There is a huge issue with putting soldier under the dependency of gadgets.
...
Soldiers walking around with broadcast devices have no ability to hide, they also run the risk of interception and force feeding bogus orders.
Yeah! These new-fangled gadgets are nothing but trouble. I mean, radios do nothing but give soldiers positions away and provide the enemy with an avenue to force feed bogus orders. In my book it's flags and smoke signals or nothing for long distance communication!
I hadn't realized facilitator companies existed, but, after it's explained, their presence seems like an obvious necessity of doing business in a country with a large degree of corruption. Now I'm really more intrigued and curious about the economic implications to this news than I am shocked in any way.
I wonder how the size of the bribe is decided. It would pretty much have to be what the market would bear, wouldn't it? So, not enough to raise eyebrows from other sources or cause the briber to take their business elsewhere instead, but as much as you can get away with. And is the incidence of bribery correlatable with how laissez-faire and unregulated an economy is? Directly or inversely? Does it act as an inflationary force, deflationary force, or does it instead react to inflation/deflation?
As someone who has never paid or been paid a bribe, I'm really curious about how they fit into the larger picture of an economy.
Details are especially scarce when the first link just points back to this article. Who the hell is The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology? A cursory Google search reveals that they're a (pending) nonprofit with an interest in pushing for greater cybersecurity policies at the federal level. Great. I've never heard of them, so why do I care what they say about Gryphon-X? And what, exactly, is Gryphon-X proposed to do? Without details I'd be inclined to just assume it's some sort of vague pork barrel project for Silicon Valley that someone slapped NASA's name on. If so, I hope that congress continues to ignore it and moves on.
There are actually valid reasons to turn off your wifi on a Kindle. I have a friend who turns off the wireless on her old Kindle Paperwhite for months at a time. Why? Because almost all the books she loads onto the Kindle are ones she got on it for free by checking them out from the local library online. You can only check out a few at a time, and the library only gives you access to each book for about a month when your turn to check it out comes up. She's a slow reader, and it usually takes her more than a month just to get through one book. However, the time limit on the book is handled by the Kindle checking the library's server to see if the book is expired, so as long as she turns off her internet after checking the book out, it won't remove it from her Kindle. So she often shuts off her Kindle's wireless for months at a time after loading her next few books onto it.
Still, it's not as if your Kindle will just be bricked if you didn't do the update. You can still access things you don't need from the internet without updating. And you can still update and regain internet connectivity with a computer and USB connection if you didn't get the update in time.
I thought something similar when I skimmed the headline. I mean, I don't bother using an adblocker, but I also ignore and don't click on banner ads. Then I decided to dig deeper and read the NY Times article in the "Target knowing a woman is pregnant" link. That was a very illuminating article and showed me just how clever companies have gotten about analyzing data and creating marketings strategies around the data.
Companies like Target can now do intelligent marketing targeted towards you even if you block all banner ads. Hell, even if you haven't touched a computer in the last 5 years they can still find a way to market to you. Have you ever bought anything from a Target store? If you used a credit card, they have a way to uniquely identify who you are and what your shopping habits are at their stores. What's more, from other sources of publicly available data and purchase histories they can buy from other companies, they can fill in a lot of gaps and figure out much more about you and what you may be interested in buying than you might think.
To those who have never been to a Target store, whenever you buy your items and check out, you're handed a few coupons along with your receipt. These coupons don't exist until your payment is being printed - they come out of a separate printer whose sole purpose is to print coupons tailored to the person who is buying goods. If you've used their store a few times with the same credit card, you start seeing a lot of coupons either for the items you have already bought in the past or for items in the same general category as items you've bought in the past. And that's even if you've never bought anything from them online or used any of their online offers.
I was especially surprised to read that Target had apparently already considered that people don't like companies like Target knowing too much about them. So, if they do figure out, for example, that a woman is pregnant then they pepper in random coupons for unrelated things along with the baby-related coupons to make it seem like the baby-related coupons were just random chance coupons that anyone could have gotten.
It's a very interesting age of data analysis we're entering into. Potentially dystopian and Orwellian? Sure. Potentially utopian and equalitarian? Sure, that too. As usual, I'll predict it ends up somewhere in-between.
I'm really not sure why the submitter decided to describe it as counterintuitive, but I did find it interesting that, technically, it may be possible to have a form of proto-life that evolves by mutating during replication and does not die. But if that happens, evolution ends as soon as all available space is taken up. It kind of makes me wonder whether it's possible that there are dead-end planets in the universe where that did, indeed happen. And what the odds would then be of that sort of life starting is vs the kind of cycle-based life that developed on earth.
Let's try a somewhat-analogous scenario as a thought exercise:
I find out that on my bank's website, I can easily see my neighbor's bank account by doing some obvious URL manipulation. I immediately tell the bank that I'm worried about the security of my own account because I know that I could go into anyone else's. The bank locks me, and only me, from accessing any bank accounts, including my own.
That response makes no sense. The only proper response would be to revoke ALL access to the bank's website until such time as the security hole can be confirmed fixed. Otherwise, the implied message is that you should NEVER tell the bank that they have a potential problem.
I just wonder whether this was actually a story of extreme incompetence or extreme corruption.
Didn't we elect someone to get us the hell out of some sandy region where everyone hates everyone else, and the only people they hate more is anyone who shows up to help? Are we really going to do this all over again with the advisers and the airstrikes and then another Iraq/Libya/Egypt clusterfuck?
Who is "we?" The US? Did you even read the summary, much less the article? Other than Turkey and the US both being members of NATO, this story does not involve the US whatsoever. Turkey shot down a Russian aircraft for violating Turkish airspace. Russia says the aircraft was not even in Turkish airspace. End of story so far. The US was not so much as mentioned. There has been no press release or White House briefing on a US response to these actions. In short, what the hell does this comment have to do with TFA?
At first, I thought maybe this was mislabeled sarcasm and should have been marked "funny". Then I looked at the other posts and realized you're serious. Look, I realize policy-bashing and myopic politicizing is a recurring theme on these threads, but this is by far the most masturbatory and off topic post I have seen marked "insightful" in a long time.
Each US administration has a long list of tragic or inflammatory events that it could be argued were a direct result of the actions they took or did not take. This is not one of those events.
Organized sports allow their participants and technology to optimize... until suddenly they don't.
The argument is usually "we want a level playing field", but that's still rubbish.
I actually have a different theory about why technology becomes banned in sports. In order for a sport to catch on and have staying power, the way its played has to have mass appeal. There are an awful lot of factors that go into a sport finding and keeping an audience. If you change a sport's rules and style of play too quickly, you run a very real risk of losing most of your audience. You could potentially gain more audience instead, but you're more likely to lose people if your sport is already well established and you change the rules.
So, a sport will allow new strategies, new technologies, and new refinements of the rules until just before the point where the sport would no longer feel like the widely accepted version of the sport. Over time, the sport can see drastic changes. But new technology like these brooms would cause such a rapid change in the way curling is played that there's a very real risk that the sport could lose most of what few fans it already has if it allows them in tournament play.
The choice of what to allow or ban in a sport is not arbitrary or inconsequential. Nor is it usually clear-cut or easily quantifiable. It's really a marketing decision that must rely on gut feeling more than statistical analysis.
Well, I guess on the plus side you could see a really clear representation of how your servers smoke, catch on fire, and explode when you put too much load on them now.
Ok, I get the robot part. Makes enough sense to me and doesn't require explanation. But why humanoid? So the astronauts will have an illusion of more humans to interact with? Because they want the robot to perform tasks on machines that are only capable of accommodating the human form? Because it makes better PR than a more outlandish but perhaps more sensible quadruped approach? Some sort of official response to that question seems like it would have been a no-brainer for the articles.
So doxing is completely unethical but torturing animals is OK?
Actually, the only logical inconsistency would be saying that either both doxing and animal experimentation are ethical or that both are unethical.
Doxing is unethical because it is an single person or small group anonymously inciting a larger group to retaliatory action against an individual. Did the individual deserve it? It's possible, but not important because the larger issue is that there is no oversight or consequence to those who incite action if they are wrong. If doxing is ethical, then the individual is the ultimate determinant of the moral justification to cause a chain of events.
Institutional animal experimentation is ethical because it is a group performing potentially harmful acts upon living beings for the possibility to prevent or alleviate further harm to other living beings in the future. Was the research worth the suffering? It's possible that they weren't, but that's part of the reason why peer review and government oversight exist in the realm of animal testing. If animal testing is ethical, then the collective is the ultimate determinant of the moral justification to cause a chain of events.
PETA believes that doxing is ethical but animal experimentation is unethical. The slashdot community appears to mostly believe that doxing is unethical but animal experimentation is ethical. Both positions are logically consistent. They just come from opposite views on where moral authority should ultimately lie.
I'm thinking about buying a GTX 700-series card from NewEgg. Do you have any advice?
Well, I'm not personally very experienced with the GTX 700 series, but I can give some general NewEgg advice that I'm not sure if everyone is following. Read a few reviews from people who gave both good and bad reviews of the product. Don't just rely on the star ratings.
The nicest thing for me about NewEgg (other than the very nice RMA policy for defective items) is that a lot of the reviewers are usually pretty technologically proficient and will get specific about their praise/gripes. Sometimes you'll find some item that's otherwise awesome and has a 5 star average, but that dies for 10% of the owners after 3 months. And sometimes you'll find a 4 star average on an item that's a very solid and stable product and has a good price, but got rated lower because it is outclassed on some benchmark by a more expensive similar product. The review comments are a good place to find things like that out.
Unless you throughly reviewed and and independently tested TrueCyrpt all you seem to have done is to exchange one set of assumptions for another (and you also allude to the fact that you have no idea as to the quality of TrueCrypt.)
Unless you have the time and the background to understand each choice you will ever be given, you're going to have to make some assumptions in life. Does it not make more sense to assume that well known software whose sole purpose is encryption might be better than software added on by a manufacturer who is not necessarily well known to be knowledgeable in encryption practices?
I've always felt that the way many people think about movie reviews is generally flawed. They seem to go to imdb or rottentomatoes and say something like "Oh, movie X got high user reviews. It must be a good movie." To me, what they should really be saying is, "Movie X got high user reviews. People who go to this kind of movie generally liked it." I think a good example of how these are different is the movie Jurassic World. It got 70%+ from both audiences and critics on rottentomatoes and more than 7 average rating on imdb. That doesn't mean it's an ground-breakingly good movie. Quite the contrary. If you saw the original Jurassic Park, you already saw a movie with the same basic plot and movie-going experience. If you go to that movie expecting to see an objectively wonderful film, you are going to be disappointed. If, however, you already know that the plot is basically the same and you want to see a shallow disaster/CG flick with dinosaurs, you're going to get exactly what you wanted and be mostly pleased with the result.
Reviews are ALWAYS subjective and always will be. If you went and saw a movie based purely on how many people liked it without reading any of the complaints/praise of the movie, the problem is with you. If you vociferously disagree with a movie's popularity and think it should be less popular, again the problem is with you. You're looking for objective measurements that don't exist.
I don't disagree with the concept that what someone learns outside of the classroom is often even more important and far-reaching than what they learned in the classroom. But does this man have such hubris that he thinks he can actually quantify it in any meaningful way? We can't even get traditional classroom education quantified in much more than "years spent in classes on this subject", so what makes anyone think we could do it with what people read from newspaper articles/heard on TED talks/etc?
"Do Tech Firms Really Want Liberal Arts Majors?" No more than any other companies do. "Can someone with a liberal arts major expect to find easy employment with tech firms?" Probably not.
If you've got some really solid interpersonal skills or other non-technical skill that a business can leverage for an advantage, then sure, you can get hired in tech. To be honest, if you're good enough at that sort of thing you can be hired anywhere. I don't see why tech would be so special. But if you read the Forbes article and decided to pursue a liberal arts degree as your path to being hired by a big up and coming tech company, you were a fool.
In short, tech companies want people that can fill their business needs. And the degree is really only good at getting your foot in the door on your first job. After that, experience trumps all.
The article and summary were pretty terrible about getting across the salient points. NPR did a much better job earlier this week. Here's a few things glossed over or not adequately highlighted in TFA:
1) The American Egg Board is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and funded by the egg industry. The anti-competition actions were taken by a government run entity on behalf of non-government entities.
2) The American Egg Board's sole purpose is the marketing and promotion of eggs for human consumption. Smear campaigns and lobbying the FDA against competition are in no way in line with their charter.
3) The only reason we know for sure that this happened was an activist requesting that the information be released because the American Egg Board, being a government entity, falls under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Without that, this would be just a conspiracy theory.
To sum up, this is a story about monopolistic collusion between a government-run organization and a consortium of business interests that was brought to light by FOIA. The cynic in us is not surprised by any of this, perhaps, but it's still news and still something worth noting and discussing.
Ok, I'm pretty sure there is, in fact, some compelling evidence that over-indulgence in sugary drinks, fast food, etc do, in fact, contribute to obesity. Especially since you don't really have to partake very much to over-indulge. But assuming there isn't, are they really proposing to prove that one can eat a high-calorie, high-sugar diet without large amounts of exercise to offset it and remain healthy? If so, they're about to make a health and quality of life breakthrough the likes of which hasn't been seen since the development of the vaccine!
After missing two expansions, I came back to WoW for the latest expansion and actually had a lot of fun... For a little while... I'll speak of my PvP experience, since that's where I spent most of my time.
Actually, the whole "end game grinding so that one can fight other players" part was changed in the most recent expansion (possibly even back in Pandaria? I didn't play that expansion at all). There are now two levels of PvP gear: beginner and elite. Beginner gear is better in PvP and comparable in PvE to the gear you get from small PvE dungeons. Elite PvP gear is better than any other gear in the game for the purpose of PvP. The best raid gear from PvE is always worse than the current season's elite PvP gear, but only in PvP. They did this by scaling gear based on what you're doing. In most of the world, PvP gear is so-so and will get you by in seeing any of the game's content as long as you're not trying to do hardcore raiding. But as soon as you enter a PvP area or enter PvP combat with another player your stats from gear are all re-scaled to a much higher level if you're wearing PvP gear.
Now you can get "beginner" PvP gear quickly and easily at the start of each PvP season by doing PvP, either through battlegrounds (random matchups on objective-based maps with anywhere from 10v10 to 40v40 combat) or the Ashran open-world PvP area (which, to varying degrees throughout the patches allowed you to get PvP items from the area's "events").
But then, once you have the beginner gear, things get ugly. And this is why I canceled my subscription. Once you have your beginner gear, the only way to get elite PvP gear is to fight in 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5 arenas with pre-made teams or do 10v10 rated battlegrounds with pre-made teams. I left out a whole side story about being able to get elite gear at one point from Ashran because it was just silly and eventually went away anyway. And the only way you win the points necessary to get the elite gear is by winning... This led to incredibly toxic PvP experiences. You either played with your friends (and lost a lot if you were a casual player) or played with serious PvPers who were PvPing 4+ hours a day. Some of whom were also intense jerks. But the only way to avoid getting completely stomped by the serious PvPers in any PvP mode was to grind PvP for the elite gear, and the attraction to doing that is inversely proportional to the amount of time you're willing to invest in it.
In the end, PvP did get noticeably better for a while in the latest expansion, but there's still a grind at the end, even if they did move it from PvE to PvP. And there have been constant complaints about the matchmaking system. Incidentally, that seems to be the most common complaint from players about Blizzard games in general nowadays. Anyway, they're definitely improving, but I'm still pretty surprised nobody has managed to unseat WoW for popularity in the classic MMO arena after all these years.
Anyone else read this and feel slightly disappointed that someone saying "hey, wait, don't take that study we did out of context and start implying causalities" is considered news instead of the norm?
Also, according to TFA the estimate was that 750,000 lights were dimmed or shut off. There is no indication given of the percent that were dimmed vs shut off, so even the headline isn't accurate.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a huge issue with putting soldier under the dependency of gadgets.
...
Soldiers walking around with broadcast devices have no ability to hide, they also run the risk of interception and force feeding bogus orders.
Yeah! These new-fangled gadgets are nothing but trouble. I mean, radios do nothing but give soldiers positions away and provide the enemy with an avenue to force feed bogus orders. In my book it's flags and smoke signals or nothing for long distance communication!
Wait... what?
I hadn't realized facilitator companies existed, but, after it's explained, their presence seems like an obvious necessity of doing business in a country with a large degree of corruption. Now I'm really more intrigued and curious about the economic implications to this news than I am shocked in any way.
I wonder how the size of the bribe is decided. It would pretty much have to be what the market would bear, wouldn't it? So, not enough to raise eyebrows from other sources or cause the briber to take their business elsewhere instead, but as much as you can get away with. And is the incidence of bribery correlatable with how laissez-faire and unregulated an economy is? Directly or inversely? Does it act as an inflationary force, deflationary force, or does it instead react to inflation/deflation?
As someone who has never paid or been paid a bribe, I'm really curious about how they fit into the larger picture of an economy.
Details are especially scarce when the first link just points back to this article. Who the hell is The Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology? A cursory Google search reveals that they're a (pending) nonprofit with an interest in pushing for greater cybersecurity policies at the federal level. Great. I've never heard of them, so why do I care what they say about Gryphon-X? And what, exactly, is Gryphon-X proposed to do? Without details I'd be inclined to just assume it's some sort of vague pork barrel project for Silicon Valley that someone slapped NASA's name on. If so, I hope that congress continues to ignore it and moves on.
There are actually valid reasons to turn off your wifi on a Kindle. I have a friend who turns off the wireless on her old Kindle Paperwhite for months at a time. Why? Because almost all the books she loads onto the Kindle are ones she got on it for free by checking them out from the local library online. You can only check out a few at a time, and the library only gives you access to each book for about a month when your turn to check it out comes up. She's a slow reader, and it usually takes her more than a month just to get through one book. However, the time limit on the book is handled by the Kindle checking the library's server to see if the book is expired, so as long as she turns off her internet after checking the book out, it won't remove it from her Kindle. So she often shuts off her Kindle's wireless for months at a time after loading her next few books onto it.
Still, it's not as if your Kindle will just be bricked if you didn't do the update. You can still access things you don't need from the internet without updating. And you can still update and regain internet connectivity with a computer and USB connection if you didn't get the update in time.
I thought something similar when I skimmed the headline. I mean, I don't bother using an adblocker, but I also ignore and don't click on banner ads. Then I decided to dig deeper and read the NY Times article in the "Target knowing a woman is pregnant" link. That was a very illuminating article and showed me just how clever companies have gotten about analyzing data and creating marketings strategies around the data.
Companies like Target can now do intelligent marketing targeted towards you even if you block all banner ads. Hell, even if you haven't touched a computer in the last 5 years they can still find a way to market to you. Have you ever bought anything from a Target store? If you used a credit card, they have a way to uniquely identify who you are and what your shopping habits are at their stores. What's more, from other sources of publicly available data and purchase histories they can buy from other companies, they can fill in a lot of gaps and figure out much more about you and what you may be interested in buying than you might think.
To those who have never been to a Target store, whenever you buy your items and check out, you're handed a few coupons along with your receipt. These coupons don't exist until your payment is being printed - they come out of a separate printer whose sole purpose is to print coupons tailored to the person who is buying goods. If you've used their store a few times with the same credit card, you start seeing a lot of coupons either for the items you have already bought in the past or for items in the same general category as items you've bought in the past. And that's even if you've never bought anything from them online or used any of their online offers.
I was especially surprised to read that Target had apparently already considered that people don't like companies like Target knowing too much about them. So, if they do figure out, for example, that a woman is pregnant then they pepper in random coupons for unrelated things along with the baby-related coupons to make it seem like the baby-related coupons were just random chance coupons that anyone could have gotten.
It's a very interesting age of data analysis we're entering into. Potentially dystopian and Orwellian? Sure. Potentially utopian and equalitarian? Sure, that too. As usual, I'll predict it ends up somewhere in-between.
I'm really not sure why the submitter decided to describe it as counterintuitive, but I did find it interesting that, technically, it may be possible to have a form of proto-life that evolves by mutating during replication and does not die. But if that happens, evolution ends as soon as all available space is taken up. It kind of makes me wonder whether it's possible that there are dead-end planets in the universe where that did, indeed happen. And what the odds would then be of that sort of life starting is vs the kind of cycle-based life that developed on earth.
Let's try a somewhat-analogous scenario as a thought exercise:
I find out that on my bank's website, I can easily see my neighbor's bank account by doing some obvious URL manipulation.
I immediately tell the bank that I'm worried about the security of my own account because I know that I could go into anyone else's.
The bank locks me, and only me, from accessing any bank accounts, including my own.
That response makes no sense. The only proper response would be to revoke ALL access to the bank's website until such time as the security hole can be confirmed fixed. Otherwise, the implied message is that you should NEVER tell the bank that they have a potential problem.
I just wonder whether this was actually a story of extreme incompetence or extreme corruption.
Didn't we elect someone to get us the hell out of some sandy region where everyone hates everyone else, and the only people they hate more is anyone who shows up to help? Are we really going to do this all over again with the advisers and the airstrikes and then another Iraq/Libya/Egypt clusterfuck?
Who is "we?" The US? Did you even read the summary, much less the article? Other than Turkey and the US both being members of NATO, this story does not involve the US whatsoever. Turkey shot down a Russian aircraft for violating Turkish airspace. Russia says the aircraft was not even in Turkish airspace. End of story so far. The US was not so much as mentioned. There has been no press release or White House briefing on a US response to these actions. In short, what the hell does this comment have to do with TFA?
At first, I thought maybe this was mislabeled sarcasm and should have been marked "funny". Then I looked at the other posts and realized you're serious. Look, I realize policy-bashing and myopic politicizing is a recurring theme on these threads, but this is by far the most masturbatory and off topic post I have seen marked "insightful" in a long time.
Each US administration has a long list of tragic or inflammatory events that it could be argued were a direct result of the actions they took or did not take. This is not one of those events.
Organized sports allow their participants and technology to optimize... until suddenly they don't.
The argument is usually "we want a level playing field", but that's still rubbish.
I actually have a different theory about why technology becomes banned in sports. In order for a sport to catch on and have staying power, the way its played has to have mass appeal. There are an awful lot of factors that go into a sport finding and keeping an audience. If you change a sport's rules and style of play too quickly, you run a very real risk of losing most of your audience. You could potentially gain more audience instead, but you're more likely to lose people if your sport is already well established and you change the rules.
So, a sport will allow new strategies, new technologies, and new refinements of the rules until just before the point where the sport would no longer feel like the widely accepted version of the sport. Over time, the sport can see drastic changes. But new technology like these brooms would cause such a rapid change in the way curling is played that there's a very real risk that the sport could lose most of what few fans it already has if it allows them in tournament play.
The choice of what to allow or ban in a sport is not arbitrary or inconsequential. Nor is it usually clear-cut or easily quantifiable. It's really a marketing decision that must rely on gut feeling more than statistical analysis.
Well, I guess on the plus side you could see a really clear representation of how your servers smoke, catch on fire, and explode when you put too much load on them now.
Ok, I get the robot part. Makes enough sense to me and doesn't require explanation. But why humanoid? So the astronauts will have an illusion of more humans to interact with? Because they want the robot to perform tasks on machines that are only capable of accommodating the human form? Because it makes better PR than a more outlandish but perhaps more sensible quadruped approach? Some sort of official response to that question seems like it would have been a no-brainer for the articles.
So doxing is completely unethical but torturing animals is OK?
Actually, the only logical inconsistency would be saying that either both doxing and animal experimentation are ethical or that both are unethical.
Doxing is unethical because it is an single person or small group anonymously inciting a larger group to retaliatory action against an individual. Did the individual deserve it? It's possible, but not important because the larger issue is that there is no oversight or consequence to those who incite action if they are wrong. If doxing is ethical, then the individual is the ultimate determinant of the moral justification to cause a chain of events.
Institutional animal experimentation is ethical because it is a group performing potentially harmful acts upon living beings for the possibility to prevent or alleviate further harm to other living beings in the future. Was the research worth the suffering? It's possible that they weren't, but that's part of the reason why peer review and government oversight exist in the realm of animal testing. If animal testing is ethical, then the collective is the ultimate determinant of the moral justification to cause a chain of events.
PETA believes that doxing is ethical but animal experimentation is unethical. The slashdot community appears to mostly believe that doxing is unethical but animal experimentation is ethical. Both positions are logically consistent. They just come from opposite views on where moral authority should ultimately lie.
Spherical
Soooo, Quake 3 cows then?
I'm thinking about buying a GTX 700-series card from NewEgg. Do you have any advice?
Well, I'm not personally very experienced with the GTX 700 series, but I can give some general NewEgg advice that I'm not sure if everyone is following. Read a few reviews from people who gave both good and bad reviews of the product. Don't just rely on the star ratings.
The nicest thing for me about NewEgg (other than the very nice RMA policy for defective items) is that a lot of the reviewers are usually pretty technologically proficient and will get specific about their praise/gripes. Sometimes you'll find some item that's otherwise awesome and has a 5 star average, but that dies for 10% of the owners after 3 months. And sometimes you'll find a 4 star average on an item that's a very solid and stable product and has a good price, but got rated lower because it is outclassed on some benchmark by a more expensive similar product. The review comments are a good place to find things like that out.
Unless you throughly reviewed and and independently tested TrueCyrpt all you seem to have done is to exchange one set of assumptions for another (and you also allude to the fact that you have no idea as to the quality of TrueCrypt.)
Unless you have the time and the background to understand each choice you will ever be given, you're going to have to make some assumptions in life. Does it not make more sense to assume that well known software whose sole purpose is encryption might be better than software added on by a manufacturer who is not necessarily well known to be knowledgeable in encryption practices?
I've always felt that the way many people think about movie reviews is generally flawed. They seem to go to imdb or rottentomatoes and say something like "Oh, movie X got high user reviews. It must be a good movie." To me, what they should really be saying is, "Movie X got high user reviews. People who go to this kind of movie generally liked it." I think a good example of how these are different is the movie Jurassic World. It got 70%+ from both audiences and critics on rottentomatoes and more than 7 average rating on imdb. That doesn't mean it's an ground-breakingly good movie. Quite the contrary. If you saw the original Jurassic Park, you already saw a movie with the same basic plot and movie-going experience. If you go to that movie expecting to see an objectively wonderful film, you are going to be disappointed. If, however, you already know that the plot is basically the same and you want to see a shallow disaster/CG flick with dinosaurs, you're going to get exactly what you wanted and be mostly pleased with the result.
Reviews are ALWAYS subjective and always will be. If you went and saw a movie based purely on how many people liked it without reading any of the complaints/praise of the movie, the problem is with you. If you vociferously disagree with a movie's popularity and think it should be less popular, again the problem is with you. You're looking for objective measurements that don't exist.
I don't disagree with the concept that what someone learns outside of the classroom is often even more important and far-reaching than what they learned in the classroom. But does this man have such hubris that he thinks he can actually quantify it in any meaningful way? We can't even get traditional classroom education quantified in much more than "years spent in classes on this subject", so what makes anyone think we could do it with what people read from newspaper articles/heard on TED talks/etc?
"Do Tech Firms Really Want Liberal Arts Majors?" No more than any other companies do. "Can someone with a liberal arts major expect to find easy employment with tech firms?" Probably not. If you've got some really solid interpersonal skills or other non-technical skill that a business can leverage for an advantage, then sure, you can get hired in tech. To be honest, if you're good enough at that sort of thing you can be hired anywhere. I don't see why tech would be so special. But if you read the Forbes article and decided to pursue a liberal arts degree as your path to being hired by a big up and coming tech company, you were a fool. In short, tech companies want people that can fill their business needs. And the degree is really only good at getting your foot in the door on your first job. After that, experience trumps all.
The article and summary were pretty terrible about getting across the salient points. NPR did a much better job earlier this week. Here's a few things glossed over or not adequately highlighted in TFA: 1) The American Egg Board is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and funded by the egg industry. The anti-competition actions were taken by a government run entity on behalf of non-government entities. 2) The American Egg Board's sole purpose is the marketing and promotion of eggs for human consumption. Smear campaigns and lobbying the FDA against competition are in no way in line with their charter. 3) The only reason we know for sure that this happened was an activist requesting that the information be released because the American Egg Board, being a government entity, falls under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Without that, this would be just a conspiracy theory. To sum up, this is a story about monopolistic collusion between a government-run organization and a consortium of business interests that was brought to light by FOIA. The cynic in us is not surprised by any of this, perhaps, but it's still news and still something worth noting and discussing.
Ok, I'm pretty sure there is, in fact, some compelling evidence that over-indulgence in sugary drinks, fast food, etc do, in fact, contribute to obesity. Especially since you don't really have to partake very much to over-indulge. But assuming there isn't, are they really proposing to prove that one can eat a high-calorie, high-sugar diet without large amounts of exercise to offset it and remain healthy? If so, they're about to make a health and quality of life breakthrough the likes of which hasn't been seen since the development of the vaccine!
After missing two expansions, I came back to WoW for the latest expansion and actually had a lot of fun... For a little while... I'll speak of my PvP experience, since that's where I spent most of my time.
Actually, the whole "end game grinding so that one can fight other players" part was changed in the most recent expansion (possibly even back in Pandaria? I didn't play that expansion at all). There are now two levels of PvP gear: beginner and elite. Beginner gear is better in PvP and comparable in PvE to the gear you get from small PvE dungeons. Elite PvP gear is better than any other gear in the game for the purpose of PvP. The best raid gear from PvE is always worse than the current season's elite PvP gear, but only in PvP. They did this by scaling gear based on what you're doing. In most of the world, PvP gear is so-so and will get you by in seeing any of the game's content as long as you're not trying to do hardcore raiding. But as soon as you enter a PvP area or enter PvP combat with another player your stats from gear are all re-scaled to a much higher level if you're wearing PvP gear.
Now you can get "beginner" PvP gear quickly and easily at the start of each PvP season by doing PvP, either through battlegrounds (random matchups on objective-based maps with anywhere from 10v10 to 40v40 combat) or the Ashran open-world PvP area (which, to varying degrees throughout the patches allowed you to get PvP items from the area's "events").
But then, once you have the beginner gear, things get ugly. And this is why I canceled my subscription. Once you have your beginner gear, the only way to get elite PvP gear is to fight in 2v2, 3v3, or 5v5 arenas with pre-made teams or do 10v10 rated battlegrounds with pre-made teams. I left out a whole side story about being able to get elite gear at one point from Ashran because it was just silly and eventually went away anyway. And the only way you win the points necessary to get the elite gear is by winning... This led to incredibly toxic PvP experiences. You either played with your friends (and lost a lot if you were a casual player) or played with serious PvPers who were PvPing 4+ hours a day. Some of whom were also intense jerks. But the only way to avoid getting completely stomped by the serious PvPers in any PvP mode was to grind PvP for the elite gear, and the attraction to doing that is inversely proportional to the amount of time you're willing to invest in it.
In the end, PvP did get noticeably better for a while in the latest expansion, but there's still a grind at the end, even if they did move it from PvE to PvP. And there have been constant complaints about the matchmaking system. Incidentally, that seems to be the most common complaint from players about Blizzard games in general nowadays. Anyway, they're definitely improving, but I'm still pretty surprised nobody has managed to unseat WoW for popularity in the classic MMO arena after all these years.
Anyone else read this and feel slightly disappointed that someone saying "hey, wait, don't take that study we did out of context and start implying causalities" is considered news instead of the norm?
Also, according to TFA the estimate was that 750,000 lights were dimmed or shut off. There is no indication given of the percent that were dimmed vs shut off, so even the headline isn't accurate.