From what I've seen (could be wrong), the buses that recharge shortly at every stop (or every third or fourth stop) use supercapacitors that can be charged very quickly. The buses with batteries recharge for a longer time at fewer locations where the bus holds for several minutes, or more (e.g. places where the driver takes a break, or end-points of a line).
The feeling that I got doing that was VERY similar to when I stopped smoking.
To put the finest point on it: It was the feeling of withdrawal from an addiction.
An addiction with both physical and psychological components.
It was then that I knew two things:
1. People aren't going to quit without a very compelling self-interest reason that overrides an addictive attachment.
2. The future will look back on us allowing children to have social media accounts as an incredibly horrible evil that we were at first too ignorant and then too lazy, to do anything about.
If I could moderate this discussion, I'd mod you up. I totally agree.
Tell it to employers who want a FB account, or disqualify you from being hired, as you are a "fossil."
Tell that to organizations that do all their group stuff on FB, because it is free, easy to manage, and works well.
If you really have to be on FB, for the reasons you mention above, you can always create a very basic profile. Name and picture. Nothing else there. Nothing that anyone couldn't get just by Googling you. That's what I would do if I needed to have FB to get hired (I mean, first I would try to avoid having to work for an employer who requires me to have a *personal* Facebook profile prior to being hired...because that employer is likely and idiot. I understand of course that some people have no choice).
Tell that to people who want a one stop "watering hole" for socialization.
Not exactly sure why I should care...?
Even with these issues, there is no way FB will ever stop growing... people like being social, and FB is the only game in town.
Facebook isn't the only game in town. A lot of the kids and teens already think Facebook is lame and full of old farts, and prefer Snapchat (or whatever). "No way it will ever stop growing" - I'm sure a lot of people said that about MySpace, too.
It is that easy. I've done it long ago. As have many other people.
It's almost like saying "just give up your phone, don't use phone calls". After all, you can live without a phone.
Yeah, almost like that...except that it isn't really. You can't really compare it to a phone back in the pre-internet days (you could compare it to a phone in current times...now it is conceivable to live without a phone entirely, as long as you have internet access and people can reach you through other means). Phones used to be the only method for real-time long-distance voice communication...also, the simplest way for most people. Facebook doesn't have near the monopoly plain old phones used to have on such communication. Smartphones have cemented that - there are tons of ways to communicate besides plain old phone calls and e-mail: Skype, Viber, WhatsApp (+ endless list of messaging apps). The old instant messaging programs (ICQ, AOL, MSN) have died off mostly but the smartphone-based instant messaging apps (most of which also have desktop clients) have replaced them.
Yeah, you can do that... sort of. Tell everyone "no more phone calls for me."
When I tell people I don't have Facebook, usually the reply is "OK, what about WhatsApp?" - a while ago, I might also get a strange look along with that question. Nowadays people just ask about alternatives...because they exist, and they are used.
And you can get all your friends, family, and associates to use some other communications channel just for you. In a dream world.
So I live in a dream world? I would beg to differ. Yes, most of the people around me have Facebook. I don't, and I still communicate with them just fine. We use other communication channels, because, wait for it...none of them are just for me. Those other people use WhatsApp, or Viber, or whatever to communicate with other people too. I never tell anyone "here's an app I designed that you use just to talking to me, and no one else". Of course that's nonsense. However, there are other, widely used channels of communication that are not Facebook.
Its what we tell ourselves to protect us from what other people might think about us. With enough effort, anyone can gather just about any information about you that they want. Hire a PI and have them follow you around for long enough, and they will tell you things about yourself that in some cases you are unaware of.
Once you realize that privacy is an illusion, then you'll be much happier about your life. Playing pretend is a child's game.
Likewise, most people don't care about much of what you do behind closed doors. Sure there are exceptions, but I can tell you that most./ers don't give a shit about what's growing in my back yard.
I'm afraid you've drunk the Zuckerbeg Kool-Aid.
Yes, absolute privacy is an illusion. Unless of course you are willing to live as a hermit completely isolated from society. People, of course, at least intuitively, know this. Relative privacy on the other hand, is not an illusion at all - it's a real thing. It's about what we decide to tell or reveal about ourselves to different classes of people. This is a fundamental pillar of social relations. Some things, I tell to no one (although it's conceivable that people could find out about them if they really tried). Some things, I will tell my wife, but not my co-workers...some to my friends, but not my wife...and so on. Of course, those different sets of people could talk to each other and destroy my perception of relative privacy. Which is where we get to another thing: trust.
The whole uproar about privacy in the modern era and its impact by modern technologies is really about two things. The first is exposure. With these new technologies, the vast majority of people have no idea how exposed they are to the world when they are using certain services, and very few of those service providers communicate that in a clear way. It's hard to intuitively understand, because what is done to your data is very opaque to you as a user. The average person will make the connection between using a free service (Free-to-air TV channels, Gmail, Facebook) and being shown ads while they use it: OK, they will say, by serving up advertising they make money since I don't pay them directly. However, the average person will not make the connection between the ads and data gathering (now they might of course after all the news on it, but at the beginning of such services years ago, they would not have). If I read a book (a paper copy), and do not talk about it, no one knows I read it. If I buy a newspaper, nobody knows if I've read the sports section or the cooking section. If I read an article on my phone, tons of apps might be tracking me and seeing what I've read. If I talk to a friend in a cafe, I know that besides my friend, what I said was perhaps overhead by a few people around me. If I chat to that friend over Facebook, Facebook knows the entire content of that conversation...and who know who else as well.
People need to know about this, because if they don't, they will be unwittingly exposed. This can go from the party-pooping (I'm buying a surprise gift for my wife, we share computers, then before her birthday Google and Facebook ads spam her for the exact thing I bought - no longer a surprise) to the life-destroying (I have a fight with my wife, think of divorce, google it up but then forget about it - then at maybe a very bad time, she realizes I was doing this via some Google Ad or whatever, and things get worse). That doesn't mean we should limit people's exposure at all times. It means people have a right to know what exposes them - so that they can choose what and when to expose to whom - to protect their relative privacy.
The second issue is trust. If I say something to a friend, I have some expectations about whether he will share this information, and with whom: I have a certain level of trust in him regarding the protection of my (relative) privacy. With Facebook and the like, the level of trust you
If Facebook's policies piss you off so much, stop using it (I stopped in 2011). It's not like you have a subscription you paid for the year and now have to use up to get your money's worth or something. Just log off. Delete your account. Say no.
You can live without Facebook. It's not necessary. If they change their ways, you can always go back. Nothing will get Facebook to change the way they operate like losing millions of users really quickly. If users just bitch about, but keep using it, nothing substantial will change. If people start leaving in droves, then they will change things.
By this logic, advanced rich countries like the US and Canada should accept no immigrants at all, because by definition, they are all malcontents. They obviously weren't happy with the country they lived in previously, otherwise they would not immigrate.
It's funny how rich countries are all to happy to accept smart, skilled, educated, hard-working immigrants and even like the boast about it ("the best people in the world come here!") but then they bitch when they leave. These people obviously look out for themselves and their families first (nothing wrong with that, btw). If they already ditched Country A for Country B for that reason, they'll ditch Country B for Country C if they can, too.
Integration is much better in the UK than in the US, although certainly not perfect. The parts that have immigration fears are quite often left-leaning, not almost all right-leaning like in the US.
Do you seriously believe this?
The UK, which started dealing with mass migration about 50-60 years ago, is better at integration than the US, a mass-immigrant society from its very beginnings?
Most of what I've read, seen, heard from people etc. suggests the UK is not very good at integrating immigrants at all. Granted, it was much more open to immigration than other European countries and much more welcoming to immigrants initially, but due do that it assumed things would take care of themselves...which resulted in rather poor integration of immigrants, especially some groups (like the South Asians that ended up grouping into ghettos in the cities).
All the traditionally immigrant-based societies that sprung out of the British Empire (Canada, the US, Australia, etc.) are better at integrating immigrants than the UK. Since if they didn't do that well, they wouldn't exist.
I think the point of the article is that teens will always be bored.
I don't think that's the point. From TFA:
Phone boredom occurs when you’re technically “on your phone,” but you’re still bored out of your mind. It’s that feeling when you’re mindlessly clicking around, opening and closing apps, looking for something to do digitally and finding the options uninteresting.
Whereas previous generations may have scrolled through channels on the radio, wandered into different rooms in their house, or flicked through countless TV channels, today’s teens say they’ll sometimes open and close up to 20-30 apps, hoping that something, anything, will catch their attention.
Sarah, a 14-year-old in New York, describes it this way: “I’ll go on Insta and it’s just people all talking about the same things. I’m like, I already heard that or I already saw that. It’s like, when you’ve seen everything there is to see in your Insta feed or on the internet. We see the same lip gloss, the same eyebrow style, the same meme like 14 times. It all gets old and then you get bored.”
I've experienced this, and I am no Gen. Z teen. I'm a Gen. X/Millenial (depending on where you draw the cut-off point...I certainly don't feel like I fit the "millenanial" definition though).
The point is that this whole immersion into phones, tablets, the internet, social media, posts and likes actually MAKES you bored eventually. Bored out of your mind. You get addicted, because it's a dopamine high - click, click, like, like, post, post, notification this, notification that. That gets you hooked, and then you start checking your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, forums, even e-mail, favourite websites, etc. etc. all the time. The problem is that enough content - or at least enough content to keep you interested - cannot be produced quickly enough to satisfy your addiction. Therefore you become bored and disappointed - you want more - MOAR! - but at some point, you can't get it. Then you get something like withdrawal symptoms. You can't get no satisfaction - but you keep checking anyway, hoping something comes up. Something does come up eventually, but not quickly enough and not often enough. That's the "phone boredom" described in the article.
I experienced this with the Web as far back as the late 90s. Checking my favourite websites constantly, only to realize I spent half a day looking at pages the content of which has not changed for the past few hours. Back then, updates were a lot less frequent. Today, it's more of being bored by the actual content (which does appear at least on an hourly basis, but as those kids in the article say, it's all the same stuff over and over - you've seen it before, basically).
So it's not about "teens always being bored no matter what". It's about people (not just teens) being overwhelmed by stuff to the point that their senses are numbed and that nothing can stimulate them anymore. Hence the boredom. You need every next high to be bigger and better, but eventually, you can't get that. It's like being an adrenaline junkie. Or a drug addict.
This with this attitude, the UK should give nothing on the way out. I can't wait for the EU to collapse. Eurotrash need their collective hands slapped until they remember basic human decency.
This is nonsense. People (especially UK Leavers and those outside the EU) don't get what the EU is about.
The EU is about rules. Common rules that everyone agrees to follow. Sure, it's not always perfect, but no organization is. Now, those rules also define what EU members can do (and not do), and what non-EU members can do (and not do). There are rights and obligations. If you want rights, obligations come with it. If you take on the obligations, you get the rights. Simple, really. The EU has been very reasonable in the exit talks. It's the UK that has been the problem - defining only strictly what it doesn't want, not what it wants. Then, when the EU says, "well, if you don't want this [single market membership, customs union membership, etc.] you can't have that [full access to the EU market as before, etc.]", the UK complains about how it's not being treated fairly. Who is then being childish and petty?
Mind, the UK already had a bunch of special statuses and exemptions as an EU member. More of those were offerred to Cameron before the Brexit referendum. The UK voted to leave, despite all of the special treatment it received over the years. Now, it wants even more special treatment...so needs to learn basic human decency?
What both the Brexit and Trump votes have proved is that there's a whole bunch of small-minded, Xenophobic people out there if you give them a chance to vote.
No. What those votes prove is that there is a lot people "left behind" (in more ways than one) and screwed over by the economic developments of the past few decades who have been ignored by the mainstream (media, political and business elites, etc.) and who therefore have lost faith in said mainstream and thus became susceptible to populist propaganda supposedly offering them a better alternative. Some believe it, some just use it as a way to stick the finger to the system they feel has let them down.
In the case of the UK however, most of the policies that have screwed those people have been the fault of the UK government, not the EU. The fact that the UK politicians have been using the EU is a scapegoat and convenient excuse ("it's not our fault, Brussels made us do it") is another matter. While people who voted for Brexit have legitimate concerns, they were duped - because the Conservative Leavers (most of them) don't give a rats' ass about jobless industrial workers and struggling working class people. They want out of the EU so they can turn in (in their fantasies) into some sort of huge offshore tax haven slash Singapore/Hong Kong deregulated capitalist paradise. While this might turn out great for them and their donors, it's probably going to make the lives of those living in England's depressed post-industrial wastelands worse.
So far this action tells me that Brexit may have been the best thing to happen to the UK for quite some time. Right now it's just the.eu TLD. ( that we know of ) With a clearly petulant EU leadership that's appointed and not elected I shudder to imagine where the line would be drawn between necessity and atrocity.
You have a bunch of misconceptions here.
The EU commission is no more "appointed, not elected" than the UK government.
First, the UK head of state is an unelected, herediatery monarch (this is not criticism - I happen to think this is good thing, actually - just a statement of fact). No equivalent of this exists at the EU level. There is no King of Europe.
Second, the UK has an upper house of parliament, the House of Lords, which is totally unelected - it's a mix of heredietary and appointed positions. Appointed, ostensibly, by the Queen, but in reality nowadays by the Prime Minister. There is no equivalent at the EU level - the EU has a unicameral, fully democratically elected (directly by the citizens of each country) parliament.
Third, while we think of the UK government as "elected", legally speaking it is appointed. By custom, the Prime Minister and the other ministers are all of Members of Parliament (although this is not legally required), however technically no one elected David Cameron or Theresa May Prime Minister in a nationwide vote - they were elected MPs for Whitney and Maidenhead, respectively, only by the voters in those constituencies. The Queen appoints the Prime Minister and his government. This is different from other parliamentary systems, where the president/king proposes a prime minister and a government, and the parliament approves or explicitly elects it - the UK parliament does not approve a government before it takes office - however it can pass a motion of no confidence in that government and bring it down. That is why, in order for the government to function, the Queen must appoint a government that can "command a majority" in the House of Commons. So, the government is de facto, indirectly elected by the MPs, while the MPs are directly elected by the people - so the government is de facto, indirectly elected by the people.
How does this compare to the EU? How is the European Commission appointed? It starts with the EU parliamentary elections. Then, the European Council, "taking into account the elections to the European Parliament" (Article 17 of the Lisbon Treaty), proposes a candidate for the President of the Commission. The candidate is chosen by qualified majority voting. The European Council consits of the heads of state or heads of government of each member state, who are all either directly elected (e.g. the President of France) or indirectly elected (e.g. the Prime Minister of the UK) by the people. So the council proposes a candidate to the European Parliament. The Parliament must then explicitly approve, i.e. elect the President of the Commission - an absoluty majorty of MEPs must vote in his favour. The MEPs are directly elected by the people in the member states. Then the President must propose a Commission to Parliament - i.e. the other commissioners, one for each portfolio. Each potential commissioner is then scrutinized in front of the relevant committes in Parliament. Finally, Parliament votes on the Commission as a whole, and an absolute majority of MEPs must vote for it to be approved. Then the European Council, again by a qualified majority decision, appoints the entire Commission. So you see, on paper, this is actually more democratic than the UK process for appointing a government. No unelected heads of state are involved. Each candidate for a post gets parliamentary scrutiny (like hearings in the US senate before secretary appointments). The parliament must explicitly approve i.e. elect the commission.
Finally, in the UK people indirectly vote for a Prime Minister because they know that their local candidate for MP which they are voting for is a member of
In return Britain should try to banish the use of English language on the.EU domains — when they leave, there will no countries left in the EU, where English is a national language:)
English is an official language in the Republic of Ireland and in Malta. Says so in their constitutions. In Ireland the vast majority of people speak only English in their day-to-day lives, with Irish being an everyday language only in a few rural communities. Malta is a bit weird, as I got the impression that Maltese is the dominant spoken language (almost all the locals I overheard speaking spoke Maltese among themselves) while English is the dominant written language (all business signs, ads, billboards etc. were in English - the only billboard I saw in Maltese was one put up by the government, advertising an upcoming Maltese independance day celebration).
What kind of fucking moron cares about the "EU's best interest?" The EU ostensibly exists for the convenience of its members states, and those states exist for the convenience and welfare of their citizens.
The "EU's best interest" is shorthand here for the "best interest of its member states" i.e. "the best interest of the citizens of the EU member states".
This is what UK Leavers don't get - that in the other 27 EU states, people don't generally hate the EU and don't want to get out, and feel that they have a common interest to defend. This is demonstrated by the EU27 maintaining a common front in the Brexit talks, whereas the UK side thought it would be easy to play them against one another to get a good deal for the UK.
There are only two countries in the EU with sizeable military budgets and capabilities (France and the UK). The UK leaving the EU won't change that at all. The EU has next to nothing to do with military planning at the moment.
Actually it will change it a lot, since it will leave only one country in the EU with a sizable military budget (France). Also, after the UK initiated Article 50 proceedings, the EU started to get more serious about military matters by creating (activating) PESCO. Continental EU countries have long wanted to give the EU a significant military dimension, but it was exactly the UK which was vetoing all those proposals (often at the behest of the Americans, who fear an EU military would make NATO far less relevant).
And how do you know this is not just coincidence? If you talked about it it's credible to believe that other people did so as well.
How do you know it wasn't common?
Well of course it could be a coincidence, but it's a very freaky coincidence...and I don't know 100% that a search term is not common, but I know that it's highly likely (given the particular situations) that it's not, and that when you "normally" search Google with the same few starting letters, in 95% of the cases that I've tried it suggests something else (and in 0% of the cases prior to a given conversation was it giving me what it gave me after the conversation).
Of course if you use Android always remember that Google makes their money from advertising so any decisions they make will be through that lens. The more information they have about you the more effective they will be at selling advertising so use Android and any other Google products with that in mind. Not saying be paranoid but be aware.
Of course I'm aware, I just think it's wrong to use something people paid for explicitly (i.e. their phones) to collect data (for any purpose other than technical troubleshooting and bug fixes). If I'm using Gmail, Google Maps, Google search, Chrome, whatever, those I got "for free" and hence I will be paying with my data and/or eyeballs glued to some advertising. If I download a "free" app to my phone, I can expect the same, that's fine. However I paid a couple of hundred dollars for my phone, it's main and basic function is to make phone calls, so it's 100% wrong for phone calls to be eavesdropped on by the stock apps (i.e. Google apps) for the purpose of advertising-driven data harvesting.
Given Uber's history of flouting taxi and labor laws just about anywhere they operate...
...Uber should not be allowed to do anything that can jeopardize the safety of people, period. Flouting taxi regulations doesn't kill anyone. Flouting car safety regulations does. If Uber were a car company, they'd sell you something that fails a crash test and tell you'll be fine, who needs crash tests?
It's about money, California will do anything to protect it's stream of revenue to dump into any libtard project moonbeam chooses, that's why Uber needs a permit.
Uhm, no, it's not about money, it's about safety.
An autonomous vehicle testing permit has an annual fee of $3600 and includes 10 test vehicles. Additional batches of 10 vehicles can be added at $50 a batch.
Currently there are about 50 companies testing about 300 cars total. 50 licences mean 500 cars if everyone is testing 10 cars. This is not the case (since there are less than 500 cars on the road), and you have some companies (e.g. Waymo) testing way more than 10, while others are probably testing one or two. So that's 50*3600 = $180,000 in application fees + a few hundred, maybe thousand, dollars more from the companies testing more than 10 vehicles.
This is hardly some sort of windfall for the government of California. The money probably doesn't cover the cost of developing the legislation, processing the applications, and monitoring the results.
I suppose in your non-nanny non-fascist non-shithole hypothetical state, driver licenses are not required? Let's just let a 10 year old, or a blind person, or a person with dementia (etc...) drive, because if we don't, that would be fascism.
At this point, allowing Uber's autonomous cars to drive around is something akin to that.
Can I have some citation on this. It isn't that I don't believe you, I just hadn't heard that particular statistic before and would like to understand the details on such information.
The statistic is from a NYT article (there was a Slashdot story about it a few days ago), that is, from leaked internal Uber company data obtained by the NYT.
Also, not all self-driving cars are the same. Google's tend to have a good safety record thus far, Uber seems to try and piggy back on this (like they tried to "piggy back" on Google's technology, too...) to assure everyone that testing self-driving cars is safe, while refusing to release their own testing data. The information obtained by the NYT suggests the performance of the Uber cars is terrible in comparison to Google.
Uber deserves no trust and no benefit of the doubt, I mean they were kicked out of California because they didn't apply for a $150 licence for autonomous car testing. If they can't be bothered to fill out some paperwork, I wonder where else they are cutting corners.
This is a completely irrelevant statistic at this point. You're comparing accidents per miles driven of regular vs. experimental self-driving cars...the two "sample sizes" so to speak are so vastly different that no valid comparison is possible.
You are quite mistaken. The comparison is fair in deciding whether AVs are safe enough for real world testing in limited environments, not whether they are ready to be left unsupervised in all conditions.
No it isn't. It isn't a fair comparison is any way, because we are not comparing the same type of data. That linked study analyzes the country-wide crash rate to the Google autonomous vehicle crash rate. Google autonomous vehicles do not operate in every environment. Your assertion would be OK if the comparison was autonomous vehicles vs. human drivers driving on the same streets, in the same conditions. So if Google is only testing in 3 cities in California or whatever, then only the crash data from those three cities. Don't use the crash data from Vermont, where there are accidents due to snow or ice, while the Google cars were initially confied only to sunny and dry places.
Furthermore the linked study attempts to compensate for unreported crashed using data from "naturalistic studies" of crashes...which means we are no longer dealing with actual national crash data (and using all of it was a flawed approach to begin with), but with estimates. Furthermore from reading the article I am left unsure whether for the autonomous cars, they have counted only the actual crashes, or the potential crashes as well (the car would have been in a crash but the human driver intervened to stop it), because those should be counted too for a fair comparison.
Finally, as I already said, the study only applies to Google cars, not Uber cars - and an Uber car killed someone. Even we accept your argument, then this study should only be used to decide whether to allow Google to test its cars on the road in real conditions, and not for anything else.
I can confirm that I (and close people) have received targeted ads related to stuff we merely TALKED about, with the phones in our pockets.
I can confirm a similar experience. Not with Facebook (I don't use it), but with Google.
There have been several eerie instances where Google auto-suggested a search item (based on the first letter or first few letters) that has just been talked about on the phone. This has happened to me, and it has happened to my friends who also have Android phones. No, it was not a common search term, no it did not make sense based on location, past search history, browsing or whatever. If those weren't just very weird coincidences (which I find hard to believe), then the only logical explanation was that Google was analyzing the voice conversation.
That's active listening (i.e. recording what you talk about on the phone). I've also had a few instances of what points to passive listening (i.e. just picking up ambient sounds while you are not using the phone to talk). For example, while watching Youtube videos a friend and I were talking, and he said the words "marxist" and "communist" - since I was watching some comedy on YT, the next suggested video was all of a sudden a Monty Python "communist quiz" (not the exact title, but that was the point - the skit where Karl Marx is a participant and they ask him questions about football). Now I don't watch marxist/communist stuff on Youtube, so again, if that's not a concidence, it's Google matching what it heard (passively!) with what I was watching at the time (comedy stuff) to make a recommendation.
Slashdot Mirror
Duh. They could have done this in a much much better way. Make it wireless charging!
Depends how you define "better". Wireless charging is usually much less efficient.
How long does a bus stop at a bus stop?
About 20 seconds on average?
From what I've seen (could be wrong), the buses that recharge shortly at every stop (or every third or fourth stop) use supercapacitors that can be charged very quickly. The buses with batteries recharge for a longer time at fewer locations where the bus holds for several minutes, or more (e.g. places where the driver takes a break, or end-points of a line).
Like you, I stopped using Facebook.
The feeling that I got doing that was VERY similar to when I stopped smoking. To put the finest point on it: It was the feeling of withdrawal from an addiction. An addiction with both physical and psychological components.
It was then that I knew two things:
1. People aren't going to quit without a very compelling self-interest reason that overrides an addictive attachment.
2. The future will look back on us allowing children to have social media accounts as an incredibly horrible evil that we were at first too ignorant and then too lazy, to do anything about.
If I could moderate this discussion, I'd mod you up. I totally agree.
Tell it to employers who want a FB account, or disqualify you from being hired, as you are a "fossil."
Tell that to organizations that do all their group stuff on FB, because it is free, easy to manage, and works well.
If you really have to be on FB, for the reasons you mention above, you can always create a very basic profile. Name and picture. Nothing else there. Nothing that anyone couldn't get just by Googling you. That's what I would do if I needed to have FB to get hired (I mean, first I would try to avoid having to work for an employer who requires me to have a *personal* Facebook profile prior to being hired...because that employer is likely and idiot. I understand of course that some people have no choice).
Tell that to people who want a one stop "watering hole" for socialization.
Not exactly sure why I should care...?
Even with these issues, there is no way FB will ever stop growing... people like being social, and FB is the only game in town.
Facebook isn't the only game in town. A lot of the kids and teens already think Facebook is lame and full of old farts, and prefer Snapchat (or whatever). "No way it will ever stop growing" - I'm sure a lot of people said that about MySpace, too.
If only it were that easy. Network effect.
It is that easy. I've done it long ago. As have many other people.
It's almost like saying "just give up your phone, don't use phone calls". After all, you can live without a phone.
Yeah, almost like that...except that it isn't really. You can't really compare it to a phone back in the pre-internet days (you could compare it to a phone in current times...now it is conceivable to live without a phone entirely, as long as you have internet access and people can reach you through other means). Phones used to be the only method for real-time long-distance voice communication...also, the simplest way for most people. Facebook doesn't have near the monopoly plain old phones used to have on such communication. Smartphones have cemented that - there are tons of ways to communicate besides plain old phone calls and e-mail: Skype, Viber, WhatsApp (+ endless list of messaging apps). The old instant messaging programs (ICQ, AOL, MSN) have died off mostly but the smartphone-based instant messaging apps (most of which also have desktop clients) have replaced them.
Yeah, you can do that ... sort of. Tell everyone "no more phone calls for me."
When I tell people I don't have Facebook, usually the reply is "OK, what about WhatsApp?" - a while ago, I might also get a strange look along with that question. Nowadays people just ask about alternatives...because they exist, and they are used.
And you can get all your friends, family, and associates to use some other communications channel just for you. In a dream world.
So I live in a dream world? I would beg to differ. Yes, most of the people around me have Facebook. I don't, and I still communicate with them just fine. We use other communication channels, because, wait for it...none of them are just for me. Those other people use WhatsApp, or Viber, or whatever to communicate with other people too. I never tell anyone "here's an app I designed that you use just to talking to me, and no one else". Of course that's nonsense. However, there are other, widely used channels of communication that are not Facebook.
Privacy is an illusion.
Its what we tell ourselves to protect us from what other people might think about us. With enough effort, anyone can gather just about any information about you that they want. Hire a PI and have them follow you around for long enough, and they will tell you things about yourself that in some cases you are unaware of.
Once you realize that privacy is an illusion, then you'll be much happier about your life. Playing pretend is a child's game.
Likewise, most people don't care about much of what you do behind closed doors. Sure there are exceptions, but I can tell you that most ./ers don't give a shit about what's growing in my back yard.
I'm afraid you've drunk the Zuckerbeg Kool-Aid.
Yes, absolute privacy is an illusion. Unless of course you are willing to live as a hermit completely isolated from society. People, of course, at least intuitively, know this. Relative privacy on the other hand, is not an illusion at all - it's a real thing. It's about what we decide to tell or reveal about ourselves to different classes of people. This is a fundamental pillar of social relations. Some things, I tell to no one (although it's conceivable that people could find out about them if they really tried). Some things, I will tell my wife, but not my co-workers...some to my friends, but not my wife...and so on. Of course, those different sets of people could talk to each other and destroy my perception of relative privacy. Which is where we get to another thing: trust.
The whole uproar about privacy in the modern era and its impact by modern technologies is really about two things. The first is exposure. With these new technologies, the vast majority of people have no idea how exposed they are to the world when they are using certain services, and very few of those service providers communicate that in a clear way. It's hard to intuitively understand, because what is done to your data is very opaque to you as a user. The average person will make the connection between using a free service (Free-to-air TV channels, Gmail, Facebook) and being shown ads while they use it: OK, they will say, by serving up advertising they make money since I don't pay them directly. However, the average person will not make the connection between the ads and data gathering (now they might of course after all the news on it, but at the beginning of such services years ago, they would not have). If I read a book (a paper copy), and do not talk about it, no one knows I read it. If I buy a newspaper, nobody knows if I've read the sports section or the cooking section. If I read an article on my phone, tons of apps might be tracking me and seeing what I've read. If I talk to a friend in a cafe, I know that besides my friend, what I said was perhaps overhead by a few people around me. If I chat to that friend over Facebook, Facebook knows the entire content of that conversation...and who know who else as well.
People need to know about this, because if they don't, they will be unwittingly exposed. This can go from the party-pooping (I'm buying a surprise gift for my wife, we share computers, then before her birthday Google and Facebook ads spam her for the exact thing I bought - no longer a surprise) to the life-destroying (I have a fight with my wife, think of divorce, google it up but then forget about it - then at maybe a very bad time, she realizes I was doing this via some Google Ad or whatever, and things get worse). That doesn't mean we should limit people's exposure at all times. It means people have a right to know what exposes them - so that they can choose what and when to expose to whom - to protect their relative privacy.
The second issue is trust. If I say something to a friend, I have some expectations about whether he will share this information, and with whom: I have a certain level of trust in him regarding the protection of my (relative) privacy. With Facebook and the like, the level of trust you
If Facebook's policies piss you off so much, stop using it (I stopped in 2011). It's not like you have a subscription you paid for the year and now have to use up to get your money's worth or something. Just log off. Delete your account. Say no.
You can live without Facebook. It's not necessary. If they change their ways, you can always go back. Nothing will get Facebook to change the way they operate like losing millions of users really quickly. If users just bitch about, but keep using it, nothing substantial will change. If people start leaving in droves, then they will change things.
Hire a malcontent, get a malcontent.
By this logic, advanced rich countries like the US and Canada should accept no immigrants at all, because by definition, they are all malcontents. They obviously weren't happy with the country they lived in previously, otherwise they would not immigrate.
It's funny how rich countries are all to happy to accept smart, skilled, educated, hard-working immigrants and even like the boast about it ("the best people in the world come here!") but then they bitch when they leave. These people obviously look out for themselves and their families first (nothing wrong with that, btw). If they already ditched Country A for Country B for that reason, they'll ditch Country B for Country C if they can, too.
He seems to have assumed that it would be like when it was running a business, with lots of people kissing his ass and eager to do deals.
...and if he fucks up and goes bankrupt, that he can just dust it off and go start again.
Integration is much better in the UK than in the US, although certainly not perfect. The parts that have immigration fears are quite often left-leaning, not almost all right-leaning like in the US.
Do you seriously believe this?
The UK, which started dealing with mass migration about 50-60 years ago, is better at integration than the US, a mass-immigrant society from its very beginnings?
Most of what I've read, seen, heard from people etc. suggests the UK is not very good at integrating immigrants at all. Granted, it was much more open to immigration than other European countries and much more welcoming to immigrants initially, but due do that it assumed things would take care of themselves...which resulted in rather poor integration of immigrants, especially some groups (like the South Asians that ended up grouping into ghettos in the cities).
All the traditionally immigrant-based societies that sprung out of the British Empire (Canada, the US, Australia, etc.) are better at integrating immigrants than the UK. Since if they didn't do that well, they wouldn't exist.
I think the point of the article is that teens will always be bored.
I don't think that's the point. From TFA:
Phone boredom occurs when you’re technically “on your phone,” but you’re still bored out of your mind. It’s that feeling when you’re mindlessly clicking around, opening and closing apps, looking for something to do digitally and finding the options uninteresting.
Whereas previous generations may have scrolled through channels on the radio, wandered into different rooms in their house, or flicked through countless TV channels, today’s teens say they’ll sometimes open and close up to 20-30 apps, hoping that something, anything, will catch their attention.
Sarah, a 14-year-old in New York, describes it this way: “I’ll go on Insta and it’s just people all talking about the same things. I’m like, I already heard that or I already saw that. It’s like, when you’ve seen everything there is to see in your Insta feed or on the internet. We see the same lip gloss, the same eyebrow style, the same meme like 14 times. It all gets old and then you get bored.”
I've experienced this, and I am no Gen. Z teen. I'm a Gen. X/Millenial (depending on where you draw the cut-off point...I certainly don't feel like I fit the "millenanial" definition though).
The point is that this whole immersion into phones, tablets, the internet, social media, posts and likes actually MAKES you bored eventually. Bored out of your mind. You get addicted, because it's a dopamine high - click, click, like, like, post, post, notification this, notification that. That gets you hooked, and then you start checking your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, forums, even e-mail, favourite websites, etc. etc. all the time. The problem is that enough content - or at least enough content to keep you interested - cannot be produced quickly enough to satisfy your addiction. Therefore you become bored and disappointed - you want more - MOAR! - but at some point, you can't get it. Then you get something like withdrawal symptoms. You can't get no satisfaction - but you keep checking anyway, hoping something comes up. Something does come up eventually, but not quickly enough and not often enough. That's the "phone boredom" described in the article.
I experienced this with the Web as far back as the late 90s. Checking my favourite websites constantly, only to realize I spent half a day looking at pages the content of which has not changed for the past few hours. Back then, updates were a lot less frequent. Today, it's more of being bored by the actual content (which does appear at least on an hourly basis, but as those kids in the article say, it's all the same stuff over and over - you've seen it before, basically).
So it's not about "teens always being bored no matter what". It's about people (not just teens) being overwhelmed by stuff to the point that their senses are numbed and that nothing can stimulate them anymore. Hence the boredom. You need every next high to be bigger and better, but eventually, you can't get that. It's like being an adrenaline junkie. Or a drug addict.
This with this attitude, the UK should give nothing on the way out. I can't wait for the EU to collapse. Eurotrash need their collective hands slapped until they remember basic human decency.
This is nonsense. People (especially UK Leavers and those outside the EU) don't get what the EU is about.
The EU is about rules. Common rules that everyone agrees to follow. Sure, it's not always perfect, but no organization is. Now, those rules also define what EU members can do (and not do), and what non-EU members can do (and not do). There are rights and obligations. If you want rights, obligations come with it. If you take on the obligations, you get the rights. Simple, really. The EU has been very reasonable in the exit talks. It's the UK that has been the problem - defining only strictly what it doesn't want, not what it wants. Then, when the EU says, "well, if you don't want this [single market membership, customs union membership, etc.] you can't have that [full access to the EU market as before, etc.]", the UK complains about how it's not being treated fairly. Who is then being childish and petty?
Mind, the UK already had a bunch of special statuses and exemptions as an EU member. More of those were offerred to Cameron before the Brexit referendum. The UK voted to leave, despite all of the special treatment it received over the years. Now, it wants even more special treatment...so needs to learn basic human decency?
What both the Brexit and Trump votes have proved is that there's a whole bunch of small-minded, Xenophobic people out there if you give them a chance to vote.
No. What those votes prove is that there is a lot people "left behind" (in more ways than one) and screwed over by the economic developments of the past few decades who have been ignored by the mainstream (media, political and business elites, etc.) and who therefore have lost faith in said mainstream and thus became susceptible to populist propaganda supposedly offering them a better alternative. Some believe it, some just use it as a way to stick the finger to the system they feel has let them down.
In the case of the UK however, most of the policies that have screwed those people have been the fault of the UK government, not the EU. The fact that the UK politicians have been using the EU is a scapegoat and convenient excuse ("it's not our fault, Brussels made us do it") is another matter. While people who voted for Brexit have legitimate concerns, they were duped - because the Conservative Leavers (most of them) don't give a rats' ass about jobless industrial workers and struggling working class people. They want out of the EU so they can turn in (in their fantasies) into some sort of huge offshore tax haven slash Singapore/Hong Kong deregulated capitalist paradise. While this might turn out great for them and their donors, it's probably going to make the lives of those living in England's depressed post-industrial wastelands worse.
So far this action tells me that Brexit may have been the best thing to happen to the UK for quite some time. Right now it's just the .eu TLD. ( that we know of ) With a clearly petulant EU leadership that's appointed and not elected I shudder to imagine where the line would be drawn between necessity and atrocity.
You have a bunch of misconceptions here.
The EU commission is no more "appointed, not elected" than the UK government.
First, the UK head of state is an unelected, herediatery monarch (this is not criticism - I happen to think this is good thing, actually - just a statement of fact). No equivalent of this exists at the EU level. There is no King of Europe.
Second, the UK has an upper house of parliament, the House of Lords, which is totally unelected - it's a mix of heredietary and appointed positions. Appointed, ostensibly, by the Queen, but in reality nowadays by the Prime Minister. There is no equivalent at the EU level - the EU has a unicameral, fully democratically elected (directly by the citizens of each country) parliament.
Third, while we think of the UK government as "elected", legally speaking it is appointed. By custom, the Prime Minister and the other ministers are all of Members of Parliament (although this is not legally required), however technically no one elected David Cameron or Theresa May Prime Minister in a nationwide vote - they were elected MPs for Whitney and Maidenhead, respectively, only by the voters in those constituencies. The Queen appoints the Prime Minister and his government. This is different from other parliamentary systems, where the president/king proposes a prime minister and a government, and the parliament approves or explicitly elects it - the UK parliament does not approve a government before it takes office - however it can pass a motion of no confidence in that government and bring it down. That is why, in order for the government to function, the Queen must appoint a government that can "command a majority" in the House of Commons. So, the government is de facto, indirectly elected by the MPs, while the MPs are directly elected by the people - so the government is de facto, indirectly elected by the people.
How does this compare to the EU? How is the European Commission appointed? It starts with the EU parliamentary elections. Then, the European Council, "taking into account the elections to the European Parliament" (Article 17 of the Lisbon Treaty), proposes a candidate for the President of the Commission. The candidate is chosen by qualified majority voting. The European Council consits of the heads of state or heads of government of each member state, who are all either directly elected (e.g. the President of France) or indirectly elected (e.g. the Prime Minister of the UK) by the people. So the council proposes a candidate to the European Parliament. The Parliament must then explicitly approve, i.e. elect the President of the Commission - an absoluty majorty of MEPs must vote in his favour. The MEPs are directly elected by the people in the member states. Then the President must propose a Commission to Parliament - i.e. the other commissioners, one for each portfolio. Each potential commissioner is then scrutinized in front of the relevant committes in Parliament. Finally, Parliament votes on the Commission as a whole, and an absolute majority of MEPs must vote for it to be approved. Then the European Council, again by a qualified majority decision, appoints the entire Commission. So you see, on paper, this is actually more democratic than the UK process for appointing a government. No unelected heads of state are involved. Each candidate for a post gets parliamentary scrutiny (like hearings in the US senate before secretary appointments). The parliament must explicitly approve i.e. elect the commission.
Finally, in the UK people indirectly vote for a Prime Minister because they know that their local candidate for MP which they are voting for is a member of
In return Britain should try to banish the use of English language on the .EU domains — when they leave, there will no countries left in the EU, where English is a national language :)
English is an official language in the Republic of Ireland and in Malta. Says so in their constitutions. In Ireland the vast majority of people speak only English in their day-to-day lives, with Irish being an everyday language only in a few rural communities. Malta is a bit weird, as I got the impression that Maltese is the dominant spoken language (almost all the locals I overheard speaking spoke Maltese among themselves) while English is the dominant written language (all business signs, ads, billboards etc. were in English - the only billboard I saw in Maltese was one put up by the government, advertising an upcoming Maltese independance day celebration).
What kind of fucking moron cares about the "EU's best interest?" The EU ostensibly exists for the convenience of its members states, and those states exist for the convenience and welfare of their citizens.
The "EU's best interest" is shorthand here for the "best interest of its member states" i.e. "the best interest of the citizens of the EU member states".
This is what UK Leavers don't get - that in the other 27 EU states, people don't generally hate the EU and don't want to get out, and feel that they have a common interest to defend. This is demonstrated by the EU27 maintaining a common front in the Brexit talks, whereas the UK side thought it would be easy to play them against one another to get a good deal for the UK.
There are only two countries in the EU with sizeable military budgets and capabilities (France and the UK). The UK leaving the EU won't change that at all. The EU has next to nothing to do with military planning at the moment.
Actually it will change it a lot, since it will leave only one country in the EU with a sizable military budget (France). Also, after the UK initiated Article 50 proceedings, the EU started to get more serious about military matters by creating (activating) PESCO. Continental EU countries have long wanted to give the EU a significant military dimension, but it was exactly the UK which was vetoing all those proposals (often at the behest of the Americans, who fear an EU military would make NATO far less relevant).
Yeah, sure, the UK won't be in the Eurozone any more,
The UK was never in the eurozone, nor does being in the eurozone have anything to do with being able to register .eu domain names.
And how do you know this is not just coincidence? If you talked about it it's credible to believe that other people did so as well.
How do you know it wasn't common?
Well of course it could be a coincidence, but it's a very freaky coincidence...and I don't know 100% that a search term is not common, but I know that it's highly likely (given the particular situations) that it's not, and that when you "normally" search Google with the same few starting letters, in 95% of the cases that I've tried it suggests something else (and in 0% of the cases prior to a given conversation was it giving me what it gave me after the conversation).
Of course if you use Android always remember that Google makes their money from advertising so any decisions they make will be through that lens. The more information they have about you the more effective they will be at selling advertising so use Android and any other Google products with that in mind. Not saying be paranoid but be aware.
Of course I'm aware, I just think it's wrong to use something people paid for explicitly (i.e. their phones) to collect data (for any purpose other than technical troubleshooting and bug fixes). If I'm using Gmail, Google Maps, Google search, Chrome, whatever, those I got "for free" and hence I will be paying with my data and/or eyeballs glued to some advertising. If I download a "free" app to my phone, I can expect the same, that's fine. However I paid a couple of hundred dollars for my phone, it's main and basic function is to make phone calls, so it's 100% wrong for phone calls to be eavesdropped on by the stock apps (i.e. Google apps) for the purpose of advertising-driven data harvesting.
Given Uber's history of flouting taxi and labor laws just about anywhere they operate...
...Uber should not be allowed to do anything that can jeopardize the safety of people, period. Flouting taxi regulations doesn't kill anyone. Flouting car safety regulations does. If Uber were a car company, they'd sell you something that fails a crash test and tell you'll be fine, who needs crash tests?
It's about money, California will do anything to protect it's stream of revenue to dump into any libtard project moonbeam chooses, that's why Uber needs a permit.
Uhm, no, it's not about money, it's about safety.
An autonomous vehicle testing permit has an annual fee of $3600 and includes 10 test vehicles. Additional batches of 10 vehicles can be added at $50 a batch.
Currently there are about 50 companies testing about 300 cars total. 50 licences mean 500 cars if everyone is testing 10 cars. This is not the case (since there are less than 500 cars on the road), and you have some companies (e.g. Waymo) testing way more than 10, while others are probably testing one or two. So that's 50*3600 = $180,000 in application fees + a few hundred, maybe thousand, dollars more from the companies testing more than 10 vehicles.
This is hardly some sort of windfall for the government of California. The money probably doesn't cover the cost of developing the legislation, processing the applications, and monitoring the results.
I suppose in your non-nanny non-fascist non-shithole hypothetical state, driver licenses are not required? Let's just let a 10 year old, or a blind person, or a person with dementia (etc...) drive, because if we don't, that would be fascism.
At this point, allowing Uber's autonomous cars to drive around is something akin to that.
Can I have some citation on this. It isn't that I don't believe you, I just hadn't heard that particular statistic before and would like to understand the details on such information.
The statistic is from a NYT article (there was a Slashdot story about it a few days ago), that is, from leaked internal Uber company data obtained by the NYT.
Also, not all self-driving cars are the same. Google's tend to have a good safety record thus far, Uber seems to try and piggy back on this (like they tried to "piggy back" on Google's technology, too...) to assure everyone that testing self-driving cars is safe, while refusing to release their own testing data. The information obtained by the NYT suggests the performance of the Uber cars is terrible in comparison to Google.
Uber deserves no trust and no benefit of the doubt, I mean they were kicked out of California because they didn't apply for a $150 licence for autonomous car testing. If they can't be bothered to fill out some paperwork, I wonder where else they are cutting corners.
This is a completely irrelevant statistic at this point. You're comparing accidents per miles driven of regular vs. experimental self-driving cars...the two "sample sizes" so to speak are so vastly different that no valid comparison is possible.
You are quite mistaken. The comparison is fair in deciding whether AVs are safe enough for real world testing in limited environments, not whether they are ready to be left unsupervised in all conditions.
No it isn't. It isn't a fair comparison is any way, because we are not comparing the same type of data. That linked study analyzes the country-wide crash rate to the Google autonomous vehicle crash rate. Google autonomous vehicles do not operate in every environment. Your assertion would be OK if the comparison was autonomous vehicles vs. human drivers driving on the same streets, in the same conditions. So if Google is only testing in 3 cities in California or whatever, then only the crash data from those three cities. Don't use the crash data from Vermont, where there are accidents due to snow or ice, while the Google cars were initially confied only to sunny and dry places.
Furthermore the linked study attempts to compensate for unreported crashed using data from "naturalistic studies" of crashes...which means we are no longer dealing with actual national crash data (and using all of it was a flawed approach to begin with), but with estimates. Furthermore from reading the article I am left unsure whether for the autonomous cars, they have counted only the actual crashes, or the potential crashes as well (the car would have been in a crash but the human driver intervened to stop it), because those should be counted too for a fair comparison.
Finally, as I already said, the study only applies to Google cars, not Uber cars - and an Uber car killed someone. Even we accept your argument, then this study should only be used to decide whether to allow Google to test its cars on the road in real conditions, and not for anything else.
I can confirm that I (and close people) have received targeted ads related to stuff we merely TALKED about, with the phones in our pockets.
I can confirm a similar experience. Not with Facebook (I don't use it), but with Google.
There have been several eerie instances where Google auto-suggested a search item (based on the first letter or first few letters) that has just been talked about on the phone. This has happened to me, and it has happened to my friends who also have Android phones. No, it was not a common search term, no it did not make sense based on location, past search history, browsing or whatever. If those weren't just very weird coincidences (which I find hard to believe), then the only logical explanation was that Google was analyzing the voice conversation.
That's active listening (i.e. recording what you talk about on the phone). I've also had a few instances of what points to passive listening (i.e. just picking up ambient sounds while you are not using the phone to talk). For example, while watching Youtube videos a friend and I were talking, and he said the words "marxist" and "communist" - since I was watching some comedy on YT, the next suggested video was all of a sudden a Monty Python "communist quiz" (not the exact title, but that was the point - the skit where Karl Marx is a participant and they ask him questions about football). Now I don't watch marxist/communist stuff on Youtube, so again, if that's not a concidence, it's Google matching what it heard (passively!) with what I was watching at the time (comedy stuff) to make a recommendation.