'Self-driving cars' are not even ready for 'prime time' yet, and people have been trying to develop flying cars for literally decades, and now Uber is already trying to sell us the idea as part of their dubious ride-sharing service? Does the driver have lasers on his head, too? Or is it going to be a self-driving flying VTOL car? Is Uber trying to become the first Darwin Award recipient in history (at the cost of the lives of their passengers)?
Someone please put Uber (and Lyft, and whoever else) out of business, before they start getting people killed.
They're not even bothering to call their surveillance software by some other name to obfuscate it's actual purpose anymore, they're coming right out and telling you: We are watching and recording everything you say, do, and type, and are analyzing that data to predict your intentions. The only obfuscation left is saying it's for 'Bing', when it's also going to government agencies. It is clear now that anyone who actually tolerates this violation of their civil liberties and human rights just doesn't understand the implications of what is being done to them, and needs to have it explained to them, so they can be properly outraged.
Microsoft needs to be dismantled, plain and simple.
1. Many, many more people
2. Many, many more machines that use oxygen in one way or another (ICEs, for instance)
3. Destruction of natural oxygen generation (i.e., cutting down rainforests)
4. (speculative) Could thinning of the ozone layer make our atmosphere more permeable to loss?
I shouldn't even respond to an AC like you, but I'll make an exception.
1. How many people are 'enthusiasts' to the point where they need to store everything uncompressed like that? Not a very large percentage, I'm sure. For everyone else, a couple microSD cards are plenty. 2. If you really need that much space for your photos, get a portable hard drive. They're not very expensive anymore either. 3. If your 'photo enthusiasm' is that important to you, then I'd think you'd WANT to store your so-important photos locally, rather than trust some total strangers with them. Also, how much time are you wasting waiting for things to upload and download, if your files are that large? Also, are you actually viewing them on your phone, too? Your dataplan must be VERY expensive then.
Sorry, no one is convincing me that 'the cloud' is a good idea, especially for the average person. Just another way to separate people from their money every month, forever. If you haven't noticed, that's the way everything is going these days: You don't 'own' anything, you 'rent' everything, and pay ad infinitum. It's a gigantic scam if you ask me. I'd much rather own my own things, and I'll keep recommending to people that they eschew 'the cloud' and all these other 'rental' scams.
Based on your other comments in other threads I think you just like to argue to argue, and because you have a pathological need to always be right and never be contradicted.
EVERYTHING can fail at any time for no particular reason. If your data is so valuable to you that you don't have it stored on more than one cheap, readily-available storage device, then you're the one who is foolish. I'd say you're more likely to be trolling than I ever am, seeing as how I'm promoting an inexpensive, one-time purchase, common sense approach to storing photos or other data, rather than uploading it to some server that you don't even know the physical location of, that can be hacked, that can lose your data, that can violate your data, and that you won't be able to hold accountable for any of the above. Now, explain to me again how being responsible for your own things makes less sense than sending to to Timbuktu in the care of complete strangers who, by the way, are taking your money every month for the 'privilege'? I don't think you can, and I wonder if you're really just trying to justify to yourself your own decisions and the money you've given these people and not any intelligent principle.
But do you really truly need that or is there another way that doesn't involve sketchy 'services' that may or may not decide to be around later, or that is scanning what you're storing, or that might get hacked and all your data disappears? Do you have to use your phone for everything? Why not use your computer instead? MicroSD card adapters to USB are cheap and easily obtained; now is it easy enough? Or is 'convenience' so important that people are wiling to put up with these shenanigans?
I really don't get why, other than perhaps for the novelty factor, you'd want something that's only voice activated, that furthermore is surveilling every sound in your house the entire time it's plugged in? Honestly, is it really that much of an inconvenience in 2016 for people to get up and go to their computer (or grab their tablet, or their phone, or their laptop) and look things up on an Internet search engine? Or start some music? Or send an email? Honestly, have people become so lazy?
Get an antenna. Voila, you're not paying for TV anymore. I haven't paid to watch TV for about 10 years now and haven't regretted the decision even once. Honestly, between all the crap channels you're paying for that you don't and won't ever watch, and the way the signal is recompressed within an inch of it's life, you're getting ripped off like you wouldn't believe. The only way to possibly reverse the trend of being price-gouged by cable, satellite, and now streaming Internet companies, is to opt-out of the entire game and go back to free, OTA broadcast television, or just give up and watch nothing but DVD and BluRay. They lose enough customers and enough profits they'll have to change. Continuing to pay them out of inertia or flat-out apathy just gives them your consent to keep bleeding you.
Let's face it, folks: 'The Cloud' was a gigantic troll from the beginning, too many of you fell for it, and too many people continue to fall for it. You want your photos and important data available to you quickly and easily, with little to no downtime, chance of being hacked, or chance of data lost forever? Get your own local storage. Unless you're storing all your digital photos as uncompressed bitmap files, you can store tens to hundreds of thousands of jpeg photos on a microSD card. 'The Cloud' really doesn't make any sense anymore when you keep getting the rug yanked out from under you like this, or in any number of other ways.
..which leaves us at the question I asked at the end of my original comment: When the Internet is effectively ruined by being controlled by a few large corporations, what will we turn to in that post-Internet world? The 'free and open internet' and the 'age of information' are on their way to becoming extinct because of this. Will we have a viable replacement for it, or will the whole idea go the way of the dinosaurs?
I don't even use Twitter, but I can see the social value in it as a tool for free speech. I can also see having it owned by any of the companies that are planning on bidding in it as being a Bad Thing. Twitter should be it's own company, not a wholly owned subsidiary of one of these big, oppressive corporations, that don't particularly respect their customers and users. Sadly, the Internet seems to be heading in the direction of being 'owned' by a few large corporations, at which point the Internet will become more or less useless for anything other than surveillance of it's users, and as a marketing tool. In a post-Internet world, I wonder what we'll use instead?
There are two problems at work here: 1. Wireless companies 'overbook' their networks when they sell, sell, sell to too many people. 2. Too many people spend too much time mucking about with their phones If people broke their addiction to their phones and spent more time doing other, more productive/creative/healthy things, then this wouldn't be a problem. That being said, wireless companies also price-gouge everyone for their 'services' and it would be nice if they could be reined in somehow. They're almost as bad as the pharmaceutical industry.
I hate to sound cynical, but this really does sound like just one of those 'feel good' ideas that come up over a few drinks, that totally ignores your lack of knowledge on the subject, or anything else related to reality. We, as a species, have been trying to 'cure all disease' for thousands of years, and while we've come a long way in that time, we've only scratched the surface -- and along the way we've created more problems. We're starting to run out of antibiotics that actually work. Our own technology and civilization itself has caused more diseases. For all we know, genetically-modified foods, over the next, say, 100 years, might cause diseases. If I give Zuckerberg the benefit of the doubt, I'd call him naive; if I don't give him the benefit of the doubt, then I'd call him arrogant. Either way, even if he liquidated Facebook and all his other holdings, business, personal, or otherwise, he still would only have a tiny fraction of a percent of what it'll take to 'cure all diseases'. More likely than not, this is just a public relations stunt to improve the optics of Zuckerberg and Facebook. He'll pledge some large-sounding sum of money to some medical research or other, get a nice tax write-off, then no one will hear about it again.
I think I just came up with a new cloud storage technique, aimed at protecting people's data from nosy governments, which (for the time being) I'm calling 'decentralized strips sets'. I'm forming the details for this as I write this so bear with me. Let's say you break each byte up into stripes of each bit position, zero through seven. You store each of these bit-stripes on a different one of 8 servers, all located in 8 different countries. Any one of the 8 servers has the capability of reassembling the data. The data itself can be in any format, of course; it could be anything from cleartext all the way to highly encrypted, doesn't matter. The point of this would be, that if the government of any of the 8 countries involved decides to make a law that says they have the right to any data stored on any server within their countries' borders, all they'd get is one bit-stripe of it, which of course would be totally useless; since the other 7/8ths of the data is stored in other countries, they can't compel anyone to provide it. If there is some sort of security breach (some government decides to seize the server in their country), you could 'break' the bit-stripe set, rendering the rest of the bit-stripes useless. Or, if you were more concerned with preserving the integrity of the data, spread out literally across the world, you could use 9 servers instead of 8, the 9th server storing a parity bit-stripe, from which any one bit-stripe that 'failed' could be regenerated.
Am I on to something here? Has someone else thought of this already? Or is it just a dumb idea? No, I'm not trying to be funny with this, this is a serious idea.
Slashdot Mirror
'Self-driving cars' are not even ready for 'prime time' yet, and people have been trying to develop flying cars for literally decades, and now Uber is already trying to sell us the idea as part of their dubious ride-sharing service? Does the driver have lasers on his head, too? Or is it going to be a self-driving flying VTOL car? Is Uber trying to become the first Darwin Award recipient in history (at the cost of the lives of their passengers)?
Someone please put Uber (and Lyft, and whoever else) out of business, before they start getting people killed.
Well I guess that's what separates us from the cattle.
They're not even bothering to call their surveillance software by some other name to obfuscate it's actual purpose anymore, they're coming right out and telling you: We are watching and recording everything you say, do, and type, and are analyzing that data to predict your intentions. The only obfuscation left is saying it's for 'Bing', when it's also going to government agencies. It is clear now that anyone who actually tolerates this violation of their civil liberties and human rights just doesn't understand the implications of what is being done to them, and needs to have it explained to them, so they can be properly outraged.
Microsoft needs to be dismantled, plain and simple.
1. Many, many more people
2. Many, many more machines that use oxygen in one way or another (ICEs, for instance)
3. Destruction of natural oxygen generation (i.e., cutting down rainforests)
4. (speculative) Could thinning of the ozone layer make our atmosphere more permeable to loss?
I shouldn't even respond to an AC like you, but I'll make an exception.
1. How many people are 'enthusiasts' to the point where they need to store everything uncompressed like that? Not a very large percentage, I'm sure. For everyone else, a couple microSD cards are plenty.
2. If you really need that much space for your photos, get a portable hard drive. They're not very expensive anymore either.
3. If your 'photo enthusiasm' is that important to you, then I'd think you'd WANT to store your so-important photos locally, rather than trust some total strangers with them. Also, how much time are you wasting waiting for things to upload and download, if your files are that large? Also, are you actually viewing them on your phone, too? Your dataplan must be VERY expensive then.
Sorry, no one is convincing me that 'the cloud' is a good idea, especially for the average person. Just another way to separate people from their money every month, forever. If you haven't noticed, that's the way everything is going these days: You don't 'own' anything, you 'rent' everything, and pay ad infinitum. It's a gigantic scam if you ask me. I'd much rather own my own things, and I'll keep recommending to people that they eschew 'the cloud' and all these other 'rental' scams.
Based on your other comments in other threads I think you just like to argue to argue, and because you have a pathological need to always be right and never be contradicted.
EVERYTHING can fail at any time for no particular reason. If your data is so valuable to you that you don't have it stored on more than one cheap, readily-available storage device, then you're the one who is foolish. I'd say you're more likely to be trolling than I ever am, seeing as how I'm promoting an inexpensive, one-time purchase, common sense approach to storing photos or other data, rather than uploading it to some server that you don't even know the physical location of, that can be hacked, that can lose your data, that can violate your data, and that you won't be able to hold accountable for any of the above. Now, explain to me again how being responsible for your own things makes less sense than sending to to Timbuktu in the care of complete strangers who, by the way, are taking your money every month for the 'privilege'? I don't think you can, and I wonder if you're really just trying to justify to yourself your own decisions and the money you've given these people and not any intelligent principle.
But do you really truly need that or is there another way that doesn't involve sketchy 'services' that may or may not decide to be around later, or that is scanning what you're storing, or that might get hacked and all your data disappears? Do you have to use your phone for everything? Why not use your computer instead? MicroSD card adapters to USB are cheap and easily obtained; now is it easy enough? Or is 'convenience' so important that people are wiling to put up with these shenanigans?
I really don't get why, other than perhaps for the novelty factor, you'd want something that's only voice activated, that furthermore is surveilling every sound in your house the entire time it's plugged in? Honestly, is it really that much of an inconvenience in 2016 for people to get up and go to their computer (or grab their tablet, or their phone, or their laptop) and look things up on an Internet search engine? Or start some music? Or send an email? Honestly, have people become so lazy?
Get an antenna. Voila, you're not paying for TV anymore. I haven't paid to watch TV for about 10 years now and haven't regretted the decision even once. Honestly, between all the crap channels you're paying for that you don't and won't ever watch, and the way the signal is recompressed within an inch of it's life, you're getting ripped off like you wouldn't believe. The only way to possibly reverse the trend of being price-gouged by cable, satellite, and now streaming Internet companies, is to opt-out of the entire game and go back to free, OTA broadcast television, or just give up and watch nothing but DVD and BluRay. They lose enough customers and enough profits they'll have to change. Continuing to pay them out of inertia or flat-out apathy just gives them your consent to keep bleeding you.
Buy a MicroSD card.
Let's face it, folks: 'The Cloud' was a gigantic troll from the beginning, too many of you fell for it, and too many people continue to fall for it. You want your photos and important data available to you quickly and easily, with little to no downtime, chance of being hacked, or chance of data lost forever? Get your own local storage. Unless you're storing all your digital photos as uncompressed bitmap files, you can store tens to hundreds of thousands of jpeg photos on a microSD card. 'The Cloud' really doesn't make any sense anymore when you keep getting the rug yanked out from under you like this, or in any number of other ways.
..which leaves us at the question I asked at the end of my original comment: When the Internet is effectively ruined by being controlled by a few large corporations, what will we turn to in that post-Internet world? The 'free and open internet' and the 'age of information' are on their way to becoming extinct because of this. Will we have a viable replacement for it, or will the whole idea go the way of the dinosaurs?
I don't even use Twitter, but I can see the social value in it as a tool for free speech. I can also see having it owned by any of the companies that are planning on bidding in it as being a Bad Thing. Twitter should be it's own company, not a wholly owned subsidiary of one of these big, oppressive corporations, that don't particularly respect their customers and users. Sadly, the Internet seems to be heading in the direction of being 'owned' by a few large corporations, at which point the Internet will become more or less useless for anything other than surveillance of it's users, and as a marketing tool. In a post-Internet world, I wonder what we'll use instead?
There are two problems at work here:
1. Wireless companies 'overbook' their networks when they sell, sell, sell to too many people.
2. Too many people spend too much time mucking about with their phones
If people broke their addiction to their phones and spent more time doing other, more productive/creative/healthy things, then this wouldn't be a problem.
That being said, wireless companies also price-gouge everyone for their 'services' and it would be nice if they could be reined in somehow. They're almost as bad as the pharmaceutical industry.
I hate to sound cynical, but this really does sound like just one of those 'feel good' ideas that come up over a few drinks, that totally ignores your lack of knowledge on the subject, or anything else related to reality. We, as a species, have been trying to 'cure all disease' for thousands of years, and while we've come a long way in that time, we've only scratched the surface -- and along the way we've created more problems. We're starting to run out of antibiotics that actually work. Our own technology and civilization itself has caused more diseases. For all we know, genetically-modified foods, over the next, say, 100 years, might cause diseases. If I give Zuckerberg the benefit of the doubt, I'd call him naive; if I don't give him the benefit of the doubt, then I'd call him arrogant. Either way, even if he liquidated Facebook and all his other holdings, business, personal, or otherwise, he still would only have a tiny fraction of a percent of what it'll take to 'cure all diseases'. More likely than not, this is just a public relations stunt to improve the optics of Zuckerberg and Facebook. He'll pledge some large-sounding sum of money to some medical research or other, get a nice tax write-off, then no one will hear about it again.
I think I just came up with a new cloud storage technique, aimed at protecting people's data from nosy governments, which (for the time being) I'm calling 'decentralized strips sets'. I'm forming the details for this as I write this so bear with me. Let's say you break each byte up into stripes of each bit position, zero through seven. You store each of these bit-stripes on a different one of 8 servers, all located in 8 different countries. Any one of the 8 servers has the capability of reassembling the data. The data itself can be in any format, of course; it could be anything from cleartext all the way to highly encrypted, doesn't matter. The point of this would be, that if the government of any of the 8 countries involved decides to make a law that says they have the right to any data stored on any server within their countries' borders, all they'd get is one bit-stripe of it, which of course would be totally useless; since the other 7/8ths of the data is stored in other countries, they can't compel anyone to provide it. If there is some sort of security breach (some government decides to seize the server in their country), you could 'break' the bit-stripe set, rendering the rest of the bit-stripes useless. Or, if you were more concerned with preserving the integrity of the data, spread out literally across the world, you could use 9 servers instead of 8, the 9th server storing a parity bit-stripe, from which any one bit-stripe that 'failed' could be regenerated.
Am I on to something here? Has someone else thought of this already? Or is it just a dumb idea? No, I'm not trying to be funny with this, this is a serious idea.