Geoengineering is yet another stalling tactic by the fossil fuels industry, like carbon capture and storage. They promise huge grants and investments into research which stimulates a lot of interest from researchers and universities who are desperate for the money. They'll build a bunch of white elephant projects and then move on to the next grant while the fossil fuels industry thinks up yet another stalling tactic. If you're not convinced about how ridiculous geoengineering as a concpet is, check out what Christopher Williams has to say: Can Geo-Engineering Save the Planet? http://therealnews.com/t2/inde...
No, seriously, as others have alluded to in this thread as well, the term "troll" is subjective. And some commenters on/. seem to be particularly sensitive to anyone posting anything they disagree with and deciding it's trolling.
OK, suppose you set up a public web forum with 1,000,000 users where trolls are banished for life based on a consensus opinion from other commenters. How long do you think it would take before they reached a total number of 1 commenter? That's by a combination of #1 - banishing each other as trolls and #2 - users leaving because the resulting commenters are so afraid of being labelled trolls that they daren't write anything against the consensus and therefore all the discussions become bland, blithe, agreeable, re-iterations of the already accepted and established consensus view.
Re: "The world has moved on - now, in the US at least, it's about truly epic levels of pork and comfortable sinecures." -- More than likely true. Still, alarming amounts of fissile materials go "missing" each year. Where's it going? Who's got it?
Yes, burners are a tried and trusted way to achieve temporary anonymous communication at an event, like a protest. Just make sure you get rid of the phone before you go home!
The fact is that these days the police are often given carte blanche to do whatever they like with people at or near protests. Your rights more than likely won't be upheld while they try to disrupt the protest.
There are times when your own smartphone can be handy too as long as you manage your privacy well (you shouldn't have your whole personal life on your phone or on social media anyway). As others have mentioned, being able to stream video and audio to a remote server in real time is a powerful tool in your favour. However, you have to be sure that you can trust whoever your streaming it through and who's storing it, i.e. Will your network provider or the storage service block it on request from law enforcement?
Video and audio evidence seem to be the most powerful tools in social movements and challenging institutional abuse and criminal behaviour, e.g. unwarranted assaults on peaceful protesters or killing people of colour by escalating minor infractions of the law into confrontations and conflicts. You don't need a smartphone to do that. Digital cameras are small, cheap, produce high quality video and audio, and are especially easy to use discreetly (You can also get ones that have no BlueTooth or WiFi connectivity so can't be traced, monitored, or compromised remotely); you don't usually have to hold it up and look at it to go through any menus to start recording, just hit a button and you're up and running.
Also, you may not want to alert the police that you're filming the event (unless the intention is to prevent the crime from escalating any further). Start recording and leave it on a lanyard around your neck or in a top pocket with the lens poking through.
Also, store data on removable memory cards (and bring lots of spares - they're cheap and tiny) so that you can quickly remove and pass on to other trusted people or hide in the event that you think you may be compromised.
If everyone uses different devices, techniques, and strategies, the police will have more to deal with and less of an idea of how to manage it, leaving you to get on with protesting and documenting what happens, distributing the evidence, and making sure that the corporate media has fewer opprotunities to misrepresent peaceful, lawful, and very necessary democratic participation.
Most developed countries do have soem kind of basic income: It's called the social safety-net, welfare, income support, unemployment insurance, job seekers' allowance, SNAP, or whatever you want to call it. Nowadays, corporations have worked out that they can pay less than a living wage and let the tax payer pick up some of the slack (only some of the slack because we love to blame, berate, and punish the poor for being poor without any regard for the causes of their poverty, and claiming that it's some kind of "life style choice"). Corporations are making record profits in the midst of a poverty crisis and still refuse to pay taxes or pay their workers a living wage. What this has to do with the future of anti-virus software, I have no idea.
Too true. And it's not just in IT and/or engineering. The idea of management not knowing much about what the company or department that they're in charge of actually does and what purpose it serves has becoming all too common in "business circles." Most senior managers come from sales jobs/backgrounds. They know a lot about how to sell stuff but call for IT support if they notice that the submit buttons on their UIs are a different colour one day or if they've forgotten how to turn on their computer. Think of the people in sales, then think of them with a big promotion; same people, same values, same ignorance, same narrow views, and same lack of a sense of what their product/service actually does and how it works.
Can anyone cite a case where a nuclear power station was brought on line in time and on budget? OK, even only a little bit late and a little bit over budget? Oh alright, not too late and not rediculously over budget?
The only reason I can see for building them is to make more fissile materials for nuclear warheads. Why do you think Washington and various other countries are so upset about Iran's nuclear energy programme? What's more, the design of all the world's nuclear power plants are scaled up versions of a nuclear submarine's reactor, not particularly safe or efficient, and there's been little to no research into developing safer, more efficient ones in the past half a century. Nuclear reactors are and always have been built on a foundation of misleading information, misdirection, and bare-faced lies. Did you know that the very first large scale British nuclear reactor wasn't designed to generate a single watt of electricity? It was purely to produce fissile materials for warheads, nothing else. Generating electricity is an afterthought.
Erm, is this news? We've had web conferencing for at least a decade and thousands of colleges and universities around the world are already using it. Perhaps it's news that these people have only just discovered it? Plus there's way more to distance learning than web conferencing and putting up assignments and tests.
And MOOCs, by design, only incorporate a fraction of the elements that make up effective online learning. That's why they've been failing so spectacularly. Fully featured and professionally run online programmes have drop out rates at around 10% higher than face to face programmes, i.e. 60% - 70% for online compared to 50%-60% for face to face, although this can vary greatly from degree programme to degree programme.
From what I understand, when populations are more politically engaged, i.e. in more liberal and democratic societies, they tend to vote for more workers' rights, better education, and universal, comprehensive healthcare. Those are the things that make their lives more enjoyable and societies more prosperous and stable as a result. The loudest voices calling for small government in the US are funded by the billionnaire Plutocrats like the Koch brothers. If you look at what the public say in opinion polls, it paints quite a different picture to what we get on corporate media. Currently, nobody's offering the public the choices that they want so how can they vote for them? Is that democracy?
Wow, someone didn't like what I wrote. I got this comment moderation: "Re:Sorry but why is this news?, posted to Skype Blocks Customers Using OS-X 10.5.x and Earlier, has been moderated Troll (-1)." Am I trolling?
Re: going free and open source, the main advantage is that you no longer need to use expensive, limiting, privacy invasive apps when there are free and open source alternatives. The most popular and frequently used ones often ship with FOSS OS' as a package so you get your OS + apps in one go, without needing to hunt around and pay for them. Additionally, if there are any apps you don't like on a FOSS OS' you have admin rights to remove them.
And even better than that, you don't have to dredge through 100,000 fart piano apps and the like to find useful software. There are plenty of FOSS P2P IM, VoIP and other apps and almost all of them use open web standards that are interoperable (unlike Skype).
Re: "If I get into a car in London, I can be sure that google can get me to my destination blah blah blah. Who gives a shit? What year is it?" -- Most people I know in London, Barcelona, Moscow, and Toronto (all places where I've lived and worked) use public transport and taxis to get around. They leave their cars at home because it's just too much hassle to drive in large cities. Some friends got rid of their cars altogether and only hire them when they need to take longer journeys where public transport and taxis aren't so good. Busy cities need taxis (and usually more of them) but letting unregulated drivers with their personal cars, in whatever state they may be, take over and undercut experienced, licensed, and insured taxi drivers isn't the answer. There are illegal unregulated taxis in Moscow: go to a main street, stick out your thumb, and in a matter of seconds you'll have a line of cars offering you a lift to wherever you want to go. If you don't like the price or look of the first guy who comes along, you can go to the next one in line. In some parts of London you can find illegal taxis too.
Without a doubt, a lot of taxi services around the world could do with some reforms and improvements but on the whole they've better than just any Tom, Dick, or Harry picking people up off the streets whenever they feel like it. I don't think silicon valley's "culture of disruption" is a particularly constructive approach and their true motives are more likely to be along the lines of creating controlling monopolies that suck all of the profits from both ends, passengers and drivers, and leave them effectively powerless and disenfranchised. How exactly would you go about having a legitimate grievance heard against Uber or Lyft? What do you think the likelihood of having it settled reasonably and quickly would be? PayPal already ignores UK and European consumer protection rights and laws and is effectively a law unto itself. You're much better off going directly through the established consumer protection processes than trying to register a complaint through PayPal's grievance procedures.
Uber and Lyft have the potential to destroy taxi driving as a professional industry and a job and leave and inadequate mess in its place. If so, that'll push more people into using their cars in cities and add to congestion, pollution, accidents, stress, costs, and frustration for everyone.
Definitely. I think too many pundits use the extreme, exceptional minority of cases of trolling to label all internet commenters who may be contentious, argumentative, and/or enjoy debating ideas and views thoroughly; that's what makes online discussions interesting, engaging, and worthwhile rather than bland agreeable echo chambers. I like the phrase, "Some people can't tell the difference between critical thinkers and haters."
Most people react emotionally to views and opinions that contradict or infringe on their own. Most people have learned to filter their reactions and think others' views and opinions through, i.e. to see your side through their eyes and try to understand how you see them seeing you (If that makes sense?). I guess we call people who haven't learned to do this online "trolls." They may turn out to be reasonable, sensitive people if you meet them in person but somehow that gets lost online: https://xkcd.com/438/
I work in online learning (elearning) and discussion forums play an important and central role in many courses. The main problem there is the opposite and that too many people are "pathologically polite." It takes a lot of coaxing and encouragement to get people to really express their opinions and views and to examine, explore, and even challenge each others'.
What bar are Uber raising? All I can see is a race to the bottom. If I get into a taxi, I want to know that it's insured, up to a reasonable minimum standard of safety and security, that the driver is fully informed of his/her legal obligations, and that if something happens that's suspect, illegal, or just plain wrong, I have official channels to go through that can deal with the issue quickly and effectively. That means every taxi and every driver has to be identifiable and reachable. How else do you ensure that without licensing?
If you get into a taxi in London, you can be sure that the driver can get you to your destination in the shortest possible time any time of day and any day of the week: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Does anyone have any evidence establishing a negative causal relationship between effective environmental regulation and state economic growth and job creation or are we just making assumptions here? I'll give you a clue; we're making assumptions and/or repeating neo-liberal propaganda that we hear constantly, every day on the corporate media.
If Elon Musk is such a great philanthropist and forward thinker, perhaps he should comply with the best environmental regulations in the US? Or even do better? Is part of the sales and marketing hype for Tesla environmental?
I don't think Amazon, as evil as they are, are the real culprit in this scenario. Educational publishing has always been used as a way to fleece learners for extra cash. I doubt Purdue are any exception. In contrast, non-profit, egalitarian educational publishing is quite different, e.g. a course text book, authored by one of the leading researchers in his field, is free to download and print as the whole book or chapter by chapter: http://www.aupress.ca/index.ph... It's Creative Commons licensed so learners can do whatever they like with it within the generous terms of the licence: http://creativecommons.org/lic... They can also buy a professionally printed and bound copy of it for $39.95 CAD. All the publications from Athabasca University Press are like this. So why is Purdue charging $100s per student for text books? And why do we have to have new editions every year or so when undergraduate studies are mostly on topics and subject matter that are well-established and don't change very much?
All I can see here is Amazon trying to get a bigger foothold in the market for this cash cow.
Let's see... maybe they'll gather enough metrics on productivity and frequency of lapses in concentration and discover that the only thing that really correlates with those are the number of hours per week that they're working, previously recorded at an average of 35-40 hours per week, after which workers are no more productive but do less creative and/or innovative work. They might find out some interesting and novel details but the research into working practices is already pretty sound. It's just a pity that most executives, managers, and HR managers don't read it.
Yep, there's lots of people repeating the PR and marketing mantra that children need mobile devices in schools without showing any evidence that it's beneficial to them or their academic performance. Where are the studies and pilot schemes that show significant and substantial effect sizes (i.e. above d 0.4) that would warrant diverting time and resources away from actually studying? Where's the evidence showing that tablets in classrooms contribute to children's literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking skills?
If we don't care about evidence, we could equally claim that computer software, since it's so narrowly and rigidly designed, contributes to increasing and entrenching functional fixedness, i.e. the inability to take knowledge from one situation/context and apply it to another. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... (I'm not claiming that this is the case, just that we can claim anything we like without the need to provide appropriate, valid, reliable evidence).
Well, if OS X isn't working on your hardware, why not cut out the middle-men (Apple Inc.) and install the free and open source OS that they copied most of it from; FreeBSD http://www.freebsd.org/
People keep saying that Apple Inc. are innovative... I'm still waiting for them to innovate.
Yep, idiots. This looks like MIT's marketing department is running their learning programmes now, like the tail wagging the dog. I've seen this happen to a certain degree in other universities; marketing decide that they can sell more courses/get more students if they shorten courses to 7 weeks. They halve the learning targets and distribute them across twice as many courses.
What's wrong with that? Well for starters, it means that twice as much course time is taken up with introducing the course at the beginning and taking exams at the end. In other words, In a 14 week course, students lose 2 weeks of actual studying (giving them 12 weeks' study) and in a 7 week course students lose 2 weeks (giving them 5 weeks' study). Another thing is that it takes time to settle into a course, get to know your tutor, how s/he works, what her/his expactations are, get to grips with the nuances of the subject, get to know your classmates and form study groups so that you can learn more effectively, etc. With shorter "modules", you're going to be constantly disrupting students' and tutors' "flow" and as a result, I expect learning will become shallower and suffer even more from what they call the "transfer deficit", i.e. the inability of learners to adapt and apply what they've learned to novel problems in new contexts.
MIT might make more money in the short term but their reputation will eventually take a nose-dive and they won't be able to charge as much per degree. But the most serious issue is that if the majority of universities started thinking in this way, their graduates would no longer be as innovative and productive in the US economy. Everyone would suffer as a result.
Morgan Stanley are a highly reputable financial institution and everything they do is completely legal and above board. It would be simply ridiculous to suggest that they would mislead their investors in order to make a quick buck themselves. Their CEO, James P. Gorman, is a truly dedicated and patriotic Amernican to the core (rumours of his Australianness have been greatly exaggerated). He pays all his taxes and declares all his income to the IRS and has never even been tempted to hide his money in off-shore banks and tax havens, and has never used his personal wealth or his bank's wealth to undermine democracy in state and national elections or through lobbying. He's a man who knows exactly what is going on in his bank and knows that everything is ethical and reputable and in the best interests of his investors and the American people.
Real journalism is dying without the help of the internet. The news that matters, the news that gets people's attention, the news that affects how people engage in civil society is TV news. It's all been Foxed. No more background, no more historical context, no more broader perspective, no more deep investigating unless it's on a celebrity or other public figure for a nonsense, inconsequential, personal interest piece.
Yes, newspapers are where most of our TV news originates but those are mired in conflicts of interest (Seen any objective, fact-based reporting from the middle east lately?) and balking away from running any stories that might upset sponsors or powerful people who can afford big lawsuits. Any news organisation that's funded by advertising or patronage (e.g. Washington Post and The Intercept) is, without a doubt, misleading the public not so much by the stories they do run but more by the stories they don't and you never get to hear about.
We need new ways to do news. Real investigative journalism is highly skilled and requires budgets to follow stories wherever they may lead. It needs sources of funds that aren't conditional on appeasing the rich and powerful. If we had real, meaningful news that told us about how the world really works and that empowered us, I think we'd be surprised about how interesting and engaging politics, law, and economics could be.
How we transmit/broadcast it is secondary, whether it be in print or electronic.
Agreed. There are other states that adopted or have adopted pervasive, warrantless surveillance on its people; pre-1989 East Germany (Stasi), North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and now the "five eyes" (USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia). What's not to like about it?
BTW, what has pervasive, warrantless surveillance got to do with education, affordable housing, and healthcare?
Couldn't agree more. It's not in the public's or consumers' interests to turn taxi driving into one of those "Work for yourself and earn $10,000 a month!" scams that we get in our junk mail. Worse than turning your livingroom into a mini one-person sweatshop with no health a safety, it unleashes tired, stressed, desperate, overworked drivers on the public at large and it's the public who have to pick up the bill for the legal costs and deal with the traffic carnage, bodily harm, and loss of life after them. The roads are dangerous enough as it is. Thanks for making the world a shittier place for everyone Uber and Lyft - I bet they're rich enough to use licensed, regulated, insured limo services.
I think one contributing factor is the commonly conceived idea of management: Managers tell people what to do and when to do it. They rate their own success at managing and workplace status more by how well others comply with their demands than from their teams' or departments' productivity (that's an abstract number on a report somewhere). Lots of workers are unhappy about the way their managers treat them and want to leave at the earliest possible opportunity, unless of course, they like their colleagues (Should we reward colleagues more for workers' productivity?) When managers can drop the "command and control is good" mindset, then they're ready to do something more constructive, egalitarian, and ultimately productive... you know, like show some support and leadership.
Slashdot Mirror
Geoengineering is yet another stalling tactic by the fossil fuels industry, like carbon capture and storage. They promise huge grants and investments into research which stimulates a lot of interest from researchers and universities who are desperate for the money. They'll build a bunch of white elephant projects and then move on to the next grant while the fossil fuels industry thinks up yet another stalling tactic. If you're not convinced about how ridiculous geoengineering as a concpet is, check out what Christopher Williams has to say: Can Geo-Engineering Save the Planet? http://therealnews.com/t2/inde...
No, seriously, as others have alluded to in this thread as well, the term "troll" is subjective. And some commenters on /. seem to be particularly sensitive to anyone posting anything they disagree with and deciding it's trolling.
OK, suppose you set up a public web forum with 1,000,000 users where trolls are banished for life based on a consensus opinion from other commenters. How long do you think it would take before they reached a total number of 1 commenter? That's by a combination of #1 - banishing each other as trolls and #2 - users leaving because the resulting commenters are so afraid of being labelled trolls that they daren't write anything against the consensus and therefore all the discussions become bland, blithe, agreeable, re-iterations of the already accepted and established consensus view.
Or am I just trolling? ;)
Re: "The world has moved on - now, in the US at least, it's about truly epic levels of pork and comfortable sinecures." -- More than likely true. Still, alarming amounts of fissile materials go "missing" each year. Where's it going? Who's got it?
Yes, burners are a tried and trusted way to achieve temporary anonymous communication at an event, like a protest. Just make sure you get rid of the phone before you go home!
The fact is that these days the police are often given carte blanche to do whatever they like with people at or near protests. Your rights more than likely won't be upheld while they try to disrupt the protest.
There are times when your own smartphone can be handy too as long as you manage your privacy well (you shouldn't have your whole personal life on your phone or on social media anyway). As others have mentioned, being able to stream video and audio to a remote server in real time is a powerful tool in your favour. However, you have to be sure that you can trust whoever your streaming it through and who's storing it, i.e. Will your network provider or the storage service block it on request from law enforcement?
Video and audio evidence seem to be the most powerful tools in social movements and challenging institutional abuse and criminal behaviour, e.g. unwarranted assaults on peaceful protesters or killing people of colour by escalating minor infractions of the law into confrontations and conflicts. You don't need a smartphone to do that. Digital cameras are small, cheap, produce high quality video and audio, and are especially easy to use discreetly (You can also get ones that have no BlueTooth or WiFi connectivity so can't be traced, monitored, or compromised remotely); you don't usually have to hold it up and look at it to go through any menus to start recording, just hit a button and you're up and running.
Also, you may not want to alert the police that you're filming the event (unless the intention is to prevent the crime from escalating any further). Start recording and leave it on a lanyard around your neck or in a top pocket with the lens poking through.
Also, store data on removable memory cards (and bring lots of spares - they're cheap and tiny) so that you can quickly remove and pass on to other trusted people or hide in the event that you think you may be compromised.
If everyone uses different devices, techniques, and strategies, the police will have more to deal with and less of an idea of how to manage it, leaving you to get on with protesting and documenting what happens, distributing the evidence, and making sure that the corporate media has fewer opprotunities to misrepresent peaceful, lawful, and very necessary democratic participation.
Most developed countries do have soem kind of basic income: It's called the social safety-net, welfare, income support, unemployment insurance, job seekers' allowance, SNAP, or whatever you want to call it. Nowadays, corporations have worked out that they can pay less than a living wage and let the tax payer pick up some of the slack (only some of the slack because we love to blame, berate, and punish the poor for being poor without any regard for the causes of their poverty, and claiming that it's some kind of "life style choice"). Corporations are making record profits in the midst of a poverty crisis and still refuse to pay taxes or pay their workers a living wage. What this has to do with the future of anti-virus software, I have no idea.
Too true. And it's not just in IT and/or engineering. The idea of management not knowing much about what the company or department that they're in charge of actually does and what purpose it serves has becoming all too common in "business circles." Most senior managers come from sales jobs/backgrounds. They know a lot about how to sell stuff but call for IT support if they notice that the submit buttons on their UIs are a different colour one day or if they've forgotten how to turn on their computer. Think of the people in sales, then think of them with a big promotion; same people, same values, same ignorance, same narrow views, and same lack of a sense of what their product/service actually does and how it works.
New names? Let's get started. How about:
!-- if IE... -- ? (Can't put in the enclosing tags)
M$ Page Breaker?
M$ Still doesn't interpret SVG correctly?
M$ Web Designer F*^ker?
Any more?
Can anyone cite a case where a nuclear power station was brought on line in time and on budget? OK, even only a little bit late and a little bit over budget? Oh alright, not too late and not rediculously over budget?
The only reason I can see for building them is to make more fissile materials for nuclear warheads. Why do you think Washington and various other countries are so upset about Iran's nuclear energy programme? What's more, the design of all the world's nuclear power plants are scaled up versions of a nuclear submarine's reactor, not particularly safe or efficient, and there's been little to no research into developing safer, more efficient ones in the past half a century. Nuclear reactors are and always have been built on a foundation of misleading information, misdirection, and bare-faced lies. Did you know that the very first large scale British nuclear reactor wasn't designed to generate a single watt of electricity? It was purely to produce fissile materials for warheads, nothing else. Generating electricity is an afterthought.
Erm, is this news? We've had web conferencing for at least a decade and thousands of colleges and universities around the world are already using it. Perhaps it's news that these people have only just discovered it? Plus there's way more to distance learning than web conferencing and putting up assignments and tests.
And MOOCs, by design, only incorporate a fraction of the elements that make up effective online learning. That's why they've been failing so spectacularly. Fully featured and professionally run online programmes have drop out rates at around 10% higher than face to face programmes, i.e. 60% - 70% for online compared to 50%-60% for face to face, although this can vary greatly from degree programme to degree programme.
You can check out the UK's OU programme retention rates here: http://www.ormondsimpson.com/U...
From what I understand, when populations are more politically engaged, i.e. in more liberal and democratic societies, they tend to vote for more workers' rights, better education, and universal, comprehensive healthcare. Those are the things that make their lives more enjoyable and societies more prosperous and stable as a result. The loudest voices calling for small government in the US are funded by the billionnaire Plutocrats like the Koch brothers. If you look at what the public say in opinion polls, it paints quite a different picture to what we get on corporate media. Currently, nobody's offering the public the choices that they want so how can they vote for them? Is that democracy?
Wow, someone didn't like what I wrote. I got this comment moderation: "Re:Sorry but why is this news?, posted to Skype Blocks Customers Using OS-X 10.5.x and Earlier, has been moderated Troll (-1)." Am I trolling?
Re: going free and open source, the main advantage is that you no longer need to use expensive, limiting, privacy invasive apps when there are free and open source alternatives. The most popular and frequently used ones often ship with FOSS OS' as a package so you get your OS + apps in one go, without needing to hunt around and pay for them. Additionally, if there are any apps you don't like on a FOSS OS' you have admin rights to remove them.
And even better than that, you don't have to dredge through 100,000 fart piano apps and the like to find useful software. There are plenty of FOSS P2P IM, VoIP and other apps and almost all of them use open web standards that are interoperable (unlike Skype).
Re: "If I get into a car in London, I can be sure that google can get me to my destination blah blah blah. Who gives a shit? What year is it?" -- Most people I know in London, Barcelona, Moscow, and Toronto (all places where I've lived and worked) use public transport and taxis to get around. They leave their cars at home because it's just too much hassle to drive in large cities. Some friends got rid of their cars altogether and only hire them when they need to take longer journeys where public transport and taxis aren't so good. Busy cities need taxis (and usually more of them) but letting unregulated drivers with their personal cars, in whatever state they may be, take over and undercut experienced, licensed, and insured taxi drivers isn't the answer. There are illegal unregulated taxis in Moscow: go to a main street, stick out your thumb, and in a matter of seconds you'll have a line of cars offering you a lift to wherever you want to go. If you don't like the price or look of the first guy who comes along, you can go to the next one in line. In some parts of London you can find illegal taxis too.
Without a doubt, a lot of taxi services around the world could do with some reforms and improvements but on the whole they've better than just any Tom, Dick, or Harry picking people up off the streets whenever they feel like it. I don't think silicon valley's "culture of disruption" is a particularly constructive approach and their true motives are more likely to be along the lines of creating controlling monopolies that suck all of the profits from both ends, passengers and drivers, and leave them effectively powerless and disenfranchised. How exactly would you go about having a legitimate grievance heard against Uber or Lyft? What do you think the likelihood of having it settled reasonably and quickly would be? PayPal already ignores UK and European consumer protection rights and laws and is effectively a law unto itself. You're much better off going directly through the established consumer protection processes than trying to register a complaint through PayPal's grievance procedures.
Uber and Lyft have the potential to destroy taxi driving as a professional industry and a job and leave and inadequate mess in its place. If so, that'll push more people into using their cars in cities and add to congestion, pollution, accidents, stress, costs, and frustration for everyone.
Definitely. I think too many pundits use the extreme, exceptional minority of cases of trolling to label all internet commenters who may be contentious, argumentative, and/or enjoy debating ideas and views thoroughly; that's what makes online discussions interesting, engaging, and worthwhile rather than bland agreeable echo chambers. I like the phrase, "Some people can't tell the difference between critical thinkers and haters."
Most people react emotionally to views and opinions that contradict or infringe on their own. Most people have learned to filter their reactions and think others' views and opinions through, i.e. to see your side through their eyes and try to understand how you see them seeing you (If that makes sense?). I guess we call people who haven't learned to do this online "trolls." They may turn out to be reasonable, sensitive people if you meet them in person but somehow that gets lost online: https://xkcd.com/438/
I work in online learning (elearning) and discussion forums play an important and central role in many courses. The main problem there is the opposite and that too many people are "pathologically polite." It takes a lot of coaxing and encouragement to get people to really express their opinions and views and to examine, explore, and even challenge each others'.
What bar are Uber raising? All I can see is a race to the bottom. If I get into a taxi, I want to know that it's insured, up to a reasonable minimum standard of safety and security, that the driver is fully informed of his/her legal obligations, and that if something happens that's suspect, illegal, or just plain wrong, I have official channels to go through that can deal with the issue quickly and effectively. That means every taxi and every driver has to be identifiable and reachable. How else do you ensure that without licensing?
If you get into a taxi in London, you can be sure that the driver can get you to your destination in the shortest possible time any time of day and any day of the week: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Does anyone have any evidence establishing a negative causal relationship between effective environmental regulation and state economic growth and job creation or are we just making assumptions here? I'll give you a clue; we're making assumptions and/or repeating neo-liberal propaganda that we hear constantly, every day on the corporate media.
If Elon Musk is such a great philanthropist and forward thinker, perhaps he should comply with the best environmental regulations in the US? Or even do better? Is part of the sales and marketing hype for Tesla environmental?
I don't think Amazon, as evil as they are, are the real culprit in this scenario. Educational publishing has always been used as a way to fleece learners for extra cash. I doubt Purdue are any exception. In contrast, non-profit, egalitarian educational publishing is quite different, e.g. a course text book, authored by one of the leading researchers in his field, is free to download and print as the whole book or chapter by chapter: http://www.aupress.ca/index.ph... It's Creative Commons licensed so learners can do whatever they like with it within the generous terms of the licence: http://creativecommons.org/lic... They can also buy a professionally printed and bound copy of it for $39.95 CAD. All the publications from Athabasca University Press are like this. So why is Purdue charging $100s per student for text books? And why do we have to have new editions every year or so when undergraduate studies are mostly on topics and subject matter that are well-established and don't change very much?
All I can see here is Amazon trying to get a bigger foothold in the market for this cash cow.
Let's see... maybe they'll gather enough metrics on productivity and frequency of lapses in concentration and discover that the only thing that really correlates with those are the number of hours per week that they're working, previously recorded at an average of 35-40 hours per week, after which workers are no more productive but do less creative and/or innovative work. They might find out some interesting and novel details but the research into working practices is already pretty sound. It's just a pity that most executives, managers, and HR managers don't read it.
Yep, there's lots of people repeating the PR and marketing mantra that children need mobile devices in schools without showing any evidence that it's beneficial to them or their academic performance. Where are the studies and pilot schemes that show significant and substantial effect sizes (i.e. above d 0.4) that would warrant diverting time and resources away from actually studying? Where's the evidence showing that tablets in classrooms contribute to children's literacy, numeracy, and critical thinking skills?
If we don't care about evidence, we could equally claim that computer software, since it's so narrowly and rigidly designed, contributes to increasing and entrenching functional fixedness, i.e. the inability to take knowledge from one situation/context and apply it to another. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... (I'm not claiming that this is the case, just that we can claim anything we like without the need to provide appropriate, valid, reliable evidence).
Well, if OS X isn't working on your hardware, why not cut out the middle-men (Apple Inc.) and install the free and open source OS that they copied most of it from; FreeBSD http://www.freebsd.org/
People keep saying that Apple Inc. are innovative... I'm still waiting for them to innovate.
Yep, idiots. This looks like MIT's marketing department is running their learning programmes now, like the tail wagging the dog. I've seen this happen to a certain degree in other universities; marketing decide that they can sell more courses/get more students if they shorten courses to 7 weeks. They halve the learning targets and distribute them across twice as many courses.
What's wrong with that? Well for starters, it means that twice as much course time is taken up with introducing the course at the beginning and taking exams at the end. In other words, In a 14 week course, students lose 2 weeks of actual studying (giving them 12 weeks' study) and in a 7 week course students lose 2 weeks (giving them 5 weeks' study). Another thing is that it takes time to settle into a course, get to know your tutor, how s/he works, what her/his expactations are, get to grips with the nuances of the subject, get to know your classmates and form study groups so that you can learn more effectively, etc. With shorter "modules", you're going to be constantly disrupting students' and tutors' "flow" and as a result, I expect learning will become shallower and suffer even more from what they call the "transfer deficit", i.e. the inability of learners to adapt and apply what they've learned to novel problems in new contexts.
MIT might make more money in the short term but their reputation will eventually take a nose-dive and they won't be able to charge as much per degree. But the most serious issue is that if the majority of universities started thinking in this way, their graduates would no longer be as innovative and productive in the US economy. Everyone would suffer as a result.
Morgan Stanley are a highly reputable financial institution and everything they do is completely legal and above board. It would be simply ridiculous to suggest that they would mislead their investors in order to make a quick buck themselves. Their CEO, James P. Gorman, is a truly dedicated and patriotic Amernican to the core (rumours of his Australianness have been greatly exaggerated). He pays all his taxes and declares all his income to the IRS and has never even been tempted to hide his money in off-shore banks and tax havens, and has never used his personal wealth or his bank's wealth to undermine democracy in state and national elections or through lobbying. He's a man who knows exactly what is going on in his bank and knows that everything is ethical and reputable and in the best interests of his investors and the American people.
Real journalism is dying without the help of the internet. The news that matters, the news that gets people's attention, the news that affects how people engage in civil society is TV news. It's all been Foxed. No more background, no more historical context, no more broader perspective, no more deep investigating unless it's on a celebrity or other public figure for a nonsense, inconsequential, personal interest piece.
Yes, newspapers are where most of our TV news originates but those are mired in conflicts of interest (Seen any objective, fact-based reporting from the middle east lately?) and balking away from running any stories that might upset sponsors or powerful people who can afford big lawsuits. Any news organisation that's funded by advertising or patronage (e.g. Washington Post and The Intercept) is, without a doubt, misleading the public not so much by the stories they do run but more by the stories they don't and you never get to hear about.
We need new ways to do news. Real investigative journalism is highly skilled and requires budgets to follow stories wherever they may lead. It needs sources of funds that aren't conditional on appeasing the rich and powerful. If we had real, meaningful news that told us about how the world really works and that empowered us, I think we'd be surprised about how interesting and engaging politics, law, and economics could be.
How we transmit/broadcast it is secondary, whether it be in print or electronic.
Agreed. There are other states that adopted or have adopted pervasive, warrantless surveillance on its people; pre-1989 East Germany (Stasi), North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and now the "five eyes" (USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia). What's not to like about it?
BTW, what has pervasive, warrantless surveillance got to do with education, affordable housing, and healthcare?
Couldn't agree more. It's not in the public's or consumers' interests to turn taxi driving into one of those "Work for yourself and earn $10,000 a month!" scams that we get in our junk mail. Worse than turning your livingroom into a mini one-person sweatshop with no health a safety, it unleashes tired, stressed, desperate, overworked drivers on the public at large and it's the public who have to pick up the bill for the legal costs and deal with the traffic carnage, bodily harm, and loss of life after them. The roads are dangerous enough as it is. Thanks for making the world a shittier place for everyone Uber and Lyft - I bet they're rich enough to use licensed, regulated, insured limo services.
I think one contributing factor is the commonly conceived idea of management: Managers tell people what to do and when to do it. They rate their own success at managing and workplace status more by how well others comply with their demands than from their teams' or departments' productivity (that's an abstract number on a report somewhere). Lots of workers are unhappy about the way their managers treat them and want to leave at the earliest possible opportunity, unless of course, they like their colleagues (Should we reward colleagues more for workers' productivity?) When managers can drop the "command and control is good" mindset, then they're ready to do something more constructive, egalitarian, and ultimately productive... you know, like show some support and leadership.