Even though I agree the for-profit model of health care is complete broken, the same calculation will apply even in nationalised health.
Only, instead of maximizing profits, the money saved from that last 3 months would be spent on curing other patients. What would you choose, spending $100 on one patient to live one year longer while leaving 4 untreated and die without that extra year, OR spent $20 on 5 patients so each of them live for 9 months longer?
Just like "Don't be evil", they will keep promising until and after the day it became clear to everyone they have been breaking that promise for years. Then they will just hide it somewhere obscure, but that still won't stop them from saying that promise.
Empty words that have no cost and carried no penalty if broken, why not?
The timer is super useful once I found out how easy it is to start one with Siri, just lift my watch near my mouth and say "Hey Siri, two minutes timer", then let the watch do its job.
Sleep tracking is very useful once you got into the habit of it. Sleep tracker that only need the watch avoid draining the battery on the phone (which one usually don't have time to charge in the morning), and amazingly it use almost zero battery on the watch (still reports 100% battery in the morning).
Exercise tracking is of course useful, unless one don't do any exercise. Not to say other fitness tracker won't do better, they probably do, but compounded with the convenience of replacing phone alerts, and all of the above, the Apple Watch is the my most used device now, I wear it nearly 24 hours a day except for charging, using it more than even my phone.
who is this tech for? I don't need an AI assistant to *call* a restaurant and make a reservation for me, I just need a reservation.
You don't need an assistant to call *a* restaurant, but you surely need it to call *all* restaurants that met your criteria *at the same time*, and as soon as one got a reservation, the others will (hopefully) politely end the call.
This is simply robocalling, but from customer to business instead.
Personally, I think this is bad idea, it would be much better if restaurants allow online booking instead, but the fact is most didn't.
Note the weasel words, Google just said they stopped scanning the mail for a very narrow specific purpose. They did NOT say they stopped scanning email, they still scan mails for other unspecified purpose.
And, of course, what they collected during that scan, they can apply to ad personalizaton again, any time in the future. That's the key problem, once they got your data, you have no way of getting it back.
That's why laws like GDPR is important, it prevent your data from being used for different purpose after companies like Google got their hands on them.
Have fun trying to get a usual Japanese to agree with that.
(Not to say I personally disagree with that statement, looking at the map and then looking at the faces of Koreans and Japanese would convince most people that’s very likely, except Japanese)
What good is getting feedback from your customers if the people getting the feedback are not tightly integrated with management to ensure a good feedback loop.
It is cheaper to hire someone to apologise to the customers, than to actually fix the problems so the customers stop complaining.
Just like I disabled TouchID and the passcode. I just want easy access.
I want the opposite - I want to be able to configure those 7 days down to six hours. Or however long I want. So yes, this should be a user decision, not a hardcoded value pulled out of some Apple guy's derriere.
Second this. I use wifi sync and almost never use the connector to sync. I want to be able to completely disable the connector for anything except charging.
A common theme throughout all the Hyperloop news in the recent years, is that Hyperloop is obviously a solution looking for a problem.
There are high-speed rails running in Europe, Japan, and more recently China. Thousands of miles of it, carrying millions of people around every day. In the past few years, when all you get from Hyperloop is talk of what it "promises", China had built thousands of miles of HSR tracks around the country.
These real world HSR only need the laying of tracks and overhead power cables. Fresh food and medical supplies simply didn't have enough the volume to support the extra cost to build the airtight enclosure.
If Hyperloop really made good economic sense, then *somewhere* in the world would have built one already.
I have never looked at Rust and never participated in Rust's community.
But when someone posted a clear, well-written comment with some very specific points, and then I see only people either agreeing with or attacking the messenger, but no one refuted the specific points raised... The only reasonable take away is that the points were valid and that got some people pissed.
It might be a copy/pasted post, so what? One can repeat a lie a hundred times, but one cannot repeat the truth?
People keep bitcoins in exchanges temporarily because they want to convert it to other currency.
As if. If that's the real reason, there wouldn't be *millions* of dollars worth of Bitcoin stored in a single exchange to be stolen by hackers. The fact is people keep Bitcoins in exchanges because doing Bitcoin transactions otherwise is simply not practical.
You are talking as if banks don't have similar problems. In fact, the main problem of the banking system (and arguably, the reason behind the bitcoin development) is exactly their breach of trust. Think about it, if you were operating a bank, with *no obligation to have an equal amount of gold in your vaults to match the credit you have outstanding*, wouldn't it make sense to lend out more money than you have? After all, it's just some numbers in a computer.
Bank HAD the same problem, and that's exactly why banks are heavily regulated and there is this thing called FDIC. My money in the bank would be safe even if someone took all the money and ran away.
Read up on the history of bank runs in American before banks were regulated. Bitcoin exchanges are now repeating the same mistakes people learned 100 years ago with banks.
Some of us have vivid memories of our savings evaporating because some Icelandic bank collapsed. I think the appeal of bitcoin, for some, is the idea that we go back to having the currency under our own control. Like having a stack of bank notes under our mattress (yes, with all the associated risks and drawbacks).
Your own fault with putting money in a bank not covered with any deposit insurance, and putting Bitcoins in any exchanges is even worse. Holding it in your wallet, your take on the risk of illiquidity instead (you can't sell them fast enough when needed). A real currency would not have the illiquidity problem.
I have now seen multiple stories of crypto-currencies getting stolen or exchanges hacked. Then I read about how blockchain is supposed to be the end all, be all, of transaction security. Aren't these things connected at some level?
Yes, it is telling you this kind of cryptocurrency doesn't really work.
The most basic function of a "currency" is to settle payments, but transaction rate actually achievable (at least with the existing the Bitcoin) is so damn low that you simply cannot complete a transaction in reasonable amount of time, such as less than a minute.
So, to actually do transactions effectively, people have to store their Bitcoins in exchanges, so any transaction within the exchange will simply result in a change of record in the exchange's accounting system, completely bypassing the use of blockchain transaction.
Now, let that sink in for a moment.
A supposed "currency" cannot support the most basic transaction of its users, to the extend people have to setup exchanges so they can transact that "currency" effectively. Is that not a big enough flashing sign saying Bitcoin simply doesn't work as a currency at all?
And the people betting on Bitcoin continuing to rise? Just think about it, as the price of a Bitcoin rise to $50K, $100K, $1M, etc. Won't it eventually make more financial sense for every exchange to simply sell their coins and disappear? If they didn't get hacked first.
Think about, if you were operating such an exchange, wouldn't YOU start secretly selling the Bitcoins you kept for your users, and just wait for the perfect moment to disappear with the money?
Or if you are lucky, you might get hacked (so you blame all loses to the hacker) and declare bankruptcy (while hiding the money), or Bitcoin might just crash tomorrow so you can buy back all the coins with a tiny fraction of the money you took, then close off the exchange fair and square.
Think through this, and then realize how much of a fool you need to be to bet on making money buying Bitcoins.
"But it's not hard to see how this creative explosion could all go very wrong."
No. It is VERY HARD to see how this could go wrong.
You mean, computer can generate an entire movie without having to hire real actors? So Hollywood movie stars can't make millions anymore? Cry me a river.
This would be just as bad, which is to say not at all, as computers able to generate the sound of musical instruments which normal person cannot distinguish from real recordings. (Gee! Computer can generate a "fake" recording of an orchestra playing Bach symphonies! Aren't you afraid now?) It allowed music writers to compose and create music recordings (and put on YouTube) even though he cannot play any of the instruments in the score, including synthetic singers singing the song that goes with it. Is that bad?
In the future, there could be many more solo "movie creators" who would, by his/her own effort, create an entire movie. Much like writers writing up a whole novel. It will take out all the middle man like the movie studio. This can only be good for humanity.
I think the newsworthy part is, even after 30 years, the facts still haven't gotten through to the students.
I blame it on the universities for not drilling this fact to prospective students. Graduate programmes take in groups of new students every year, knowing most of them have unrealistic expectations of an academic career afterwards, and universities did NOTHING to made them aware such expectation is unrealistic.
If the company hiring just wanted a programmer they wouldn't ask for code samples, they'd just pick the first candidate. What they want is the best programmer.
I see you have never worked in any large company as a programmer.
Most companies do NOT want the best programmer, they would cost too much, and they would leave for another job very soon because the work is too boring for them.
Most companies just want a "good enough" programmer, who can (1) do the job adequately and (2) won't give them any headache, and (3) stay long enough to make the hire worthwhile.
i.e. exactly what YOU would want if you were hiring a house cleaner to clean your house. While you may not simply pick the first cleaner who came by, but you probably would pick the first adequate cleaner you saw.
The LAST thing you would want to see from a prospective house cleaner interviewing for the job would be a "sample" jewellery case from his/her previous employer showing you how well it was cleaned.
In nearly all companies, what you wrote as part of employment is owned by the company. So asking for live code from job applicants is no different from asking for trade secrets, and there should only be one respond:
"It is both against my ethics and my employment contract to show any of my employer's code to you, but I can tell you my code is being used in production capacity in my employer servicing business function X, Y and Z. I am happy to provide codes which I do own so you can judge the quality of my work."
Essentially, you ignore the unreasonable requests and provide a reasonable alternative. Any company that rejected you for that, you wouldn't want to work there anyway, who knows what further unreasonable/unethical request you would get if they became your boss.
Slashdot Mirror
Even though I agree the for-profit model of health care is complete broken, the same calculation will apply even in nationalised health.
Only, instead of maximizing profits, the money saved from that last 3 months would be spent on curing other patients. What would you choose, spending $100 on one patient to live one year longer while leaving 4 untreated and die without that extra year, OR spent $20 on 5 patients so each of them live for 9 months longer?
the "Scandal" is mostly invented
I saw the "Greenpeace" in the summary and could already guess that.
Problem is ANY BUZZ WORD would be used as a management code word for "understaffed, overworked, and unsupported".
In short, problem is in the management.
Just like "Don't be evil", they will keep promising until and after the day it became clear to everyone they have been breaking that promise for years. Then they will just hide it somewhere obscure, but that still won't stop them from saying that promise.
Empty words that have no cost and carried no penalty if broken, why not?
The timer is super useful once I found out how easy it is to start one with Siri, just lift my watch near my mouth and say "Hey Siri, two minutes timer", then let the watch do its job.
Sleep tracking is very useful once you got into the habit of it. Sleep tracker that only need the watch avoid draining the battery on the phone (which one usually don't have time to charge in the morning), and amazingly it use almost zero battery on the watch (still reports 100% battery in the morning).
Exercise tracking is of course useful, unless one don't do any exercise. Not to say other fitness tracker won't do better, they probably do, but compounded with the convenience of replacing phone alerts, and all of the above, the Apple Watch is the my most used device now, I wear it nearly 24 hours a day except for charging, using it more than even my phone.
How else could they charge extra for the top spot in people’s feed?
A lot of FB "stories" already are thinly veiled commerical ads or outright political propaganda, so they are going to more ads on top of ads?
who is this tech for? I don't need an AI assistant to *call* a restaurant and make a reservation for me, I just need a reservation.
You don't need an assistant to call *a* restaurant, but you surely need it to call *all* restaurants that met your criteria *at the same time*, and as soon as one got a reservation, the others will (hopefully) politely end the call.
This is simply robocalling, but from customer to business instead.
Personally, I think this is bad idea, it would be much better if restaurants allow online booking instead, but the fact is most didn't.
Note the weasel words, Google just said they stopped scanning the mail for a very narrow specific purpose. They did NOT say they stopped scanning email, they still scan mails for other unspecified purpose.
And, of course, what they collected during that scan, they can apply to ad personalizaton again, any time in the future. That's the key problem, once they got your data, you have no way of getting it back.
That's why laws like GDPR is important, it prevent your data from being used for different purpose after companies like Google got their hands on them.
Most Japanese are ethnically Korean.
Have fun trying to get a usual Japanese to agree with that.
(Not to say I personally disagree with that statement, looking at the map and then looking at the faces of Koreans and Japanese would convince most people that’s very likely, except Japanese)
Wow, a law that seemed to be actually accomplishing what it intended to do! Who would have thought?
What good is getting feedback from your customers if the people getting the feedback are not tightly integrated with management to ensure a good feedback loop.
It is cheaper to hire someone to apologise to the customers, than to actually fix the problems so the customers stop complaining.
As long as I can disable it...
Just like I disabled TouchID and the passcode. I just want easy access.
I want the opposite - I want to be able to configure those 7 days down to six hours. Or however long I want.
So yes, this should be a user decision, not a hardcoded value pulled out of some Apple guy's derriere.
Second this. I use wifi sync and almost never use the connector to sync. I want to be able to completely disable the connector for anything except charging.
A common theme throughout all the Hyperloop news in the recent years, is that Hyperloop is obviously a solution looking for a problem.
There are high-speed rails running in Europe, Japan, and more recently China. Thousands of miles of it, carrying millions of people around every day. In the past few years, when all you get from Hyperloop is talk of what it "promises", China had built thousands of miles of HSR tracks around the country.
These real world HSR only need the laying of tracks and overhead power cables. Fresh food and medical supplies simply didn't have enough the volume to support the extra cost to build the airtight enclosure.
If Hyperloop really made good economic sense, then *somewhere* in the world would have built one already.
Back to cars: Just because you wouldn't buy the Grand Prix doesn't mean you can take one from someone else regardless of your income.
Is it a crime if I took a picture of someone else's car?
No? So why is it suddenly a crime if I can, later on, magically create a physical working replica of the car from that picture?
I have never looked at Rust and never participated in Rust's community.
But when someone posted a clear, well-written comment with some very specific points, and then I see only people either agreeing with or attacking the messenger, but no one refuted the specific points raised... The only reasonable take away is that the points were valid and that got some people pissed.
It might be a copy/pasted post, so what? One can repeat a lie a hundred times, but one cannot repeat the truth?
Just switch on airplane mode. Make the battery lasts even longer.
The device would either have that mode, or be banned on planes. Would be fun to watch if the device cannot login when offline though.
People keep bitcoins in exchanges temporarily because they want to convert it to other currency.
As if. If that's the real reason, there wouldn't be *millions* of dollars worth of Bitcoin stored in a single exchange to be stolen by hackers. The fact is people keep Bitcoins in exchanges because doing Bitcoin transactions otherwise is simply not practical.
You are talking as if banks don't have similar problems. In fact, the main problem of the banking system (and arguably, the reason behind the bitcoin development) is exactly their breach of trust. Think about it, if you were operating a bank, with *no obligation to have an equal amount of gold in your vaults to match the credit you have outstanding*, wouldn't it make sense to lend out more money than you have? After all, it's just some numbers in a computer.
Bank HAD the same problem, and that's exactly why banks are heavily regulated and there is this thing called FDIC. My money in the bank would be safe even if someone took all the money and ran away.
Read up on the history of bank runs in American before banks were regulated. Bitcoin exchanges are now repeating the same mistakes people learned 100 years ago with banks.
Some of us have vivid memories of our savings evaporating because some Icelandic bank collapsed. I think the appeal of bitcoin, for some, is the idea that we go back to having the currency under our own control. Like having a stack of bank notes under our mattress (yes, with all the associated risks and drawbacks).
Your own fault with putting money in a bank not covered with any deposit insurance, and putting Bitcoins in any exchanges is even worse. Holding it in your wallet, your take on the risk of illiquidity instead (you can't sell them fast enough when needed). A real currency would not have the illiquidity problem.
I have now seen multiple stories of crypto-currencies getting stolen or exchanges hacked. Then I read about how blockchain is supposed to be the end all, be all, of transaction security. Aren't these things connected at some level?
Yes, it is telling you this kind of cryptocurrency doesn't really work.
The most basic function of a "currency" is to settle payments, but transaction rate actually achievable (at least with the existing the Bitcoin) is so damn low that you simply cannot complete a transaction in reasonable amount of time, such as less than a minute.
So, to actually do transactions effectively, people have to store their Bitcoins in exchanges, so any transaction within the exchange will simply result in a change of record in the exchange's accounting system, completely bypassing the use of blockchain transaction.
Now, let that sink in for a moment.
A supposed "currency" cannot support the most basic transaction of its users, to the extend people have to setup exchanges so they can transact that "currency" effectively. Is that not a big enough flashing sign saying Bitcoin simply doesn't work as a currency at all?
And the people betting on Bitcoin continuing to rise? Just think about it, as the price of a Bitcoin rise to $50K, $100K, $1M, etc. Won't it eventually make more financial sense for every exchange to simply sell their coins and disappear? If they didn't get hacked first.
Think about, if you were operating such an exchange, wouldn't YOU start secretly selling the Bitcoins you kept for your users, and just wait for the perfect moment to disappear with the money?
Or if you are lucky, you might get hacked (so you blame all loses to the hacker) and declare bankruptcy (while hiding the money), or Bitcoin might just crash tomorrow so you can buy back all the coins with a tiny fraction of the money you took, then close off the exchange fair and square.
Think through this, and then realize how much of a fool you need to be to bet on making money buying Bitcoins.
"But it's not hard to see how this creative explosion could all go very wrong."
No. It is VERY HARD to see how this could go wrong.
You mean, computer can generate an entire movie without having to hire real actors? So Hollywood movie stars can't make millions anymore? Cry me a river.
This would be just as bad, which is to say not at all, as computers able to generate the sound of musical instruments which normal person cannot distinguish from real recordings. (Gee! Computer can generate a "fake" recording of an orchestra playing Bach symphonies! Aren't you afraid now?) It allowed music writers to compose and create music recordings (and put on YouTube) even though he cannot play any of the instruments in the score, including synthetic singers singing the song that goes with it. Is that bad?
In the future, there could be many more solo "movie creators" who would, by his/her own effort, create an entire movie. Much like writers writing up a whole novel. It will take out all the middle man like the movie studio. This can only be good for humanity.
She has been around for 10 years and now it is "news" for Slashdot.
Next, are we going to get "news" about the 10-year old sub-prime crisis on the front page?
I think the newsworthy part is, even after 30 years, the facts still haven't gotten through to the students.
I blame it on the universities for not drilling this fact to prospective students. Graduate programmes take in groups of new students every year, knowing most of them have unrealistic expectations of an academic career afterwards, and universities did NOTHING to made them aware such expectation is unrealistic.
If the company hiring just wanted a programmer they wouldn't ask for code samples, they'd just pick the first candidate.
What they want is the best programmer.
I see you have never worked in any large company as a programmer.
Most companies do NOT want the best programmer, they would cost too much, and they would leave for another job very soon because the work is too boring for them.
Most companies just want a "good enough" programmer, who can (1) do the job adequately and (2) won't give them any headache, and (3) stay long enough to make the hire worthwhile.
i.e. exactly what YOU would want if you were hiring a house cleaner to clean your house. While you may not simply pick the first cleaner who came by, but you probably would pick the first adequate cleaner you saw.
The LAST thing you would want to see from a prospective house cleaner interviewing for the job would be a "sample" jewellery case from his/her previous employer showing you how well it was cleaned.
Most job applications ask for links to live code
In nearly all companies, what you wrote as part of employment is owned by the company. So asking for live code from job applicants is no different from asking for trade secrets, and there should only be one respond:
"It is both against my ethics and my employment contract to show any of my employer's code to you, but I can tell you my code is being used in production capacity in my employer servicing business function X, Y and Z. I am happy to provide codes which I do own so you can judge the quality of my work."
Essentially, you ignore the unreasonable requests and provide a reasonable alternative. Any company that rejected you for that, you wouldn't want to work there anyway, who knows what further unreasonable/unethical request you would get if they became your boss.
In the article: "Who is affected.... All iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices with iOS 9.3.5 and lower"
The latest version of iOS is 10.3.3. So it has long been patched in the current major version.
Sensationalist headline on /., why am I not surprised?