Still more secure than that swipey pattern thing which one can shoulder-surf from three desks over. And wasn't there a recent ruling that being ordered to unlock a phone with a fingerprint amounted to self-incrimination?
That's what they told one woman who complained about a 5 fold increase of her electric bill after the smart meter was installed: "Your smart meter is working fine. Possibly your old meter was faulty and we have been under-charging you all these years". Which might even be true, sadly the reporter didn't mention what the woman was paying (which should have made it instantly clear whether or not something was out of whack). But it does point out that they make it very hard to dispute these bills. The company told her she could have an electrician check out all of the wiring and appliances for any problems that would cause an increased power draw, or she could have the meter recalibrated, but she would have to bear the cost of around €900 (which seems unnecessarily high by the way).
I think we're seeing deplorable but wholly expected behaviour in a typical case where there could well be a problem with a company's equipment, which could turn out very embarrassing and expensive for them if they admitted it. So instead they deny everything and chalk any complaints up to isolated defects or fraud.
While I don't endorse the tone, I do agree somewhat with the sentiment of this. Depending on your field and your location, it can be very hard to find a job as a 45+ year old professional, and not just in IT: there's a few other professions which are not in hot demand right now, with a lot of older experienced people looking for jobs. It may be somewhat true that people with extensive professional networks always get hired, but that certainly doesn't equate to "the good ones will always find work", and by extension "it's your own fault if you can't find any work"
until social scum like you forced the socially awkward out of the industry which they built for you
I'd say that the industry has evolved beyond the basement dwelling coder; social skills are more important in IT these days, and the industry is better for it. But now that there are fewer job openings, employers get to be more picky, and they don't always select on the right criteria. A strong emphasis on social skills where they aren't needed, for example. Or just hiring the most likable of qualifying candidates. Add to that the widespread notion that programming is a young man's game, that good programmers always move on to do other stuff at some point, that you're a loser dinosaur if you're still coding past your 30s. I recently had a chat with some ex-colleagues about hiring practices, and I got the impression that their companies are looking for people who are either college graduates, or experienced programmers who at the very least have developed and launched a wildly successful new OS or social media service. But a middle aged coder who is "merely" very good is suspect: why isn't he an architect or a project manager?
To be fair, you do it for both. Most companies expect their professionals to stay current in their field and further develop their skills, and the good ones provide at least some help in doing so: training (on the company time & dime), a book budget, 2 hours a week of study time, help getting certified in relevant areas of expertise, etc.
I've read a fair few of those books; this is a great list for self-taught programmers, and I certainly include myself in that category
But one thing I often find lacking in both amateur programmers and coders with a formal education is the skills to do OO properly. These days most of them know the basics: class vs instance, abstract classes, inheritance and overloading etc, but what's missing is the knowledge and skill to design a good object model. In an OOP course I did years ago, students were given the books "Design Patterns" and "Anti-patterns", which were useful to teach common OO patterns and to promote thinking in patterns, but it doesn't cover object modelling as a whole. If anyone knows of a seminal work on the subject, I think it belongs on this list.
Also the thing would have to be rugged, and fairly sophisticated. Aiming using a controller is going to be slow and crappy, especially on a moving target. You'd need to add multiple cameras and perhaps a VR helmet to make this effective. Guy peeping out a window has instant 90 ish degree situational awareness and can bring his gun to bear on any target in a fraction of a second. A simple turret isn't going to come close.
Surprisingly, even crap movies like that are still around being seeded. Want "The Last Airbender"? Couple of formats with plenty of seeders: this taken from TPB just now:
Video
Avatar: The Last Airbender [Remastered 1080p]
Magnet linkPlay linkThis torrent has 3 comments. Uploaded 12-11 2016, Size 63.46 GiB, ULed by RemasteringATLA 78 32
The Last Airbender (2010) 1080p BrRip x264 - YIFY
Magnet linkPlay linkThis torrent has 7 comments.VIP Uploaded 11-20 2012, Size 1.4 GiB, ULed by YIFY 57 16
The Last Airbender (2010) 720p BrRip x264 - YIFY
Magnet linkPlay linkThis torrent has 10 comments.VIP Uploaded 11-20 2012, Size 750.83 MiB, ULed by YIFY 50 9
AVATAR - 2010 Movie, The LAST Airbender, Legend of KORRA - 720p
Magnet linkThis torrent has 1 comments.Trusted Uploaded 10-11 2016, Size 29.19 GiB, ULed by HardToF1nd 29 64
Sure, not everything is there, and if movie studios were to offer their complete collection online for downloading I'd be a happy customer. But if TPB were a legit shop, even movie buffs would be pretty happy with the selection.
What Snapchat actually gets from its users is not that relevant, they are still perceived as a threat to Facebook. Not a threat to the entire company, but to the bottom line to be sure. If you are selling apples and your neighbour is giving away his for free, it might make economic sense to buy him out.
Cloning only makes sense if you can actually entice users to switch. But perhaps those users like Snapchat because it's lightweight and it's not Facebook.
i don't think that would actually happen because A) the big pirates actually have to pay money for the upload bandwidth B) a professional amazon-grade website would have download speeds greater than Bittorrent C) I think most people actually WANT to pay a few bucks for a legitimate copy of a movie they're gonna watch once D) a bunch of other economic factors i don't wanna bother to type out, but basically I think they would make more money from this buisness model then they would loose from the small percentage who will continue to pirate, using files from the official site
Most importantly: E) All the movies you could possibly want are already available on the pirate sites, in your favorite format, despite DRM and legal smackdowns. Making movies available as legal downloads with no DRM isn't going to change that.
A missing wallet is noticed immediately, but someone looking at the password sticky in that wallet and then putting it back isn't. If someone then has your password, it hardly matters if they get to use for 30, 60 or 90 days, a few days will be enough to screw you royally.
Besides using 2 factor authentication, one of the better security practices I experienced was a login screen that prominently displayed your last login time and the computer from which you logged in last, highlighted in red if the terminal was different from the current one, or the last login time was outside your usual working hours. This was a high security environment, so people were told to (and did) check the information instead of just clicking right past it.
Pirated content: timely, convenient, a decent choice of formats and compression, unencumbered with DRM for offline watching on any device, a huge selection of both older and new material, easy to find and download. And also cheap, but I put that advantage last for a reason. Remember when we had AllOfMP3? At the time I said it made a great example for a proper legal online music shop. Maybe at some point the movie / TV industry will take note as well, and start offering their content in a more timely and friendly manner.
In this country, the official position used to be "provide your content in an acceptable manner or we won't prosecute people when they pirate it". They have since changed that policy but I still think it's a decent one. Specifically where it concerns geoblocked content. Not willing to sell here for some arbitrary reason? Then people are free to avail themselves of it as far as I am concerned, and that's precisely what I did for a while with ebooks. I'd try the regular stores, and if I hit a geoblock (which was very often during the early days of ebooks) I'd try a store that accepted PayPal (so I could just enter a bogus US address and bypass the block). But if that failed, TPB usually had what I wanted.
Copyright was intented to foster the spread of cultural works, and to encourage creators to keep on creating. Giving creators a chance to make some money with their craft is one way to encourage them thusly, but the reward is a means, not an end.
It's mostly about losing less time getting from and to the airport, losing less time getting through security, less time checking in and boarding, not having to show up crazy early just in case any of the previous processes delay you past your departure time, more comfort once on board, and often a more generous policy to refund or rebook unused tickets. Existing high speed rail already has those advantages, and Hyperloop offers an important additional advantage: there's no reason to build loads of stations along the way. Individual pods can simply be shunted off and stop at any 2 horse town, whereas regular high speed trains only make sense if the stops are spaced widely apart.
Riding those trains is sometimes fairly expensive though; unless Hyperloop can be built for less than regular high speed track, it'll be hard to offer rides at competitive prices.
I do share your scepticism about this doing anothing about congestion.
I'd rather see some cheaper models. I'm still shopping around for a good basic laptop for my wife. It doesn't need to be ultra thin (it won't travel much) or super stylish, just something basic to run Ubuntu with a browser and LibreOffice. Not having to pay the Redmont tax is an even bigger deal on a cheap laptop. But the selection of low end laptops seems to be rather a lot poorer then when I last bought one around 5 years ago. And so does the selection of laptops with Linux or without Windows, come to think of it.
They're just throwing hot buzzwords around, and "storytelling" is an attention grabber in certain business circles.
Speaking of attention grabbing, I'm glad that in my country this sort of thing isn't allowed. Electronic billboards are allowed, but there are some strict limits on what you can display on them, especially regarding animations or transitions.
That's just how it works. If your underlings fuck up, it's poor management on your part. If your cloud hosting partner fucks up, it's breach of contract and not your fault. Especially if you went with a well known vendor with all the right ISO stuff. You probably won't even be challenged much on the decision to go to the cloud in the first place, since that's now standard business practice. And to be honest, running your own data centre only makes sense if you know how to do that; I've had a few clients that saw a vast improvement in reliability and delivery after they moved to the cloud.
The intrinsic value of bitcoin is zero, same as paper money. Yet I'd still stop to pick up a €10 bill.
A more interesting question is what you can actually use BTC for. Not too long ago it was mostly useful to buy illegal drugs or guns online. These days you can also use it to pay for pizza; some online stores have begun accepting BTC but you get utterly raped on the exchange rate. The same more or less applies to transfering money: how often is it that people need to send money where more convenient and/or cheaper alternatives are not available? Very rarely I suspect. You can use it to pay ransomware operators (and I suspect some companies keep a few BTC on hand just for that). And it appears to be slowly adopted as a store of wealth; the long term price is still trending upwards, giving confidence in its longer term value. Demand for a safe haven might be what is actually driving the exchange rate upwards, but keep in mind that when conditions change and people start to liquidate their BTC, the price will plummet and your holdings will be wiped out in no time. By the way, the same is true for gold although to a lesser extent, but whether that is due to the nature of gold or simply the larger volume of the market I don't know.
Social media operators are not technology companies. They are advertising agencies and marketing data processors. Your understanding of technology is not going to help you assess the worth of these companies or the risk of investing in them.
Cops have a right to privacy too, to some extent. That doesn't mean the camera shouldn't be always on, but it does mean that there should be some rules and regulations to protect the privacy of everyone being filmed, including the cops themselves. Rules that determine when the footage may be used and for what purposes. For example: not to be used for job performance reviews, nor to check how many donuts each cop consumes on the job. Only to be used for training purposes with the consent of everyone in the video (or properly anonymized). Proper process for using the videos in after-action reviews. Access to the videos to be regulated and audited. Etc. The cops should be certain that if they harass someone or use undue violence, it will be on film and can be used against them. But they should also be certain that the videos will only be used as evidence in case of complaints or interventions where some violence occurred, and that they won't be done for publicly picking their nose or not being polite enough to a member of the public.
Most people just use their phones for those instant messages, short status updates or blog posts, and short emails. A physical keyboard may not be superior in this case; a "smart" virtual keyboard like Swype can be more convenient for short messages without a lot of special characters or unusual words. And a physical keyboard makes the phone bulkier. That's why most people prefer a virtual keyboard. It has nothing to do with advertising, it's about what people actually use their phones for.
So basically he'll be grounded (just like his drone)... I actually quite like that policy: refrain from completely upsetting his life in order to serve a relatively short sentence, just make him give up his free time for a bit, if the judge thinks community service is too lenient.
I'm often amazed at the size of servings in the US. When I go out, I usually have 2 courses, either a starter and a main course, or a main course and dessert. But in the US I sometimes struggled to finish a damn starter. When I travel there I usually order a main course and that'll be more than enough for me.
The secret is in the sauce. Do you make yours fresh from tomatoes and other veggies and herbs, or do you get the premade sauce in a jar? The latter comes laden with sugar and other crap.
It seems that he broke FAA rules (I'm not familiar with those, but most countries' rules for model aircraft don't allow them to be flown over crowds). Because of the resulting injury, a stiff sentence would be in order. But in this case, as opposed to violent crimes and the like, there is no benefit in removing this guy from society for a bit, other than making an example out of him. Wouldn't justice be better served with community service? Especially since I'd think the guy is also on the hook to pay a substantial amount in damages to the girl, even if he's only ordered to pay actual damages.
Slashdot Mirror
Still more secure than that swipey pattern thing which one can shoulder-surf from three desks over. And wasn't there a recent ruling that being ordered to unlock a phone with a fingerprint amounted to self-incrimination?
That's what they told one woman who complained about a 5 fold increase of her electric bill after the smart meter was installed: "Your smart meter is working fine. Possibly your old meter was faulty and we have been under-charging you all these years". Which might even be true, sadly the reporter didn't mention what the woman was paying (which should have made it instantly clear whether or not something was out of whack). But it does point out that they make it very hard to dispute these bills. The company told her she could have an electrician check out all of the wiring and appliances for any problems that would cause an increased power draw, or she could have the meter recalibrated, but she would have to bear the cost of around €900 (which seems unnecessarily high by the way).
I think we're seeing deplorable but wholly expected behaviour in a typical case where there could well be a problem with a company's equipment, which could turn out very embarrassing and expensive for them if they admitted it. So instead they deny everything and chalk any complaints up to isolated defects or fraud.
until social scum like you forced the socially awkward out of the industry which they built for you
I'd say that the industry has evolved beyond the basement dwelling coder; social skills are more important in IT these days, and the industry is better for it. But now that there are fewer job openings, employers get to be more picky, and they don't always select on the right criteria. A strong emphasis on social skills where they aren't needed, for example. Or just hiring the most likable of qualifying candidates. Add to that the widespread notion that programming is a young man's game, that good programmers always move on to do other stuff at some point, that you're a loser dinosaur if you're still coding past your 30s. I recently had a chat with some ex-colleagues about hiring practices, and I got the impression that their companies are looking for people who are either college graduates, or experienced programmers who at the very least have developed and launched a wildly successful new OS or social media service. But a middle aged coder who is "merely" very good is suspect: why isn't he an architect or a project manager?
To be fair, you do it for both. Most companies expect their professionals to stay current in their field and further develop their skills, and the good ones provide at least some help in doing so: training (on the company time & dime), a book budget, 2 hours a week of study time, help getting certified in relevant areas of expertise, etc.
I've read a fair few of those books; this is a great list for self-taught programmers, and I certainly include myself in that category
But one thing I often find lacking in both amateur programmers and coders with a formal education is the skills to do OO properly. These days most of them know the basics: class vs instance, abstract classes, inheritance and overloading etc, but what's missing is the knowledge and skill to design a good object model. In an OOP course I did years ago, students were given the books "Design Patterns" and "Anti-patterns", which were useful to teach common OO patterns and to promote thinking in patterns, but it doesn't cover object modelling as a whole. If anyone knows of a seminal work on the subject, I think it belongs on this list.
Cheap? This is the military.
Also the thing would have to be rugged, and fairly sophisticated. Aiming using a controller is going to be slow and crappy, especially on a moving target. You'd need to add multiple cameras and perhaps a VR helmet to make this effective. Guy peeping out a window has instant 90 ish degree situational awareness and can bring his gun to bear on any target in a fraction of a second. A simple turret isn't going to come close.
Video Avatar: The Last Airbender [Remastered 1080p]
Magnet linkPlay linkThis torrent has 3 comments. Uploaded 12-11 2016, Size 63.46 GiB, ULed by RemasteringATLA 78 32
The Last Airbender (2010) 1080p BrRip x264 - YIFY
Magnet linkPlay linkThis torrent has 7 comments.VIP Uploaded 11-20 2012, Size 1.4 GiB, ULed by YIFY 57 16
The Last Airbender (2010) 720p BrRip x264 - YIFY
Magnet linkPlay linkThis torrent has 10 comments.VIP Uploaded 11-20 2012, Size 750.83 MiB, ULed by YIFY 50 9
AVATAR - 2010 Movie, The LAST Airbender, Legend of KORRA - 720p
Magnet linkThis torrent has 1 comments.Trusted Uploaded 10-11 2016, Size 29.19 GiB, ULed by HardToF1nd 29 64
Sure, not everything is there, and if movie studios were to offer their complete collection online for downloading I'd be a happy customer. But if TPB were a legit shop, even movie buffs would be pretty happy with the selection.
What Snapchat actually gets from its users is not that relevant, they are still perceived as a threat to Facebook. Not a threat to the entire company, but to the bottom line to be sure. If you are selling apples and your neighbour is giving away his for free, it might make economic sense to buy him out.
Cloning only makes sense if you can actually entice users to switch. But perhaps those users like Snapchat because it's lightweight and it's not Facebook.
i don't think that would actually happen because A) the big pirates actually have to pay money for the upload bandwidth B) a professional amazon-grade website would have download speeds greater than Bittorrent C) I think most people actually WANT to pay a few bucks for a legitimate copy of a movie they're gonna watch once D) a bunch of other economic factors i don't wanna bother to type out, but basically I think they would make more money from this buisness model then they would loose from the small percentage who will continue to pirate, using files from the official site
Most importantly: E) All the movies you could possibly want are already available on the pirate sites, in your favorite format, despite DRM and legal smackdowns. Making movies available as legal downloads with no DRM isn't going to change that.
A missing wallet is noticed immediately, but someone looking at the password sticky in that wallet and then putting it back isn't. If someone then has your password, it hardly matters if they get to use for 30, 60 or 90 days, a few days will be enough to screw you royally.
Besides using 2 factor authentication, one of the better security practices I experienced was a login screen that prominently displayed your last login time and the computer from which you logged in last, highlighted in red if the terminal was different from the current one, or the last login time was outside your usual working hours. This was a high security environment, so people were told to (and did) check the information instead of just clicking right past it.
Pirated content: timely, convenient, a decent choice of formats and compression, unencumbered with DRM for offline watching on any device, a huge selection of both older and new material, easy to find and download. And also cheap, but I put that advantage last for a reason. Remember when we had AllOfMP3? At the time I said it made a great example for a proper legal online music shop. Maybe at some point the movie / TV industry will take note as well, and start offering their content in a more timely and friendly manner.
In this country, the official position used to be "provide your content in an acceptable manner or we won't prosecute people when they pirate it". They have since changed that policy but I still think it's a decent one. Specifically where it concerns geoblocked content. Not willing to sell here for some arbitrary reason? Then people are free to avail themselves of it as far as I am concerned, and that's precisely what I did for a while with ebooks. I'd try the regular stores, and if I hit a geoblock (which was very often during the early days of ebooks) I'd try a store that accepted PayPal (so I could just enter a bogus US address and bypass the block). But if that failed, TPB usually had what I wanted.
Copyright was intented to foster the spread of cultural works, and to encourage creators to keep on creating. Giving creators a chance to make some money with their craft is one way to encourage them thusly, but the reward is a means, not an end.
It's mostly about losing less time getting from and to the airport, losing less time getting through security, less time checking in and boarding, not having to show up crazy early just in case any of the previous processes delay you past your departure time, more comfort once on board, and often a more generous policy to refund or rebook unused tickets. Existing high speed rail already has those advantages, and Hyperloop offers an important additional advantage: there's no reason to build loads of stations along the way. Individual pods can simply be shunted off and stop at any 2 horse town, whereas regular high speed trains only make sense if the stops are spaced widely apart.
Riding those trains is sometimes fairly expensive though; unless Hyperloop can be built for less than regular high speed track, it'll be hard to offer rides at competitive prices.
I do share your scepticism about this doing anothing about congestion.
I'd rather see some cheaper models. I'm still shopping around for a good basic laptop for my wife. It doesn't need to be ultra thin (it won't travel much) or super stylish, just something basic to run Ubuntu with a browser and LibreOffice. Not having to pay the Redmont tax is an even bigger deal on a cheap laptop. But the selection of low end laptops seems to be rather a lot poorer then when I last bought one around 5 years ago. And so does the selection of laptops with Linux or without Windows, come to think of it.
If bloody rap albums occupy the #1 and #2 spots, the one thing that makes no sense is humanity.
They're just throwing hot buzzwords around, and "storytelling" is an attention grabber in certain business circles.
Speaking of attention grabbing, I'm glad that in my country this sort of thing isn't allowed. Electronic billboards are allowed, but there are some strict limits on what you can display on them, especially regarding animations or transitions.
Nothing lasts forever
That's just how it works. If your underlings fuck up, it's poor management on your part. If your cloud hosting partner fucks up, it's breach of contract and not your fault. Especially if you went with a well known vendor with all the right ISO stuff. You probably won't even be challenged much on the decision to go to the cloud in the first place, since that's now standard business practice. And to be honest, running your own data centre only makes sense if you know how to do that; I've had a few clients that saw a vast improvement in reliability and delivery after they moved to the cloud.
The intrinsic value of bitcoin is zero, same as paper money. Yet I'd still stop to pick up a €10 bill.
A more interesting question is what you can actually use BTC for. Not too long ago it was mostly useful to buy illegal drugs or guns online. These days you can also use it to pay for pizza; some online stores have begun accepting BTC but you get utterly raped on the exchange rate. The same more or less applies to transfering money: how often is it that people need to send money where more convenient and/or cheaper alternatives are not available? Very rarely I suspect. You can use it to pay ransomware operators (and I suspect some companies keep a few BTC on hand just for that). And it appears to be slowly adopted as a store of wealth; the long term price is still trending upwards, giving confidence in its longer term value. Demand for a safe haven might be what is actually driving the exchange rate upwards, but keep in mind that when conditions change and people start to liquidate their BTC, the price will plummet and your holdings will be wiped out in no time. By the way, the same is true for gold although to a lesser extent, but whether that is due to the nature of gold or simply the larger volume of the market I don't know.
Social media operators are not technology companies. They are advertising agencies and marketing data processors. Your understanding of technology is not going to help you assess the worth of these companies or the risk of investing in them.
Cops have a right to privacy too, to some extent. That doesn't mean the camera shouldn't be always on, but it does mean that there should be some rules and regulations to protect the privacy of everyone being filmed, including the cops themselves. Rules that determine when the footage may be used and for what purposes. For example: not to be used for job performance reviews, nor to check how many donuts each cop consumes on the job. Only to be used for training purposes with the consent of everyone in the video (or properly anonymized). Proper process for using the videos in after-action reviews. Access to the videos to be regulated and audited. Etc. The cops should be certain that if they harass someone or use undue violence, it will be on film and can be used against them. But they should also be certain that the videos will only be used as evidence in case of complaints or interventions where some violence occurred, and that they won't be done for publicly picking their nose or not being polite enough to a member of the public.
Most people just use their phones for those instant messages, short status updates or blog posts, and short emails. A physical keyboard may not be superior in this case; a "smart" virtual keyboard like Swype can be more convenient for short messages without a lot of special characters or unusual words. And a physical keyboard makes the phone bulkier. That's why most people prefer a virtual keyboard. It has nothing to do with advertising, it's about what people actually use their phones for.
So basically he'll be grounded (just like his drone)... I actually quite like that policy: refrain from completely upsetting his life in order to serve a relatively short sentence, just make him give up his free time for a bit, if the judge thinks community service is too lenient.
I'm often amazed at the size of servings in the US. When I go out, I usually have 2 courses, either a starter and a main course, or a main course and dessert. But in the US I sometimes struggled to finish a damn starter. When I travel there I usually order a main course and that'll be more than enough for me.
The secret is in the sauce. Do you make yours fresh from tomatoes and other veggies and herbs, or do you get the premade sauce in a jar? The latter comes laden with sugar and other crap.
It seems that he broke FAA rules (I'm not familiar with those, but most countries' rules for model aircraft don't allow them to be flown over crowds). Because of the resulting injury, a stiff sentence would be in order. But in this case, as opposed to violent crimes and the like, there is no benefit in removing this guy from society for a bit, other than making an example out of him. Wouldn't justice be better served with community service? Especially since I'd think the guy is also on the hook to pay a substantial amount in damages to the girl, even if he's only ordered to pay actual damages.