's no novelty, nothing is perfect. What's so different from Xiaomi really? Can't we trust they won't install decent software?
We see a lot of criticism on the tech industry to chinese companies. I believe this is highly unfounded.
One of the few things I will take for granted from Elon, is his vision that if EVERY car on the road follows SOLIDLY PROGRAMMED RULES (and the sensors, of course, do not all catastrophically fail, frequently), you will have a drastic decrease, maybe even statistically eliminate car accidents. Everybody has this misconception that automated "piloting", whatever its form, will eventually create harm either by outright failure or for being so right it eventually acknowledges the "crew" is "a" harm. Fact of the matter is, everybody is just afraid of acknowledging their own imperfection, and of losing their jobs and their economy, because the definition of automation is exactly that: replacing people with a better, cheaper and easier process. We have robots flying millions of miles to other planets without much issue. Yet the main reason we don't send humans to first missions of anything is not because they're worse - it's just that they're a liability to lose in a complexity of aspects that cannot be controlled at all - public opinion is very powerful into downing any idea it preempts wrong..
I believe Elon is damn right that it is necessary to take risks in driving automation, and the holy grail in that field is to move human brain and action 100% out of the equation, for the simplest reason of them all: the driver, unlike computers, does not always have his safety as the first priority, be it by will to do something else or by distraction. Were talking big car companies here, not a service provider of a yet small car producer. Small companies cannot phathom the handling of such liability, oftentimes they don't even have the financial or legal capacity to handicap themselves with an established legal defense: ultimately the driver is liable for 99% litigation that happens about accidents TODAY because HE IS MAKING ALL DECISIONS IN REAL-TIME. Drivers don't stand a chance really. Judges will minutely side with the driver in litigation "against a car", and when they do, it usually makes it to national television.
Elon has been risking it with both Tesla and Space X because he knows he has, to some extent, the money (or the ability to direct others' money) into something bold. This is not courage like Apple likes to call it, it's calculated risk assessment with a very high return and smaller than usual probability - nobody wants that kind of bet, unless they're either truly altruistic or they're in the business of not having a standardized existence in this world. And guess what, that is just fine by me and I won't blame him for trying to be great.
The deadlock, or better, conundrum of DC's elected officials wanting to take the Telecom lobbying money, yet having to prioritize the People, and following the constitution. An actual synonym for this deadlock-breaking, research-backed wonder is "lubricant", and it's not gonna be used on the Telecoms or their lobbyists arses, if you know what I mean. It's been done with cigarettes, sugar, oil and medication, and is usually the best way to convince the public to bend over and get fckd without having to vote the other side.
As I said in another comment, this looks like staging research for "QoS that can be on by default". Basically this is providing a platform for ISP's and the state to say "hey, there's a lot of users picking traffic A over traffic B, so let's make traffic B BAD for everyone, because you know, democracy, and traffic B happens to be something we don't want you to see. What a coincidence!". The comparison I find the most striking is UK's mandatory opt-out parental control for pr0n sites - "most people thought it was good (actually nobody but moralists), so we decided to turn it off by default. Freedom of speech is not freedom of distribution you know."
Something I don't get is why would anyone want another tool to "configure their own traffic", this time ISP-side, when clearly there are already equivalent QoS control tools, which don't even require leaving the network boundary of your residence for their use. Implementations of software or hardware-based QoS might not all be straightforward, but that goes to show just how useful most people find "individual traffic rating". It's very niche. Let's face it: most people that pay for a connection want it full throttle, 24-7, no restrictions, because most people change their browsing habits fast enough they rarely need QoS control. What they also expect is what they pay for: a dedicated line for whatever needs they have - not a customized data plan that will have (e.g.) faster video streaming and slower torrent downloading.
What this tool would bring, in practice, is a platform much like the default-on, opt-out-type state/isp-sponsored parental control implemented ISP-side in the UK, and I believe 200% the only real reason research is being done in the matter is that some form of legislation can go into effect which will force users to get some "standard QoS" turned on by default, then be able to opt out obscurely enough to prevent most - which is what ISPs want, to block the ignorant majority. This is gonna sound super-commie, but the best way capitalists have of making money is gently penetrating every ignorant sucker that fails to look at the rear-view mirror. After something like this is set in place, it becomes a matter of the ISP's and the gvm't "loopholing it" to having something much like the great Chinese firewall, and people getting "neutral" shit blocked because "state says I should not like it".
Given that, let's focus on the real, and only problem of net neutrality - it is on a grand scale, NOT individual. A simple example is when other uplinks, or clients of an ISP, are hampered by the 1GB plan guy down the street who hogs the neighborhood by running a private usenet server, or by going on a 4k Netflix rampage. An entire city failing to submit their taxes because everybody is downloading/streaming a new episode of Game of Thrones. Stuff like that. You can't control this with something like what the Stanford guys are doing: the 1GB plan guy pays for what he has. The problem is ISP's offering something they can't actually provide, becoming FSPs - failure service providers.
I can see this being super useful (for the perpetrators I mean) in scenarios where pcs are left either locked (session running, yet needs pass) or even before logging any account. Windows time to desktop from a login screen is so fast it looks like every service, such as the PnP one is already up and accepting software installation. Does anyone have deeper knowledge if such a thing might happen? As in: has anyone ever tested plugging a PnP device whilst a Win pc is locked, then found ways to check it DID install (maybe even that it ran whatever form of "autorun")?
Well I guess logic is in disuse. "Those are stupid reasons", "Neither of these jerks has a handicap", "it's nepotiszzzszszxzxzsxzxszm"
(I bet you were aching to use that word you memorized from whatever media you consumed last week, yet you don't know the slightest thing about it's meaning, and ended up using it catastrophically wrong. Nepotism is a part of the problem - which I actually mentioned as a merit in "family" - not the entire thing. Unless you're Jerry Fletcher and your life is a conspiracy).
The cherry on top though is you basically started by discrediting me, then went on to conclude exactly the same I did, which makes you a hypocrite, although a dumb one because I'm not sure you actually didn't figure it out yourself:
A[n election] is just gonna place more emphases on the least "true-merit" traits of them all.
...which is basically what you say:
They have an advantage because of traits that don't qualify them for anything.
...both sentences meaning:
being able for the seat means nothing; people vote randomly
But the worst part is you came here and made this about the US presidential election, which I used as a legit comparison. Yet I knew beforehand I would attract useless attention from your likes. And I never said you voted for Obama because he was black. You came from 8 years of the worst republican experience since the other Gulf War (and other Bush), you would vote a democrat if he was of Alien ancestry. Fortunately for you Obama turned out to be well above average in times an average president is a blessing (including his very passive, as it should be, external policy).
There's no way around it - be it by luck, opportunism, IQ, bank account, family, networking, entrepreneurship, share ownership, influence or the most relevant of all: charisma - leadership these days is acquired through different forms of merit, never democratically. A suffrage for C-level anything is just gonna place more emphases on the least "true-merit" traits of them all.
This is mostly what happens nowadays on evolved democracies, and why they are, ultimately, in decadence. Think about it like so: there's this guy called Trump with no real quality other than bringing a lot of empathy to the table, because a lot of voters are being driven by his isolationism rhetoric which never fails to catch a big chunk of an ever-increasing patriot country's vote. And in my opinion, he's gonna win because the other candidate has a near-50% handicap, from the long-established, yet to be solved gender problem, even more relevant than the previous incumbent's racial minority trait, for the simple fact America has embraced different races a lot more than it has suppressed gender inequality.
This is gonna be equivalent in a company, to a different extent but to similar outcomes - the bottom-of-the-pyramid voters are gonna side with whoever seems to bring more to their table, and candidates just need to find the rhetoric that identifies them as such. If this is, like american politics, mixed up with a candidate-picking system that pre-establishes a small pool of "desirables", no single candidate will truthfully bring anything to the bottom tiers. Winning will be a matter of the best liar. I would likely fire my current CEO if I had one (don't work in that kind of corporate structure) , but the question remains: would we be allowed to pick something better than the status quo?
the Nth of Nth-ember - give it time. Why keep speculating crappy stats. Apple - I get it: was the first to make an actual Smartphone. And yes, it did piggybak on Samsung chip-making most of the way. But Samsung really had no reason at all to be where it is now in the smartphone market, other than bleeding money until it didn't. Guess what: if Samsung had it's technology, fabs, and long-standing product-cycle experience to back them up, all of them chinese market disrupters also got their own trump cards: direct access to quasi-free labour, thieving tech from the top makers that depend on making their products in mainland.cn, and boy oh boy, do they have money to throw at the problem (until they don't need to anymore). You can try and speculate all you want, but a big chinese name will take the top 2 eventually, 2, 4 or 10 years from now. They are already threatening in revenue, it will be natural. Accept it: the market changes, you might want it to stay in US or US-friendly soil forever, but fact of the matter is: it won't. You should stop being afraid that the tech things you use might be designed in a communist state. And the main reason for stopping: THEY ARE ALREADY ASSEMBLED THERE. China actually CHOSES not to lead profits in the top of the line (read: design phase), because they hadn't felt the need to yet - but man, they already lead in the profits they currently pursue. And whoever is afraid they might lead in something else eventually is just thinking wishfully - they, or whoever else will. It's how a free market works.
So, I got this S6 and A3 (2016 model) standing in my desk. They both are asking me to update Samsung Games Service in a persistent notification (can't dismiss). Take a guess at the amazing options I got: "Later" and "Update". FCK YEAH. And this is their "Games Service" - you don't even get a notification for their "Samsung Apps" app (you know, their stupid market). You can't freeze/disable/uninstall any of these apps in a recent, bootloader-FULLY-LOCKED Sammy phone. You might argue "but hey, you're not using them, you just have them installed!", to which I say: you go tell that to the millions of Koreans tuned in at their launch events seeing stupid, cherry-picked market statistics which say "999999 MILLION PEOPLE USED THESE LAST YEAR AND SO SHOULD YOU". Chances are that thing is gonna get a lot of traction from now on, for no actual decent reason at all, other than a great marketing strategy. Who is your god now?
Other companies you heard also do this kind of product promotion through BS stats: Apple, Google, and... Microsoft. Trust me, when you're the market leader on anything (and Samsung is, in the mobile department), you WILL push whatever you want to people. They just don't want to push this because they didn't see the bucks coming in the way they wanted (which is to say: it probably didn't scale well enough to be as profitable as other services that actually make it outside S. Korea).
If they really wanted you to eat that crappy music service, they would make it work. Just like Spotify is making people eat their 8-bucks subscription service even though can get everything they need for free or really really cheap (e.g. by faking a "family"). Tech companies are not THAT stupid.
The best thing about wikileaks is that normal people don't read it. Normal people read news headlines, from generic news sources, which eventually have resources to filter out the REAL news from leak websites. I expect those to do some sort of filtering. Now why you have to go and blame wikileaks from something they state, from the very start, they want to do on purpose... Snowden is definitely a good example of a guy who wanted stuff outted cleanlu, filtered out and redacted where it effectively didn't help anyone might hurt innocent or even hamper stuff that he didn't deem needed hampering. Since he knew he was not capable of it, he went to decent publications like the Guardian and asked for help, and decided to out stuff periodically. Wikileaks decides not to do so this way, and that is their prerrogative. There are benefits and consequences for both ways.
I've been dwelling the past months in my team's will to go full-fledged MVC (actually MVP) while developing for the Android SDK (for those out of topic: making apps). I see peers and myself struggling with old, large activities, running laps around to make them pass "technical debt" code reviews intending to "make them more future proof".
It would be nice and all if I could grasp the benefits, but the problem is three-fold:
a) the team is fooling themselves and the company into spending too much resources in something they can't assure adds value;
b) Android already has a very solid MVP-like pattern going on, and MVP-ing it up further is a clear case of overengineering
c) most important of all: there is no actual standard to guide the team, so it's a free for all and I see all the initial benefits down the drain just because everybody tastes a different flavour of the view/presenter combo
And I see and underlying problem which might even be more crucial: the app will likely be dropped before reaping the long-term benefits, turning the entire endeavor TOTALLY WORTHLESS. So what I'm trying to say is: you got a solid framework with great patterns put in place already, developed by a company that is on the tech top 10, and you decide to be all trendy around it? You're pretty much grinding for a promotion you definitely don't deserve, because you're making that framework worse for everybody that you manage.
Fires: I can understand their effect on thermometers as they are statistically around climate stations of populated areas. But an anthrax outbreak in Russia affecting global temperature averages... That is logic beyond my understanding. Someone care to elaborate?
Anti-deuchebaggerism is actually what needs global attention.
The elimination of hypocrisy must take precedence over the patching of other societal problems, because that's what the "fight against message encryption" is just that: a patch to the failures of internal security. The real problem is what causes this terrorism, and while most people think closing borders is the solution, it is just another patch to another failure. The thing that both these have the most in common isn't actually the fact they are both patches, but that they are both killing much more important things than the possibility of there being bombs or killing: they are taking away freedoms of privacy, safe-haven/asylum, or even freedom of speech. They are, and sorry to be cliché in advance, turning developed democracies into a 1984-esque states.
France, the U.S. and the rest of Europe need to dive deep into their consciousness and create solutions for the real problem - solutions that tackle directly the radicalism problem rather than attempt to generalize it to any and all dark-skinned foreigners, or even the entirety of people inside a country. They need to help Syria get their stuff sorted out and they need to stand besides the more civilized party of that conflict. They need to do exactly what Russia is doing but with a better partner than one that is stoic to the use of chlorine, because, you know, chemical attacks are just a bit harder to target specifically to your enemies (i.e. to avoid killing innocents). And yes, there is no actual good party involved in a war like Syria has, but you need to pick the BETTER one, educate it, and instruct it during and after the conflict.
"But you want to start a war to solve a problem that can easily be solved by me not having an encrypted app or not letting Muslims in?" Yeap: For starters, losing privacy and freedom might not sound like much now, but a lot of people died in the past for us to have what we have now. If you think being less free solves anything you're flat out wrong. And secondly, the war has already started. The main point here is: states need to act in accordance to their own standards. Lowering the standards to suit one's own transient needs is the same as printing money or lending banks money to avoid default - it has been proven wrong in the long term and to setting precedents that are way to hard to roll back.
But the the "DOTA 2 official forums have been hacked" hyperlink was not an edited I originally made:D. It does make the quote more dynamic, and I repeat: it is my original source link.
Actually, I submitted the article with the ZDNet link as the post eventually ended up with. I swear for the love of god I didn't even make the connection to slashdot ownership, but now that I think of it, it might have enhanced my odds (And yay! Got my first one on the front page. GO ME!)
Actually the original reporting was vague, and so was my submission copy by association (for which I totally understand my subtle quote). It was more of a site administration failure (since the hack was possible through an old version of vBulletin), from not keeping the back-end updated. Also of note is I failed to point out the hack was on the so-called Dev forums (which are still official), where people go and report bugs or imbalances in the game (i.e. it supposedly shouldn't have links to Steam accounts, but that depends on individual user credential patterns or lack thereof). In any case it's sad to see that either a 2013 version of vBulletin was this flawed, or that someone in 2013 picked a version of vBulletin without issues such as SQL injection or usage of MD5+salt fixed.
I wonder if Canada still has the loophole where patent trolls can abuse litigation simply because they never have to factor the defense attorney costs even if they lose. That loophole (a.k.a. the American Rule) was a major impulsive force for patent trolls' practice, but since 2014 there has been a patent-trolling specific exception created by the Supreme Court, which pretty much denies patent trollers from trolling for cheap (like in Europe, where patent trolling is less common exactl because of the English Rule in prevalence, opposite of the American Rule).
Might as well have titled the article: "Blackberry switches focus from premium tech company to major patent troll", or "How to avoid bankruptcy of a society-contributing company by turning it into a society hazard".
Yeap, that's exactly what I meant, so basically some less important services I sign up to using my yahoo account have now been compromised because someone didn't read the fking RFC memo.
You gotta be kidding me, they're storing passwords as MD5 hashes... There goes my spam Yahoo mail account. Anyone got good alternatives that aren't Google bound?
Slashdot Mirror
These guys are still wanting to prove that their infrastructure cost is exponentially proportional to the data people spend. The problem: it's exactly the opposite - technology keeps improving in ways that copper, fiber, wireless and whatever transmit more data for the same amount of cash. Exponentially more. They somehow want to keep maximizing profits by spending pennies on their infrastructure, while the clients who pay more every year for a service that's supposed to have more max throughput. They somehow thought client needs would stay the same and that those extra megabits attracted more clients to their more expensive services just because they want that peace of mind. Guess what: clients want flat rates but they will use the bandwidth more because services on the web keep providing better content with more detail (read: more data), and paying for that content is already enough, they don't want their data plan to also go up, because in all honesty, it doesn't have to! Why would I pay 10 more bucks for 1gb/s when my 100mb/s is good enough for my 4k netflix plan (which I also pay for)? This is their problem. They aren't able to scale profit as their investors expected thus they can't grow financially, because they have to keep looking at their 100mb/s clients pay 30 bucks (example) when last year they only used a third of that bandwidth on 1080p, and now they stream 4k. They have that gb/s plan nobody will pay 100 dollars for because they can't convince individuals it's better (because it isn't for their needs), and they can't cut that 4k streaming on the 100mb/s plans because that is not neutral. In sum: they can't make money exponentially. So they do the only thing a good company does - they lobby politicians for ways of turning their flawed, net-biased logic into law that can be used to make the user cough up more bucks for a service they DO NOT provide. It's hypocrisy in its finest.
until confirmation is out, you cannot be sure. But I put my money on also being part. One main perk of using a tech company for your services is they handle security. It is usually a requirement for the deal. Sometimes it might be the other way around but that depends on ATT's initial intentions (e.g. saving IT costs or keeping user data contained to themselves)... It also depends on privacy policies ATT may have made you abide to. If you want advanced details about a possible leak, you should probably read them agreements.
We have gotten to a point where bureaucracy is hampering basic human traits like originality, creativity or even technological progress. I'm kinda picturing what it would have been like if a guy in the stone age discovered a fire starting method, but then some form of authority came along and said "nuh-uh, that thing is dangerous, it's hot yet we cannot stop it with sheer will, and it spreads around like, huh, fire. Come back to me when it has been socially accepted to be safe, but you CAN'T introduce it to society :'-( . Who knows, you might not even be alive by then but at least you didn't die from a blaze. Hopefully."
I guess it's a scale problem. We need to get to them exoplantes STAT.
It might not be totally silent, but eventually if you have one of recent Sammy phones, you get persistent notifications that will not go away until you update "Samsung Apps" (it's own app store). A single press of that button and the app immediately installs without any sort of permission usage description or whatever. Maybe they don't do it over plain http, but they can still do what they want server side.
And about this particular case, I wouldn't jump all my guns, because I doubt the source can prove all his claims: code that performs all these tasks can download an apk but is it actually using an install command on it? It can just be using some form of upgrade like what is available in vanilla Android, which would prevent a lot of bad things happening such as different validation keys. Also, the apks themselves might have to be signed by the company before even running the command, preventing anyone without this private key from doing so to modified apks. All in all I believe explanations are in order, but this only goes to show the big problem that is buying ANY platform that does not provide the source of the underlying OS and preinstalled, privilleged services on the device, including but not restricted to: Sammy, Xiaomi, HTC, Apple, Huawei, Nokia, Lenovo, Motorola, Siemens, Lg, Sony, Archos, even Google. And from any country. The user simply doesn't know what's going on, but he does place his trust in the closed source by signing privacy and end-user agreements, so there's that. Unless you're buying something like a CM supported device and/or install it on your phone, there's not much you should be amazed about. It's not hacking, it's power abuse, but you do give it to them.
For instance, I would love to see someone explain me the difference of Google itself spicing up a random Play Store apk into something the user is not expecting. What is the difference? It might even be something that fails to pass Google's validation and enters their store contaminating whoever gets their curated software. There have always been viruses in Play and we all know it, it's no novelty, nothing is perfect. What's so different from Xiaomi really? Can't we trust they won't install decent software?
We see a lot of criticism on the tech industry to chinese companies. I believe this is highly unfounded.
One of the few things I will take for granted from Elon, is his vision that if EVERY car on the road follows SOLIDLY PROGRAMMED RULES (and the sensors, of course, do not all catastrophically fail, frequently), you will have a drastic decrease, maybe even statistically eliminate car accidents. Everybody has this misconception that automated "piloting", whatever its form, will eventually create harm either by outright failure or for being so right it eventually acknowledges the "crew" is "a" harm. Fact of the matter is, everybody is just afraid of acknowledging their own imperfection, and of losing their jobs and their economy, because the definition of automation is exactly that: replacing people with a better, cheaper and easier process. We have robots flying millions of miles to other planets without much issue. Yet the main reason we don't send humans to first missions of anything is not because they're worse - it's just that they're a liability to lose in a complexity of aspects that cannot be controlled at all - public opinion is very powerful into downing any idea it preempts wrong..
I believe Elon is damn right that it is necessary to take risks in driving automation, and the holy grail in that field is to move human brain and action 100% out of the equation, for the simplest reason of them all: the driver, unlike computers, does not always have his safety as the first priority, be it by will to do something else or by distraction. Were talking big car companies here, not a service provider of a yet small car producer. Small companies cannot phathom the handling of such liability, oftentimes they don't even have the financial or legal capacity to handicap themselves with an established legal defense: ultimately the driver is liable for 99% litigation that happens about accidents TODAY because HE IS MAKING ALL DECISIONS IN REAL-TIME. Drivers don't stand a chance really. Judges will minutely side with the driver in litigation "against a car", and when they do, it usually makes it to national television.
Elon has been risking it with both Tesla and Space X because he knows he has, to some extent, the money (or the ability to direct others' money) into something bold. This is not courage like Apple likes to call it, it's calculated risk assessment with a very high return and smaller than usual probability - nobody wants that kind of bet, unless they're either truly altruistic or they're in the business of not having a standardized existence in this world. And guess what, that is just fine by me and I won't blame him for trying to be great.
The deadlock, or better, conundrum of DC's elected officials wanting to take the Telecom lobbying money, yet having to prioritize the People, and following the constitution. An actual synonym for this deadlock-breaking, research-backed wonder is "lubricant", and it's not gonna be used on the Telecoms or their lobbyists arses, if you know what I mean. It's been done with cigarettes, sugar, oil and medication, and is usually the best way to convince the public to bend over and get fckd without having to vote the other side.
As I said in another comment, this looks like staging research for "QoS that can be on by default". Basically this is providing a platform for ISP's and the state to say "hey, there's a lot of users picking traffic A over traffic B, so let's make traffic B BAD for everyone, because you know, democracy, and traffic B happens to be something we don't want you to see. What a coincidence!". The comparison I find the most striking is UK's mandatory opt-out parental control for pr0n sites - "most people thought it was good (actually nobody but moralists), so we decided to turn it off by default. Freedom of speech is not freedom of distribution you know."
Something I don't get is why would anyone want another tool to "configure their own traffic", this time ISP-side, when clearly there are already equivalent QoS control tools, which don't even require leaving the network boundary of your residence for their use. Implementations of software or hardware-based QoS might not all be straightforward, but that goes to show just how useful most people find "individual traffic rating". It's very niche. Let's face it: most people that pay for a connection want it full throttle, 24-7, no restrictions, because most people change their browsing habits fast enough they rarely need QoS control. What they also expect is what they pay for: a dedicated line for whatever needs they have - not a customized data plan that will have (e.g.) faster video streaming and slower torrent downloading.
What this tool would bring, in practice, is a platform much like the default-on, opt-out-type state/isp-sponsored parental control implemented ISP-side in the UK, and I believe 200% the only real reason research is being done in the matter is that some form of legislation can go into effect which will force users to get some "standard QoS" turned on by default, then be able to opt out obscurely enough to prevent most - which is what ISPs want, to block the ignorant majority. This is gonna sound super-commie, but the best way capitalists have of making money is gently penetrating every ignorant sucker that fails to look at the rear-view mirror. After something like this is set in place, it becomes a matter of the ISP's and the gvm't "loopholing it" to having something much like the great Chinese firewall, and people getting "neutral" shit blocked because "state says I should not like it".
Given that, let's focus on the real, and only problem of net neutrality - it is on a grand scale, NOT individual. A simple example is when other uplinks, or clients of an ISP, are hampered by the 1GB plan guy down the street who hogs the neighborhood by running a private usenet server, or by going on a 4k Netflix rampage. An entire city failing to submit their taxes because everybody is downloading/streaming a new episode of Game of Thrones. Stuff like that. You can't control this with something like what the Stanford guys are doing: the 1GB plan guy pays for what he has. The problem is ISP's offering something they can't actually provide, becoming FSPs - failure service providers.
All of this without actually logging in or unlocking the logged account of course...
I can see this being super useful (for the perpetrators I mean) in scenarios where pcs are left either locked (session running, yet needs pass) or even before logging any account. Windows time to desktop from a login screen is so fast it looks like every service, such as the PnP one is already up and accepting software installation. Does anyone have deeper knowledge if such a thing might happen? As in: has anyone ever tested plugging a PnP device whilst a Win pc is locked, then found ways to check it DID install (maybe even that it ran whatever form of "autorun")?
Well I guess logic is in disuse. "Those are stupid reasons", "Neither of these jerks has a handicap", "it's nepotiszzzszszxzxzsxzxszm" (I bet you were aching to use that word you memorized from whatever media you consumed last week, yet you don't know the slightest thing about it's meaning, and ended up using it catastrophically wrong. Nepotism is a part of the problem - which I actually mentioned as a merit in "family" - not the entire thing. Unless you're Jerry Fletcher and your life is a conspiracy).
The cherry on top though is you basically started by discrediting me, then went on to conclude exactly the same I did, which makes you a hypocrite, although a dumb one because I'm not sure you actually didn't figure it out yourself:
A[n election] is just gonna place more emphases on the least "true-merit" traits of them all.
...which is basically what you say:
They have an advantage because of traits that don't qualify them for anything.
...both sentences meaning:
being able for the seat means nothing; people vote randomly
But the worst part is you came here and made this about the US presidential election, which I used as a legit comparison. Yet I knew beforehand I would attract useless attention from your likes. And I never said you voted for Obama because he was black. You came from 8 years of the worst republican experience since the other Gulf War (and other Bush), you would vote a democrat if he was of Alien ancestry. Fortunately for you Obama turned out to be well above average in times an average president is a blessing (including his very passive, as it should be, external policy).
There's no way around it - be it by luck, opportunism, IQ, bank account, family, networking, entrepreneurship, share ownership, influence or the most relevant of all: charisma - leadership these days is acquired through different forms of merit, never democratically. A suffrage for C-level anything is just gonna place more emphases on the least "true-merit" traits of them all.
This is mostly what happens nowadays on evolved democracies, and why they are, ultimately, in decadence. Think about it like so: there's this guy called Trump with no real quality other than bringing a lot of empathy to the table, because a lot of voters are being driven by his isolationism rhetoric which never fails to catch a big chunk of an ever-increasing patriot country's vote. And in my opinion, he's gonna win because the other candidate has a near-50% handicap, from the long-established, yet to be solved gender problem, even more relevant than the previous incumbent's racial minority trait, for the simple fact America has embraced different races a lot more than it has suppressed gender inequality.
This is gonna be equivalent in a company, to a different extent but to similar outcomes - the bottom-of-the-pyramid voters are gonna side with whoever seems to bring more to their table, and candidates just need to find the rhetoric that identifies them as such. If this is, like american politics, mixed up with a candidate-picking system that pre-establishes a small pool of "desirables", no single candidate will truthfully bring anything to the bottom tiers. Winning will be a matter of the best liar. I would likely fire my current CEO if I had one (don't work in that kind of corporate structure) , but the question remains: would we be allowed to pick something better than the status quo?
the Nth of Nth-ember - give it time. Why keep speculating crappy stats. Apple - I get it: was the first to make an actual Smartphone. And yes, it did piggybak on Samsung chip-making most of the way. But Samsung really had no reason at all to be where it is now in the smartphone market, other than bleeding money until it didn't. Guess what: if Samsung had it's technology, fabs, and long-standing product-cycle experience to back them up, all of them chinese market disrupters also got their own trump cards: direct access to quasi-free labour, thieving tech from the top makers that depend on making their products in mainland .cn, and boy oh boy, do they have money to throw at the problem (until they don't need to anymore). You can try and speculate all you want, but a big chinese name will take the top 2 eventually, 2, 4 or 10 years from now. They are already threatening in revenue, it will be natural. Accept it: the market changes, you might want it to stay in US or US-friendly soil forever, but fact of the matter is: it won't. You should stop being afraid that the tech things you use might be designed in a communist state. And the main reason for stopping: THEY ARE ALREADY ASSEMBLED THERE. China actually CHOSES not to lead profits in the top of the line (read: design phase), because they hadn't felt the need to yet - but man, they already lead in the profits they currently pursue. And whoever is afraid they might lead in something else eventually is just thinking wishfully - they, or whoever else will. It's how a free market works.
So, I got this S6 and A3 (2016 model) standing in my desk. They both are asking me to update Samsung Games Service in a persistent notification (can't dismiss). Take a guess at the amazing options I got: "Later" and "Update". FCK YEAH. And this is their "Games Service" - you don't even get a notification for their "Samsung Apps" app (you know, their stupid market). You can't freeze/disable/uninstall any of these apps in a recent, bootloader-FULLY-LOCKED Sammy phone. You might argue "but hey, you're not using them, you just have them installed!", to which I say: you go tell that to the millions of Koreans tuned in at their launch events seeing stupid, cherry-picked market statistics which say "999999 MILLION PEOPLE USED THESE LAST YEAR AND SO SHOULD YOU". Chances are that thing is gonna get a lot of traction from now on, for no actual decent reason at all, other than a great marketing strategy. Who is your god now?
Other companies you heard also do this kind of product promotion through BS stats: Apple, Google, and... Microsoft. Trust me, when you're the market leader on anything (and Samsung is, in the mobile department), you WILL push whatever you want to people. They just don't want to push this because they didn't see the bucks coming in the way they wanted (which is to say: it probably didn't scale well enough to be as profitable as other services that actually make it outside S. Korea).
If they really wanted you to eat that crappy music service, they would make it work. Just like Spotify is making people eat their 8-bucks subscription service even though can get everything they need for free or really really cheap (e.g. by faking a "family"). Tech companies are not THAT stupid.
The best thing about wikileaks is that normal people don't read it. Normal people read news headlines, from generic news sources, which eventually have resources to filter out the REAL news from leak websites. I expect those to do some sort of filtering. Now why you have to go and blame wikileaks from something they state, from the very start, they want to do on purpose... Snowden is definitely a good example of a guy who wanted stuff outted cleanlu, filtered out and redacted where it effectively didn't help anyone might hurt innocent or even hamper stuff that he didn't deem needed hampering. Since he knew he was not capable of it, he went to decent publications like the Guardian and asked for help, and decided to out stuff periodically. Wikileaks decides not to do so this way, and that is their prerrogative. There are benefits and consequences for both ways.
I've been dwelling the past months in my team's will to go full-fledged MVC (actually MVP) while developing for the Android SDK (for those out of topic: making apps). I see peers and myself struggling with old, large activities, running laps around to make them pass "technical debt" code reviews intending to "make them more future proof".
It would be nice and all if I could grasp the benefits, but the problem is three-fold:
a) the team is fooling themselves and the company into spending too much resources in something they can't assure adds value;
b) Android already has a very solid MVP-like pattern going on, and MVP-ing it up further is a clear case of overengineering
c) most important of all: there is no actual standard to guide the team, so it's a free for all and I see all the initial benefits down the drain just because everybody tastes a different flavour of the view/presenter combo
And I see and underlying problem which might even be more crucial: the app will likely be dropped before reaping the long-term benefits, turning the entire endeavor TOTALLY WORTHLESS. So what I'm trying to say is: you got a solid framework with great patterns put in place already, developed by a company that is on the tech top 10, and you decide to be all trendy around it? You're pretty much grinding for a promotion you definitely don't deserve, because you're making that framework worse for everybody that you manage.
Fires: I can understand their effect on thermometers as they are statistically around climate stations of populated areas. But an anthrax outbreak in Russia affecting global temperature averages... That is logic beyond my understanding. Someone care to elaborate?
Anti-deuchebaggerism is actually what needs global attention.
The elimination of hypocrisy must take precedence over the patching of other societal problems, because that's what the "fight against message encryption" is just that: a patch to the failures of internal security. The real problem is what causes this terrorism, and while most people think closing borders is the solution, it is just another patch to another failure. The thing that both these have the most in common isn't actually the fact they are both patches, but that they are both killing much more important things than the possibility of there being bombs or killing: they are taking away freedoms of privacy, safe-haven/asylum, or even freedom of speech. They are, and sorry to be cliché in advance, turning developed democracies into a 1984-esque states.
France, the U.S. and the rest of Europe need to dive deep into their consciousness and create solutions for the real problem - solutions that tackle directly the radicalism problem rather than attempt to generalize it to any and all dark-skinned foreigners, or even the entirety of people inside a country. They need to help Syria get their stuff sorted out and they need to stand besides the more civilized party of that conflict. They need to do exactly what Russia is doing but with a better partner than one that is stoic to the use of chlorine, because, you know, chemical attacks are just a bit harder to target specifically to your enemies (i.e. to avoid killing innocents). And yes, there is no actual good party involved in a war like Syria has, but you need to pick the BETTER one, educate it, and instruct it during and after the conflict.
"But you want to start a war to solve a problem that can easily be solved by me not having an encrypted app or not letting Muslims in?" Yeap: For starters, losing privacy and freedom might not sound like much now, but a lot of people died in the past for us to have what we have now. If you think being less free solves anything you're flat out wrong. And secondly, the war has already started. The main point here is: states need to act in accordance to their own standards. Lowering the standards to suit one's own transient needs is the same as printing money or lending banks money to avoid default - it has been proven wrong in the long term and to setting precedents that are way to hard to roll back.
But the the "DOTA 2 official forums have been hacked" hyperlink was not an edited I originally made :D. It does make the quote more dynamic, and I repeat: it is my original source link.
Actually, I submitted the article with the ZDNet link as the post eventually ended up with. I swear for the love of god I didn't even make the connection to slashdot ownership, but now that I think of it, it might have enhanced my odds (And yay! Got my first one on the front page. GO ME!)
Actually the original reporting was vague, and so was my submission copy by association (for which I totally understand my subtle quote). It was more of a site administration failure (since the hack was possible through an old version of vBulletin), from not keeping the back-end updated. Also of note is I failed to point out the hack was on the so-called Dev forums (which are still official), where people go and report bugs or imbalances in the game (i.e. it supposedly shouldn't have links to Steam accounts, but that depends on individual user credential patterns or lack thereof). In any case it's sad to see that either a 2013 version of vBulletin was this flawed, or that someone in 2013 picked a version of vBulletin without issues such as SQL injection or usage of MD5+salt fixed.
I wonder if Canada still has the loophole where patent trolls can abuse litigation simply because they never have to factor the defense attorney costs even if they lose. That loophole (a.k.a. the American Rule) was a major impulsive force for patent trolls' practice, but since 2014 there has been a patent-trolling specific exception created by the Supreme Court, which pretty much denies patent trollers from trolling for cheap (like in Europe, where patent trolling is less common exactl because of the English Rule in prevalence, opposite of the American Rule).
Might as well have titled the article: "Blackberry switches focus from premium tech company to major patent troll", or "How to avoid bankruptcy of a society-contributing company by turning it into a society hazard".
Yeap, that's exactly what I meant, so basically some less important services I sign up to using my yahoo account have now been compromised because someone didn't read the fking RFC memo.
You gotta be kidding me, they're storing passwords as MD5 hashes... There goes my spam Yahoo mail account. Anyone got good alternatives that aren't Google bound?