Most Home Automation hobbyists (and yes, this tech is still in the hobby stage) are very wary of HA hubs that have to call home to the mothership. There are plenty of options that do not require an Internet connection, unless you want the entirely optional remote control away from home.
Actually, the Greens are one of the few parties to take privacy issues seriously. Same in a lot of EU countries. Too bad their ideas about the economy, society and even environmental policy are mostly rubbish.
The point of brand advertising is not to make you go out and buy a beer, but to make sure that when you do, you'll choose Budweiser. There is plenty of research that shows such advertising works. A while back, some marketroid told me about a female hygiene product that offered the same quality as the competition but cost 1,5 times as much, yet it was one of the more popular brands. The "secret" was that almost all of that extra margin was spent on brand advertising.
What is less clear is which brand ads work best. Facebook claims that their environment is better than Google's due to the "experience" factor, but I doubt that: the more you integrate the ad with the actual experience, the more pissed off your customers are going to be. Just look at TV ads, which they claim are similar to theirs.
I do, and I'm no manager (thank god). It's a fairly useful tool to get updates on job changes and anniversaries of friends and colleagues, and to stay in touch; in other words: "Facebook for work". My more active relations often post useful work-related articles or events on LinkedIn. And it's proven to be a very useful tool to get in touch with people at other companies with whom I have no prior relations. Faster and more effective than cold calling the receptionist (it helps when I represent a company with a name that generally opens doors).
It's not just for managers, in fact, line managers are generally the least active contacts on LinkedIn. Unsurprisingly it seems to offer the most value to people who have to network a lot: account managers, entrepreneurs, but also consultants, freelancers, etc.
And after a horrible crash in RL, you don't get to "revert to vehicle assembly" for a free retry.
Also, re-entry seems rather easy in KSP. NASA worries over loose tiles on a heat shield, whereas KSP lets me aerobrake insane contraptions on a hot trajectory without any problem.
If a drone still flies over my property, who do I sue?
Follow the money:
- Drone operator: nope
- Noflyzone: nope
- Manufacturer of drone: Maybe, unless it's one of those DIY contraptions
- City council, for failing to provide an appropriate local ordinance: nope... still waiting on approval for that permit to build an outhouse, so better not tick them off
- Smith & Wesson, for failing to provide a warning that shooting at drones presents a hazard to surrounding wildlife and/or neighbours
- Owner of the land from which the drone took off: jackpot!
You know the joke about the statistician who tried to cross a river with an average depth of 1 meter (3 feet ish)... and drowned. Just looking at the expected return in lotteries is just as silly, you also have to consider the potential actual return. If you don't believe me, ask the previous Powerball winners. You have insurance? Same thing: the expected return on insurance is also negative (insurers need to make a profit somehow, after all), and based on that value it seems silly to have it... until you ask the owner of the uninsured house that burned down.
People don't gamble for a guaranteed payout of the expected return. If that were the case, casinos would consist only of a teller window where you'd hand in a $100 bill and get $70 in return. People gamble in hopes of being an outlier when it comes to the actual return. Some gamble in small stakes game, for them it's mostly about the thrill of the game itself; most games are more fun when there's actually something at stake, even if it's a candy bar. Others gamble in lotteries, in order to increase their chances at riches from a flat zero to some tiny probability. That's a poor decision only if you look at averages.
My advise: gamble away, as long as you don't gamble with money you don't have or can't afford to miss, and don't count on a positive outcome. That goes for lotteries as well as insurance (or more accurately: not having insurance)
Some say that anonymity is a fundamental right, like free speech. Free speech allows people to say bad things, and anonymity allows them do do bad things online, but in both cases, curtailing those rights is not an option, and does more harm than good besides. For some, running a TOR node or contributing to such projects is their way of asserting the right to anonymity, which is indeed for the greater good.
In addition, making providers of a platform (be it TOR, and ISP, or a discussion board) responsible for the content being moved over that platform is rather impractical. If such responsibility is legally enforced, it'll be the end of the open Internet. And of privacy and encryption, by the way (though I see a new market for steganography)
The title and snippet from that paper sound very much like coming from someone who had already made up their mind about euthanasia before doing the study.
About that slippery slope. Yes, more and more types of cases are being allowed for assisted suicide, but that has mostly to do with social inertia. It took a long and hard fight against religious conservatives to allow even the most obvious cases to be helped: people in constant pain with no hope for a cure. Religion would prefer to have these people live out their last days (or years, if they are unfortunate) in a hell on earth. Anyway, now that this first step has been taken, legislators are indeed trying to get other types of cases accepted for assisted suicide under law. Those legislators know more or less where they want to go with this. No slippery slope, but an uphill struggle against religious conservatives.
No system is perfect, but the solution is not to disallow all cases.
Here in the Netherlands (a country with an assisted suicide scheme), one can initiate a procedure to compel the attorney general to prosecute, if the court decides the case has merit. I don't know if this procedure has ever been used in an assisted suicide case, but if it has, it'll be a handful of cases only. Contrary to popular belief (or whatever passes for facts at Fox News), assisted suicide is taken very seriously here, and while mistakes do happen, there's no government offing grannies to save on health care here.
It will become very hard to sue someone who have killed someone else in the conditions described by the Court to prove the killed one has never asked to be killed.
In most assisted-suicide schemes, the burden of proof is on the "killer", not on the prosecution. The killer will have to prove in exquisite and irrefutable detail that the victim wanted to die. In any good system, such proof is filed and challenged before the assisted suicide even takes place.
Such as system does not aim to answer the question if a life is worth living; the answer to that question can only be given by the person living it. The system does set up safeguards, to ward against other people making that decision for them (in case of coma, dementia or people who are otherwise mentally incapacitated), setting conditions under which people can make arrangements for when they become mentally incapacitated (in the form of a living will or a notarized declaration), and to protect people from making overly hasty decisions (in case of depression). In other words, the system doesn't decide, but it protects against abuse.
The system should also not "demand that others validate their choice by killing them". In the Netherlands, no doctor is compelled by law to assist with a suicide; no one has the right to demand to be helped, what those people are demanding is the right to be allowed to be helped. There are many doctors willing to help, depending on your reasons for ending your life. One doctor might not want to assist if you're ending your life because you are old and have nothing to look forward to, but another doctor might. What the system does is ensure that appropriate checks are cleared before the doctor actually assists you.
As far as I know, the only chips fit for implanting into humans are very easy to clone. What I don't know is how long one needs access to the chip to clone it. Do you need 10 minutes to break some weak-ass encryption, or is it as easy as sneakily running a scanner past someone's hand as you shake it? If cloning the chip takes some time, then putting it in your hand adds some security as it'll be much less easy to clone. Still, that doesn't outweigh the downsides.
Give it time, prices are coming down. They used to be way more than $1500-$3000. Today, there are cheap ones for €800 (around $950), and that's including our insane VAT. The one I got was €1000 and came with a spare battery (a pricey item) and free servicing for 3 years.
That goes for cocaine as well, and any other substance abuse.
I think anyone should have the right to snort, shoot or smoke anything they like, and that the government should curtail the use of drugs only in exceptional cases:
- Use of the substance causes a clear danger to others (like drugs that turn you into an axe wielding maniac after 1 hit)
- Use of the substance causes a clear danger to users (such as highly addictive drugs or drugs causing damage: marihuana / alcohol and minors)
In such cases the government should step in, if:
- The number of problem cases far outweighs the number of normally functioning users, and
- The proposed controls are effective in reducing the number of problem cases, and
- The effects of the proposed controls outweigh the undesired side effects of the controls (such as the impact on responsible users)
Of course, one man's undesired side effects (such as regular pot smokers being jailed) are another man's bonus side effects.
The markup has always been too high, at least in Europe. You could get most of the components and gadgets cheaper elsewhere, but that meant driving a lot further or waiting for mail order delivery (and back then mail order wasn't really a "thing" here, it was slow and shipping charges were high as well(.
As a home automation hobbyist I can see the value of such a device. Listening all the time for certain audible events and having an API could make this useful in a HA setup. However to this "connected to the cloud" I say:"not on my watch". If it's not autonomous, I'm not having it.
Good point actually... there's 2 sides to that equation. Working for a startup often means that a lot more is expected of you in terms of overtime or even pay cuts to get over a rough financial patch. No money for training so the seniors end up training the juniors, which is fine (more than fine: I think it ought to be part of every senior tech's job description to do a little coaching), but it's going to be after hours. You'll be working at a couple of different jobs and often expected to learn fast, which is hard work and risky as well, to your reputation as well as your sanity. That's what we signed up for, sure, but then I want my slice of the reward when all that hard work does pay off. I'm not expecting a 10% stake but I do expect something and not in bloody stock options that become void if you leave the company... Didn't Facebook fire a bunch of staff just before their options vested?
For the rest, the guy does have a point. Money and nice offices are important but they are hygiene factors: at some point, improving them yields very little additional benefit. Sell staff on your vision, make sure they are managed well, weed out the assholes (especially amongst the seniors), and treat them fairly. With the right team and the right leadership, all those long nights working hard can be a great experience, but let the staff share in the financial rewards as well, and that includes equity if you want them to act and work like it is "their" startup.
They say it's free to the maker community, but what if you want to turn your creation into a commercial product? Especially for IoT devices it makes little sense to use an OS not known for its reliability, and encumbered by a non-free license. I see no reason not to use proven and free Linux instead.
Forcing Uber out of business won't stop rape by cabbies. And unless there was something that Uber could reasonably have or should have done, but neglected to do, then this is not justice but just someone looking for a payday.
Sometimes the debate is so politicized that even reputable sources get tainted. An example is one of the IPCC reports on climate change, where the summary (what most people and press would read) got changed for political reasons into an overly alarmist version that did not match the scientific data in the rest of the report. Quite a few contributors to that report objected to the change, and rightly so. Not because the report wasn't a cause for worry about our influence on the climate, but because such politics have no place in science. Besides, it gave opponents of the idea of AGW ammunition to dismiss the entire report, and call the integrity of the IPCC in question.
As a European, I agree. To the military I say: buy the best on the market, with a proven track record, with a slight bias for buying local. But for something as symbolic as Air Force 1, it makes sense to go for a domestic supplier. Especially as it's not a bad choice in this case.
I kind of wonder why my own country went for totally unproven foreign F35 JSFs (yay budget overruns), then decided to get totally proven "domestic" NH90 helos. Proven to be crappy rustbuckets.
Also: the free market, which the government actually helped bring about: some telco's had to be dragged kicking and screaming into that. In the Netherlands, the incumbent telco PTT (now KPN) was first forced to co-locate equipment from other ISPs (they actually sabotaged that equipment from time to time), then forced to share the local loop for a reasonable fee. And in this country almost all homes have cable, which meant another option for obtaining Internet. As a result we've always had a good many choices of ISPs and decent fees. I now have fiber to the home, and a choice of 3 ISPs on that fiber. Then there's ADSL and cable if I want another option (but who'd want to with 500 Mb up/down?)
As TFA mentions, detecting these drones is not the issue, the problem is how to stop one without causing too much damage to the surrounding buildings and citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
Most Home Automation hobbyists (and yes, this tech is still in the hobby stage) are very wary of HA hubs that have to call home to the mothership. There are plenty of options that do not require an Internet connection, unless you want the entirely optional remote control away from home.
Actually, the Greens are one of the few parties to take privacy issues seriously. Same in a lot of EU countries. Too bad their ideas about the economy, society and even environmental policy are mostly rubbish.
The point of brand advertising is not to make you go out and buy a beer, but to make sure that when you do, you'll choose Budweiser. There is plenty of research that shows such advertising works. A while back, some marketroid told me about a female hygiene product that offered the same quality as the competition but cost 1,5 times as much, yet it was one of the more popular brands. The "secret" was that almost all of that extra margin was spent on brand advertising.
What is less clear is which brand ads work best. Facebook claims that their environment is better than Google's due to the "experience" factor, but I doubt that: the more you integrate the ad with the actual experience, the more pissed off your customers are going to be. Just look at TV ads, which they claim are similar to theirs.
I do, and I'm no manager (thank god). It's a fairly useful tool to get updates on job changes and anniversaries of friends and colleagues, and to stay in touch; in other words: "Facebook for work". My more active relations often post useful work-related articles or events on LinkedIn. And it's proven to be a very useful tool to get in touch with people at other companies with whom I have no prior relations. Faster and more effective than cold calling the receptionist (it helps when I represent a company with a name that generally opens doors).
It's not just for managers, in fact, line managers are generally the least active contacts on LinkedIn. Unsurprisingly it seems to offer the most value to people who have to network a lot: account managers, entrepreneurs, but also consultants, freelancers, etc.
And after a horrible crash in RL, you don't get to "revert to vehicle assembly" for a free retry.
Also, re-entry seems rather easy in KSP. NASA worries over loose tiles on a heat shield, whereas KSP lets me aerobrake insane contraptions on a hot trajectory without any problem.
If a drone still flies over my property, who do I sue?
Follow the money:
- Drone operator: nope
- Noflyzone: nope
- Manufacturer of drone: Maybe, unless it's one of those DIY contraptions
- City council, for failing to provide an appropriate local ordinance: nope... still waiting on approval for that permit to build an outhouse, so better not tick them off
- Smith & Wesson, for failing to provide a warning that shooting at drones presents a hazard to surrounding wildlife and/or neighbours
- Owner of the land from which the drone took off: jackpot!
You know the joke about the statistician who tried to cross a river with an average depth of 1 meter (3 feet ish)... and drowned. Just looking at the expected return in lotteries is just as silly, you also have to consider the potential actual return. If you don't believe me, ask the previous Powerball winners. You have insurance? Same thing: the expected return on insurance is also negative (insurers need to make a profit somehow, after all), and based on that value it seems silly to have it... until you ask the owner of the uninsured house that burned down.
People don't gamble for a guaranteed payout of the expected return. If that were the case, casinos would consist only of a teller window where you'd hand in a $100 bill and get $70 in return. People gamble in hopes of being an outlier when it comes to the actual return. Some gamble in small stakes game, for them it's mostly about the thrill of the game itself; most games are more fun when there's actually something at stake, even if it's a candy bar. Others gamble in lotteries, in order to increase their chances at riches from a flat zero to some tiny probability. That's a poor decision only if you look at averages.
My advise: gamble away, as long as you don't gamble with money you don't have or can't afford to miss, and don't count on a positive outcome. That goes for lotteries as well as insurance (or more accurately: not having insurance)
Some say that anonymity is a fundamental right, like free speech. Free speech allows people to say bad things, and anonymity allows them do do bad things online, but in both cases, curtailing those rights is not an option, and does more harm than good besides. For some, running a TOR node or contributing to such projects is their way of asserting the right to anonymity, which is indeed for the greater good.
In addition, making providers of a platform (be it TOR, and ISP, or a discussion board) responsible for the content being moved over that platform is rather impractical. If such responsibility is legally enforced, it'll be the end of the open Internet. And of privacy and encryption, by the way (though I see a new market for steganography)
The title and snippet from that paper sound very much like coming from someone who had already made up their mind about euthanasia before doing the study.
About that slippery slope. Yes, more and more types of cases are being allowed for assisted suicide, but that has mostly to do with social inertia. It took a long and hard fight against religious conservatives to allow even the most obvious cases to be helped: people in constant pain with no hope for a cure. Religion would prefer to have these people live out their last days (or years, if they are unfortunate) in a hell on earth. Anyway, now that this first step has been taken, legislators are indeed trying to get other types of cases accepted for assisted suicide under law. Those legislators know more or less where they want to go with this. No slippery slope, but an uphill struggle against religious conservatives.
No system is perfect, but the solution is not to disallow all cases.
Here in the Netherlands (a country with an assisted suicide scheme), one can initiate a procedure to compel the attorney general to prosecute, if the court decides the case has merit. I don't know if this procedure has ever been used in an assisted suicide case, but if it has, it'll be a handful of cases only. Contrary to popular belief (or whatever passes for facts at Fox News), assisted suicide is taken very seriously here, and while mistakes do happen, there's no government offing grannies to save on health care here.
It will become very hard to sue someone who have killed someone else in the conditions described by the Court to prove the killed one has never asked to be killed.
In most assisted-suicide schemes, the burden of proof is on the "killer", not on the prosecution. The killer will have to prove in exquisite and irrefutable detail that the victim wanted to die. In any good system, such proof is filed and challenged before the assisted suicide even takes place.
Such as system does not aim to answer the question if a life is worth living; the answer to that question can only be given by the person living it. The system does set up safeguards, to ward against other people making that decision for them (in case of coma, dementia or people who are otherwise mentally incapacitated), setting conditions under which people can make arrangements for when they become mentally incapacitated (in the form of a living will or a notarized declaration), and to protect people from making overly hasty decisions (in case of depression). In other words, the system doesn't decide, but it protects against abuse.
The system should also not "demand that others validate their choice by killing them". In the Netherlands, no doctor is compelled by law to assist with a suicide; no one has the right to demand to be helped, what those people are demanding is the right to be allowed to be helped. There are many doctors willing to help, depending on your reasons for ending your life. One doctor might not want to assist if you're ending your life because you are old and have nothing to look forward to, but another doctor might. What the system does is ensure that appropriate checks are cleared before the doctor actually assists you.
As far as I know, the only chips fit for implanting into humans are very easy to clone. What I don't know is how long one needs access to the chip to clone it. Do you need 10 minutes to break some weak-ass encryption, or is it as easy as sneakily running a scanner past someone's hand as you shake it? If cloning the chip takes some time, then putting it in your hand adds some security as it'll be much less easy to clone. Still, that doesn't outweigh the downsides.
Give it time, prices are coming down. They used to be way more than $1500-$3000. Today, there are cheap ones for €800 (around $950), and that's including our insane VAT. The one I got was €1000 and came with a spare battery (a pricey item) and free servicing for 3 years.
That goes for cocaine as well, and any other substance abuse.
I think anyone should have the right to snort, shoot or smoke anything they like, and that the government should curtail the use of drugs only in exceptional cases:
- Use of the substance causes a clear danger to others (like drugs that turn you into an axe wielding maniac after 1 hit)
- Use of the substance causes a clear danger to users (such as highly addictive drugs or drugs causing damage: marihuana / alcohol and minors)
In such cases the government should step in, if:
- The number of problem cases far outweighs the number of normally functioning users, and
- The proposed controls are effective in reducing the number of problem cases, and
- The effects of the proposed controls outweigh the undesired side effects of the controls (such as the impact on responsible users)
Of course, one man's undesired side effects (such as regular pot smokers being jailed) are another man's bonus side effects.
Texting while flying, a new low (pun definitely intended)
The markup has always been too high, at least in Europe. You could get most of the components and gadgets cheaper elsewhere, but that meant driving a lot further or waiting for mail order delivery (and back then mail order wasn't really a "thing" here, it was slow and shipping charges were high as well(.
As a home automation hobbyist I can see the value of such a device. Listening all the time for certain audible events and having an API could make this useful in a HA setup. However to this "connected to the cloud" I say:"not on my watch". If it's not autonomous, I'm not having it.
Good point actually... there's 2 sides to that equation. Working for a startup often means that a lot more is expected of you in terms of overtime or even pay cuts to get over a rough financial patch. No money for training so the seniors end up training the juniors, which is fine (more than fine: I think it ought to be part of every senior tech's job description to do a little coaching), but it's going to be after hours. You'll be working at a couple of different jobs and often expected to learn fast, which is hard work and risky as well, to your reputation as well as your sanity. That's what we signed up for, sure, but then I want my slice of the reward when all that hard work does pay off. I'm not expecting a 10% stake but I do expect something and not in bloody stock options that become void if you leave the company... Didn't Facebook fire a bunch of staff just before their options vested?
For the rest, the guy does have a point. Money and nice offices are important but they are hygiene factors: at some point, improving them yields very little additional benefit. Sell staff on your vision, make sure they are managed well, weed out the assholes (especially amongst the seniors), and treat them fairly. With the right team and the right leadership, all those long nights working hard can be a great experience, but let the staff share in the financial rewards as well, and that includes equity if you want them to act and work like it is "their" startup.
They say it's free to the maker community, but what if you want to turn your creation into a commercial product? Especially for IoT devices it makes little sense to use an OS not known for its reliability, and encumbered by a non-free license. I see no reason not to use proven and free Linux instead.
Forcing Uber out of business won't stop rape by cabbies. And unless there was something that Uber could reasonably have or should have done, but neglected to do, then this is not justice but just someone looking for a payday.
Sometimes the debate is so politicized that even reputable sources get tainted. An example is one of the IPCC reports on climate change, where the summary (what most people and press would read) got changed for political reasons into an overly alarmist version that did not match the scientific data in the rest of the report. Quite a few contributors to that report objected to the change, and rightly so. Not because the report wasn't a cause for worry about our influence on the climate, but because such politics have no place in science. Besides, it gave opponents of the idea of AGW ammunition to dismiss the entire report, and call the integrity of the IPCC in question.
As a European, I agree. To the military I say: buy the best on the market, with a proven track record, with a slight bias for buying local. But for something as symbolic as Air Force 1, it makes sense to go for a domestic supplier. Especially as it's not a bad choice in this case.
I kind of wonder why my own country went for totally unproven foreign F35 JSFs (yay budget overruns), then decided to get totally proven "domestic" NH90 helos. Proven to be crappy rustbuckets.
Also: the free market, which the government actually helped bring about: some telco's had to be dragged kicking and screaming into that. In the Netherlands, the incumbent telco PTT (now KPN) was first forced to co-locate equipment from other ISPs (they actually sabotaged that equipment from time to time), then forced to share the local loop for a reasonable fee. And in this country almost all homes have cable, which meant another option for obtaining Internet. As a result we've always had a good many choices of ISPs and decent fees. I now have fiber to the home, and a choice of 3 ISPs on that fiber. Then there's ADSL and cable if I want another option (but who'd want to with 500 Mb up/down?)
As TFA mentions, detecting these drones is not the issue, the problem is how to stop one without causing too much damage to the surrounding buildings and citizens.