Pretty much this, the exception being movie reviews. There I tend to read both the positive and negative ones. Well, until recently. Is it me or is there something fishy going on at IMDB? New movies receiving positive reviews, written by long time members, yet uncannily smelling like something written by studio drones, using words you'd expect from a marketeer rather than from a movie enthusiast. There's an odd sort of similarity to these reviews.
A lot of our far right groups are not big on religion. They may have some, and may share some views with religious extremist, but the driving force is conservatism and tradition, not religion itself. Most European far right groups are not at all the same as the religious fundamentalists in the States, though there are a few similar ones (mostly in eastern Europe IIRC).
But who knows. Suppose that Islam in the west wasn't associated with a vulnerable and economically disadvantaged group of immigrants, but with a group of confident, strong and self-supporting people. I am sure that in this case the left would rip into islam with the same enthusiasm they showed when they ridiculed christian faiths in the 60s and 70s. And in this case, the far right might well cosy up to extremist islam, abeit for a common cause rather than common viewpoints.
Asking the far right to reflect is a bit of a stretch... but their focus on radical islam is easily explained. They don't like immigrants, and in Europe Islam is a very large common denominator amongst immigrants, so they fight Islam too. To them, extremist muslims are just examples they can point out while explaining why all of islam sucks.
I live in Europe and believe me: the right do not control the media in my country. Not at all.
Antifa aren't anarchist, they are mostly anti-establishment. And over here they are highly organized, there really isn't any comparison with the far right on that score. I'm not sure what the situation is in the USA but it would seem to be very different. As for the islamic terrorists, that's where the notion of left and right kind of break down. For one, the left are far more sympathetic to fundamentalist islam than the right. Fundamentalist islam (not necessarily terrorists) identifies and associates far more with the left than the right as well. The idea that islamic terrorists can simply be lumped in with the far right extremists is ridiculous beyond belief... a bit like saying that the actual Nazis were left wing ("National Socialism, says so right there on the tin!")
They organize better? Not sure what country you hail from, but in most of Europe, the right wing extremists suck at getting organized. Sure, a few political parties got some tractions, but if you look at actual grass roots movements, most of them are just a bunch of, well, soccer hooligans and disgruntled cab drivers. They can barely organize a rally; most couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery. Even Pegida, one of the more successful movements, is prone to infighting and they really don't amount to much anymore.
Contrast that with Antifa, who are highly organized even across borders, they are good at mobilizing and networking at multiple levels (from the dark violent underbelly to mainstream political circles), and they are what you might call professional protesters. Even their violence is better organized. The extreme left movement in Europe has a far more extensive history of violence than the far right has, in recent history. Yes, I am not counting the nazis, they were an abberation, a dark en terrible one, but still an exception if subsequent events are any indication. Today's far right are scary looking loudmouth idiots, who look like a lot of trouble but are rarely involved in violence, let alone organized violence like at the G20, or terrorism. The left on the other hand...
I'm a big believer in free speech and all that, but I am glad that Germany is at least applying whatever laws against extremist speech they have to both sides equally. Keep in mind though that they have an extensive and fairly recent history of actual left wing terrorism.
It can be hard to tell the fascists and antifascists apart sometimes, in methods, ideology and in appearance. Just how hard it can be was nicely illustrated today in an article on a Dutch left wing (and fairly sympathetic to Antifa) blog about how the altish-rightish FvD party has ties with neo-nazis. The article itself isn't relevant, but it carried a picture of a group of scary looking masked people with red, black and white banners, one of them flashing what at first glance appears to be a nazi salute. That blog could be forgiven for the fact that these are not neo-nazis, but Antifa. You can tell by looking closely at the flags.
I used this in a home automation app, where having the connection set up as fast as possible adds a lot to the user experience. The app remembers your home's SSID, and when you are on your home wifi it will hit the local address. When you are on LTE or on some other Wifi (different SSID), it'll hit the remote access gateway service.
Sure, another strategy is to just try both connections at once, but I didn't want to hit the remote service when not needed.
Never say never. When (if) autonomous VTOL craft are feasible, and if there is enough public demand and perceived benefit to society, the rules will be changed. Perhaps we'll see a new class of airspace, under (semi) automated air traffic control in order to cope with the increased traffic. Which will be great, we can stick the toy drones in that control network too. But sure, I don't expect to see these things flying around my city in the next decade.
Insurance for these things is exactly what it will be for autonomous cars: a non-issue. Oh I am sure we'll see plenty of lawyers lining their pockets in cases over accidents caused by autonomous vehicles, but insurance can work like it does for regular auto insurance here in NL: in principle the owner of the vehicle is liable (not the driver like in many other countries) and has to take out insurance on that vehicle. The insurer simply assesses potential liability and risk and sets the coverage and premiums accordingly. If something happens, they pay. If it turns out there's a nasty defect or gross negligence on part of the manufacturer, the insurer will sue them. This is nothing new. And I fully expect that insurance for autonomous cars, once they hit the road, will actually become a lot cheaper than that for regular cars, after a few years. For autonomous aircraft, a lot will depend on their safety record, but eventually insurers can routinely handle policies for these,
Thats a good point. The fact that Squeezebox is open means that there are several ways and platforms to run the server component (LMC). If Synology or whoever created that package pulls the rug from under me, setting up a new server is trivial. These days there's probably a Docker container for it.
I treat proprietary solutions and anything with a SaaS component the way a lot of corporations treat open source software: when you use it, you must have an alternative and an exit strategy. That way I can move if they change terms of service on me.
Sonos is a bit more than a wireless speaker, it provides whole house audio streamed from your music collection (on a NAS or whatever) instead on from your phone over sucktastic Bluetooth. I like the quality of their stuff but after this I might get rid of the lot on the second hand market.
Squeezebox could be a decent replacement for that, extensive functionality and loads of open(ish) client and server implementations. Run a client on an RPi and hook up a quality speaker with amp and aux in. I currently have a couple of Squeezebox clients on Windows & Linux, with the server running on a Synology NAS and so far I am pretty happy with it.
Vast majority? I was under the impression that even in the USA, most people have at least some basic internet over cable or ADSL, sufficient for streaming.
A better analogy would be if a publisher forced you to subscribe to all of their magazines in order to get the one you wanted. Just want to watch Game of Thrones and House of Cards? You can't get individual subscriptions to those, and have pay for all the content on HBO and Netflix to get them. Your analogy would be valid if they'd let you watch individual series for $1/month or whatever.
With this fragmentation I am kind of hoping VOD will take off again at some point, but there's precious little on offer and the prices generally are outrageous, sometimes more than triple the price of video rentals in the days of yore.
I really hope so. I love the fingerprint scanner on the iPhone 6, works reliably and is very convenient, and it's reasonably secure. Secure enough for plenty of entities who are both serious and knowledgable about security to okay these phones for use in their BYOD environments. But I have some serious doubts about the security of the facial scanner, and It will be a while, if ever, before these phones are approved for BYOD use. Which means I'm not going to get one.
If they drop the fingerprint scanner - or move it to the back of the phone, which is a crappy place for it - I hope that the model after the next one will have a scanner under the screen. I'll just skip this model then.
Decent generalists (competent in many areas in their specific field) are somewhat rare, let alone true polymaths (expert in several fields). That means they are hard to find and recruit, plus they are somewhat hard to test, so most HR depts avoid creating job openings for them like the plague. They'd prefer to hire 5 other guys to do the same job at much greater expense, if those 5 fit their cookie cutter job descriptions. Same goes for managers, they prefer to manage interchangable resources rather than people. (Yes, there are some managers and HR people I respect, but I have very little respect for these professions as they are generally taught and practised)
The exception seems to be working in innovation (which is not at all like thinking up cool shit with a bunch of other neck beards in a hipster office with a foosball table and an office cat, by the way). Being a generalist there can be a real asset, and a polymath even more so. But even in innovation (in larger organisations), it's not that often that the need for good generalists is recognized up front.
Same here. We still have cable, the basic package (which is pretty comprehensive) comes pretty much for free with our Internet subscription. The only reason we got it is so my mother in law could watch Eastenders on the BBC when she visited, and I still haven't gotten around to putting up the FreeSat dish to get BBC for, well, free.
The difference is that land mines (or chemical weapons) will not win your war. Autonomous killbots just might, especially in force on force conflicts that aren't so much about hearts and minds as they are about eliminating opposing equipment and meatbags. And if your only viable defense against killbots is to build your own robot army, then you have yourself an arms race that no treaty is going to stop.
The solution of course it to build those killbots with a preset kill limit. If they get out of hand and rebel, we simply send wave after wave of men against them until they shut down.
This happened in the Netherlands. A case was made against a cartoonist who made fun of Islam, descendants of slaves on a guilt trip, politics in general, that sort of thing. Hate speech? Not at all a clear cut case, nevertheless an indictment was made and 9 heavily armed policemen broke into his flat in the middle of the night to grab him and his laptop. In the end all charges were dropped, but the guy got the message and stopped making cartoons. Mission accomplished, one undesirable voice silenced.
This sort of thing shouldn't be possible in a society that takes free speech seriously. And that starts with not having vague delimitations of that freedom. In Europe, critique of Islam is increasingly seen as "hate speech". In the USA, you don't have to wave a swastika around to be branded a nazi, it is enough to defend a statue of a confederate general. Or maybe a trump bumper sticker is sufficient these days. Look at what happened on some social media sites in the wake of events in Charlottesville: suddenly all of alt-right (whatever the hell that is) is branded undesirable.
"First they came for the Nazis...". If a couple of entities get to decide what speech is acceptable and what isn't, and can effectively keep "undesirable" speech from reaching the public, then who is to say who's next? If the nazis don't have freedom of speech, we don't have it either, even if it feels good to be rid of them and we ourselves don't yet have to feel limited in what we say. Just wait.
I've no idea, honestly. A lot depends on the exploit they used, how well they cooperate once caught... In this case the fact that they went all out and put a bunch of their ill gotten items up for sale doesn't speak well of their intent. My guess is yes, they would be charged. But if you get a €20 card and use it to order €100 worth of stuff and kept all of it for yourself, I doubt there'd be any charges.
This is more like those people hearing about that trick (or maybe finding out themselves), then making sure they scanned every item upside down. It's similar to incorrectly priced items, and over here (NL) the law is sort of clear on that. If an item is priced too low by accident (or rung up incorrectly at the register), the customer gets to keep the purchase at the lower price... unless there is a "clearly apparent mistake". A €1000 TV priced at €800 would not be a clear mistake; a €200 discount would be a really good one, but plausible. That same TV priced at €100 is clearly a mistake though. Same as someone who manages to order over $18.000 worth of goods on a $20 gift gard because of a flaw in the system. Even if it is clear that the system was at fault and that no exploit was used, that person would not get to keep the goods over here. How does that work in the States?
Also wholly unneccesary. That line about "helping to improve our product" is always given to justify data collection, but it's often not the main reason and pretty much never the only one. Even if they collect this data to see how their product is being used, do they really know what to do with all that data, gain insights from it, and act accordingly? Or is it just the 90s PHB from Dilbert again, demanding "a database", except these days its "big data"?
Just listen to your customers instead of spying on them.
Maybe not explicitly. But with the rise of "islamophobia" (a particularly nasty term), some people feel that certain minority religions need extra legal protection against "hate". It has been suggested, even in the upper echelons of the EC, that there ought to be laws against islamophobia, and that mere criticism of that religion should fall under the definition of that word. In this day and age I can see companies jumping on that bandwagon, either out of their own volition or because they are being pressured onto it by the public. Not the majority public but a small but loud minority of do-gooders who demand from companies that they stop doing business or advertise with "immoral entities", or they will be publicly shamed. This is already happening, albeit with little success thus far.
And after all that, other religions will demand similar protection, of course. Which pretty much amounts to reinstituting the old blasphemy laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much this, the exception being movie reviews. There I tend to read both the positive and negative ones. Well, until recently. Is it me or is there something fishy going on at IMDB? New movies receiving positive reviews, written by long time members, yet uncannily smelling like something written by studio drones, using words you'd expect from a marketeer rather than from a movie enthusiast. There's an odd sort of similarity to these reviews.
The best part is that there wasn't a 2 hour wait, nor a requirement to have Amazon Prime. And I doubt any ID checking went on.
A lot of our far right groups are not big on religion. They may have some, and may share some views with religious extremist, but the driving force is conservatism and tradition, not religion itself. Most European far right groups are not at all the same as the religious fundamentalists in the States, though there are a few similar ones (mostly in eastern Europe IIRC).
But who knows. Suppose that Islam in the west wasn't associated with a vulnerable and economically disadvantaged group of immigrants, but with a group of confident, strong and self-supporting people. I am sure that in this case the left would rip into islam with the same enthusiasm they showed when they ridiculed christian faiths in the 60s and 70s. And in this case, the far right might well cosy up to extremist islam, abeit for a common cause rather than common viewpoints.
Asking the far right to reflect is a bit of a stretch... but their focus on radical islam is easily explained. They don't like immigrants, and in Europe Islam is a very large common denominator amongst immigrants, so they fight Islam too. To them, extremist muslims are just examples they can point out while explaining why all of islam sucks.
I live in Europe and believe me: the right do not control the media in my country. Not at all.
Antifa aren't anarchist, they are mostly anti-establishment. And over here they are highly organized, there really isn't any comparison with the far right on that score. I'm not sure what the situation is in the USA but it would seem to be very different. As for the islamic terrorists, that's where the notion of left and right kind of break down. For one, the left are far more sympathetic to fundamentalist islam than the right. Fundamentalist islam (not necessarily terrorists) identifies and associates far more with the left than the right as well. The idea that islamic terrorists can simply be lumped in with the far right extremists is ridiculous beyond belief... a bit like saying that the actual Nazis were left wing ("National Socialism, says so right there on the tin!")
They organize better? Not sure what country you hail from, but in most of Europe, the right wing extremists suck at getting organized. Sure, a few political parties got some tractions, but if you look at actual grass roots movements, most of them are just a bunch of, well, soccer hooligans and disgruntled cab drivers. They can barely organize a rally; most couldn't organize a piss-up in a brewery. Even Pegida, one of the more successful movements, is prone to infighting and they really don't amount to much anymore.
Contrast that with Antifa, who are highly organized even across borders, they are good at mobilizing and networking at multiple levels (from the dark violent underbelly to mainstream political circles), and they are what you might call professional protesters. Even their violence is better organized. The extreme left movement in Europe has a far more extensive history of violence than the far right has, in recent history. Yes, I am not counting the nazis, they were an abberation, a dark en terrible one, but still an exception if subsequent events are any indication. Today's far right are scary looking loudmouth idiots, who look like a lot of trouble but are rarely involved in violence, let alone organized violence like at the G20, or terrorism. The left on the other hand...
I'm a big believer in free speech and all that, but I am glad that Germany is at least applying whatever laws against extremist speech they have to both sides equally. Keep in mind though that they have an extensive and fairly recent history of actual left wing terrorism.
It can be hard to tell the fascists and antifascists apart sometimes, in methods, ideology and in appearance. Just how hard it can be was nicely illustrated today in an article on a Dutch left wing (and fairly sympathetic to Antifa) blog about how the altish-rightish FvD party has ties with neo-nazis. The article itself isn't relevant, but it carried a picture of a group of scary looking masked people with red, black and white banners, one of them flashing what at first glance appears to be a nazi salute. That blog could be forgiven for the fact that these are not neo-nazis, but Antifa. You can tell by looking closely at the flags.
I used this in a home automation app, where having the connection set up as fast as possible adds a lot to the user experience. The app remembers your home's SSID, and when you are on your home wifi it will hit the local address. When you are on LTE or on some other Wifi (different SSID), it'll hit the remote access gateway service.
Sure, another strategy is to just try both connections at once, but I didn't want to hit the remote service when not needed.
If that's the case, then the web is seriously broken.
Never say never. When (if) autonomous VTOL craft are feasible, and if there is enough public demand and perceived benefit to society, the rules will be changed. Perhaps we'll see a new class of airspace, under (semi) automated air traffic control in order to cope with the increased traffic. Which will be great, we can stick the toy drones in that control network too. But sure, I don't expect to see these things flying around my city in the next decade.
Insurance for these things is exactly what it will be for autonomous cars: a non-issue. Oh I am sure we'll see plenty of lawyers lining their pockets in cases over accidents caused by autonomous vehicles, but insurance can work like it does for regular auto insurance here in NL: in principle the owner of the vehicle is liable (not the driver like in many other countries) and has to take out insurance on that vehicle. The insurer simply assesses potential liability and risk and sets the coverage and premiums accordingly. If something happens, they pay. If it turns out there's a nasty defect or gross negligence on part of the manufacturer, the insurer will sue them. This is nothing new. And I fully expect that insurance for autonomous cars, once they hit the road, will actually become a lot cheaper than that for regular cars, after a few years. For autonomous aircraft, a lot will depend on their safety record, but eventually insurers can routinely handle policies for these,
Thats a good point. The fact that Squeezebox is open means that there are several ways and platforms to run the server component (LMC). If Synology or whoever created that package pulls the rug from under me, setting up a new server is trivial. These days there's probably a Docker container for it.
I treat proprietary solutions and anything with a SaaS component the way a lot of corporations treat open source software: when you use it, you must have an alternative and an exit strategy. That way I can move if they change terms of service on me.
Sonos is a bit more than a wireless speaker, it provides whole house audio streamed from your music collection (on a NAS or whatever) instead on from your phone over sucktastic Bluetooth. I like the quality of their stuff but after this I might get rid of the lot on the second hand market.
Squeezebox could be a decent replacement for that, extensive functionality and loads of open(ish) client and server implementations. Run a client on an RPi and hook up a quality speaker with amp and aux in. I currently have a couple of Squeezebox clients on Windows & Linux, with the server running on a Synology NAS and so far I am pretty happy with it.
Vast majority? I was under the impression that even in the USA, most people have at least some basic internet over cable or ADSL, sufficient for streaming.
A better analogy would be if a publisher forced you to subscribe to all of their magazines in order to get the one you wanted. Just want to watch Game of Thrones and House of Cards? You can't get individual subscriptions to those, and have pay for all the content on HBO and Netflix to get them. Your analogy would be valid if they'd let you watch individual series for $1/month or whatever.
With this fragmentation I am kind of hoping VOD will take off again at some point, but there's precious little on offer and the prices generally are outrageous, sometimes more than triple the price of video rentals in the days of yore.
I really hope so. I love the fingerprint scanner on the iPhone 6, works reliably and is very convenient, and it's reasonably secure. Secure enough for plenty of entities who are both serious and knowledgable about security to okay these phones for use in their BYOD environments. But I have some serious doubts about the security of the facial scanner, and It will be a while, if ever, before these phones are approved for BYOD use. Which means I'm not going to get one.
If they drop the fingerprint scanner - or move it to the back of the phone, which is a crappy place for it - I hope that the model after the next one will have a scanner under the screen. I'll just skip this model then.
"As a service" really means "at someone else's mercy"
Decent generalists (competent in many areas in their specific field) are somewhat rare, let alone true polymaths (expert in several fields). That means they are hard to find and recruit, plus they are somewhat hard to test, so most HR depts avoid creating job openings for them like the plague. They'd prefer to hire 5 other guys to do the same job at much greater expense, if those 5 fit their cookie cutter job descriptions. Same goes for managers, they prefer to manage interchangable resources rather than people. (Yes, there are some managers and HR people I respect, but I have very little respect for these professions as they are generally taught and practised)
The exception seems to be working in innovation (which is not at all like thinking up cool shit with a bunch of other neck beards in a hipster office with a foosball table and an office cat, by the way). Being a generalist there can be a real asset, and a polymath even more so. But even in innovation (in larger organisations), it's not that often that the need for good generalists is recognized up front.
Same here. We still have cable, the basic package (which is pretty comprehensive) comes pretty much for free with our Internet subscription. The only reason we got it is so my mother in law could watch Eastenders on the BBC when she visited, and I still haven't gotten around to putting up the FreeSat dish to get BBC for, well, free.
If all the live TV you really want is a couple of news channels, get a dish.
The difference is that land mines (or chemical weapons) will not win your war. Autonomous killbots just might, especially in force on force conflicts that aren't so much about hearts and minds as they are about eliminating opposing equipment and meatbags. And if your only viable defense against killbots is to build your own robot army, then you have yourself an arms race that no treaty is going to stop.
The solution of course it to build those killbots with a preset kill limit. If they get out of hand and rebel, we simply send wave after wave of men against them until they shut down.
This happened in the Netherlands. A case was made against a cartoonist who made fun of Islam, descendants of slaves on a guilt trip, politics in general, that sort of thing. Hate speech? Not at all a clear cut case, nevertheless an indictment was made and 9 heavily armed policemen broke into his flat in the middle of the night to grab him and his laptop. In the end all charges were dropped, but the guy got the message and stopped making cartoons. Mission accomplished, one undesirable voice silenced.
This sort of thing shouldn't be possible in a society that takes free speech seriously. And that starts with not having vague delimitations of that freedom. In Europe, critique of Islam is increasingly seen as "hate speech". In the USA, you don't have to wave a swastika around to be branded a nazi, it is enough to defend a statue of a confederate general. Or maybe a trump bumper sticker is sufficient these days. Look at what happened on some social media sites in the wake of events in Charlottesville: suddenly all of alt-right (whatever the hell that is) is branded undesirable.
"First they came for the Nazis...". If a couple of entities get to decide what speech is acceptable and what isn't, and can effectively keep "undesirable" speech from reaching the public, then who is to say who's next? If the nazis don't have freedom of speech, we don't have it either, even if it feels good to be rid of them and we ourselves don't yet have to feel limited in what we say. Just wait.
I've no idea, honestly. A lot depends on the exploit they used, how well they cooperate once caught... In this case the fact that they went all out and put a bunch of their ill gotten items up for sale doesn't speak well of their intent. My guess is yes, they would be charged. But if you get a €20 card and use it to order €100 worth of stuff and kept all of it for yourself, I doubt there'd be any charges.
This is more like those people hearing about that trick (or maybe finding out themselves), then making sure they scanned every item upside down. It's similar to incorrectly priced items, and over here (NL) the law is sort of clear on that. If an item is priced too low by accident (or rung up incorrectly at the register), the customer gets to keep the purchase at the lower price... unless there is a "clearly apparent mistake". A €1000 TV priced at €800 would not be a clear mistake; a €200 discount would be a really good one, but plausible. That same TV priced at €100 is clearly a mistake though. Same as someone who manages to order over $18.000 worth of goods on a $20 gift gard because of a flaw in the system. Even if it is clear that the system was at fault and that no exploit was used, that person would not get to keep the goods over here. How does that work in the States?
Also wholly unneccesary. That line about "helping to improve our product" is always given to justify data collection, but it's often not the main reason and pretty much never the only one. Even if they collect this data to see how their product is being used, do they really know what to do with all that data, gain insights from it, and act accordingly? Or is it just the 90s PHB from Dilbert again, demanding "a database", except these days its "big data"?
Just listen to your customers instead of spying on them.
Maybe not explicitly. But with the rise of "islamophobia" (a particularly nasty term), some people feel that certain minority religions need extra legal protection against "hate". It has been suggested, even in the upper echelons of the EC, that there ought to be laws against islamophobia, and that mere criticism of that religion should fall under the definition of that word. In this day and age I can see companies jumping on that bandwagon, either out of their own volition or because they are being pressured onto it by the public. Not the majority public but a small but loud minority of do-gooders who demand from companies that they stop doing business or advertise with "immoral entities", or they will be publicly shamed. This is already happening, albeit with little success thus far.
And after all that, other religions will demand similar protection, of course. Which pretty much amounts to reinstituting the old blasphemy laws.