That is where the real danger lies: stacks: the joint ownership of or collusion between content providers and transport providers. If the interests of a specific content provider overlaps with those of a specific transport provider, there is an opportunity to screw the customers and competing content providers. Net neutrality aims to prevent such practices, and rightly so. You don't want to be locked out of DuckDuckGo (or even Bing) because Google have paid off your ISP.
In a socialist country (like mine), the state is doing this. If you get a company car, you are taxed for private use of that car (to the tune of 24% of the sticker price added to your income each year, typically in the 42% or 52% tax bracket, and that sticker price already includes close to 50% VAT and special duties on cars). Getting a company car includes paid-for petrol and servicing, but the tax makes it only slightly cheaper than buying your own car.
Stating that revenues from oil production concessions belong to "the people" instead of whomever gets there first or gets it out of the ground first is hardly socialism. Most countries, capitalist or otherwise, collect revenues from natural resources collected in that country, effectively establishing a part collective ownership.
Pissing away those revenues on bloated bureaucracies, pointless state programs and overly cushy social security, without any plans whatsoever on what to do when those revenues dry up, that is socialism. That's what the Netherlands did with its vast natural gas reserves; it's called the Dutch Disease (look it up), and Norway has learned from it.
Some guys already tried that, for a different reason. They mounted a projector in a car to act as headlight, and added a camera to track raindrops as they fell through the beam. A computer then predicted the path of each drop and made the projector not illuminate that bit, giving a much clearer view ahead during nightly rainfall.
Que the people whi argue that "this will cause people to drive much faster in unsafe conditions!". They said the same about seat belts and airbags.
The ability to press criminal charges doesn't go away after the offending exec has left the company.
Also, I don't think the right way to prevent cover-ups is to give those responsible a free pass. That's like letting murderers walk free in exchange for a confession (there might be a reduced sentence in it for them, but no acquittal). Besides, it's not like the current soft approach has encouraged a lot of companies to come clean; those coverups will happen regardless of penal consequences (since there are financial and career related consequences as well).
This. Being an executive means (or should mean) being personally responsible for your actions, and that includes criminal charges for pulling stunts like this. Without the option of course to buy your own arse out of a lawsuit using corporate (shareholders) funds
Home automation is getting there in terms of standardization, ease of use, and maintainability (not quite there yet, though!). I've built a setup that is affordable and has actual use in the form of comfort, convenience, and energy savings. But the main stumbling block is that you still have to tell the system what you want, i.e. there's some programming involved if you want to go beyond a remotely controllable home towards an automated home. That's not just about schedules, but also about logic: "don't turn off the heating in the guest bedroom if someone is sleeping there", "don't set off the lawn sprinklers if it's going to rain", "warn me if the back door is still unlocked when I hit the 'go to bed' button", that sort of thing. It's a little bit like the better universal remotes: a bloody hassle to set up, but once you have them working the way you want, they are convenient and you can just leave them alone. Nest tries to do the hard work of programming for you but it only works for HVAC applications and not always all that well.
Smart Homes go a bit beyond that both in usefulness and in the need for standardization, and this is only just recently getting off the ground. The idea is that smart homes will tie into a smart power grid, and negotiate for flexible energy rates. The house can turn on the AC or charge your EV when the clouds break and the grid has a lot of surplus solar power available, or you ask it to dry the laundry before 5pm, letting the house or power company decide what the most economical time to run the machine is, in return for a good rate.
What does the weather report have to do with any temperature scale? That's not even how Fahrenheit is defined, and saying that 100 degrees F is "Hot" may not depend on altitude but it sure depends on the person, wind chill factor, humidity, etc.
Let's look at calibrating thermometers on both scales from 0 to 100:
0 degrees. Celsius: freezing water. Fahrenheit: how far you can cool brine. Let's call it a tie thus far
100 degrees. Celsius: boiling water, easy and useful: you can make tea after calibrating your thermometer. Fahrenheit: shove the thermometer up your arse for the correct 100 degree reading. I'll take Celsius, thank you very much.
It's not that hard:
0 degrees C = water freezes
100 degrees C = water boils
We "encounter" these temperatures all the time, and they can be reproduced easily in your own kitchen with very good accuracy compared to the subjective "really cold" or "really hot" of the F scale.
I can vacuum myself but I'd prefer a robot if it did a good job. In my old apartment, a Roomba did a decent job of keeping the place free of cat hairs etc; the only problem was that its battery was crap (even the new Roombas still use NiMH batteries). It's nice to come home to a clean house instead of having to vacuum after a day of work.
I wonder what Dyson will come up with this time. He's not that good at inventing new stuff; none of his flagship products (the cyclone vacuum, the Air Blade dryer, the bladeless fan) were invented by him. But he is good at packaging them into usable products of decent quality.
It's reasonable to assume that no hacker will have physical access to your computer. For your car, that's a much less reasonable assumption. Cars sit unattended in public places for long periods, so someone intent on messing with you will probably have little trouble gaining access to your car and installing this box.
A simple way to improve security somewhat would be to require CAN devices to be paired with the car's computer. IIRC Volvo used to do this; installing a CD player on the CAN bus required a trip to the dealer to pair it, but they've since disabled this security as it was "too troublesome".
Calling it a tyranny without considering the other side of the story nor knowing on how hard it is to receive such permit is.
No. Tyranny is more about the means than it is about the end goal (and a lot of tyrannies got started in the pursuit of lofty goals). Protecting Finns from fundraising scams is a worthy goal, but how you implement that protection makes all the difference. Going after actual scamsters and warning people through public service messages is a lot less tyrannical than censoring websites or requiring permits for fundraisers.
Paywalls are fine for regular subscribers, but if you're just after 1 article, they are a nuisance at best and a rip-off at worst. Nag walls would be better; I can get that article I'm after and I might still be enticed to subscribe for more. Perhaps that's where the hate comes from: these days people don't read 1 or 2 newspapers, but get their news from a wide variety of sources, sometimes through links sent by their friends or posted in online discussions. It is not unreasonable to ask money for such content, but if you had to subscribe to each news source, things would get expensive real fast. Offer a few articles for free, or make it real easy (not registration + CC, but something like PayPal) to pay a reasonable amount for single articles, and people would pay. I know I would.
By the way, I ran into a (Dutch) site called The Correspondent, which offers no news but a fixed panel of columnists writing about the affairs of the day, and a discussion forum for members. The surprising thing is that this site was paywalled from the get-go (though every now and then they offer articles that can be freely shared). It's been rather successful thus far; apparently there are plenty of people out there willing to pay for online content.
It all depends on how you measure corruption. The study seems to have measured how many Europeans have come into direct contact with corruption, i,e, offering or being offered a bribe. My country (the Netherlands) scores quite well on that score; no need to pay of anyone at city hall unless you want to get something done in real estate or construction. Bribery is so uncommon here that the vast majority of people never suspect that a bribe is asked for when their request is turned down. But below the surface, where most ordinary citizens don't venture, it exists. Some have compared the nature and level of corruption here to that of Japan.
The study does lighlight such factors, and as far as I know Sweden also has a lot less of this hidden corruption compared to NL. Not because they are a nanny state, but because of functional transparency laws. In the Netherlands, comparatively few people bother to check on their government, and when they do, they find transparency laws that are ranked amongst the worst in the world. Corrpution exists where it is profitable, undetected or unpunished. In that light, I shudder to think about what we can find in the EU offices themselves...
I'd be fine with this if the search results would clearly mark entries sitting behind a paywall or requiring registration to access. I'm sure we've all been frustrated multiple times by the likes of Experts-exchange (who show answers to tech questions in Google but won;t let you at them unless you pay up).
Don't dump on Dyson for these vacuum cleaners; he didn't invent them. Cyclone dust separation was invented and patented around the '30s if I recall correctly, and has been in use ever since, especially in industrial shop vacs. He didn't invent the Air Blade dryer (invented by Mitsubishi) nor the Bladeless Fan (invented by Toshiba) either. What he did do is improve these products, package them well, and market them succesfully.
With that said, I have a small Dyson handheld vacuum, and I love it. Not just because it doesn't have a bag; it's powerful and has a strong Li-Ion battery which means that you don;t have to choose between always empty batteries and broken batteries (are you listening, Roomba?!).
Perhaps, and in that case you're damned if you do (stay) and damned if you don't (quit and run). In either case you could be looking at reputation damage.
It might be worth doing some digging around the company, though. What relation does your boss have with this app and with the previous developer? What is the history of the development of this app? If this is a doomed but high profile app, the scapegoat theory would seem to hold. But if your boss wants the app to succeed and has no reason to be afraid to potentially piss of this darling developer, then it's worth talking to him, especially if he knows a bit about software development. Explain the problem and provide estimates on what it takes to turn this thing around. That's what I would expect a contractor to tell me if I hired him with honest intentions.
The question brought to mind a nice quote by Oscar Wilde: "A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten some". Coding is not for everyone. Neither are history, poetry, chemistry, or Latin for that matter. But it's important enough to be included in a broad curriculum. Show your children everything, and they'll choose the stuff that is of interest to them.
Twitter and similar companies have processes for "celebrity" accounts. This guy is no celebrity but perhaps sufficiently high-profile, and combined with the unusual @N nick and multiple attempts to steal the account as evidenced by the many password reset messages, there's enough grounds for an exception. Companies hate exceptions, but they hate bad press even worse.
How about One.com making waves? Sky is an ISP (amongst other things), but One.com is a service provider, and a little bit closer to what SkyDrive actually does (though I'm not sure if One.com offers similar cloud storage).
You get the same justice as they do. They avoided criminal charges by paying a fine from the coffers of the company they happened to be running. You can do the same thing when facing similar charges.
The kind of voice control Google is after (as in "the second-most intuitive interface") is hardly the same as the kind of voice control that is available today. The first would be able to interpret your intent as well as a human could, possibly better (filtering out noise, asking to clarify ambiguities rather than making assumptions). And it's nothing like the command line, which does no interpreting, refining or clarification at all; it just executes a limited set of commands exactly as entered, with no room for so much as a misplaced comma.
Slashdot Mirror
That is where the real danger lies: stacks: the joint ownership of or collusion between content providers and transport providers. If the interests of a specific content provider overlaps with those of a specific transport provider, there is an opportunity to screw the customers and competing content providers. Net neutrality aims to prevent such practices, and rightly so. You don't want to be locked out of DuckDuckGo (or even Bing) because Google have paid off your ISP.
In a socialist country (like mine), the state is doing this. If you get a company car, you are taxed for private use of that car (to the tune of 24% of the sticker price added to your income each year, typically in the 42% or 52% tax bracket, and that sticker price already includes close to 50% VAT and special duties on cars). Getting a company car includes paid-for petrol and servicing, but the tax makes it only slightly cheaper than buying your own car.
Stating that revenues from oil production concessions belong to "the people" instead of whomever gets there first or gets it out of the ground first is hardly socialism. Most countries, capitalist or otherwise, collect revenues from natural resources collected in that country, effectively establishing a part collective ownership.
Pissing away those revenues on bloated bureaucracies, pointless state programs and overly cushy social security, without any plans whatsoever on what to do when those revenues dry up, that is socialism. That's what the Netherlands did with its vast natural gas reserves; it's called the Dutch Disease (look it up), and Norway has learned from it.
Some guys already tried that, for a different reason. They mounted a projector in a car to act as headlight, and added a camera to track raindrops as they fell through the beam. A computer then predicted the path of each drop and made the projector not illuminate that bit, giving a much clearer view ahead during nightly rainfall.
Que the people whi argue that "this will cause people to drive much faster in unsafe conditions!". They said the same about seat belts and airbags.
The ability to press criminal charges doesn't go away after the offending exec has left the company.
Also, I don't think the right way to prevent cover-ups is to give those responsible a free pass. That's like letting murderers walk free in exchange for a confession (there might be a reduced sentence in it for them, but no acquittal). Besides, it's not like the current soft approach has encouraged a lot of companies to come clean; those coverups will happen regardless of penal consequences (since there are financial and career related consequences as well).
This. Being an executive means (or should mean) being personally responsible for your actions, and that includes criminal charges for pulling stunts like this. Without the option of course to buy your own arse out of a lawsuit using corporate (shareholders) funds
Home automation is getting there in terms of standardization, ease of use, and maintainability (not quite there yet, though!). I've built a setup that is affordable and has actual use in the form of comfort, convenience, and energy savings. But the main stumbling block is that you still have to tell the system what you want, i.e. there's some programming involved if you want to go beyond a remotely controllable home towards an automated home. That's not just about schedules, but also about logic: "don't turn off the heating in the guest bedroom if someone is sleeping there", "don't set off the lawn sprinklers if it's going to rain", "warn me if the back door is still unlocked when I hit the 'go to bed' button", that sort of thing. It's a little bit like the better universal remotes: a bloody hassle to set up, but once you have them working the way you want, they are convenient and you can just leave them alone. Nest tries to do the hard work of programming for you but it only works for HVAC applications and not always all that well.
Smart Homes go a bit beyond that both in usefulness and in the need for standardization, and this is only just recently getting off the ground. The idea is that smart homes will tie into a smart power grid, and negotiate for flexible energy rates. The house can turn on the AC or charge your EV when the clouds break and the grid has a lot of surplus solar power available, or you ask it to dry the laundry before 5pm, letting the house or power company decide what the most economical time to run the machine is, in return for a good rate.
What does the weather report have to do with any temperature scale? That's not even how Fahrenheit is defined, and saying that 100 degrees F is "Hot" may not depend on altitude but it sure depends on the person, wind chill factor, humidity, etc.
Let's look at calibrating thermometers on both scales from 0 to 100:
0 degrees. Celsius: freezing water. Fahrenheit: how far you can cool brine. Let's call it a tie thus far
100 degrees. Celsius: boiling water, easy and useful: you can make tea after calibrating your thermometer. Fahrenheit: shove the thermometer up your arse for the correct 100 degree reading. I'll take Celsius, thank you very much.
It's not that hard:
0 degrees C = water freezes
100 degrees C = water boils
We "encounter" these temperatures all the time, and they can be reproduced easily in your own kitchen with very good accuracy compared to the subjective "really cold" or "really hot" of the F scale.
I can vacuum myself but I'd prefer a robot if it did a good job. In my old apartment, a Roomba did a decent job of keeping the place free of cat hairs etc; the only problem was that its battery was crap (even the new Roombas still use NiMH batteries). It's nice to come home to a clean house instead of having to vacuum after a day of work.
I wonder what Dyson will come up with this time. He's not that good at inventing new stuff; none of his flagship products (the cyclone vacuum, the Air Blade dryer, the bladeless fan) were invented by him. But he is good at packaging them into usable products of decent quality.
It's reasonable to assume that no hacker will have physical access to your computer. For your car, that's a much less reasonable assumption. Cars sit unattended in public places for long periods, so someone intent on messing with you will probably have little trouble gaining access to your car and installing this box.
A simple way to improve security somewhat would be to require CAN devices to be paired with the car's computer. IIRC Volvo used to do this; installing a CD player on the CAN bus required a trip to the dealer to pair it, but they've since disabled this security as it was "too troublesome".
Calling it a tyranny without considering the other side of the story nor knowing on how hard it is to receive such permit is.
No. Tyranny is more about the means than it is about the end goal (and a lot of tyrannies got started in the pursuit of lofty goals). Protecting Finns from fundraising scams is a worthy goal, but how you implement that protection makes all the difference. Going after actual scamsters and warning people through public service messages is a lot less tyrannical than censoring websites or requiring permits for fundraisers.
Paywalls are fine for regular subscribers, but if you're just after 1 article, they are a nuisance at best and a rip-off at worst. Nag walls would be better; I can get that article I'm after and I might still be enticed to subscribe for more. Perhaps that's where the hate comes from: these days people don't read 1 or 2 newspapers, but get their news from a wide variety of sources, sometimes through links sent by their friends or posted in online discussions. It is not unreasonable to ask money for such content, but if you had to subscribe to each news source, things would get expensive real fast. Offer a few articles for free, or make it real easy (not registration + CC, but something like PayPal) to pay a reasonable amount for single articles, and people would pay. I know I would.
By the way, I ran into a (Dutch) site called The Correspondent, which offers no news but a fixed panel of columnists writing about the affairs of the day, and a discussion forum for members. The surprising thing is that this site was paywalled from the get-go (though every now and then they offer articles that can be freely shared). It's been rather successful thus far; apparently there are plenty of people out there willing to pay for online content.
It all depends on how you measure corruption. The study seems to have measured how many Europeans have come into direct contact with corruption, i,e, offering or being offered a bribe. My country (the Netherlands) scores quite well on that score; no need to pay of anyone at city hall unless you want to get something done in real estate or construction. Bribery is so uncommon here that the vast majority of people never suspect that a bribe is asked for when their request is turned down. But below the surface, where most ordinary citizens don't venture, it exists. Some have compared the nature and level of corruption here to that of Japan.
The study does lighlight such factors, and as far as I know Sweden also has a lot less of this hidden corruption compared to NL. Not because they are a nanny state, but because of functional transparency laws. In the Netherlands, comparatively few people bother to check on their government, and when they do, they find transparency laws that are ranked amongst the worst in the world. Corrpution exists where it is profitable, undetected or unpunished. In that light, I shudder to think about what we can find in the EU offices themselves...
I'd be fine with this if the search results would clearly mark entries sitting behind a paywall or requiring registration to access. I'm sure we've all been frustrated multiple times by the likes of Experts-exchange (who show answers to tech questions in Google but won;t let you at them unless you pay up).
Don't dump on Dyson for these vacuum cleaners; he didn't invent them. Cyclone dust separation was invented and patented around the '30s if I recall correctly, and has been in use ever since, especially in industrial shop vacs. He didn't invent the Air Blade dryer (invented by Mitsubishi) nor the Bladeless Fan (invented by Toshiba) either. What he did do is improve these products, package them well, and market them succesfully.
With that said, I have a small Dyson handheld vacuum, and I love it. Not just because it doesn't have a bag; it's powerful and has a strong Li-Ion battery which means that you don;t have to choose between always empty batteries and broken batteries (are you listening, Roomba?!).
Perhaps, and in that case you're damned if you do (stay) and damned if you don't (quit and run). In either case you could be looking at reputation damage.
It might be worth doing some digging around the company, though. What relation does your boss have with this app and with the previous developer? What is the history of the development of this app? If this is a doomed but high profile app, the scapegoat theory would seem to hold. But if your boss wants the app to succeed and has no reason to be afraid to potentially piss of this darling developer, then it's worth talking to him, especially if he knows a bit about software development. Explain the problem and provide estimates on what it takes to turn this thing around. That's what I would expect a contractor to tell me if I hired him with honest intentions.
The question brought to mind a nice quote by Oscar Wilde: "A gentleman need not know Latin, but he should at least have forgotten some". Coding is not for everyone. Neither are history, poetry, chemistry, or Latin for that matter. But it's important enough to be included in a broad curriculum. Show your children everything, and they'll choose the stuff that is of interest to them.
Twitter and similar companies have processes for "celebrity" accounts. This guy is no celebrity but perhaps sufficiently high-profile, and combined with the unusual @N nick and multiple attempts to steal the account as evidenced by the many password reset messages, there's enough grounds for an exception. Companies hate exceptions, but they hate bad press even worse.
That goes for adults, too. Treat people like little children, and they will act accordingly.
How about One.com making waves? Sky is an ISP (amongst other things), but One.com is a service provider, and a little bit closer to what SkyDrive actually does (though I'm not sure if One.com offers similar cloud storage).
You get the same justice as they do. They avoided criminal charges by paying a fine from the coffers of the company they happened to be running. You can do the same thing when facing similar charges.
The kind of voice control Google is after (as in "the second-most intuitive interface") is hardly the same as the kind of voice control that is available today. The first would be able to interpret your intent as well as a human could, possibly better (filtering out noise, asking to clarify ambiguities rather than making assumptions). And it's nothing like the command line, which does no interpreting, refining or clarification at all; it just executes a limited set of commands exactly as entered, with no room for so much as a misplaced comma.
That's what it was founded on, too.
Only if you treat them as such. I used to think the same, until I started to take time for and pay attention to every meal. It's worth it.