I think the gap between greed and fear of the future is quite a narrow one, but from the outside they look like the same thing. Like, how much money is enough? Depends on how long you plan on living, and what the next most worrying thing is. When I was a young adult I used to worry about having enough money to pay the rent and eat each month. Now I worry about having enough money in retirement, or what would happen if I get ill and can't work ever again. Both of these things drive me to seek the highest salary I can reasonably achieve, which is way more than my friends or national median average, but I still feel a bit insecure because I just imagine bigger worse things to save for.
From the outside it looks like greed, but it's just fear scaled up.
I had a friend years ago who was depressed. She was tall slim attractive, high salary, highly educated not a drug addict or gambler or anything. I suggested she go to live in India for 1 year and it would have solved her depression for life.
If you're talking about actual medical depression, then that's not how it works. Chemical imbalances that are out of your control in the brain affect your mood. You can't just wish it away with nice thoughts, the brain is a electrochemical device and sometimes those things don't work properly, like any function of the body. Just because you have never had to deal with such a problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist - though possibly you are having to deal with a lack of empathy.
The government has passed a law that provides for fines on the order of $23 million (or more, if the business is large). Businesses that are requesting new opt-ins are doing it so they can demonstrate that they have explained what they do with customer data and have obtained explicit permission to do so.
Yeah, it would have been great if these businesses had been doing that all along, but there was no legal requirement for them to do so. They may not have kept records that would allow them to demonstrate compliance. Why would it be a surprise to anybody that businesses are trying to cover their asses to avoid paying fines that could destroy them? This is a completely foreseeable result.
It's an annoying week of emails, but I'm ok with it. Atleast from now on we will be in a state where companies have to care about how they deal with me. It's kindof revelatory how many companies have come out of the woodwork that have my details, rather glad that I can now fail to confirm that they can keep it.
...don't fucking hit on passengers in your cab unless they hit on you first, so you aren't taking advantage of people in a situation they're stuck in.
How about just don't. Full stop. You have someone semi-trapped in your vehicle, with the ability to take them anywhere against their will. This is not a place to be finding your next date.
I'm genuinely curious as to whether you read and comprehend all the privacy policies that are presented to you on the internet for every site that you interact with... and whether you think that that can be a reasonable thing to expect people to do.
The anthropology professor could have got his/her pretty little lily-clean hands dirty and fixed the shelf him/herself. Just because you're in academia doesn't mean you're not allowed to work with your hands.
Y'know, not everyone has practical skills like that, or the knowledge to do it safely. (Or indeed the time, since they have a job that is to do something else.) You sure you can put shelves up in a public building safely, where if they fall on someone they could be millions in liability? Why would you know without experience and training?
And in an environment where the carpenter is unwilling to do any work because there's books on the floor probably means that doing work like that will get you in trouble.
I'd say first of all, the general public doesn't really give a shit about data collection, because they don't understand what data collection is capable of. People ignored facebooks nonsense for a decade more or less, until it became a major news story of how one group used that data. People still don't understand the possibility that similar levels of mass population manipulation could be happening every day.
People will care, but it's a very abstract concept at the moment, they are theoretical problems that are hard to visualise for somebody outside the industry that doesn't think it every day. There is always a time-delay between new technology ill effects and general public awareness. Feels like things are starting to change now.
Mad, unlikely, an asshole, most likely. We tried to invite him at a conference we were organizing in 2004, and submitted a two pages list of requirements, from hotel connectivity to tea brands. And I'm not even getting started about the way he behaves in the FSF, he made a lot of damages in their projects...
There was a quote, I forget where it comes from:
"Yes he's an arsehole. But he's *our* arsehole. And you can't hate your own arsehole."
If it takes $20 billion to fix it right, is there a better transportation system that could be bought for that kind of money? $20 billion would put 5000 new electric cabs on the street and pay each driver $50k for the next 26 years. I'm not saying its better,
I mean, good, because it's very plainly very much worse. Subway trains carry hundreds of passengers each. Tens of thousands per hour at the very least. Adding 5000 cabs, even if they all took several people and ran constantly, is a drop in the ocean. Even if they could travel as fast as trains, which on the congested roads they just can't. Vehicles are nowhere near as efficient as trains.
People take up finite physical space. Unless you want to redefine who travels where, there are a limited number of ways to do that. Thinking outside the box is not magic.
The subway’s cost-induced construction paralysis becomes more severe with every passing decade. We must learn from history in order to break it.
In different words, subways are too expensive to build and maintain and voters are not willing to approve either the fare increases or the tax increases to pay for them. It's unclear what the authors want to "learn" from that. In fact, it's more likely that more subway lines will get closed over time, instead of new ones getting opened.
But what then? The city gradually grinds to a halt as people can't actually get around? They might be expensive but there's not a whole lot of other options for a dense urban environment.
If you buy an iPhone then Apple is going to do everything in its power to ensure that all repairs (that are under warranty) will be done by authorized Apple repair shops. Why are people surprised when they push an update that invalidates third party repair?
Um... because it's immoral and potentially illegal?
And there are ZERO fucks given for the idiot Facebook users suddenly crying about privacy and yet continue to use their services.
Yeah - throw that expensive headset in the bin now that Facebook bought the company!
This is going to go waaaay beyond a single social network that you personally can avoid, it's gonna need regulating. We're gonna have to start thinking about personal data in a different way than we currently do, as property almost. It's not even clear that you can avoid it by not using the site, if enough of your friends are on there, plus photos they've uploaded plus facial recognition plus graph analysis, you can still be identified.
Coding doesn't teach you how to think and be a decent human being.
I mean, experience from this site suggests to me that it gives a moral superiority and unearned certainty that actively harms the ability to be a decent human being.
Keep using your older devices that still respect your freedoms. Collect spares and learn to repair if you haven't already. You'll save money and become more self-sufficient as a bonus.
Those old devices full of bugs? Security holes? That don't inter-operate with the newer devices that other people use and therefore don't do the job they were designed for? Why trust those devices anyway, have you vetted them?
Repeat after me: "The market cannot fix everything"
Sometimes you need legislation. Sometimes you need regulation. I know that stings for some people on this site, but the alternative is that you have to educate and persuade a big section of people to care about relatively technical and complex things that are way outside their normal world, and that's never going to happen, they have other shit to do. Hell, I'm a developer and I don't really know what you mean by "web bug".
The same way we expect airlines to be forced by regulation to maintain their aircraft. We don't pick flights based on who has crashed the least number of planes. So it will need to be the same with technology, especially when to use any service you have to click through a wall of legalese that is deliberately written to be long and difficult to understand. Stop blaming the user, blame the perpetrators.
I don't think boredom in itself is a bad thing, it's part of life, part of finding out your own thoughts and who you are. To have the space to think, imagine, and decide what you're going to do to relieve the boredom...
A constantly occupied mind has no time to actually ponder.
I think one of the issues is that too much complexity isn't really solvable by young minds - I grew up with a Spectrum and was alright with it, the language was BASIC, and it was thrown in your face whenever you switched the thing on. There was loads of help to be had, every Spectrum the same. When I graduated to a PC in my early teens I stopped programming, basically until I went to university and was taught "properly". There was too much complexity, the route wasn't clear and any help you might get was fragmented and hard to come by.
Things are much the same now - there are so many things that computers can do, it's hard to actually see them as new or interesting and they are completely un-understandable for a developing mind.
I think you forget what it's actually like. There has been no point in my life unpleasant and stressful as when I was a teenager - the rife and constant violence at school, the unending mental bullying, the lack of confidence in own abilities, the lack of knowledge of own abilities, the lack of understanding of the world, the lack of control of what happens...
Remember what it was like, *really* remember rather than lauding it about some imagined blue remembered hills.
Convenience... it gets you out of the tedium of asking users for names, DOB and photos and things, and having to build photo uploading tools, and requiring the user to actually find photos that they may not have available on the device their currently using... Or you can use Facebook login and just drag all that from their site. It's a huge timesaver for the dev and the user, if you are willing to lean on Facebook. I mean yeah it's not a great idea to be reliant on a 3rd party, but then Tinder was one of the first to do it and it really helped them in the early days, they might not be a thing at all with out having that sort of convenience.
Hello software programmers; its called regression testing. You do it after making major changes to check if you have broken anything. I think it's ususlly taught in CompSci 101.
Um... I doubt that Facebook were going to test 3rd party sites when they're changing their API, they've got more important self-interest things to worry about now. And Tinder devs were caught out because the API changed.
Reminds me of when Windows locked down admin privileges and a bunch of programs broke. Probably they shouldn't have been operating like that in the first place... but that's difficult to know when it was working fine...
Slashdot Mirror
Baby boomers: ...
Millennials: ...
Myself, I'd blame an abstract concept: greed.
I think the gap between greed and fear of the future is quite a narrow one, but from the outside they look like the same thing. Like, how much money is enough? Depends on how long you plan on living, and what the next most worrying thing is. When I was a young adult I used to worry about having enough money to pay the rent and eat each month. Now I worry about having enough money in retirement, or what would happen if I get ill and can't work ever again. Both of these things drive me to seek the highest salary I can reasonably achieve, which is way more than my friends or national median average, but I still feel a bit insecure because I just imagine bigger worse things to save for.
From the outside it looks like greed, but it's just fear scaled up.
I had a friend years ago who was depressed. She was tall slim attractive, high salary, highly educated not a drug addict or gambler or anything. I suggested she go to live in India for 1 year and it would have solved her depression for life.
If you're talking about actual medical depression, then that's not how it works. Chemical imbalances that are out of your control in the brain affect your mood. You can't just wish it away with nice thoughts, the brain is a electrochemical device and sometimes those things don't work properly, like any function of the body. Just because you have never had to deal with such a problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist - though possibly you are having to deal with a lack of empathy.
The government has passed a law that provides for fines on the order of $23 million (or more, if the business is large). Businesses that are requesting new opt-ins are doing it so they can demonstrate that they have explained what they do with customer data and have obtained explicit permission to do so.
Yeah, it would have been great if these businesses had been doing that all along, but there was no legal requirement for them to do so. They may not have kept records that would allow them to demonstrate compliance. Why would it be a surprise to anybody that businesses are trying to cover their asses to avoid paying fines that could destroy them? This is a completely foreseeable result.
It's an annoying week of emails, but I'm ok with it. Atleast from now on we will be in a state where companies have to care about how they deal with me. It's kindof revelatory how many companies have come out of the woodwork that have my details, rather glad that I can now fail to confirm that they can keep it.
Yeah, as always there's an XKCD for this...
https://xkcd.com/1200/
...don't fucking hit on passengers in your cab unless they hit on you first, so you aren't taking advantage of people in a situation they're stuck in.
How about just don't. Full stop. You have someone semi-trapped in your vehicle, with the ability to take them anywhere against their will. This is not a place to be finding your next date.
I'm genuinely curious as to whether you read and comprehend all the privacy policies that are presented to you on the internet for every site that you interact with... and whether you think that that can be a reasonable thing to expect people to do.
I mean they are deliberately written to be long and hard to understand https://www.theatlantic.com/te...
The anthropology professor could have got his/her pretty little lily-clean hands dirty and fixed the shelf him/herself. Just because you're in academia doesn't mean you're not allowed to work with your hands.
Y'know, not everyone has practical skills like that, or the knowledge to do it safely. (Or indeed the time, since they have a job that is to do something else.) You sure you can put shelves up in a public building safely, where if they fall on someone they could be millions in liability? Why would you know without experience and training?
And in an environment where the carpenter is unwilling to do any work because there's books on the floor probably means that doing work like that will get you in trouble.
I'd say first of all, the general public doesn't really give a shit about data collection, because they don't understand what data collection is capable of. People ignored facebooks nonsense for a decade more or less, until it became a major news story of how one group used that data. People still don't understand the possibility that similar levels of mass population manipulation could be happening every day.
People will care, but it's a very abstract concept at the moment, they are theoretical problems that are hard to visualise for somebody outside the industry that doesn't think it every day. There is always a time-delay between new technology ill effects and general public awareness. Feels like things are starting to change now.
He isn't mad. Far from it.
Mad, unlikely, an asshole, most likely. We tried to invite him at a conference we were organizing in 2004, and submitted a two pages list of requirements, from hotel connectivity to tea brands. And I'm not even getting started about the way he behaves in the FSF, he made a lot of damages in their projects...
There was a quote, I forget where it comes from:
"Yes he's an arsehole. But he's *our* arsehole. And you can't hate your own arsehole."
Facebook is a private business. Nobody forces you to use Facebook.
Go look up "shadow profiles" and rethink your statement. You're already on Facebook, whether you have an account or not.
If it takes $20 billion to fix it right, is there a better transportation system that could be bought for that kind of money? $20 billion would put 5000 new electric cabs on the street and pay each driver $50k for the next 26 years. I'm not saying its better,
I mean, good, because it's very plainly very much worse. Subway trains carry hundreds of passengers each. Tens of thousands per hour at the very least. Adding 5000 cabs, even if they all took several people and ran constantly, is a drop in the ocean. Even if they could travel as fast as trains, which on the congested roads they just can't. Vehicles are nowhere near as efficient as trains.
People take up finite physical space. Unless you want to redefine who travels where, there are a limited number of ways to do that. Thinking outside the box is not magic.
In different words, subways are too expensive to build and maintain and voters are not willing to approve either the fare increases or the tax increases to pay for them. It's unclear what the authors want to "learn" from that. In fact, it's more likely that more subway lines will get closed over time, instead of new ones getting opened.
But what then? The city gradually grinds to a halt as people can't actually get around? They might be expensive but there's not a whole lot of other options for a dense urban environment.
Having a website with "spy" in the name that is explicitly exists to expose data about users... yeah perhaps that's not going to fly anymore.
If you buy an iPhone then Apple is going to do everything in its power to ensure that all repairs (that are under warranty) will be done by authorized Apple repair shops. Why are people surprised when they push an update that invalidates third party repair?
Um... because it's immoral and potentially illegal?
Same with Whatsapp and everything else they own.
The question may as well be rhetorical.
Exactly.
And there are ZERO fucks given for the idiot Facebook users suddenly crying about privacy and yet continue to use their services.
Yeah - throw that expensive headset in the bin now that Facebook bought the company!
This is going to go waaaay beyond a single social network that you personally can avoid, it's gonna need regulating. We're gonna have to start thinking about personal data in a different way than we currently do, as property almost. It's not even clear that you can avoid it by not using the site, if enough of your friends are on there, plus photos they've uploaded plus facial recognition plus graph analysis, you can still be identified.
Coding doesn't teach you how to think and be a decent human being.
I mean, experience from this site suggests to me that it gives a moral superiority and unearned certainty that actively harms the ability to be a decent human being.
Keep using your older devices that still respect your freedoms. Collect spares and learn to repair if you haven't already. You'll save money and become more self-sufficient as a bonus.
Those old devices full of bugs? Security holes? That don't inter-operate with the newer devices that other people use and therefore don't do the job they were designed for? Why trust those devices anyway, have you vetted them?
Repeat after me: "The market cannot fix everything"
Sometimes you need legislation. Sometimes you need regulation. I know that stings for some people on this site, but the alternative is that you have to educate and persuade a big section of people to care about relatively technical and complex things that are way outside their normal world, and that's never going to happen, they have other shit to do. Hell, I'm a developer and I don't really know what you mean by "web bug".
The same way we expect airlines to be forced by regulation to maintain their aircraft. We don't pick flights based on who has crashed the least number of planes. So it will need to be the same with technology, especially when to use any service you have to click through a wall of legalese that is deliberately written to be long and difficult to understand. Stop blaming the user, blame the perpetrators.
I don't think boredom in itself is a bad thing, it's part of life, part of finding out your own thoughts and who you are. To have the space to think, imagine, and decide what you're going to do to relieve the boredom...
A constantly occupied mind has no time to actually ponder.
I think one of the issues is that too much complexity isn't really solvable by young minds - I grew up with a Spectrum and was alright with it, the language was BASIC, and it was thrown in your face whenever you switched the thing on. There was loads of help to be had, every Spectrum the same. When I graduated to a PC in my early teens I stopped programming, basically until I went to university and was taught "properly". There was too much complexity, the route wasn't clear and any help you might get was fragmented and hard to come by.
Things are much the same now - there are so many things that computers can do, it's hard to actually see them as new or interesting and they are completely un-understandable for a developing mind.
I think you forget what it's actually like. There has been no point in my life unpleasant and stressful as when I was a teenager - the rife and constant violence at school, the unending mental bullying, the lack of confidence in own abilities, the lack of knowledge of own abilities, the lack of understanding of the world, the lack of control of what happens...
Remember what it was like, *really* remember rather than lauding it about some imagined blue remembered hills.
I mean I don't even approve of rounded corners, so you can imagine what I think of a non-convex polygon as a screen shape...
Convenience... it gets you out of the tedium of asking users for names, DOB and photos and things, and having to build photo uploading tools, and requiring the user to actually find photos that they may not have available on the device their currently using... Or you can use Facebook login and just drag all that from their site. It's a huge timesaver for the dev and the user, if you are willing to lean on Facebook. I mean yeah it's not a great idea to be reliant on a 3rd party, but then Tinder was one of the first to do it and it really helped them in the early days, they might not be a thing at all with out having that sort of convenience.
Hello software programmers; its called regression testing. You do it after making major changes to check if you have broken anything. I think it's ususlly taught in CompSci 101.
Um... I doubt that Facebook were going to test 3rd party sites when they're changing their API, they've got more important self-interest things to worry about now. And Tinder devs were caught out because the API changed.
Reminds me of when Windows locked down admin privileges and a bunch of programs broke. Probably they shouldn't have been operating like that in the first place... but that's difficult to know when it was working fine...
I agree. Losers, the lot of them. Get out of your basements and off your friggin phones and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air with some friends.
He says, by posting on Slashdot...