That strategy used to work, but not anymore. For "more efficient logistics", Amazon mingles counterfeit crap with their own. I've had to return camera batteries that were clearly fake, and water filters that were used, which I purchased directly from Amazon.
No longer true. I (among many) received payment exceeding $1,000 this year from a Honda class action lawsuit, in which air conditioner compressors died at astonishingly high rates.
It was, pretty much, a dead product after Windows 7 came out. Native searching in operating systems are much better now
You're joking, right? The Windows 7 search functionality forces you to learn an arcane query language, is incredibly limited in functionality, ignores contents of non-Microsoft file formats like PDF, and regularly misses obvious results. Finally, its preview pane locks the file--so in the typical use case of searching for a file to edit, you CAN'T SAVE THE FILE until you close the search window.
Microsoft seems to intentionally make file searching less functional and more arcane with every OS since Win 2000. The only thing they've done right was to get rid of that stupid cartoon dog.
C# doesn't need to kill VB because it's assimilating it. Thanks to the CLR, they become more alike with every release. While it was almost impossible to write good code in VB4 and earlier, VB6 made it possible to write maintainable code, and VB.Net is effectively a different dialect of C#.
When I bought my house, I read through everything, and there were three places where I requested changes to the contracts. In each case, they made the change on the spot. When I was hired for one job, I said the non-compete agreement was insane, pointed out where, and the boss tore it up on the spot. Once I was hired, he asked me to help re-write it to something more reasonable. If you don't read before signing, you're still responsible.
The American high school math curriculum is intentionally designed to cover pointless and uninteresting subjects.
Why, for instance, do we shove trigonometry down every student's throat? Almost every trigonometry student knows they'll never use an arc tangent again in their life. What they do learn that math is tedious and irrelevant agony, best avoided whenever possible.
Meanwhile, high school students don't learn math which has real-world benefits for almost every citizen. If more people understood compound interest and exponential growth, they'd know how mortgages work (and why zero-down and negative amortization mortgages are catastrophes waiting to happen). If more people understood probability, they'd know how insurance works and how to choose medical treatments. Both of these subjects would help tremendously when people are choosing retirement investments. (The replacement of pensions with personal investment accounts means almost every American needs to grasp these concepts or suffer misery when they hope to retire.) For both compound interest and probability, students could solve real, interesting problems that they will face later in life, and learn to think logically at the same time. Instead, we give them pointless math that couldn't turn Americans into math-haters more effectively if math teachers deliberately conspired to do so.
Editor’s Update : “As far fetched as it seems this came from a reputable source. it would, however seem that it is a fabrication. PopJolly staff were unable to validate the source after repeated attempts. The good folks at Gizmodo have clarified the story now. We got onioned . Sorry, move on! ”
Federal safety standards are pitiful compared to insurance company standards....Federal standards mandate airbags, but only for the driver, not the passenger or side airbags they've been putting in. All of that is coming from the insurance industry
> The military is NOT the "largest entitlement program in the country." It's not even fucking CLOSE.
Your link refutes your argument. Your link refers to three large entitlement programs with approximately the same size as military spending. These numbers are from your link:
* $715 billion for military spending ("some 20 percent of the budget") * $708 billion for social security ("another 20 percent of the budget") * $753 billion for Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP ("together account for 21 percent of the budget")
Your own source states that military spending exceeds social security spending (albeit by just 1%), medicare, medicaid, and CHIP. Only by combining *all* of them can you justify your bizarre "not even fucking CLOSE" claim. It's like saying that Bill Gates was never one of the highest paid employees of Microsoft because there were many other employees whose *combined* salary exceeded his.
In addition, "military spending" above specifically excludes veterans benefits, but if we're talking about entitlements they should clearly be included. Even excluding that, military spending--using your own data--is slightly larger than spending on social security, the largest of entitlement programs.
> Your comment makes me rage. If you were close enough I kick you in the junk > so hard your grandchildren would still be feeling it...if you were still capable of having them.
I suggest consulting your own sources before getting so angry you consider assault.
Think back a little further--the post that makes you so mad isn't talking about 2009. It describes when income tax, medicare, and social security were founded--long before Obama or Bush.
With income tax, when the 16th amendment was passed in 1913, it was sold as a tax on the rich. If you made $100,000 in 1913 you were mighty wealthy:
I presume the post is also talking about Medicare's original passage in 1965. And if you don't understand the profound mission creep social security numbers have endured, then you must be very new to/. and the entire IT world.
If only people like you would occasionally shut off your outrage generators--and recognize that not everything is about modern partisanship.
> Nuclear power has a far lower cost of operation.
Only by spreading their costs to the rest of society!
The nuclear industry gets huge payments from the federal government to deal with their radioactive waste because they created the idea that society should be responsible for dealing with it. Even my house insurance has an exclusion saying I get zilch for losses caused by nuclear power accidents. Neither of these is a problem for coal, gas, wind, or hydro power.
How would an addon deal with Netflix's pending deletion of hundreds, if not thousands, of disc ratings for each profile?
Netflix is going to take entire families and give them a single ratings and recommendation pool. "Because you liked 'Teletubbies' and 'Aliens', here's our suggested film..."
The only way around that would be to create a plugin that lets you delete every one of your ratings, and then re-create a different set, whenever a different user wants to log in. Hmm... if someone did that, maybe Netflix would notice the load on their servers wasn't so bad with profiles!
Dating doesn't need more numerical analysis, it needs better analysis, which okCupid provides. Instead of providing an endless directory of unsorted profiles where members say things like "I can't be summarized in a paragraph" and "I like to have fun", okCupid lets people create, answer, and rank multiple-choice questions that are important to them. Then okCupid assigns percentage matches that lets you see the people who are most compatible, and read just those profiles.
It works great, and is how I met my fiancee.
I personally had to argue with Microsoft to get an activation code for Windows XP. The hard drive on my IBM Thinkpad failed, and I replaced it under warranty. Windows refused to authenticate using the product key printed on the bottom of my computer, saying the key was invalid. (I had bought the computer directly from IBM, which I expect eliminates the possibility this was a bogus key.) I called the Microsoft authentication hotline, which had an automated voice that insisted that I read out loud the 54-digit code that Windows provided. I tried typing it in, but it ignored me. When I read it out loud, the Hotline told me that number was invalid and hung up on me.
I called back. This time, I didn't try to read it the 54 digits again. When I was silent, it hung up on me. So I called back again. This time, I made random noises at it. After five minutes of random noises (which was quite amusing to those working nearby), I finally got hold of a person.
It took 20 minutes to convince the person at the other end of the phone that my license was legitimate. They gave me a new key to enter. Windows said the key was valid, and everything seemed ok.
Then I rebooted, and Windows again said I had an invalid key. I had to call back again, make random noises for five minutes--my coworkers were laughing hysterically--and get a new key. I told them to wait until my machine rebooted, and they said they couldn't. I asked for a way to reach them directly without making noises at their stupid voicemail, and she said there wasn't a way. While I rebooted, I said I wanted to speak to a supervisor. She waited a moment and then said there was a supervisor there--but I couldn't speak to him. She would relay what he said. (Yeah, right, Microsoft.) The "supervisor" told me I should type the "0" key on the phone when I got the first voicemail prompt, which would connect me back to a human operator. I said I didn't believe that would work (since I had tried typing the number already, when it insisted I read it). She laughed and said the "supervisor" had told her to tell me that, and she hung up on me. At least my stalling tactic worked--she stayed on the line until the machine rebooted so I could confirm it wasn't useless key.
I have lived through Microsoft's reactivation hell, personally. It's not FUD.
We complain that the marketing people took over the numbering at Microsoft and other companies--like Oracle "10g" when there was no a, b, c, d, e, or f.
Now open source is pulling the same stunts--Firefox went from 1.0 to 1.5, and OpenOffice squeezes new features into a 2.0.1 release.
Whatever happened to the standard that major feature releases increment the first number, minor feature releases increment the second number, and tweaks and bug fixes increment the third number? What is the point of numbering releases "2.0.1" if you're not going to follow the standard?
And who are the marketing people who have taken over these projects who think that version numbers are a marketing tool, and not a way to convey useful information about the extent of the changes?
Re:Social Engineering Becoming More Serious
on
Security and Usability
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> You can have a system that requires users to have a 20 character randomly
> generated password, as well as a smart card, and they will still pass their
> password around along with their card, which will have the password written
> on the back.
Don't miss the correlation here. If you require users to have a 20 character randomly generated password, how could they remember it? Like rational beings presented with an impossible problem, they wouldn't--they'd write it down.
When security people come up with ridiculous, badly-designed security requirements that make it difficult for users to get their jobs done, the users will find workarounds. Rather than shoving their responsibility onto users by creating onerous hoops to jump through, security people need to understand usability, to make systems which are actually secure, and not which are theoretically secure only when impossible requirements are met, in your case that normal people can memorize a 20-character string of nonsense characters.
While opting out of their marketing credit lists reduces the number of offers, it far from eliminates them. I opted out about 9 months ago, and still get 5-10 credit card offers per week. Many of the remaining offers are for organizations I have a connection with, like my graduate school, frequent flyer programs, and any charity I've given money to. The opt-out list is only a minor help in making it harder for somebody to steal your credit history.
What they call "Identify Theft" seems mostly to be a euphamism for financial institutions putting far too much faith in shabby documentation. It's amazing that the credit card issuers have so successfully shirked their obligation to lend responsibly! Why do they let someone get a new credit card in my name at an address where I've never lived? That's not "theft" as much as a financial institute giving away my credit!
Car & Driver may have "good" reviews, but those reviews are often based on fantasy cars of far better quality than what you'd get at a local dealer. I had a college professor who had just left a major US auto manufacturer, and she told us in detail how they had special tags on the assembly line to designate cream-puff cars destined for reviewers, car shows, and executives. Those cars would get extra attention at every stage, and then a special final inspection. Many minor defects that were acceptable for consumer-grade cars weren't acceptable for cream-puff cars that they'd send to reviewers.
I read reviews to consider which car I might want to buy. Reviews of cars I can't buy are useless.
By switching to absentee voting, we eliminate the voting booth. And the whole purpose of a voting booth is to keep each person's vote secret.
With a mail-in ballot, someone can "help" you vote. Anyone with coercive power over someone else--a sweatshop employer, an abusive spouse--can compel that person to vote the way they want them to.
The way things are now in most places, absentee ballots are rare enough that such coercion is are. But if an entire state votes by mail, the potential for corruption is huge.
In some areas, Public Radio has completely sold out. The Washington DC area used to have two different public radio stations--WETA and WAMU. WETA played classical music and WAMU played bluegrass and other traditional music, and both played news and talk at different times.
But over the past few years, they've been copying each others' schedules. WETA got rid of their unique morning content to play the same news WAMU plays, and WAMU got rid of their unique evening content to play the same news WETA plays. Instead of two stations, we now have two copies of one station during popular listening hours. Nothing seems less in the public interest than playing the exact same thing as the station next door. The station managers at both were quoted as saying they did it to raise their ratings--to sell more commercial sponsorships. So Washington DC doesn't have public radio anymore, we have ratings-driven commercial radio that's partially funded by taxpayers and listeners.
Slashdot Mirror
That strategy used to work, but not anymore. For "more efficient logistics", Amazon mingles counterfeit crap with their own. I've had to return camera batteries that were clearly fake, and water filters that were used, which I purchased directly from Amazon.
More on this subject is at http://www.thewire.com/politics/2014/01/was-drone-feinstein-encountered-her-house-tiny-pink-helicopter/357061/
No longer true. I (among many) received payment exceeding $1,000 this year from a Honda class action lawsuit, in which air conditioner compressors died at astonishingly high rates.
It was, pretty much, a dead product after Windows 7 came out. Native searching in operating systems are much better now
You're joking, right? The Windows 7 search functionality forces you to learn an arcane query language, is incredibly limited in functionality, ignores contents of non-Microsoft file formats like PDF, and regularly misses obvious results. Finally, its preview pane locks the file--so in the typical use case of searching for a file to edit, you CAN'T SAVE THE FILE until you close the search window.
Microsoft seems to intentionally make file searching less functional and more arcane with every OS since Win 2000. The only thing they've done right was to get rid of that stupid cartoon dog.
C# doesn't need to kill VB because it's assimilating it. Thanks to the CLR, they become more alike with every release. While it was almost impossible to write good code in VB4 and earlier, VB6 made it possible to write maintainable code, and VB.Net is effectively a different dialect of C#.
When I bought my house, I read through everything, and there were three places where I requested changes to the contracts. In each case, they made the change on the spot. When I was hired for one job, I said the non-compete agreement was insane, pointed out where, and the boss tore it up on the spot. Once I was hired, he asked me to help re-write it to something more reasonable. If you don't read before signing, you're still responsible.
The American high school math curriculum is intentionally designed to cover pointless and uninteresting subjects.
Why, for instance, do we shove trigonometry down every student's throat? Almost every trigonometry student knows they'll never use an arc tangent again in their life. What they do learn that math is tedious and irrelevant agony, best avoided whenever possible.
Meanwhile, high school students don't learn math which has real-world benefits for almost every citizen. If more people understood compound interest and exponential growth, they'd know how mortgages work (and why zero-down and negative amortization mortgages are catastrophes waiting to happen). If more people understood probability, they'd know how insurance works and how to choose medical treatments. Both of these subjects would help tremendously when people are choosing retirement investments. (The replacement of pensions with personal investment accounts means almost every American needs to grasp these concepts or suffer misery when they hope to retire.) For both compound interest and probability, students could solve real, interesting problems that they will face later in life, and learn to think logically at the same time. Instead, we give them pointless math that couldn't turn Americans into math-haters more effectively if math teachers deliberately conspired to do so.
How did the American math curriculum get so bad?
Federal safety standards are pitiful compared to insurance company standards....Federal standards mandate airbags, but only for the driver, not the passenger or side airbags they've been putting in. All of that is coming from the insurance industry
Wrong. They've been required for both driver and passenger since 1999.
> The military is NOT the "largest entitlement program in the country." It's not even fucking CLOSE.
Your link refutes your argument. Your link refers to three large entitlement programs with approximately the same size as military spending. These numbers are from your link:
* $715 billion for military spending ("some 20 percent of the budget")
* $708 billion for social security ("another 20 percent of the budget")
* $753 billion for Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP ("together account for 21 percent of the budget")
Your own source states that military spending exceeds social security spending (albeit by just 1%), medicare, medicaid, and CHIP. Only by combining *all* of them can you justify your bizarre "not even fucking CLOSE" claim. It's like saying that Bill Gates was never one of the highest paid employees of Microsoft because there were many other employees whose *combined* salary exceeded his.
In addition, "military spending" above specifically excludes veterans benefits, but if we're talking about entitlements they should clearly be included. Even excluding that, military spending--using your own data--is slightly larger than spending on social security, the largest of entitlement programs.
> Your comment makes me rage. If you were close enough I kick you in the junk
> so hard your grandchildren would still be feeling it...if you were still capable of having them.
I suggest consulting your own sources before getting so angry you consider assault.
Think back a little further--the post that makes you so mad isn't talking about 2009. It describes when income tax, medicare, and social security were founded--long before Obama or Bush.
With income tax, when the 16th amendment was passed in 1913, it was sold as a tax on the rich. If you made $100,000 in 1913 you were mighty wealthy:
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/02/05/original-income-tax-form-from-1913/
I presume the post is also talking about Medicare's original passage in 1965. And if you don't understand the profound mission creep social security numbers have endured, then you must be very new to /. and the entire IT world.
If only people like you would occasionally shut off your outrage generators--and recognize that not everything is about modern partisanship.
> Nuclear power has a far lower cost of operation.
Only by spreading their costs to the rest of society!
The nuclear industry gets huge payments from the federal government to deal with their radioactive waste because they created the idea that society should be responsible for dealing with it. Even my house insurance has an exclusion saying I get zilch for losses caused by nuclear power accidents. Neither of these is a problem for coal, gas, wind, or hydro power.
How would an addon deal with Netflix's pending deletion of hundreds, if not thousands, of disc ratings for each profile?
Netflix is going to take entire families and give them a single ratings and recommendation pool. "Because you liked 'Teletubbies' and 'Aliens', here's our suggested film..."
The only way around that would be to create a plugin that lets you delete every one of your ratings, and then re-create a different set, whenever a different user wants to log in. Hmm... if someone did that, maybe Netflix would notice the load on their servers wasn't so bad with profiles!
One group trying to change that is Scientists and Engineers for America.
Dating doesn't need more numerical analysis, it needs better analysis, which okCupid provides. Instead of providing an endless directory of unsorted profiles where members say things like "I can't be summarized in a paragraph" and "I like to have fun", okCupid lets people create, answer, and rank multiple-choice questions that are important to them. Then okCupid assigns percentage matches that lets you see the people who are most compatible, and read just those profiles. It works great, and is how I met my fiancee.
I personally had to argue with Microsoft to get an activation code for Windows XP. The hard drive on my IBM Thinkpad failed, and I replaced it under warranty. Windows refused to authenticate using the product key printed on the bottom of my computer, saying the key was invalid. (I had bought the computer directly from IBM, which I expect eliminates the possibility this was a bogus key.) I called the Microsoft authentication hotline, which had an automated voice that insisted that I read out loud the 54-digit code that Windows provided. I tried typing it in, but it ignored me. When I read it out loud, the Hotline told me that number was invalid and hung up on me.
I called back. This time, I didn't try to read it the 54 digits again. When I was silent, it hung up on me. So I called back again. This time, I made random noises at it. After five minutes of random noises (which was quite amusing to those working nearby), I finally got hold of a person.
It took 20 minutes to convince the person at the other end of the phone that my license was legitimate. They gave me a new key to enter. Windows said the key was valid, and everything seemed ok.
Then I rebooted, and Windows again said I had an invalid key. I had to call back again, make random noises for five minutes--my coworkers were laughing hysterically--and get a new key. I told them to wait until my machine rebooted, and they said they couldn't. I asked for a way to reach them directly without making noises at their stupid voicemail, and she said there wasn't a way. While I rebooted, I said I wanted to speak to a supervisor. She waited a moment and then said there was a supervisor there--but I couldn't speak to him. She would relay what he said. (Yeah, right, Microsoft.) The "supervisor" told me I should type the "0" key on the phone when I got the first voicemail prompt, which would connect me back to a human operator. I said I didn't believe that would work (since I had tried typing the number already, when it insisted I read it). She laughed and said the "supervisor" had told her to tell me that, and she hung up on me. At least my stalling tactic worked--she stayed on the line until the machine rebooted so I could confirm it wasn't useless key.
I have lived through Microsoft's reactivation hell, personally. It's not FUD.
At Crutchfield the cheapest HDMI cable is $60. At Circuit City, they're $120 and up. To me, that's a mighty pricey cable.
http://www.crutchfield.com/S-Xr97zu029xe/cgi-bin/P rodGroup.asp?search=hdmi+cable&skipvs=T&o=v&g=2310 0 / All/Ntt/hdmi%20cable/rpem/ccd/categorylist.do
http://www.circuitcity.com/rpsm/catOid/-12885/Ntk
We complain that the marketing people took over the numbering at Microsoft and other companies--like Oracle "10g" when there was no a, b, c, d, e, or f.
Now open source is pulling the same stunts--Firefox went from 1.0 to 1.5, and OpenOffice squeezes new features into a 2.0.1 release.
Whatever happened to the standard that major feature releases increment the first number, minor feature releases increment the second number, and tweaks and bug fixes increment the third number? What is the point of numbering releases "2.0.1" if you're not going to follow the standard?
And who are the marketing people who have taken over these projects who think that version numbers are a marketing tool, and not a way to convey useful information about the extent of the changes?
> You can have a system that requires users to have a 20 character randomly
> generated password, as well as a smart card, and they will still pass their
> password around along with their card, which will have the password written
> on the back.
Don't miss the correlation here. If you require users to have a 20 character randomly generated password, how could they remember it? Like rational beings presented with an impossible problem, they wouldn't--they'd write it down.
When security people come up with ridiculous, badly-designed security requirements that make it difficult for users to get their jobs done, the users will find workarounds. Rather than shoving their responsibility onto users by creating onerous hoops to jump through, security people need to understand usability, to make systems which are actually secure, and not which are theoretically secure only when impossible requirements are met, in your case that normal people can memorize a 20-character string of nonsense characters.
That's apparently what this book is all about.
While opting out of their marketing credit lists reduces the number of offers, it far from eliminates them. I opted out about 9 months ago, and still get 5-10 credit card offers per week. Many of the remaining offers are for organizations I have a connection with, like my graduate school, frequent flyer programs, and any charity I've given money to. The opt-out list is only a minor help in making it harder for somebody to steal your credit history.
What they call "Identify Theft" seems mostly to be a euphamism for financial institutions putting far too much faith in shabby documentation. It's amazing that the credit card issuers have so successfully shirked their obligation to lend responsibly! Why do they let someone get a new credit card in my name at an address where I've never lived? That's not "theft" as much as a financial institute giving away my credit!
Car & Driver may have "good" reviews, but those reviews are often based on fantasy cars of far better quality than what you'd get at a local dealer. I had a college professor who had just left a major US auto manufacturer, and she told us in detail how they had special tags on the assembly line to designate cream-puff cars destined for reviewers, car shows, and executives. Those cars would get extra attention at every stage, and then a special final inspection. Many minor defects that were acceptable for consumer-grade cars weren't acceptable for cream-puff cars that they'd send to reviewers. I read reviews to consider which car I might want to buy. Reviews of cars I can't buy are useless.
Could you identify this study and how one might get hold of it? Thanks!
With a mail-in ballot, someone can "help" you vote. Anyone with coercive power over someone else--a sweatshop employer, an abusive spouse--can compel that person to vote the way they want them to.
The way things are now in most places, absentee ballots are rare enough that such coercion is are. But if an entire state votes by mail, the potential for corruption is huge.
We'll all be doomed if the rumors of Yahoo buying Google (last paragraph) turn out to be true!
In some areas, Public Radio has completely sold out. The Washington DC area used to have two different public radio stations--WETA and WAMU. WETA played classical music and WAMU played bluegrass and other traditional music, and both played news and talk at different times. But over the past few years, they've been copying each others' schedules. WETA got rid of their unique morning content to play the same news WAMU plays, and WAMU got rid of their unique evening content to play the same news WETA plays. Instead of two stations, we now have two copies of one station during popular listening hours. Nothing seems less in the public interest than playing the exact same thing as the station next door. The station managers at both were quoted as saying they did it to raise their ratings--to sell more commercial sponsorships. So Washington DC doesn't have public radio anymore, we have ratings-driven commercial radio that's partially funded by taxpayers and listeners.