As soon as I saw the headline (somewhere else, not on/.) of course my first question was "how would they get get into my trunk"?
I'm obviously not going to give them my key and my car is DUMB. So it only works on a handful of newer cars that already have the ability to unlock the trunk from a remote app.
BRILLIANT. Your security was already compromised. Amazon is just taking advantage of that.
But is it a big deal? The most valuable thing in my trunk is my spare tire and I don't think anyone is going to steal that.....
Okay, after this the most valuable thing in my trunk may be my latest Amazon purchase and this sort of normalizes unfamiliar people opening up cars and messing around with the contents of their trunks.
My car is usually where I am. If my car is at work, I probably am too. If my car is at home, so am I, but it's probably in a garage. I can't wait until an Amazon delivery person rings my doorbell and asks me to open my garage so they can put my package in the trunk.
Of course they could get really creepy and track me in real time and maybe put the delivery in my car while I'm eating dinner in a restaurant......
Didn't a journalist in Malta recently get blown up by a car bomb? (Yes). So now we're going to normalize people we don't know walking up to anyone's car and putting anything they want in the trunk.
I don't like it and while neither me nor anyone I know is likely to get a bomb planted in their trunk in the past if I saw some stranger trying to get into a friend's carI might confront them, now I'm just supposed to assume they're delivering a package. But that applies to the other Amazon program where they enter your house too.
That's not a burglar. No really, he's just putting our neighbor's groceries away.
Then why is he walking out with more stuff than he went in with?
I've seen it a couple of times but more common are diesel pickups which are either modified or poorly maintained (why not both?) that just spew smoke whenever they accelerate.
Do you avoid buying clothing from overseas sweatshops? Do you only buy produce picked by well paid white people? How consistent are you really about your claims to the moral high ground?
Yesterday I was walking into the grocery store and noticed a bunch of plastic lawn chairs with stickers on them proudly proclaiming they were made in the USA.
My first cynical reaction was that they may have been molded here, but where did the plastic resin come from? And then I told myself not to be stupid because we have oil refineries here too.
But should we really strive to make plastic lawn chairs? Manufacturing plastic lawn chairs is certainly an honest living and I'm sure the people who do it work hard, but is this really the kind of job that Americans should cling to?
I know that sounds a bit arrogant - as if to say Americans are too good to make plastic lawn chairs but I don't think any kid ever dreamed of working in a factory molding things out of plastic and all the toxic fumes that must come with that,.
The video service is actually what got me to sign up.
I wanted to watch The Man In The High Castle and fully intended to cancel my membership before the free trial was over but I didn't and I now make a habit of ordering things several times a month whereas before that I had only ordered one item in the 5 years before I finally got Prime.
Nowadays I almost never watch anything on their video service. I'm still a Netflix subscriber and I haven't finished watching all of their stuff too and they keep producing more.
I never even finished watching all of The Man in the High Castle but yesterday I did spend just over $100 on stuff I expect to receive very soon.
I went to their channel, selected a news story I was interested in and what was really " cringe-worthy 80's style" was the digitized audio reading the script no doubt lifted directly from other sources. Then there's the video. It appears they just lifted images from other sources and display them drifting across the screen. Apparently the one I clicked on only had one image.
That video has 1359 views. I didn't even watch the whole thing and at least my ad-blocker still works on YT (do they still get ad revenue if I don't see the ads?). It wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know and that audio was truly cringeworthy.
I used to think Newsy and other sources like them were bad. If you've never seen any of their videos it's basically the same rehashing of stories from other sources but at least they have actual humans compiling them and repeating what you could have gotten from dozens of other video sources.
It sort of makes me a little envious. Why didn't I think of doing this?
Someone on Reddit wrote a little bot that does an okay job at summarizing articles. If they can do that, it's just one more step to grabbing images and putting the words on the screen and having a cheesy digitized voice read them too you.
If you're really lazy you could just randomly grab text off any other news site, string them together, put them in a video and collect revenue. Why am I wasting time posting on/. when I could be doing that right now?
I have the same problem with my Roku. I ditched Comcast years ago but so often there's a Roku channel available for "free" if only I sign in with my TV provider. I'm not even sure what my login for my antenna is, but even PBS does this now.
Okay, PBS just wants me to register but so many other "free channels" are only free if you are already paying for them.
I'm perfectly content with just my internet streaming (mainly Netflix) and my antenna though. I cannot say enough bad things about Comcast so I'll spare everyone the rant. I'd probably be mostly preaching to the choir anyway.
I won't sing praises about my DSL provider but it has less downtime than Comcast and is just as fast. (May not apply where you live, but it certainly does where I do).
--
Amazon pulls the same crap too Many times I have tried to watch something on it only to be told I have to subscribe to some other service first. Or I can just "buy" it. Hell no, I wouldn't even own it and there are very few things I want to "own" as opposed to just watching once.
I'll finish watching Game of Thrones when it comes on Netflix which will probably be never.
I'n not sure I agree with him, Chris Packham has suggested that it may not be worth it trying to save certain species:
Of course we would all like to keep it (the panda) on the planet but what I wonder is - is it disproportionately expensive to focus on these few animals, not just pandas but tigers and rhinos and elephants, and all of these rather famous creatures at the expense of lots of smaller ones."
She mentions that Facebook gave the Democrats special treatment "because they were on our side".
I just listened to the entire TED Talk and she never said that - at least not in that TED Talk.
She did say
So Facebook, 2012 election, had the ability for people to opt in. The Obama campaign rocked this, right? We got people to opt in and the privacy policies at that time on Facebook were that if they opted in they could tell us who all their friends were. So they told us who all their friends were.
They took advantage of the privacy policies that were already set up.
We were actually able to ingest the entire social network of the US that's on Facebook, which is most people. Where this gets complicated is that freaked Facebook out, right? So they shut off the feature.
So Facebook "freaked out" and "shut off the feature" according to her TED Talk.
I did find the source of your partial quote. It's from a recent tweet although it's not clear that she's talking about the same thing she was talking about in her TED Talk. It appears to be referencing a 2012 Time article about how they used that data which is also referenced in the Twitter thread.
I know about me. My car is a 2001 model. It's a 2-door coupe, not an SUV, luxury, sports or other type of gas guzzler. It's also not an "economy car".
I get 25 on the highway. That's what the display on my dashboard claims anyway, but if I actually calculate it when I fill up the tank I see it's more like 23 - and that's only if I spend most of my time on the highway away from stop signs and stop lights.
I suppose it depends on how you drive it but in the city with traffic and lights I can't even even get 20. Hell, I struggled to even get 19 when I lived in a big city. (and those were the dashboard figures, not actual number of miles I drove divided by number of gallons pumped in which are always lower).
If I cruise along at about 30 miles per hour on a nice long stretch of road with nothing to brake for I can actually get in the mid 30s.
30 years ago I remember driving a Suburban that could barely manage 15 on the highway. It made up for it by having a 40-gallon tank though. Even if it was only getting 10 (I think it usually got at least 12-13) you could still go 400 miles on a tank.
Which makes me think you're only considering how fuel efficient a car is on a good day under better than average conditions.
When I got laid off they didn't even call me a "chunk". They didn't even call me "dead-weight" either.
But I'm not bitter or anything. To be honest I was actually relieved.......until I realized I wasn't getting paid anymore. But then I thought about it. Was it worth it to sell my soul?
And I said "No" and realized there was still money in the banana stand....bank.....funds...whatever... even in the sofa cushions.
The work-life balance is definitely better now. Before it was all work and no life. Now it's all life and no work.
It makes me wonder if a balance could be struck between those things.
I always thought that was a conscious decision so people could mod without fear of retaliation although if it leads to less abuse by moderators.that would be good.
--
as an aside and perhaps a little off-topic I see something odd on this page.
Out of 65 full posts I have a moderator-box on only 4 of them. Maybe I got mod points as the page was loading. It doesn't say I have any on this page, but opening a new one I see I do.
Unfortunately I already commented "Someone mod this up" in a reply to another post in this thread before I noticed that. Not a big deal just strange.
That's very interesting. I followed the link to the Crime Research Prevention Center. They seem to be very picky about the definition of "mass-shooting" and "gun-free zones".
Of 133 mass shootings identified between January 2009 and July 2015, only 17 (13%) took place in “gun-free zones” (areas where the carrying of concealed guns is prohibited). The remaining incidents took place in private residences, or public places where concealed guns could be lawfully carried.
I got to wondering what the CPRC was and if they were biased. It's founder and president, John Lott, appears to be a fraud:
The organization, headquartered at his home in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, produces and publishes “academic quality” reports that have yet to be published in peer-reviewed journals, but are, according to Lott, informally reviewed by the organization’s academic board.
Researchers pressed Lott, then a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, to release the data behind his claim that 98 percent of defensive gun uses in the United States involved a would-be victim merely brandishing a gun. Lott claimed that it was based on a data from a survey he had conducted—but that the data had been lost in a computer crash.
As criticism of Lott mounted, an online commenter, who identified herself as a former student of Lott’s at Penn named Mary Rosh, lavishly praised her former professor and attacked his critics. “He was the best professor that I ever had,” she wrote. After it came out in 2003 that Rosh and Lott shared an internet address, Lott admitted to the sock puppetry, saying that he had been receiving obnoxious phone calls when using his real name, and some of Rosh’s comments were possibly written by his family members on a shared email account. “In most circles, this goes down as fraud,” wrote Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy in the magazine.
The car won't know if that person in the passenger seat is your wife, mistress, child, a co-worker or a friend and the types of ads it serves could reveal things about you as well.
Did you even know the story about the Florida shooter being part of a white nationalist movement was debunked and retracted?
That's not exactly a fair characterization. The ADL spoke with someone calling himself Jordan Jereb and claiming to be a member of a white supremacist group who said Cruz had participated in training exercises with the Republic of Florida (the white supremacist group).
(Note, they have a big Update which includes information indicating it's probably not true)
He also told that to the AP and to the Miami Herald.
Then someone posting under the name Jordan Jereb wrote:
“There was a legit misunderstanding because we have MULTIPLE people named Nicholas in ROF, and I got a bunch of conflicting information and I have not slept for like 2 days.”
The MSM reported updates as they came out. Some of the fringe sites did not report any of the updates and I wouldn't count "Woke Sloth" as MSM. I had never heard of them before this but apparently that was one such site passed around on FB.
Maybe sites like Woke Sloth (and Breitbart and InfoWars) are not good alternatives to the MSM.
The bit about paying off my fines was snark (and I should have left that out - I owe them in a different state anyway) but I just checked the local library and at least as far as newspapers go it does not appear that I can view them from home.
And it's my fault for bringing up books. I was aware that they had some digital books but I'm sure the whole catalog cannot be accessed electronically - which would be a ridiculous expectation anyway. I should have just stuck to the topic of newspapers and magazines.
It could be the wind too. I used to work near feed lots for cattle - not right next door but close enough and most days I couldn't smell a thing but on others it stunk bad.
One of the executives there told us it was the smell of money. It just smelled like cow shit to me. Maybe that was his point.
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as I saw the headline (somewhere else, not on /.) of course my first question was "how would they get get into my trunk"?
I'm obviously not going to give them my key and my car is DUMB. So it only works on a handful of newer cars that already have the ability to unlock the trunk from a remote app.
BRILLIANT. Your security was already compromised. Amazon is just taking advantage of that.
But is it a big deal? The most valuable thing in my trunk is my spare tire and I don't think anyone is going to steal that. ....
Okay, after this the most valuable thing in my trunk may be my latest Amazon purchase and this sort of normalizes unfamiliar people opening up cars and messing around with the contents of their trunks.
My car is usually where I am. If my car is at work, I probably am too. If my car is at home, so am I, but it's probably in a garage. I can't wait until an Amazon delivery person rings my doorbell and asks me to open my garage so they can put my package in the trunk.
Of course they could get really creepy and track me in real time and maybe put the delivery in my car while I'm eating dinner in a restaurant. .....
Didn't a journalist in Malta recently get blown up by a car bomb? (Yes). So now we're going to normalize people we don't know walking up to anyone's car and putting anything they want in the trunk.
I don't like it and while neither me nor anyone I know is likely to get a bomb planted in their trunk in the past if I saw some stranger trying to get into a friend's carI might confront them, now I'm just supposed to assume they're delivering a package. But that applies to the other Amazon program where they enter your house too.
That's not a burglar. No really, he's just putting our neighbor's groceries away.
Then why is he walking out with more stuff than he went in with?
In Colorado at a "March For Our Lives" demonstration there were people rolling coal as a sort of counter-protest.
At least 2 drivers were cited under Colorado law. It's only a traffic citation though, not an assault charge.
Driver slapped with ticket after ‘rolling coal’ toward ‘March For Your Life’ protestors in Steamboat
2nd driver ticketed for “rolling coal” at protesters during Steamboat’s March for Our Lives
I've seen it a couple of times but more common are diesel pickups which are either modified or poorly maintained (why not both?) that just spew smoke whenever they accelerate.
but AT WHAT TIDE LEVEL?
Next click-bait headline:
Our country expected to lose 20% of its coastline at low tide!
Netflix's UI has been annoying me for years. Amazon's isn't perfect either but in some ways is much better.
Do you avoid buying clothing from overseas sweatshops? Do you only buy produce picked by well paid white people? How consistent are you really about your claims to the moral high ground?
Yesterday I was walking into the grocery store and noticed a bunch of plastic lawn chairs with stickers on them proudly proclaiming they were made in the USA.
My first cynical reaction was that they may have been molded here, but where did the plastic resin come from? And then I told myself not to be stupid because we have oil refineries here too.
But should we really strive to make plastic lawn chairs? Manufacturing plastic lawn chairs is certainly an honest living and I'm sure the people who do it work hard, but is this really the kind of job that Americans should cling to?
I know that sounds a bit arrogant - as if to say Americans are too good to make plastic lawn chairs but I don't think any kid ever dreamed of working in a factory molding things out of plastic and all the toxic fumes that must come with that,.
The video service is actually what got me to sign up.
I wanted to watch The Man In The High Castle and fully intended to cancel my membership before the free trial was over but I didn't and I now make a habit of ordering things several times a month whereas before that I had only ordered one item in the 5 years before I finally got Prime.
Nowadays I almost never watch anything on their video service. I'm still a Netflix subscriber and I haven't finished watching all of their stuff too and they keep producing more.
I never even finished watching all of The Man in the High Castle but yesterday I did spend just over $100 on stuff I expect to receive very soon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I felt giving them a click myself.
Why feed the people who produce this crap?
I went to their channel, selected a news story I was interested in and what was really " cringe-worthy 80's style" was the digitized audio reading the script no doubt lifted directly from other sources. Then there's the video. It appears they just lifted images from other sources and display them drifting across the screen. Apparently the one I clicked on only had one image.
That video has 1359 views. I didn't even watch the whole thing and at least my ad-blocker still works on YT (do they still get ad revenue if I don't see the ads?). It wasn't telling me anything I didn't already know and that audio was truly cringeworthy.
I used to think Newsy and other sources like them were bad. If you've never seen any of their videos it's basically the same rehashing of stories from other sources but at least they have actual humans compiling them and repeating what you could have gotten from dozens of other video sources.
It sort of makes me a little envious. Why didn't I think of doing this?
Someone on Reddit wrote a little bot that does an okay job at summarizing articles. If they can do that, it's just one more step to grabbing images and putting the words on the screen and having a cheesy digitized voice read them too you.
If you're really lazy you could just randomly grab text off any other news site, string them together, put them in a video and collect revenue. Why am I wasting time posting on /. when I could be doing that right now?
I have the same problem with my Roku. I ditched Comcast years ago but so often there's a Roku channel available for "free" if only I sign in with my TV provider. I'm not even sure what my login for my antenna is, but even PBS does this now.
Okay, PBS just wants me to register but so many other "free channels" are only free if you are already paying for them.
I'm perfectly content with just my internet streaming (mainly Netflix) and my antenna though. I cannot say enough bad things about Comcast so I'll spare everyone the rant. I'd probably be mostly preaching to the choir anyway.
I won't sing praises about my DSL provider but it has less downtime than Comcast and is just as fast. (May not apply where you live, but it certainly does where I do).
--
Amazon pulls the same crap too Many times I have tried to watch something on it only to be told I have to subscribe to some other service first. Or I can just "buy" it. Hell no, I wouldn't even own it and there are very few things I want to "own" as opposed to just watching once.
I'll finish watching Game of Thrones when it comes on Netflix which will probably be never.
I actually appreciate that kind of service, but such knowledge is limited to that employee who recognizes you by appearance and not by name.
What if the nest or beaver dam is made by artificial birds or beavers?
Did Tyrell's owl build a nest?
Is the wool from electric sheep considered synthetic?
I'n not sure I agree with him, Chris Packham has suggested that it may not be worth it trying to save certain species:
Of course we would all like to keep it (the panda) on the planet but what I wonder is - is it disproportionately expensive to focus on these few animals, not just pandas but tigers and rhinos and elephants, and all of these rather famous creatures at the expense of lots of smaller ones."
Packham says saving pandas could be "waste of money"
She mentions that Facebook gave the Democrats special treatment "because they were on our side".
I just listened to the entire TED Talk and she never said that - at least not in that TED Talk.
She did say
So Facebook, 2012 election, had the ability for people to opt in. The Obama campaign rocked this, right? We got people to opt in and the privacy policies at that time on Facebook were that if they opted in they could tell us who all their friends were. So they told us who all their friends were.
They took advantage of the privacy policies that were already set up.
We were actually able to ingest the entire social network of the US that's on Facebook, which is most people.
Where this gets complicated is that freaked Facebook out, right?
So they shut off the feature.
So Facebook "freaked out" and "shut off the feature" according to her TED Talk.
I did find the source of your partial quote. It's from a recent tweet although it's not clear that she's talking about the same thing she was talking about in her TED Talk. It appears to be referencing a 2012 Time article about how they used that data which is also referenced in the Twitter thread.
I know about me. My car is a 2001 model. It's a 2-door coupe, not an SUV, luxury, sports or other type of gas guzzler. It's also not an "economy car".
I get 25 on the highway. That's what the display on my dashboard claims anyway, but if I actually calculate it when I fill up the tank I see it's more like 23 - and that's only if I spend most of my time on the highway away from stop signs and stop lights.
I suppose it depends on how you drive it but in the city with traffic and lights I can't even even get 20. Hell, I struggled to even get 19 when I lived in a big city. (and those were the dashboard figures, not actual number of miles I drove divided by number of gallons pumped in which are always lower).
If I cruise along at about 30 miles per hour on a nice long stretch of road with nothing to brake for I can actually get in the mid 30s.
30 years ago I remember driving a Suburban that could barely manage 15 on the highway. It made up for it by having a 40-gallon tank though. Even if it was only getting 10 (I think it usually got at least 12-13) you could still go 400 miles on a tank.
Which makes me think you're only considering how fuel efficient a car is on a good day under better than average conditions.
When I got laid off they didn't even call me a "chunk". They didn't even call me "dead-weight" either.
But I'm not bitter or anything. To be honest I was actually relieved.......until I realized I wasn't getting paid anymore. But then I thought about it. Was it worth it to sell my soul?
And I said "No" and realized there was still money in the banana stand....bank.....funds...whatever... even in the sofa cushions.
The work-life balance is definitely better now. Before it was all work and no life. Now it's all life and no work.
It makes me wonder if a balance could be struck between those things.
Even if the 2nd were interpreted to only apply to well regulated militias that would not mean nobody else would be allowed to own a gun.
The Bill of Rights isn't a short list of what we are allowed to do. They are specific limitations on what the government cannot do.
That's why there are phrases like "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", "shall not be violated" sprinkled throughout.
I always thought that was a conscious decision so people could mod without fear of retaliation although if it leads to less abuse by moderators.that would be good.
--
as an aside and perhaps a little off-topic I see something odd on this page.
Out of 65 full posts I have a moderator-box on only 4 of them. Maybe I got mod points as the page was loading. It doesn't say I have any on this page, but opening a new one I see I do.
Unfortunately I already commented "Someone mod this up" in a reply to another post in this thread before I noticed that. Not a big deal just strange.
Someone mod this up.
That's very interesting. I followed the link to the Crime Research Prevention Center. They seem to be very picky about the definition of "mass-shooting" and "gun-free zones".
At least they published Everytown's report:
Analysis of Recent Mass Shootings
Here's a response from Everytown:
The Gun Lobby’s False Claims About “Gun-Free Zones”
Of 133 mass shootings identified between January 2009 and July 2015, only 17 (13%) took place in “gun-free zones” (areas where the carrying of concealed guns is prohibited). The remaining incidents took place in private residences, or public places where concealed guns could be lawfully carried.
I got to wondering what the CPRC was and if they were biased. It's founder and president, John Lott, appears to be a fraud:
When the Gun Lobby Tries to Justify Firearms Everywhere, It Turns to This Guy
The organization, headquartered at his home in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, produces and publishes “academic quality” reports that have yet to be published in peer-reviewed journals, but are, according to Lott, informally reviewed by the organization’s academic board.
Researchers pressed Lott, then a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, to release the data behind his claim that 98 percent of defensive gun uses in the United States involved a would-be victim merely brandishing a gun. Lott claimed that it was based on a data from a survey he had conducted—but that the data had been lost in a computer crash.
As criticism of Lott mounted, an online commenter, who identified herself as a former student of Lott’s at Penn named Mary Rosh, lavishly praised her former professor and attacked his critics. “He was the best professor that I ever had,” she wrote. After it came out in 2003 that Rosh and Lott shared an internet address, Lott admitted to the sock puppetry, saying that he had been receiving obnoxious phone calls when using his real name, and some of Rosh’s comments were possibly written by his family members on a shared email account. “In most circles, this goes down as fraud,” wrote Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy in the magazine.
The car won't know if that person in the passenger seat is your wife, mistress, child, a co-worker or a friend and the types of ads it serves could reveal things about you as well.
Did you even know the story about the Florida shooter being part of a white nationalist movement was debunked and retracted?
That's not exactly a fair characterization. The ADL spoke with someone calling himself Jordan Jereb and claiming to be a member of a white supremacist group who said Cruz had participated in training exercises with the Republic of Florida (the white supremacist group).
Florida White Supremacist Group Admits Ties to Alleged Parkland School Shooter Nikolas Cruz
(Note, they have a big Update which includes information indicating it's probably not true)
He also told that to the AP and to the Miami Herald.
Then someone posting under the name Jordan Jereb wrote:
“There was a legit misunderstanding because we have MULTIPLE people named Nicholas in ROF, and I got a bunch of conflicting information and I have not slept for like 2 days.”
White Nationalist Appears to Disavow Connection With School Shooter
The Sheriff in news conferences said they had not been able to confirm any connection to the ROF.
In the end it all seemed to have been orchestrated by trolls.
How white nationalists fooled the media about Florida shooter
The MSM reported updates as they came out. Some of the fringe sites did not report any of the updates and I wouldn't count "Woke Sloth" as MSM. I had never heard of them before this but apparently that was one such site passed around on FB.
Maybe sites like Woke Sloth (and Breitbart and InfoWars) are not good alternatives to the MSM.
As a Syrian refugee in Sweden pointed out Greece cannot even take care of their own people let alone refugees and there is no work.
The Syrian refugee who says: 'Don't come to Sweden... or think carefully about it' - BBC Trending
That title is a bit tongue-in-cheek but he does say Syrians have unrealistic expectations of Sweden. Not that he's complaining.
The bit about paying off my fines was snark (and I should have left that out - I owe them in a different state anyway) but I just checked the local library and at least as far as newspapers go it does not appear that I can view them from home.
And it's my fault for bringing up books. I was aware that they had some digital books but I'm sure the whole catalog cannot be accessed electronically - which would be a ridiculous expectation anyway. I should have just stuck to the topic of newspapers and magazines.
It could be the wind too. I used to work near feed lots for cattle - not right next door but close enough and most days I couldn't smell a thing but on others it stunk bad.
One of the executives there told us it was the smell of money. It just smelled like cow shit to me. Maybe that was his point.
Careful there - you may create a market for snobs who demand that their copy of the New York Times be printed on mahogany pulp.