Which is good really. That smartphones have matured to a state where there is not much new each year gives us a bit of stability, which I welcome after the past few years of constant upgrades.
But I have to wonder who now pays $800 or whatever for a phone. My current is a Moto Z Play, which is mid-range really, but I haven't found anything to complain about at all... or atleast nothing that I believe would be fixed by a faster (more power-hungry) CPU or a higher screen resolution (that I can't see). If you were in the market for an Android phone, why would anyone get a flagship these days?
I find humans being utterly reliant upon reviews for every fucking thing in their life completely pathetic. Can't even drink a cup of coffee or eat a pizza without asking a panel of five-star rated liars. Ever heard of product satisfaction being subjective?
Use your own brain for once and make your own judgements. Live a little. Good or bad, it is satisfying knowing at the end of the day the decisions you made were yours, and not made based on sponsored bullshit.
Or, you have limited time and resources, try to spend it wisely. I see about 6 films a year, and I would prefer them not to be terrible if possible. Why would you *not* use the resources available to you to pick well?
Nobody is forcing you to buy a computer, and I probably can find a computer assembled by people who care about the product and their conditions. If you think there's a substantial unmet demand for that kind of thing, maybe you or a fellow-traveler should start selling artisanal computers made from sustainably sourced, fair-trade components.
You want to "fix" the parts of human nature that you've been brainwashed to find distasteful. Don't expect the rest of us to jump onto your Marxist bandwagon.
Repeat after me: "The market is not a magic fixall for every problem." How bizarrely deluded must you be to think that this entirely arbitrary concept of market forces is a substitute for actually caring about actual people and their living conditions?
I for one am glad to see the wheels starting fall off this libertarian corporate experiment. It's heartening to see signs of failure in an institution whose core principals are deeply entrenched in base human behaviours such as bullying, hypocrisy and total indifference to adverse impacts to others (including it's own people).
Own a company or be in a position of power and your opinion WILL radically change. Guarantee it
So? So what? Most people don't own companies, neither can they. If you're saying that exploiting workers is OK because... others do it in the same position... well that the exact reason that unions were invented. If you're in a position of power, you don't *have* to be a dick.
Even then you're being very generous with your average speed. Internet says 18mph is the average driving speed in San Francisco, so you can half that again...
Right...I mentioned that in my follow up reply. You and your friends are special snowflakes of course. My comment doesn't apply to people like you.
Right...I mentioned that in my follow up reply. You and your friends are special snowflakes of course. My comment doesn't apply to people like you.
Right, so, by definition anyone who can disagree with you cannot because they are in the only group of people you have excluded from your blanket claim. Fucking genius debate technique...
I'm guessing those people have searched Beauty and the Beast while signed in to Chrome at some point. And just like Google Now cards, it's an update to a product that showed interest in, so it is brought up with the question of what's happening today. One part Ad yes, but I don't think they would do it specifically for Beauty and the Beast, it may very well be a new regular response with others like: "That console you've been researching is released today" "That TV you price checked is on sale today", "That show you like has a new episode today", etc.
That is some backflipping you're doing there to excuse this. I'm usually reticent to jump on the bash-Google bandwagon, but this is pretty clearly a blatant advert. Listen to the wording and the music, it's not a 'helpful' message like the examples you give. In a reddit post author says "I don't believe I've done any searching for the film either, so I think it's not due to perceived interest."
This because there are so many of you fools out there waving dollas at your hero. Eventually he will run out of other peoples money. I read that musk is putting up $13.5 million himself. LOL! He's is worth $13 _billion_ on paper.
Atleast he's doing something. Atleast he might succeed. What are you doing for the world, dear AC?
You don't leave a 6 figure job because of "lack of confidence in management." You just don't. You milk that puppy until it's dry. Plus, at the end of the day Uber is already profitable in the US. They are bleeding money competing for market share in Europe and China. The whole "profitable in the US" thing escapes the headlines but the are making bank here and they will outside the US too once the market share fight is over.
Having been on one of these (in dollars atleast) and had the company collapse underneath me. They didn't pay November's salary, and then try getting job mid-way through December when it became clear that there was no continuing. A six-figure salary that is missing 2/12 is no longer that attractive.
Not once since college have I ever had a need to write code to construct or balance a tree on my own.
Neither have I, but it is a trivial task.
I doubt very much that I could come up with a function to balance a tree out of the blue with no prep or review
Really? You just walk the tree, and return false if any leaf is deeper than the others.
Like alot of things, it's a trivial task *if you know the answer*. If you don't happen to have the answer in your head (and many application-level programmers don't deal with trees directly, so this sort of knowledge isn't immediately available) then it's damn near imposssible, especially in the stressed situation that we're talking about.
I'm sure you can imagine some questions you can't answer that would be considered obvious by other programmers in other fields.
Do you believe that business and merchants existed long before liability protections? If so, then you have evidence that your assertion is false. If not, then history begs to differ.
But when serious risk was needed, when machinery / railroads / technology developed that might succeed but easily may also fail, it was necessary. One of the reasons that the Industrial Revolution happened in the UK at the time it did was Limited Liability being available there. I'm not say it doesn't have other potentially bad side-effects, but is very obviously necessary for any serious progress to be made.
No, really. This applies to movies too. Why spend more to see it now when you can find it in the Walmart bargain bin a year later?
Depends on what it is and whether you want to be part of the cultural experience or not. The bigger films are quite often larger events that just the act of physically taking in the entertainment, there's conversations with friends, forums, youtube breakdowns, reviews with spoilers...
I went to see Star Wars VII on a 1st-day midnight showing, and it was very exciting. I don't care *that* much for Star Wars but it was just really fun going to the cinema with a bunch of people all excited to see something. Yeah it's fake but so is most human experiences.
Because the idea that you *have* to watch a brand new movie is pretty ridiculous and it pretty much validates anything the movie companies want to charge.
Well if you want to be part of culture now - social conversations about the film, youtube philosophical breakdowns, avoiding spoilers... they yes you probably should see it around when it comes out. You can of course save yourself a little cash and wait months, but then you won't be part of the larger cultural moment, and for many films that's part of the experience.
Do you think it stops at social networks? Should you leave your phone completely?
Do you really think the two are equivalent in levels of importance?
You don't? Why are they different? Quite a few people communicate almost exclusively by text, by chat mediums with the people that they know. Some people don't like phonecalls. For an increasing number of people they are absolutely the same importance.
Social networks today, your phone call history tomorrow? Is that OK?
There are nations that for years have checked visitors' phones at customs. In case you didn't know this before, US laws don't travel with you when you enter another country - you enter another country and you are now expected to adhere to their laws. If you don't like their laws you should have traveled elsewhere.
That doesn't make the procedure good or right. Jobs and family often force travel. Anyone who has a distributed life doesn't get to smugly avoid it.
You can do this at the moment. Then tomorrow when they start doing automatic searches based on your name, and show you an account they've found that looks like you and has your name, what then?
What are you talking about? This is quite a bit removed from the topic at hand. If you're worried that a foreign nation is going to ask you to log in to a social media account, then you've made yourself a slave to social media. I'm guessing you don't leave home often with that attitude, though so you're probably just fine with that.
Amazingly naive.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
FYI (to correct your many assumptions) I'm British and have to travel to the US and other countries to see family. So yeah I'm very aware that I have no rights at the US border. If *you* don't care about rights at borders then I would say it's far more likely *you* are the one that doesn't travel.
Really, traveling without social media is a very pleasant option in most cases. My most memorable vacations are the ones I took where I was not worried about WiFi or 3G service. Your vacation should get you away from what consumes you during the rest of your existence; if you are worrying about that crap while you are away I'm going to tell you that your doing your vacation wrong.
*this is not a goddamn solution*.
Yes, you can, especially if you're only vaguely on social networks. But we shouldn't have to jump through hoops like this - when you're visiting friends and whatever while travelling, guess what, social networks are very useful in that case. Do you think it stops at social networks? Should you leave your phone completely? Social networks today, your phone call history tomorrow? Is that OK?
You can do this at the moment. Then tomorrow when they start doing automatic searches based on your name, and show you an account they've found that looks like you and has your name, what then?
In the strictest sense you are of course correct, but I don't really see why you're making a distinction between analogue technologies where we have an expectation of privacy, and digital ones where for some reason there is none. By your logic every phonecall you make can be public because it goes through the phone companies' equipment. Every letter you send could potentially be opened and read.
But we don't have it work like that, there are systems & laws set up to keep those things private and a huge fuss is made if those things are not private for some reason.
Stop throwing in the towel just because it's easier to look down on people who use social networks. It is within possibility to fix this in law.
It isn't technology nor laws. It is pure and simple ROI, as viewed by social media companies. To them:
Security has no ROI. Privacy has no ROI.
If it were in their interest to have security, we would be seeing social networks supporting client certs, reduced functionality modes, duress passwords, and many other types of security architectures, as opposed to just nothing like what we have now.
So ROI does not fix the problem? So we need laws then?
The market doesn't fix everything - that's why we have law.
I'm not sure that leaving your phone at home counts as "resistance" - it sounds more like surrendering.
When at the border you have pretty much no power at all, and if you're not a US citizen then you definitely have no power at all. It's no use calling it "surrendering", but then offering no alternative action. What are we to do instead?
Simpler way: just don't visit the United States. As a bonus, you will miss all the other airport humiliations: mass-fingerprinting, world's worst security theatre (you want my shoes off?), and risk of arbitrary refusal of entry without right of appeal or even explanation.
Yeah great, unless of course your job requires it, in which case you kindof have to. But you can just get another job that doesn't, right? Right. Unless you have family and friends there, in which case you have to. But you can just get other family, right?
Your simple solutions do not help people in the real world.
I think the better rhetorical question is: why are some people so amazingly stupid, that they are incapable of telling the difference between these two scenarios? What is causing this stupidity? Is there anything we can do about it, and if there is, should we do it?
When Facebook purports to give you control over your data, privacy settings, then yes it is absolutely reasonable to expect that stuff to be private to the people you choose. Yes, we know that their impenetrable contracts give them loads of rights, but the site does not communicate that in how it works. Despite your colourful analogy, very little about how Facebook works would make a normal person believe that they are in a fully public place.
I know it's superfun to call people stupid, and it makes you feel really great about your level of intelligence, but I would put real money on you believing stuff about other fields (law for example) that you're not personally involved in that are simply wrong. People do not have time to understand everything and they have to live their lives using reasonable expectation. The reasonable expectation of Facebook posts is that they are private to your group of friends.
What's so outrageous or even particularly newsworthy about this?
The news is that Facebook rats you out. So don't use Facebook if you don't want its database wielded against you.
Before you get too smug, think how far this can go - your phone, without Facebook, collects your location constantly, should that be available to any policeman that wants to look? What about all your email history? All the calls you've made? We've already placed limits on what's reasonable to be used by law enforcement, Facebook is just another thing that we will have to make decisions about because it's *not just Facebook*, it's every piece of technology that you interact with that stores personal information.
Seriously? Listen to what? You have a press secretary that doesn't respond to questioning, that spouts obvious bullshit about trivia, making anything he says about anything extremely untrustworthy. You want people to not assume the worst, you need to command trust.
They're in shit plans with shit companies that cost way too much, and way WAY too much for what they get. Doesn't sound like much of a loss, to me.
But still costs less that their alternatives? It might not be very good, but if the alternative is... no insurance...?
I hear lots of criticism, but no better plans that avoid the dreaded 'socialism' label that Americans hate. And certainly no better plan from the current Administration.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is good really. That smartphones have matured to a state where there is not much new each year gives us a bit of stability, which I welcome after the past few years of constant upgrades.
But I have to wonder who now pays $800 or whatever for a phone. My current is a Moto Z Play, which is mid-range really, but I haven't found anything to complain about at all... or atleast nothing that I believe would be fixed by a faster (more power-hungry) CPU or a higher screen resolution (that I can't see). If you were in the market for an Android phone, why would anyone get a flagship these days?
I find humans being utterly reliant upon reviews for every fucking thing in their life completely pathetic. Can't even drink a cup of coffee or eat a pizza without asking a panel of five-star rated liars. Ever heard of product satisfaction being subjective?
Use your own brain for once and make your own judgements. Live a little. Good or bad, it is satisfying knowing at the end of the day the decisions you made were yours, and not made based on sponsored bullshit.
Or, you have limited time and resources, try to spend it wisely. I see about 6 films a year, and I would prefer them not to be terrible if possible. Why would you *not* use the resources available to you to pick well?
Nobody is forcing you to buy a computer, and I probably can find a computer assembled by people who care about the product and their conditions. If you think there's a substantial unmet demand for that kind of thing, maybe you or a fellow-traveler should start selling artisanal computers made from sustainably sourced, fair-trade components.
You want to "fix" the parts of human nature that you've been brainwashed to find distasteful. Don't expect the rest of us to jump onto your Marxist bandwagon.
Repeat after me: "The market is not a magic fixall for every problem."
How bizarrely deluded must you be to think that this entirely arbitrary concept of market forces is a substitute for actually caring about actual people and their living conditions?
I for one am glad to see the wheels starting fall off this libertarian corporate experiment. It's heartening to see signs of failure in an institution whose core principals are deeply entrenched in base human behaviours such as bullying, hypocrisy and total indifference to adverse impacts to others (including it's own people).
Own a company or be in a position of power and your opinion WILL radically change. Guarantee it
So? So what? Most people don't own companies, neither can they. If you're saying that exploiting workers is OK because... others do it in the same position... well that the exact reason that unions were invented. If you're in a position of power, you don't *have* to be a dick.
Even then you're being very generous with your average speed. Internet says 18mph is the average driving speed in San Francisco, so you can half that again...
Right...I mentioned that in my follow up reply. You and your friends are special snowflakes of course. My comment doesn't apply to people like you.
Right...I mentioned that in my follow up reply. You and your friends are special snowflakes of course. My comment doesn't apply to people like you.
Right, so, by definition anyone who can disagree with you cannot because they are in the only group of people you have excluded from your blanket claim. Fucking genius debate technique...
I'm guessing those people have searched Beauty and the Beast while signed in to Chrome at some point. And just like Google Now cards, it's an update to a product that showed interest in, so it is brought up with the question of what's happening today. One part Ad yes, but I don't think they would do it specifically for Beauty and the Beast, it may very well be a new regular response with others like: "That console you've been researching is released today" "That TV you price checked is on sale today", "That show you like has a new episode today", etc.
That is some backflipping you're doing there to excuse this. I'm usually reticent to jump on the bash-Google bandwagon, but this is pretty clearly a blatant advert. Listen to the wording and the music, it's not a 'helpful' message like the examples you give. In a reddit post author says "I don't believe I've done any searching for the film either, so I think it's not due to perceived interest."
Making money hand over fist investing in viable companies, and shorting non-viable ones ;)
That would be doing something for *you* then.
This because there are so many of you fools out there waving dollas at your hero. Eventually he will run out of other peoples money. I read that musk is putting up $13.5 million himself. LOL! He's is worth $13 _billion_ on paper.
Atleast he's doing something. Atleast he might succeed. What are you doing for the world, dear AC?
You don't leave a 6 figure job because of "lack of confidence in management." You just don't. You milk that puppy until it's dry. Plus, at the end of the day Uber is already profitable in the US. They are bleeding money competing for market share in Europe and China. The whole "profitable in the US" thing escapes the headlines but the are making bank here and they will outside the US too once the market share fight is over.
Having been on one of these (in dollars atleast) and had the company collapse underneath me. They didn't pay November's salary, and then try getting job mid-way through December when it became clear that there was no continuing. A six-figure salary that is missing 2/12 is no longer that attractive.
Not once since college have I ever had a need to write code to construct or balance a tree on my own.
Neither have I, but it is a trivial task.
I doubt very much that I could come up with a function to balance a tree out of the blue with no prep or review
Really? You just walk the tree, and return false if any leaf is deeper than the others.
Like alot of things, it's a trivial task *if you know the answer*. If you don't happen to have the answer in your head (and many application-level programmers don't deal with trees directly, so this sort of knowledge isn't immediately available) then it's damn near imposssible, especially in the stressed situation that we're talking about.
I'm sure you can imagine some questions you can't answer that would be considered obvious by other programmers in other fields.
Do you believe that business and merchants existed long before liability protections? If so, then you have evidence that your assertion is false. If not, then history begs to differ.
But when serious risk was needed, when machinery / railroads / technology developed that might succeed but easily may also fail, it was necessary. One of the reasons that the Industrial Revolution happened in the UK at the time it did was Limited Liability being available there. I'm not say it doesn't have other potentially bad side-effects, but is very obviously necessary for any serious progress to be made.
https://xkcd.com/606/
No, really. This applies to movies too. Why spend more to see it now when you can find it in the Walmart bargain bin a year later?
Depends on what it is and whether you want to be part of the cultural experience or not. The bigger films are quite often larger events that just the act of physically taking in the entertainment, there's conversations with friends, forums, youtube breakdowns, reviews with spoilers...
I went to see Star Wars VII on a 1st-day midnight showing, and it was very exciting. I don't care *that* much for Star Wars but it was just really fun going to the cinema with a bunch of people all excited to see something. Yeah it's fake but so is most human experiences.
Because the idea that you *have* to watch a brand new movie is pretty ridiculous and it pretty much validates anything the movie companies want to charge.
Well if you want to be part of culture now - social conversations about the film, youtube philosophical breakdowns, avoiding spoilers... they yes you probably should see it around when it comes out. You can of course save yourself a little cash and wait months, but then you won't be part of the larger cultural moment, and for many films that's part of the experience.
Do you think it stops at social networks? Should you leave your phone completely?
Do you really think the two are equivalent in levels of importance?
You don't? Why are they different? Quite a few people communicate almost exclusively by text, by chat mediums with the people that they know. Some people don't like phonecalls. For an increasing number of people they are absolutely the same importance.
Social networks today, your phone call history tomorrow? Is that OK?
There are nations that for years have checked visitors' phones at customs. In case you didn't know this before, US laws don't travel with you when you enter another country - you enter another country and you are now expected to adhere to their laws. If you don't like their laws you should have traveled elsewhere.
That doesn't make the procedure good or right. Jobs and family often force travel. Anyone who has a distributed life doesn't get to smugly avoid it.
You can do this at the moment. Then tomorrow when they start doing automatic searches based on your name, and show you an account they've found that looks like you and has your name, what then?
What are you talking about? This is quite a bit removed from the topic at hand. If you're worried that a foreign nation is going to ask you to log in to a social media account, then you've made yourself a slave to social media. I'm guessing you don't leave home often with that attitude, though so you're probably just fine with that.
Amazingly naive.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
FYI (to correct your many assumptions) I'm British and have to travel to the US and other countries to see family. So yeah I'm very aware that I have no rights at the US border. If *you* don't care about rights at borders then I would say it's far more likely *you* are the one that doesn't travel.
Really, traveling without social media is a very pleasant option in most cases. My most memorable vacations are the ones I took where I was not worried about WiFi or 3G service. Your vacation should get you away from what consumes you during the rest of your existence; if you are worrying about that crap while you are away I'm going to tell you that your doing your vacation wrong.
*this is not a goddamn solution*.
Yes, you can, especially if you're only vaguely on social networks. But we shouldn't have to jump through hoops like this - when you're visiting friends and whatever while travelling, guess what, social networks are very useful in that case. Do you think it stops at social networks? Should you leave your phone completely? Social networks today, your phone call history tomorrow? Is that OK?
You can do this at the moment. Then tomorrow when they start doing automatic searches based on your name, and show you an account they've found that looks like you and has your name, what then?
In the strictest sense you are of course correct, but I don't really see why you're making a distinction between analogue technologies where we have an expectation of privacy, and digital ones where for some reason there is none. By your logic every phonecall you make can be public because it goes through the phone companies' equipment. Every letter you send could potentially be opened and read.
But we don't have it work like that, there are systems & laws set up to keep those things private and a huge fuss is made if those things are not private for some reason.
Stop throwing in the towel just because it's easier to look down on people who use social networks. It is within possibility to fix this in law.
It isn't technology nor laws. It is pure and simple ROI, as viewed by social media companies. To them:
Security has no ROI.
Privacy has no ROI.
If it were in their interest to have security, we would be seeing social networks supporting client certs, reduced functionality modes, duress passwords, and many other types of security architectures, as opposed to just nothing like what we have now.
So ROI does not fix the problem? So we need laws then?
The market doesn't fix everything - that's why we have law.
I'm not sure that leaving your phone at home counts as "resistance" - it sounds more like surrendering.
When at the border you have pretty much no power at all, and if you're not a US citizen then you definitely have no power at all. It's no use calling it "surrendering", but then offering no alternative action. What are we to do instead?
Simpler way: just don't visit the United States.
As a bonus, you will miss all the other airport humiliations: mass-fingerprinting, world's worst security theatre (you want my shoes off?), and risk of arbitrary refusal of entry without right of appeal or even explanation.
Yeah great, unless of course your job requires it, in which case you kindof have to. But you can just get another job that doesn't, right? Right. Unless you have family and friends there, in which case you have to. But you can just get other family, right?
Your simple solutions do not help people in the real world.
I think the better rhetorical question is: why are some people so amazingly stupid, that they are incapable of telling the difference between these two scenarios? What is causing this stupidity? Is there anything we can do about it, and if there is, should we do it?
When Facebook purports to give you control over your data, privacy settings, then yes it is absolutely reasonable to expect that stuff to be private to the people you choose. Yes, we know that their impenetrable contracts give them loads of rights, but the site does not communicate that in how it works. Despite your colourful analogy, very little about how Facebook works would make a normal person believe that they are in a fully public place.
I know it's superfun to call people stupid, and it makes you feel really great about your level of intelligence, but I would put real money on you believing stuff about other fields (law for example) that you're not personally involved in that are simply wrong. People do not have time to understand everything and they have to live their lives using reasonable expectation. The reasonable expectation of Facebook posts is that they are private to your group of friends.
"deemphasizing investment rounds"
"making something people want"
"creating lasting value"
"sustainable businesses"
Sounds like Communism to me.
Communism isn't concerned with what people want...
What's so outrageous or even particularly newsworthy about this?
The news is that Facebook rats you out. So don't use Facebook if you don't want its database wielded against you.
Before you get too smug, think how far this can go - your phone, without Facebook, collects your location constantly, should that be available to any policeman that wants to look? What about all your email history? All the calls you've made? We've already placed limits on what's reasonable to be used by law enforcement, Facebook is just another thing that we will have to make decisions about because it's *not just Facebook*, it's every piece of technology that you interact with that stores personal information.
They don't listen.
Seriously? Listen to what? You have a press secretary that doesn't respond to questioning, that spouts obvious bullshit about trivia, making anything he says about anything extremely untrustworthy. You want people to not assume the worst, you need to command trust.
They're in shit plans with shit companies that cost way too much, and way WAY too much for what they get. Doesn't sound like much of a loss, to me.
But still costs less that their alternatives? It might not be very good, but if the alternative is... no insurance...?
I hear lots of criticism, but no better plans that avoid the dreaded 'socialism' label that Americans hate. And certainly no better plan from the current Administration.