That sounds plausible but I'd like to see some research into that. I had a quick look at some traffic statistics but couldn't find anything on pedestrians stepping into traffic whilst looking at their smartphone. Problem is that almost all accidents involving a pedestrian and a motor vehicle are attributed to the driver in the statistics (over here, it's almost always the driver's insurer who pays regardless of who caused the accident).
One interesting thing I did manage to glean from the statistics is that fully 1/3rd of all deaths of pedestrians did not involve another party, but were caused by falls or bumping into a stationary object. Numbers for cyclists are about the same. And the vast majority of injuries did not involve another party. Cars are a big health problem but the numbers show a pretty steady overall decline (in terms of accidents as well as emissions, I might add); hopefully cars will drop below clumsiness as a cause of death of pedestrians.
Source: I work in programmatic audience targeting for a Fortune 100. (I promise we're not evil, we just want to sell you stuff you might actually want)
"Programmatic audience targeting" for a Fortune 100... evil-wise that sounds like it would be somewhere between clubbing baby seals and the guys who voted in favour of this bill.
That's another huge advantage of email: businesses can run their own email servers, ensure that their internal communication never leaves the premises and isn't harvested by the likes of Google, be in control of account creation and naming, apply any other policies they deem necessary, while still ensuring that anyone in the world can contact them using their choice of email client or service.
That's how email was designed, as opposed to all those others that are proprietary and locked down cloud services. And any smart company using those will ask themselves: "what do we do when this service goes tits up?". If the service is proprietary and is your primary internal and external communication channel, then there are no pretty answers to that.
£30M will get them the demonstrator. As they say, it is enough to build it and get it through flight testing. Once they have that, I suppose they plan to use it to attract additional funding to build the actual aircraft, or at the least sell the design (or the company) to an interested established airplane manufacturer.
At this stage, why wouldn't shareholders sue? Or are they hoping that some trust in the company can be restored is a lawsuit is averted, giving them an opportunity to unload their shares to another sucker in the future? Also, from TFA:
Theranos also has reached an agreement to buy back Rupert Murdoch’s shares — which he bought in 2015 for about $125 million — for just $1
Why would he do that? By estimates in the article the company's valuation dropped by 90%: a huge amount but it hardly makes Murdoch's holdings worthless. Seems fishy to me.
As far as I can tell, the first two conditions already exist to some degree, but companies are finding clever ways around them. Giving visa holders a work permit for a limited duration but not tied to the company that employs them would help them to not just be an indentured servant.
In Europe there are labour issues that are somewhat similar. Eastern European job agencies are sending people to work here Western Europe as labourers construction workers or truckers, at far lower wages. The issue is not one of immigration, but what amounts to circumventing minimum wage laws and such. A proposed solution is to require "like pay for like work in the same location": foreign companies sending their employees here on a long-term job (essentially indeterminate) would be required to pay them locally prevailing wages. This would make it even more attractive for foreign talent to come work here, but it would also mean that cost would no longer be a reason to hire foreigners, but filling positions with scarce foreign talent would still be viable. Perhaps that would also be a reasonable fix for the US H1B programme? IIRC, Trump already suggested to increase the minimum wage for H1B workers.
It's not the courts that need to side with us, it's the legislators. We need them to agree to the principle of customer rights as GP outlined them. Good laws will follow from that, and good rulings from judges after. Merely hoping for judges to rule in our favour according to the few disjoint customer protection laws we have is not going to help; current laws are already stacked in favour of the likes of Lexmark.
If this means they can make some money by selling my info then perhaps my internet bill out-of-pocket will come down over time.
The only thing that will accomplish that is competition at the household level. When there is no competition they will continue to charge what they want.
Alternatively, this is a bunch of script kiddies who managed to guess the password to a handful of accounts, and are now trying to make a name for themselves.
As far as I can tell, not having an EME compliant browser simply means that the browser will not be able to play streams encumbered with DRM. With Google, Microsoft and Netflix behind the standard, there's little chance of the other browser developers being able to force content providers to no adopt this standard.
Judging from footage, burglars seem to fall into two categories: the amateur criminals of opportunity who simply smash a window and make off with whatever they can get, or fail comically. And the more professional burglars who take a few very simple precautions, come in wearing hoodies and gloves, and leave in minutes. They are professional in the sense that they know how to enter a home quickly without making too much noise, spot homes where the owners are absent and the take is likely to be high, and know which valuables to grab and where they are usually "hidden". But they certainly do not employ any sophisticated methods to bypass alarms or defeat security cameras. They simply skip homes with alarms or ignore their presence depending on how long they are expecting to hang around, and make sure they cannot be recognized with the aforementioned hoodies.
And over here, most burglars don't give a rat's arse about being caught: sentences are low, there's little additional punishment for repeat offenders (the other day they caught a burglar with 33 prior convictions, think he's going to reform much?), and if the police actually do turn up the heat a bit too much for comfort, one simply relocates to the next EU country.
And that's what a real president does: setting long term budgets and targets for long term endeavours. And a real president also doesn't torpedo his predecessor's long term plans on a whim. Especially when those plans aren't overly political and mostly require government intervention for budgetary matters and auditing only.
That probably works the same as engineers designing faulty car parts: the company that employs them is held liable (and the engineer can likely kiss his christmas bonus and/or job goodbye)
"She may well be right." Says who? We've all seen some similar and widely publicized changes at other companies, and at the last large corporation I had as a client I went through several similar changes brought about by newly installed department managers. And what I have wondered and continue to wonder is: what do they base this decision on? What data, research, managerial wisdom or personal experience makes them think this works? (And by personal experience, I don't mean "I work better in an office", but "When I brought back people into the office at Company X, productivity jumped by 20%."). Or is it really nothing more than a belief? While she may have the authority do make such a change on a hunch, she would do well to make damn sure it works before issuing policy that may have a significant impact on productivity and employee well-being, positively or negatively.
Looking at how this has worked out at other companies, coupled with an increasing number of studies that suggest that constant collaboration amongst knowledge or creative workers has been vastly overrated and has been taken to a level that's pretty detrimental to productivity, I seriously doubt that she is right.
With that said, not having a way to guarantee that your software is secure is no excuse for not exercising established security practices. They may not provide a 100% guarantee but it's better than nothing. A lot of the hacks of IoT equipment that we've been hearing so much about were possible because of inexcusable negligence on the part of the manufacturer.
The article mentions electronic tickets, not boarding passes. These e-tickets are little more than a reservation number in the form of a QR code which can be scanned from a phone or a printout to save a little time at the terminal, but the number can still be manually entered by the staff member if need be. A couple of times I've flown, the airline didn't even ask for my ticket and got my reservation on screen simply by scanning my passport.
When you were a boy, you weren't told all day: "Only girls can study physics." "Boys should stay at home until their parents find them a suitable wife." "A man's place is in the kitchen, or walking 2 meters behind his wife." If you had been, you would probably have reacted differently to a man being successful in science despite such cultural obstacles.
Curie is still a hero for beating the prejudice of her time, but the difference in perception is in the eye of the beholder: boy in a more or less egalitarian society (at least when it comes to the sexes), or girl in a culture where women are not supposed to do such things. To the boy, Curie is mostly a historical example of a heroic struggle. To a girl in India, it's proof that her life and her society don't have to be the way they are.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, these women are showing girls that they can succeed even in a male-centered society, that they can do interesting things instead of preparing to be married off. They are showing parents that there is no shame in giving their daughters an education even if the village idiots are telling them otherwise. They are showing that there are worthwhile and interesting scientific pursuits in their country and that there is no need to go abroad to find them. They are inspiring Indian girls and boys to go to college and study hard. In other words, they are doing more than most to improve their country and culture. Improving the country's health care, agriculture, sanitation and education is more about hearts & minds than spending the relatively tiny space budget on these things. Given ISRO's results and the impact on local industry, international contracts, and prestige, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better place to spend that money.
Older people like me are also accustomed to being able to buy books, and not be hit with arbitrary regional restrictions. Imagine the lady at the checkout of your favourite book store or library putting aside a couple of books from your selection: "I am sorry sir, but you can't have those". That has been my main reason to pirate ebooks: region locks and availability. Thankfully the situation is improving, and publishers are learning not to piss off their customer this way.
The idea isn't necessarily terrible, it depends on a couple of things:
- Mix of workers, i.e. is it all programmers / thinkers / creative people or are there also people who need to talk a lot to each other or on the phone mixed in?
- If the office is already noisy, people tend to have less consideration about keeping quiet. However if the place is usually quiet, people tend to lower their voice or leave the room when having a longer conversation. Kind of like the quiet section on the train. I've worked in open plan offices where working was just as pleasant as in a separate cube or quiet cell, because people made an effort not to make a lot of noise
- And of course: not cramming as many people as you can into the space. Most open plan offices I worked in were fairly spacious, usually having 4 (large) desks together, with each group of 4 separated by a row of (low) filing cabinets, with plenty of space in between, and good use of sound dampening material.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds plausible but I'd like to see some research into that. I had a quick look at some traffic statistics but couldn't find anything on pedestrians stepping into traffic whilst looking at their smartphone. Problem is that almost all accidents involving a pedestrian and a motor vehicle are attributed to the driver in the statistics (over here, it's almost always the driver's insurer who pays regardless of who caused the accident).
One interesting thing I did manage to glean from the statistics is that fully 1/3rd of all deaths of pedestrians did not involve another party, but were caused by falls or bumping into a stationary object. Numbers for cyclists are about the same. And the vast majority of injuries did not involve another party. Cars are a big health problem but the numbers show a pretty steady overall decline (in terms of accidents as well as emissions, I might add); hopefully cars will drop below clumsiness as a cause of death of pedestrians.
Source: I work in programmatic audience targeting for a Fortune 100. (I promise we're not evil, we just want to sell you stuff you might actually want)
"Programmatic audience targeting" for a Fortune 100... evil-wise that sounds like it would be somewhere between clubbing baby seals and the guys who voted in favour of this bill.
That's another huge advantage of email: businesses can run their own email servers, ensure that their internal communication never leaves the premises and isn't harvested by the likes of Google, be in control of account creation and naming, apply any other policies they deem necessary, while still ensuring that anyone in the world can contact them using their choice of email client or service.
That's how email was designed, as opposed to all those others that are proprietary and locked down cloud services. And any smart company using those will ask themselves: "what do we do when this service goes tits up?". If the service is proprietary and is your primary internal and external communication channel, then there are no pretty answers to that.
A developer's most valuable resource is their attention
That's debatable, nevertheless this is a statement fit to print, frame, and hang on the wall. Your boss' wall preferably.
£30M will get them the demonstrator. As they say, it is enough to build it and get it through flight testing. Once they have that, I suppose they plan to use it to attract additional funding to build the actual aircraft, or at the least sell the design (or the company) to an interested established airplane manufacturer.
Theranos also has reached an agreement to buy back Rupert Murdoch’s shares — which he bought in 2015 for about $125 million — for just $1
Why would he do that? By estimates in the article the company's valuation dropped by 90%: a huge amount but it hardly makes Murdoch's holdings worthless. Seems fishy to me.
As far as I can tell, the first two conditions already exist to some degree, but companies are finding clever ways around them. Giving visa holders a work permit for a limited duration but not tied to the company that employs them would help them to not just be an indentured servant.
In Europe there are labour issues that are somewhat similar. Eastern European job agencies are sending people to work here Western Europe as labourers construction workers or truckers, at far lower wages. The issue is not one of immigration, but what amounts to circumventing minimum wage laws and such. A proposed solution is to require "like pay for like work in the same location": foreign companies sending their employees here on a long-term job (essentially indeterminate) would be required to pay them locally prevailing wages. This would make it even more attractive for foreign talent to come work here, but it would also mean that cost would no longer be a reason to hire foreigners, but filling positions with scarce foreign talent would still be viable. Perhaps that would also be a reasonable fix for the US H1B programme? IIRC, Trump already suggested to increase the minimum wage for H1B workers.
#3 is the one that matters. Automatic scanning is great but why on earth would I want to store the resulting files with them at all?
I'm not clear on patent law in this case (certainly not the US laws), but I thought patent licenses cover manufacturing, not use.
It's not the courts that need to side with us, it's the legislators. We need them to agree to the principle of customer rights as GP outlined them. Good laws will follow from that, and good rulings from judges after. Merely hoping for judges to rule in our favour according to the few disjoint customer protection laws we have is not going to help; current laws are already stacked in favour of the likes of Lexmark.
If this means they can make some money by selling my info then perhaps my internet bill out-of-pocket will come down over time.
The only thing that will accomplish that is competition at the household level. When there is no competition they will continue to charge what they want.
Alternatively, this is a bunch of script kiddies who managed to guess the password to a handful of accounts, and are now trying to make a name for themselves.
As far as I can tell, not having an EME compliant browser simply means that the browser will not be able to play streams encumbered with DRM. With Google, Microsoft and Netflix behind the standard, there's little chance of the other browser developers being able to force content providers to no adopt this standard.
That's why smart people say that DRM stands for Digital Restrictions Management.
Judging from footage, burglars seem to fall into two categories: the amateur criminals of opportunity who simply smash a window and make off with whatever they can get, or fail comically. And the more professional burglars who take a few very simple precautions, come in wearing hoodies and gloves, and leave in minutes. They are professional in the sense that they know how to enter a home quickly without making too much noise, spot homes where the owners are absent and the take is likely to be high, and know which valuables to grab and where they are usually "hidden". But they certainly do not employ any sophisticated methods to bypass alarms or defeat security cameras. They simply skip homes with alarms or ignore their presence depending on how long they are expecting to hang around, and make sure they cannot be recognized with the aforementioned hoodies.
And over here, most burglars don't give a rat's arse about being caught: sentences are low, there's little additional punishment for repeat offenders (the other day they caught a burglar with 33 prior convictions, think he's going to reform much?), and if the police actually do turn up the heat a bit too much for comfort, one simply relocates to the next EU country.
And that's what a real president does: setting long term budgets and targets for long term endeavours. And a real president also doesn't torpedo his predecessor's long term plans on a whim. Especially when those plans aren't overly political and mostly require government intervention for budgetary matters and auditing only.
That probably works the same as engineers designing faulty car parts: the company that employs them is held liable (and the engineer can likely kiss his christmas bonus and/or job goodbye)
"She may well be right." Says who? We've all seen some similar and widely publicized changes at other companies, and at the last large corporation I had as a client I went through several similar changes brought about by newly installed department managers. And what I have wondered and continue to wonder is: what do they base this decision on? What data, research, managerial wisdom or personal experience makes them think this works? (And by personal experience, I don't mean "I work better in an office", but "When I brought back people into the office at Company X, productivity jumped by 20%."). Or is it really nothing more than a belief? While she may have the authority do make such a change on a hunch, she would do well to make damn sure it works before issuing policy that may have a significant impact on productivity and employee well-being, positively or negatively.
Looking at how this has worked out at other companies, coupled with an increasing number of studies that suggest that constant collaboration amongst knowledge or creative workers has been vastly overrated and has been taken to a level that's pretty detrimental to productivity, I seriously doubt that she is right.
This. Also see my sig.
With that said, not having a way to guarantee that your software is secure is no excuse for not exercising established security practices. They may not provide a 100% guarantee but it's better than nothing. A lot of the hacks of IoT equipment that we've been hearing so much about were possible because of inexcusable negligence on the part of the manufacturer.
The article mentions electronic tickets, not boarding passes. These e-tickets are little more than a reservation number in the form of a QR code which can be scanned from a phone or a printout to save a little time at the terminal, but the number can still be manually entered by the staff member if need be. A couple of times I've flown, the airline didn't even ask for my ticket and got my reservation on screen simply by scanning my passport.
When you were a boy, you weren't told all day: "Only girls can study physics." "Boys should stay at home until their parents find them a suitable wife." "A man's place is in the kitchen, or walking 2 meters behind his wife." If you had been, you would probably have reacted differently to a man being successful in science despite such cultural obstacles.
Curie is still a hero for beating the prejudice of her time, but the difference in perception is in the eye of the beholder: boy in a more or less egalitarian society (at least when it comes to the sexes), or girl in a culture where women are not supposed to do such things. To the boy, Curie is mostly a historical example of a heroic struggle. To a girl in India, it's proof that her life and her society don't have to be the way they are.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, these women are showing girls that they can succeed even in a male-centered society, that they can do interesting things instead of preparing to be married off. They are showing parents that there is no shame in giving their daughters an education even if the village idiots are telling them otherwise. They are showing that there are worthwhile and interesting scientific pursuits in their country and that there is no need to go abroad to find them. They are inspiring Indian girls and boys to go to college and study hard. In other words, they are doing more than most to improve their country and culture. Improving the country's health care, agriculture, sanitation and education is more about hearts & minds than spending the relatively tiny space budget on these things. Given ISRO's results and the impact on local industry, international contracts, and prestige, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better place to spend that money.
Older people like me are also accustomed to being able to buy books, and not be hit with arbitrary regional restrictions. Imagine the lady at the checkout of your favourite book store or library putting aside a couple of books from your selection: "I am sorry sir, but you can't have those". That has been my main reason to pirate ebooks: region locks and availability. Thankfully the situation is improving, and publishers are learning not to piss off their customer this way.
That doesn't work all that well, especially on videos with a lot of specialist jargon in it. Like university lectures.
The idea isn't necessarily terrible, it depends on a couple of things:
- Mix of workers, i.e. is it all programmers / thinkers / creative people or are there also people who need to talk a lot to each other or on the phone mixed in?
- If the office is already noisy, people tend to have less consideration about keeping quiet. However if the place is usually quiet, people tend to lower their voice or leave the room when having a longer conversation. Kind of like the quiet section on the train. I've worked in open plan offices where working was just as pleasant as in a separate cube or quiet cell, because people made an effort not to make a lot of noise
- And of course: not cramming as many people as you can into the space. Most open plan offices I worked in were fairly spacious, usually having 4 (large) desks together, with each group of 4 separated by a row of (low) filing cabinets, with plenty of space in between, and good use of sound dampening material.