Good, because that chick holding it is in the middle of a call and probably doesn't want to give it up. Plus, she's over in India, which complicates things...
Yeah, I completely prefer Amazon listing itself first because whatever I'm buying will (most likely) be what was shown/described and will ship quickly.
Amazon is quickly turning into the huckster's bazaar that eBay was (is?), with the third party sellers doing things like sending used batteries in ziplock baggies instead of the retail packaged items described.
Survivorship bias. The Chinese are capable of making quality products, but companies move their manufacturing to China to cut costs and, since well-made Chinese products aren't much cheaper than well-made products from anywhere else, these companies specify that any possible corner is to be cut in the design, materials, and manufacturing.
The Chinese products that you have that have lasted decades were either high quality products (and weren't dirt cheap) or are statistical flukes that had better quality than intended. Labor costs don't account for that much of a product's cost to manufacture. A complete lack of safety and environmental regulations will shave some small percentage off of the cost. Reducing the part count and using inferior (or even not fit for purpose) materials are the real cost savers. Well, that and an increasingly permissive QA process.
It's almost as if graft, corruption, and regulatory capture are more the issue than the unions. Odd that the same thing happens in other arenas without unions. In the same vein, it's odd that government can be a force for the defense of personal rights and freedom, but corruption can turn it into a horribly oppressive force.
The answer to the issue of corrupt unions is to cleanse them of corruption, not to dissolve them so that workers are once again at a disadvantage in negotiations with management.
That's a little too free sounding for how that market would be actually implemented. In practice, there'd be a VIP class that could force your car to move out of the way for free. Initially, it'd only be for police/ambulances/presidential motorcades, but eventually people would be able to pay a third party to get on the list and force you out of their way uncompensated.
Much easier to implement and the people who matter are happy, so... problem solved.
That's my impression, too. There's a huge personal and financial cost associated with working to make the world a better place, even if your specific goal isn't controversial at all (developing medical devices in my case).
We see relatively few people working on these problems because we, as a society, value this work far less than almost every other pursuit (business, marketing, making weapons, etc). Maybe this illustrates that I'm not a very good person, but when I'm feeling down I wonder why I put myself through all of this just to help people who don't appreciate my effort at all. I could make a (relative) mint designing weapon systems and not feel like I'm helping people who wouldn't bat an eye at the sight of me starving in the street.
I'm saying that taping over your webcam is useless if you leave your microphone and your speakers (which can also act as microphones) untouched.
And I'm saying that it's not useless, but that its usefulness depends on your own specific threat scenario. If you can't think of a scenario, besides being seen masturbating (which is a valid enough scenario to completely negate your point), where one would be more worried about pictures being taken than microphones recording sound, then your imagination is seriously limited.
In many cases, laptops with cameras are present and networked in environments that are not often populated but still have sensitive activity occurring in them (not "let's build an expensive SCIF" sensitive, but "this piece of tape completely mitigates the risk" sensitive). There's your industrial espionage scenario.
A bit more mundane: your child has a laptop. Listening in on their inane chatter is going to be less attractive to the hypothetical weirdo than snapping pictures of them naked. Is that likely? Of course not, but a piece of tape completely mitigates that risk and they can still use the computer because it still plays sounds and has usable ports.
Your one-size-fits-all, over-the-top or nothing-at-all security doesn't actually apply to the real world. Everybody is much better off assessing their own risks and acting accordingly. Is this really that hard to understand??
If you want to use tape, you should also snip out your microphone and speakers, glue your USB ports shut and fully encrypt your system with a third party, open source encryption.
That's ridiculous hyperbole. Besides the sticky glue residue left behind, putting tape over the webcam is a cheap, easy, and reversible process and offers the very real potential of slightly increased privacy for most users.
If you're arguing that tape alone doesn't provide perfect security so it's not worth doing, then that's a bullshit argument. Any of the actions you suggested individually increase your privacy and may be worth doing on their own (depending on your threat scenario). They each have incremental value, even if you don't do all of them together. Real security is a continuum: full of compromises and risk assessments.
Blue coloured light is used by the brain to see different shades of white, more blue means to the eye/brain that an object is more white. It is also the colour that is leased focused on the retina.
Which is part of why this trendy fixation on putting blue LEDs in everything is so irritating. Tiny bright sources of blue light are difficult to focus on and tend to just cause a dazzling sensation. In a poorly lit environment, silkscreened text next to blue status LEDs is very difficult to read, as are blue backlit LCDs.
I still laugh every time I see companies who mark their buildings with the company's name in blue-lit letters. On a dark night and from any farther than the building's parking lot, you can't read the name at all.
It simply *is not* the information that has been copyrighted.
But is trivially transformable into the information that is. See also, a zipped jpeg.
Now, I disagree with the ruling, but I also disagree with your logic.
A URL is not trivially transformable into the the information that is copyrighted and is not equivalent to a zipped jpeg. A URL is a reference to the information, but there is no transformation that you can do to the information contained solely within the typical URL to reproduce the information that it points to. You must use the URL to fetch the actual copyrighted information.
Under the hood there is a coiled loop of red wire with a big bright orange label with a picture of wire cutters. You cut the red wire.
That's a bizarre place to put a "first responder loop". In what percentage of situations would a car require the first responders to cut at the body of the car, but still be able to open the front hood without cutting? In a good fraction of bad collisions, it's the front of the car that is demolished.
Whether they are from Apple or Fruitas Ltd, who gives a shit? What I care about is price and quality. And if companies have to pay out the nose for licensing fee, that money goes into a money sink instead of quality while driving the price up.
Yes, I think that IS relevant.
That's an overly simplistic view of 'quality'. There's more to quality than just quality of materials and if a company foregoes a better designed component or technology to avoid licensing fees, they either have to use a lower quality component/technology or engineer their own (perhaps at a higher overall cost).
Licensing technology is not always a good choice, and I'm not defending excessive licensing fees, but it is not always opposed to quality.
Even better, take some 16 year old Americans and put them in Europe where nobody cares about the legal drinking age and watch what happens!* Once they realize that they can walk into any random liquor store and buy as much alcohol as they can carry, they will do just that. Meanwhile, the local kids won't understand why this such a big deal.
*Unless they're from New Jersey. In that case, get somewhere safe and lock the door.
Well, they do it once or twice and then it loses its appeal. At least that's how it worked for me and my friends. The locals don't get it because their parents aren't so uptight and let them have a beer or a glass of wine with them before they turn sixteen. In the US, our parents let us have drinks before we turn 21, because that age is ridiculously high, but not always before we're sixteen.
For most people, binge drinking loses its appeal pretty quickly. Kids in the US only drink and drive because they can't legally hang out and drink anywhere and have poor enough risk assessment skills to realize that driving around while drinking isn't the best solution to that problem. When I was a kid, we always went into the woods to drink, but that had the unintended consequences of having litter to deal with since we couldn't travel home with empty bottles and cans.
The overall message should be that prohibition of low harm behaviors often leads to much greater harm behaviors, but authoritarian types can never seem to come to terms with that.
My own link clearly states that it's an ambiguous statement with several potentially valid interpretations. With the rest of the context, as arth1 pointed out above, your interpretation is the least likely to be correct. Do you really think that from, "Using on-board cameras, engineers have determined that the hole is about 40 centimeters in diameter," it is a reasonable assumption that the engineers think that the hole is 39.5 cm to 40.5 cm in diameter? There's a saying about making assumptions...
Clearly, your opinion on that depends solely on which political party you swear fealty to and which party your favorite criminal belongs to. Then you go out of your way to downplay and excuse the crimes of one and amplify the other's to a state of ridiculous hyperbole. But you're so steeped in the party politics that you see your actions as perfectly reasonable and are certain that anyone who disagrees with you is evil or stupid.
In reality, who gets to walk depends on who has the more powerful political connections and has nothing to do with the crime. Which means that both of the politicians walk and the petty criminals on the street have new prisons built to house them.
Honestly, this is the lamest argument and I say that as somebody who would like to see all of the criminals from both of your silly little teams in jail where they belong.
So what if the loyal party members only speak out when the other team does something wrong? Do you really expect anything else from all of these idiotic partisan hypocrites? Here you are acting as an apologist for another criminal and trying to deflect the argument away from her because she's on your stupid team. How is that any different?
I have one too, and while I always feel like I should apologize for having a Windows phone when somebody notices it and asks what it is, it's actually a great phone and the battery lasts several days under normal use (and is replaceable).
As noted by the other poster replying to me, this was a replacement for an older satellite which was being retired - if that older satellites life cannot be extended, Spacecom just lost customers to another provider, because there is no spare waiting to be launched and customers still want service...
Which seems like poor planning on Spacecom's part, since launch failures (all the way up to deployment and operation failures) are not exactly unheard of in the industry. There was already increased risk involved in sending up their payload on the first reused first stage, so if they didn't have solid contingency plans they were just acting foolishly.
Which is an assumption you can't make when given a measurement of 40 cm, which has one significant figure (though it is somewhat ambiguous... the ambiguity could be resolved by calling it a 0.4 or 0.40 m hole).
The takeaway message for you here should be that including your anti-gun political message in with your "ISIS is not a real threat" message led to a distraction from, and dilution of, your intended message. Introducing politics into discussions does that, every single time.
Your argument would have gone over better if you had stuck with the hyperbolic toenail fungus example from the beginning. Doubling down on the politics only cemented the derailing of the discussion, which you overly-political goofballs can never seem to grasp.
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Dude. I did not mean that exact phone.
Good, because that chick holding it is in the middle of a call and probably doesn't want to give it up. Plus, she's over in India, which complicates things...
Check the specs first. It only supports GSM network: 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, which neither AT&T nor T-Mobile currently use in the US.
Yeah, I completely prefer Amazon listing itself first because whatever I'm buying will (most likely) be what was shown/described and will ship quickly.
Amazon is quickly turning into the huckster's bazaar that eBay was (is?), with the third party sellers doing things like sending used batteries in ziplock baggies instead of the retail packaged items described.
Survivorship bias. The Chinese are capable of making quality products, but companies move their manufacturing to China to cut costs and, since well-made Chinese products aren't much cheaper than well-made products from anywhere else, these companies specify that any possible corner is to be cut in the design, materials, and manufacturing.
The Chinese products that you have that have lasted decades were either high quality products (and weren't dirt cheap) or are statistical flukes that had better quality than intended. Labor costs don't account for that much of a product's cost to manufacture. A complete lack of safety and environmental regulations will shave some small percentage off of the cost. Reducing the part count and using inferior (or even not fit for purpose) materials are the real cost savers. Well, that and an increasingly permissive QA process.
It's almost as if graft, corruption, and regulatory capture are more the issue than the unions. Odd that the same thing happens in other arenas without unions. In the same vein, it's odd that government can be a force for the defense of personal rights and freedom, but corruption can turn it into a horribly oppressive force.
The answer to the issue of corrupt unions is to cleanse them of corruption, not to dissolve them so that workers are once again at a disadvantage in negotiations with management.
That's a little too free sounding for how that market would be actually implemented. In practice, there'd be a VIP class that could force your car to move out of the way for free. Initially, it'd only be for police/ambulances/presidential motorcades, but eventually people would be able to pay a third party to get on the list and force you out of their way uncompensated.
Much easier to implement and the people who matter are happy, so... problem solved.
That's my impression, too. There's a huge personal and financial cost associated with working to make the world a better place, even if your specific goal isn't controversial at all (developing medical devices in my case).
We see relatively few people working on these problems because we, as a society, value this work far less than almost every other pursuit (business, marketing, making weapons, etc). Maybe this illustrates that I'm not a very good person, but when I'm feeling down I wonder why I put myself through all of this just to help people who don't appreciate my effort at all. I could make a (relative) mint designing weapon systems and not feel like I'm helping people who wouldn't bat an eye at the sight of me starving in the street.
I'm saying that taping over your webcam is useless if you leave your microphone and your speakers (which can also act as microphones) untouched.
And I'm saying that it's not useless, but that its usefulness depends on your own specific threat scenario. If you can't think of a scenario, besides being seen masturbating (which is a valid enough scenario to completely negate your point), where one would be more worried about pictures being taken than microphones recording sound, then your imagination is seriously limited.
In many cases, laptops with cameras are present and networked in environments that are not often populated but still have sensitive activity occurring in them (not "let's build an expensive SCIF" sensitive, but "this piece of tape completely mitigates the risk" sensitive). There's your industrial espionage scenario.
A bit more mundane: your child has a laptop. Listening in on their inane chatter is going to be less attractive to the hypothetical weirdo than snapping pictures of them naked. Is that likely? Of course not, but a piece of tape completely mitigates that risk and they can still use the computer because it still plays sounds and has usable ports.
Your one-size-fits-all, over-the-top or nothing-at-all security doesn't actually apply to the real world. Everybody is much better off assessing their own risks and acting accordingly. Is this really that hard to understand??
If you want to use tape, you should also snip out your microphone and speakers, glue your USB ports shut and fully encrypt your system with a third party, open source encryption.
That's ridiculous hyperbole. Besides the sticky glue residue left behind, putting tape over the webcam is a cheap, easy, and reversible process and offers the very real potential of slightly increased privacy for most users.
If you're arguing that tape alone doesn't provide perfect security so it's not worth doing, then that's a bullshit argument. Any of the actions you suggested individually increase your privacy and may be worth doing on their own (depending on your threat scenario). They each have incremental value, even if you don't do all of them together. Real security is a continuum: full of compromises and risk assessments.
Blue coloured light is used by the brain to see different shades of white, more blue means to the eye/brain that an object is more white. It is also the colour that is leased focused on the retina.
Which is part of why this trendy fixation on putting blue LEDs in everything is so irritating. Tiny bright sources of blue light are difficult to focus on and tend to just cause a dazzling sensation. In a poorly lit environment, silkscreened text next to blue status LEDs is very difficult to read, as are blue backlit LCDs.
I still laugh every time I see companies who mark their buildings with the company's name in blue-lit letters. On a dark night and from any farther than the building's parking lot, you can't read the name at all.
But is trivially transformable into the information that is. See also, a zipped jpeg.
Now, I disagree with the ruling, but I also disagree with your logic.
A URL is not trivially transformable into the the information that is copyrighted and is not equivalent to a zipped jpeg. A URL is a reference to the information, but there is no transformation that you can do to the information contained solely within the typical URL to reproduce the information that it points to. You must use the URL to fetch the actual copyrighted information.
Your logic is bunk.
Under the hood there is a coiled loop of red wire with a big bright orange label with a picture of wire cutters. You cut the red wire.
That's a bizarre place to put a "first responder loop". In what percentage of situations would a car require the first responders to cut at the body of the car, but still be able to open the front hood without cutting? In a good fraction of bad collisions, it's the front of the car that is demolished.
Whether they are from Apple or Fruitas Ltd, who gives a shit? What I care about is price and quality. And if companies have to pay out the nose for licensing fee, that money goes into a money sink instead of quality while driving the price up.
Yes, I think that IS relevant.
That's an overly simplistic view of 'quality'. There's more to quality than just quality of materials and if a company foregoes a better designed component or technology to avoid licensing fees, they either have to use a lower quality component/technology or engineer their own (perhaps at a higher overall cost).
Licensing technology is not always a good choice, and I'm not defending excessive licensing fees, but it is not always opposed to quality.
Who knows what you were trying to communicate, since you couldn't be arsed to "say" anything but a copy-pasted link, but:
...sodium coco sulfate actually is a blend of sodium lauryl sulfate, sodium caprylic sulfate, sodium capric sulfate, sodium oleic sulfate, sodium stearyl sulfate etc, and instead of naming them all out with all of the fatty acids from the coconut oil, they just call it sodium coco sulfate.
Even better, take some 16 year old Americans and put them in Europe where nobody cares about the legal drinking age and watch what happens!* Once they realize that they can walk into any random liquor store and buy as much alcohol as they can carry, they will do just that. Meanwhile, the local kids won't understand why this such a big deal.
*Unless they're from New Jersey. In that case, get somewhere safe and lock the door.
Well, they do it once or twice and then it loses its appeal. At least that's how it worked for me and my friends. The locals don't get it because their parents aren't so uptight and let them have a beer or a glass of wine with them before they turn sixteen. In the US, our parents let us have drinks before we turn 21, because that age is ridiculously high, but not always before we're sixteen.
For most people, binge drinking loses its appeal pretty quickly. Kids in the US only drink and drive because they can't legally hang out and drink anywhere and have poor enough risk assessment skills to realize that driving around while drinking isn't the best solution to that problem. When I was a kid, we always went into the woods to drink, but that had the unintended consequences of having litter to deal with since we couldn't travel home with empty bottles and cans.
The overall message should be that prohibition of low harm behaviors often leads to much greater harm behaviors, but authoritarian types can never seem to come to terms with that.
My own link clearly states that it's an ambiguous statement with several potentially valid interpretations. With the rest of the context, as arth1 pointed out above, your interpretation is the least likely to be correct. Do you really think that from, "Using on-board cameras, engineers have determined that the hole is about 40 centimeters in diameter," it is a reasonable assumption that the engineers think that the hole is 39.5 cm to 40.5 cm in diameter? There's a saying about making assumptions...
Who gets to walk?
Clearly, your opinion on that depends solely on which political party you swear fealty to and which party your favorite criminal belongs to. Then you go out of your way to downplay and excuse the crimes of one and amplify the other's to a state of ridiculous hyperbole. But you're so steeped in the party politics that you see your actions as perfectly reasonable and are certain that anyone who disagrees with you is evil or stupid.
In reality, who gets to walk depends on who has the more powerful political connections and has nothing to do with the crime. Which means that both of the politicians walk and the petty criminals on the street have new prisons built to house them.
Honestly, this is the lamest argument and I say that as somebody who would like to see all of the criminals from both of your silly little teams in jail where they belong.
So what if the loyal party members only speak out when the other team does something wrong? Do you really expect anything else from all of these idiotic partisan hypocrites? Here you are acting as an apologist for another criminal and trying to deflect the argument away from her because she's on your stupid team. How is that any different?
A plague on both your houses.
I have one too, and while I always feel like I should apologize for having a Windows phone when somebody notices it and asks what it is, it's actually a great phone and the battery lasts several days under normal use (and is replaceable).
As noted by the other poster replying to me, this was a replacement for an older satellite which was being retired - if that older satellites life cannot be extended, Spacecom just lost customers to another provider, because there is no spare waiting to be launched and customers still want service...
Which seems like poor planning on Spacecom's part, since launch failures (all the way up to deployment and operation failures) are not exactly unheard of in the industry. There was already increased risk involved in sending up their payload on the first reused first stage, so if they didn't have solid contingency plans they were just acting foolishly.
I don't watch Star Wars. I'm not an eight year old.
"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -C.S. Lewis
Assuming it's to the nearest centimetre...
Which is an assumption you can't make when given a measurement of 40 cm, which has one significant figure (though it is somewhat ambiguous... the ambiguity could be resolved by calling it a 0.4 or 0.40 m hole).
For example, I remember when almost everyone flatly declared that blue LEDs were simply impossible, period, and a decade later they were commonplace.
That's one situation where I wish they were right!
That's exactly the response I expected. Thanks for illustrating the reasoning behind the shoddy level of contemporary discourse.
The takeaway message for you here should be that including your anti-gun political message in with your "ISIS is not a real threat" message led to a distraction from, and dilution of, your intended message. Introducing politics into discussions does that, every single time.
Your argument would have gone over better if you had stuck with the hyperbolic toenail fungus example from the beginning. Doubling down on the politics only cemented the derailing of the discussion, which you overly-political goofballs can never seem to grasp.