Why anyone who has even a little knowledge and self-respect would buy a phone launched by a carrier in this era is beyond me. I will excuse people who cannot afford better or don't know better.
As public utilities, history (and experience) shows that carriers are nothing but businesses designed to get their cut of profit on a necessary service, with no sense of responsibility or care about the product, customer experience, or even technical interest in developing anything beyond the bare minimum necessary to carry the basic service without their network crashing (or customers complaining / shaming them above a certain level).
They are not paid to invest in good products, and it shows. Ever heard of an AT&T or Verizon chief product designer? No you haven't, because there is none.
And that's why you get phones that are unsupported 1 year after product launch, have the worst user interface ever conceived by humans, are ugly as fuck, and so insecure that you'd be grateful for Facebook to manage the privacy protections. Enjoy sending off emails with the signature "Sent from my 4G LTE Verizon Droid".
By the way, just before anyone takes this scant article too far and starts yelling at their companies' bulletin boards, classified ads, etc:
Finding roommates for a shared housing situation does not fall under the Fair Housing Act's provisions. It has been ruled a sufficiently personal and private matter by the courts that people are allowed to discriminate when they list to find a roommate.
Yeah, I think he meant if the primary UI requires a stylus then it sucks. This, supposedly, is turning an iPad into a *more* useful drawing, editing tool.
The "technology" that caught the bomber has been around for >30 years. Stores have been recording video and cops have been using it since your grandparents by this point.
The Google search history on the guys computer was used after he was caught. By triangulation of his cell phone, I think the author kind of means, "the fact that most people now carry cell phones", which can be triangulated.
Nothing about this is implausible to have happened 30 years ago with some moron using the pay phone system periodically instead. Makes me believe that the stupidity of criminals, and old fashioned police work based on our *current* laws are the solution to calls for increasingly invasive privacy monitoring and backdoors specially (ahem) for law enforcement.
The site's content is straight out of Google Translate engine and smacks of someone in a foreign country being hit with a lawsuit and putting up this content to satisfy the terms of the settlement. Goodbye, keepvid.com, as you get forgotten in the search rankings.
This is not good for anyone, as the slew of economists and economic reporters have been putting out there for the last few weeks.
But more than that it's every day Americans who are going to be paying for it. 20-30% more on every electronic device, gadget, previously untariffed good that was imported, all to do what? Temporarily prop up industries / companies here in the US that won't significantly change their employment levels, capital investment in manufacturing, or supply chains in time until these tariffs are lifted?
So, live in a community which falls under the control of a company which is able to monitor and judge you based on what you do, say, visit, watch, associate with, and has the right to terminate you at will for violating whatever unspoken values they enforce? And is essentially run by teenagers who suddenly got rich, powerful, and more responsibility than they knew how to handle?
Wait, and it comes with a 15% discount on their products? Sounds great!
I view UBI as just another fad in the recent trend of America's liberal thinking (which, by the way, has been taken over by almost teenage-/child-like levels of logic) that seeks to equalize all outcomes for all people, end suffering, poverty, and eliminate inequity at every stage of life. Damn anyone who thinks otherwise or wonders about how it will work (and be accused of spouting hate speech if you disagree). This is getting ridiculous, and is by the way, impossible. And mind you, I'm generally liberal myself.
UBI is the most blatant example among many proposals that is very clearly a taking of $ from the highest earners, and giving it to the lowest earners. How else could it work? If you have a closed system where the income distribution is even linear up the scale, the only way UBI works is if the top subsidize the bottom. So it's a different form of progressive tax.
However, in this case, instead of subsidizing the means to be productive and earn a living, you simply give the people cash and assume they'll work it out for themselves. (For those imagining we would keep the social services, get real -- would we really give them cash *and* the social services too? Isn't UBI envisioned as a way to reduce social services? If social services worked, why do UBI?)
Anyway, aside from the possibility somehow that corporations are the ones taxed and not individuals -- the long term question is: what kind of society does this produce, if brought to its conclusion? Some kind of Star Trek utopia where everyone's free to pursue higher, loftier goals for humanity? Or, more realistically, some kind of even more unbalanced state where the very few people at the top produce wealth, the middle class is hollowed out, and the lowest earners don't have to work? Has anyone studied the incentives that this produces, and whether it makes our society better?
I think that is lacking in these idealized proposals.
The city doesn't need to ban currency mining. They need to fix their electricity tariff (rates).
If currency miners find that it's economical to spend electricity like this, it means that the city is not charging commercial / residential customers the appropriate amounts when they exceed reasonable usage levels. They need to fix that. It probably means that a bunch of other things about their electricity and water and government services are priced incorrectly / being abused as well.
What can you do? All these local/town governments were set up with rules dating from 50 years ago, and they've never changed or adapted since.
Again, I will just state that the reason we (maybe secretly) take so much satisfaction / schadenfreude at this story is that someone who was so hyped and the darling of Silicon Valley got so much funding and attention. While others who toil away on good ideas, without nearly so many connections and silver spoons, struggle to even get 1 minute of air time with the kind of funders and backers that she got.
Separately, I hope that they absolutely nail and jail Sunny Balwani, who threatened and intimidated whistleblowing employees with their careers for exposing the massive fraud that Theranos was.
Finally, we should be thankful that the SEC and agencies like DHHS and CMMS actually still have some teeth and reputability to follow through on issues like this and have not been totally gutted. Imagine 100 years ago when hucksters like this were touting every fake medicine under the sun and people were actually grateful for public-serving regulation. The order from CMMS to Theranos actually essentially said, "You are in immediate jeopardy of violating the law and must provide proof that you're reversing the harm caused by your inaccurate / fraudulent medical test results. Simply closing your lab will not remove this jeopardy." Thank god for rules.
I'm surprised that the researchers didn't start to run into university politics before they published their result -- namely, that the University is using data to segregate students and preferentially help some students and not others.
Many a data science / predictive algorithm study has been sunk because university administrators think it singles out people, even if it is to help them.
Look, don't blame Airbnb, Uber or whatever company happened to come along in this moment, for all your woes. What you're actually mad at is the absolute failure of our governments, public institutions, and elected officials to adapt their services and approaches (or be allowed to do this by a public that seemingly wants to vote by popularity contest rather than efficacy of government).
Get mad at your fellow city residents who only vote in and approve of city ordinances that let housing stagnate, reward people who've just been here a long time and nothing else, foster complacency and lack of quality in taxi regulation, or believe that voters should have a say in everything and vote out people who happen to implement one rule they don't like.
Get mad at policymakers who are too distracted with getting re-elected and resisting PAC money to actually focus on governing and making reasonable policies, leaving our basic infrastructure to crumble while they go after higher profile symbolic issues.
Be mad at yourself, and this system we thought was the best in the world, but actually needs maintenance and dedication to make it work properly.
Youtube / Google brought this on themselves -- they got so rich and full of ideals (and swept up in the fad of corporations becoming social change agents) that they tried to turn a workplace into some utopian college campus where all ideas are free to be debated on company servers. It's a workplace. Stop debating the world's problems. trying to "make the world a better place", and do work, for godssake. Maybe, by the way, this is a signal that Google has a few too many people with free time on their hands to get themselves into trouble.
The current political climate is that the law incoherently calls for contradictory inputs and outcomes (and frankly from my point of view, is poorly written), and anyone who opens their mouth or makes an overt deal to call out any of the inconsistencies or even implement the law can get sued, from either side. So the smarter choice is to shutup about it while you're at work, advocate for change as your personal hobby at home, and leave your employer out of it. There's a reason the tired old rule exists about not talking politics or religion in polite company.
Maybe this cautionary tale will help people remember (bosses and employees) to focus on work, and not drag everyone or invite social / political action where it's inappropriate, and remember that you work at will for a corporation that may not have your interests at heart.
I wonder whether it can be explained by the gut biome taking a large role in the actual metabolism of food consumed? There's all the stories lately about how the composition and behavior of the gut bacteria actually favor/prevent people's efforts to change their diet and effects on weight. Would make sense then that one's own DNA has less to do with it.
Lots of people seem to misunderstand what Silicon Valley is.
Silicon Valley is not much different than North Dakota and the oil/gas industry, where lots of young men go to earn big bucks for jobs that need some certain skills and are in demand compared to the average population. The housing prices are ridiculous there too and the aren't many women in oil/gas fields because they're sensible enough not to want to do that kind of work.
Silicon valley just looks a little bit nicer and appears like a place where you might try to raise a family, but it's actually almost as hard and unpleasant as trying to raise a family in North Dakota.
Don't be surprised that things aren't as good as they seem. There's a reason people get paid a lot for living and working in with places. Few things come for free in this life.
Redirect your anger towards the incompetent governments of the cities around the Bay Area, and the already-got-theirs citizens of these cities who choose to do nothing about the growing numbers of people who want to move here.
It's the inability of government to handle these problems (and the lack of leadership to tell citizens they're going to have to experience change) that you're seeing companies step in to take the role of transportation, education, social welfare for their employees. Where governments let their infrastructure and civic fabric fall apart because of complacent old people, companies have taken on the responsibility.
All the people who protest these giant companies causing traffic, gentrification, etc... Companies are providing jobs and skills and livelihoods to people, things that everyone wants. You should thank them and their employees for keeping our economy going. And criticize the people who refuse to admit change in their neighborhoods, saying that "we don't want displacement" or "we need to preserve the character of our neighborhood". Well, fuck that. Things change, and no one ever promised you that the place you moved into you'd never have to move out.
Everyone reflexively jumps on the bandwagon of displaced elderly or gentrified neighborhoods, because they're easy to see. But who advocates for the thousands of young people who come here and have to pay $2000 just for a single room? Your kids, your classmates, who come here in search of having the American dream too? Sorry if I don't have sympathy for the "locals". The lives of the young professionals who come here are far more impacted by the cost of living and lack of housing than anyone who's already been here for 20 years and got theirs (and pulled up the ladder behind them).
Sorry, people. If you're basically trying to solve the problem by forcing the entities you know to stop gathering data that's publicly out there, you've lost already. The entities who collect it will just be the ones you don't know...
It's not like the data isn't out there any more. And then governments, when they want/need it, will buy it from that megacorporation that did manage to gather the data without your protests.
You (collectively) wanted stylish, small, and cheap. The laws of manufacturing and hardware design don't allow you to just throw "easily repairable" into the equation without paying for it somewhere else.
Everyone should really read this article to know the kind of bullshit that these apps are inserting into the restaurant business. You may love the convenience, but they're 0-value adding middlemen that are sucking the restaurant dry: http://tribecacitizen.com/2016...
Seamless, for example, not only takes a commission on every purchase (even if you would just call up the restaurant on an ongoing basis, and not being a new customer) -- the telephone numbers you sometimes see for a restaurant are actually Seamless's number, piped through their system to the restaurant. And they monitor transactions to make sure they're getting their cut.
Technology is great and all, but you should realize the ways that people use it to take advantage of those who aren't the masters of it.
Well, maybe they should do something like give everyone the equivalent of a date of birth at the end of the username, so that people can be distinguished even if they have the same core name.
Otherwise, as time goes on, won't we start to run out of names if you can never reuse them?
How do we deal with this problem for actual human beings who have similar names?
Well, in this case the depth of knowledge is not a safety issue, as it might be in someone's fireman example above. At most, it provides customers with a sense of confidence that their driver knows where they're going -- which some people value more, some people less.
I would say, let customers decide whether this knowledge is worth it by giving them the choice. Otherwise, it's a barrier to entry to a restricted group of drivers so that they enjoy a monopoly and the power to price their taxi services accordingly.
Why would Accuweather (the company who sent this) want the liability and burden of being responsible for (or even touching anything to do with) sending a life-or-death tsunami warning? Would you, as a company say "ok, the National Weather Service sends these things out, let's let them handle this the whole way"? Why would you think it good to take on that role?
Slashdot Mirror
Why anyone who has even a little knowledge and self-respect would buy a phone launched by a carrier in this era is beyond me. I will excuse people who cannot afford better or don't know better.
As public utilities, history (and experience) shows that carriers are nothing but businesses designed to get their cut of profit on a necessary service, with no sense of responsibility or care about the product, customer experience, or even technical interest in developing anything beyond the bare minimum necessary to carry the basic service without their network crashing (or customers complaining / shaming them above a certain level).
They are not paid to invest in good products, and it shows. Ever heard of an AT&T or Verizon chief product designer? No you haven't, because there is none.
And that's why you get phones that are unsupported 1 year after product launch, have the worst user interface ever conceived by humans, are ugly as fuck, and so insecure that you'd be grateful for Facebook to manage the privacy protections. Enjoy sending off emails with the signature "Sent from my 4G LTE Verizon Droid".
By the way, just before anyone takes this scant article too far and starts yelling at their companies' bulletin boards, classified ads, etc:
Finding roommates for a shared housing situation does not fall under the Fair Housing Act's provisions. It has been ruled a sufficiently personal and private matter by the courts that people are allowed to discriminate when they list to find a roommate.
However, I believe it only extends to male/female, not other protected characteristics. ( https://www.craigslist.org/abo... )
Yeah, I think he meant if the primary UI requires a stylus then it sucks. This, supposedly, is turning an iPad into a *more* useful drawing, editing tool.
Does anyone have a report or link to details of the findings that led to the delay decision?
There are like 5000 people working on this thing and I would think they have to issue a report to explain a significant delay.
The "technology" that caught the bomber has been around for >30 years. Stores have been recording video and cops have been using it since your grandparents by this point.
The Google search history on the guys computer was used after he was caught. By triangulation of his cell phone, I think the author kind of means, "the fact that most people now carry cell phones", which can be triangulated.
Nothing about this is implausible to have happened 30 years ago with some moron using the pay phone system periodically instead. Makes me believe that the stupidity of criminals, and old fashioned police work based on our *current* laws are the solution to calls for increasingly invasive privacy monitoring and backdoors specially (ahem) for law enforcement.
The site's content is straight out of Google Translate engine and smacks of someone in a foreign country being hit with a lawsuit and putting up this content to satisfy the terms of the settlement. Goodbye, keepvid.com, as you get forgotten in the search rankings.
This is not good for anyone, as the slew of economists and economic reporters have been putting out there for the last few weeks.
But more than that it's every day Americans who are going to be paying for it. 20-30% more on every electronic device, gadget, previously untariffed good that was imported, all to do what? Temporarily prop up industries / companies here in the US that won't significantly change their employment levels, capital investment in manufacturing, or supply chains in time until these tariffs are lifted?
"Aleksandr Spectre"? Are you fucking kidding me? Was it so cartoonishly evil that Facebook's legal and ethics team didn't believe it was real?
So, live in a community which falls under the control of a company which is able to monitor and judge you based on what you do, say, visit, watch, associate with, and has the right to terminate you at will for violating whatever unspoken values they enforce? And is essentially run by teenagers who suddenly got rich, powerful, and more responsibility than they knew how to handle?
Wait, and it comes with a 15% discount on their products? Sounds great!
I view UBI as just another fad in the recent trend of America's liberal thinking (which, by the way, has been taken over by almost teenage-/child-like levels of logic) that seeks to equalize all outcomes for all people, end suffering, poverty, and eliminate inequity at every stage of life. Damn anyone who thinks otherwise or wonders about how it will work (and be accused of spouting hate speech if you disagree). This is getting ridiculous, and is by the way, impossible. And mind you, I'm generally liberal myself.
UBI is the most blatant example among many proposals that is very clearly a taking of $ from the highest earners, and giving it to the lowest earners. How else could it work? If you have a closed system where the income distribution is even linear up the scale, the only way UBI works is if the top subsidize the bottom. So it's a different form of progressive tax.
However, in this case, instead of subsidizing the means to be productive and earn a living, you simply give the people cash and assume they'll work it out for themselves. (For those imagining we would keep the social services, get real -- would we really give them cash *and* the social services too? Isn't UBI envisioned as a way to reduce social services? If social services worked, why do UBI?)
Anyway, aside from the possibility somehow that corporations are the ones taxed and not individuals -- the long term question is: what kind of society does this produce, if brought to its conclusion? Some kind of Star Trek utopia where everyone's free to pursue higher, loftier goals for humanity? Or, more realistically, some kind of even more unbalanced state where the very few people at the top produce wealth, the middle class is hollowed out, and the lowest earners don't have to work? Has anyone studied the incentives that this produces, and whether it makes our society better?
I think that is lacking in these idealized proposals.
The city doesn't need to ban currency mining. They need to fix their electricity tariff (rates).
If currency miners find that it's economical to spend electricity like this, it means that the city is not charging commercial / residential customers the appropriate amounts when they exceed reasonable usage levels. They need to fix that. It probably means that a bunch of other things about their electricity and water and government services are priced incorrectly / being abused as well.
What can you do? All these local/town governments were set up with rules dating from 50 years ago, and they've never changed or adapted since.
Why don't they just cut all electricity, plumbing, and all other services so people are sure to reflect on the simple joy of life?
Again, I will just state that the reason we (maybe secretly) take so much satisfaction / schadenfreude at this story is that someone who was so hyped and the darling of Silicon Valley got so much funding and attention. While others who toil away on good ideas, without nearly so many connections and silver spoons, struggle to even get 1 minute of air time with the kind of funders and backers that she got.
Separately, I hope that they absolutely nail and jail Sunny Balwani, who threatened and intimidated whistleblowing employees with their careers for exposing the massive fraud that Theranos was.
Finally, we should be thankful that the SEC and agencies like DHHS and CMMS actually still have some teeth and reputability to follow through on issues like this and have not been totally gutted. Imagine 100 years ago when hucksters like this were touting every fake medicine under the sun and people were actually grateful for public-serving regulation. The order from CMMS to Theranos actually essentially said, "You are in immediate jeopardy of violating the law and must provide proof that you're reversing the harm caused by your inaccurate / fraudulent medical test results. Simply closing your lab will not remove this jeopardy." Thank god for rules.
I'm surprised that the researchers didn't start to run into university politics before they published their result -- namely, that the University is using data to segregate students and preferentially help some students and not others.
Many a data science / predictive algorithm study has been sunk because university administrators think it singles out people, even if it is to help them.
Look, don't blame Airbnb, Uber or whatever company happened to come along in this moment, for all your woes. What you're actually mad at is the absolute failure of our governments, public institutions, and elected officials to adapt their services and approaches (or be allowed to do this by a public that seemingly wants to vote by popularity contest rather than efficacy of government).
Get mad at your fellow city residents who only vote in and approve of city ordinances that let housing stagnate, reward people who've just been here a long time and nothing else, foster complacency and lack of quality in taxi regulation, or believe that voters should have a say in everything and vote out people who happen to implement one rule they don't like.
Get mad at policymakers who are too distracted with getting re-elected and resisting PAC money to actually focus on governing and making reasonable policies, leaving our basic infrastructure to crumble while they go after higher profile symbolic issues.
Be mad at yourself, and this system we thought was the best in the world, but actually needs maintenance and dedication to make it work properly.
Companies are just the messengers.
Youtube / Google brought this on themselves -- they got so rich and full of ideals (and swept up in the fad of corporations becoming social change agents) that they tried to turn a workplace into some utopian college campus where all ideas are free to be debated on company servers. It's a workplace. Stop debating the world's problems. trying to "make the world a better place", and do work, for godssake. Maybe, by the way, this is a signal that Google has a few too many people with free time on their hands to get themselves into trouble.
The current political climate is that the law incoherently calls for contradictory inputs and outcomes (and frankly from my point of view, is poorly written), and anyone who opens their mouth or makes an overt deal to call out any of the inconsistencies or even implement the law can get sued, from either side. So the smarter choice is to shutup about it while you're at work, advocate for change as your personal hobby at home, and leave your employer out of it. There's a reason the tired old rule exists about not talking politics or religion in polite company.
Maybe this cautionary tale will help people remember (bosses and employees) to focus on work, and not drag everyone or invite social / political action where it's inappropriate, and remember that you work at will for a corporation that may not have your interests at heart.
I wonder whether it can be explained by the gut biome taking a large role in the actual metabolism of food consumed? There's all the stories lately about how the composition and behavior of the gut bacteria actually favor/prevent people's efforts to change their diet and effects on weight. Would make sense then that one's own DNA has less to do with it.
Lots of people seem to misunderstand what Silicon Valley is.
Silicon Valley is not much different than North Dakota and the oil/gas industry, where lots of young men go to earn big bucks for jobs that need some certain skills and are in demand compared to the average population. The housing prices are ridiculous there too and the aren't many women in oil/gas fields because they're sensible enough not to want to do that kind of work.
Silicon valley just looks a little bit nicer and appears like a place where you might try to raise a family, but it's actually almost as hard and unpleasant as trying to raise a family in North Dakota.
Don't be surprised that things aren't as good as they seem. There's a reason people get paid a lot for living and working in with places. Few things come for free in this life.
Redirect your anger towards the incompetent governments of the cities around the Bay Area, and the already-got-theirs citizens of these cities who choose to do nothing about the growing numbers of people who want to move here.
/rant.
It's the inability of government to handle these problems (and the lack of leadership to tell citizens they're going to have to experience change) that you're seeing companies step in to take the role of transportation, education, social welfare for their employees. Where governments let their infrastructure and civic fabric fall apart because of complacent old people, companies have taken on the responsibility.
All the people who protest these giant companies causing traffic, gentrification, etc... Companies are providing jobs and skills and livelihoods to people, things that everyone wants. You should thank them and their employees for keeping our economy going. And criticize the people who refuse to admit change in their neighborhoods, saying that "we don't want displacement" or "we need to preserve the character of our neighborhood". Well, fuck that. Things change, and no one ever promised you that the place you moved into you'd never have to move out.
Everyone reflexively jumps on the bandwagon of displaced elderly or gentrified neighborhoods, because they're easy to see. But who advocates for the thousands of young people who come here and have to pay $2000 just for a single room? Your kids, your classmates, who come here in search of having the American dream too? Sorry if I don't have sympathy for the "locals". The lives of the young professionals who come here are far more impacted by the cost of living and lack of housing than anyone who's already been here for 20 years and got theirs (and pulled up the ladder behind them).
Figure out whose side you're really on.
Sorry, people. If you're basically trying to solve the problem by forcing the entities you know to stop gathering data that's publicly out there, you've lost already. The entities who collect it will just be the ones you don't know...
It's not like the data isn't out there any more. And then governments, when they want/need it, will buy it from that megacorporation that did manage to gather the data without your protests.
You (collectively) wanted stylish, small, and cheap. The laws of manufacturing and hardware design don't allow you to just throw "easily repairable" into the equation without paying for it somewhere else.
Everyone should really read this article to know the kind of bullshit that these apps are inserting into the restaurant business. You may love the convenience, but they're 0-value adding middlemen that are sucking the restaurant dry: http://tribecacitizen.com/2016...
Seamless, for example, not only takes a commission on every purchase (even if you would just call up the restaurant on an ongoing basis, and not being a new customer) -- the telephone numbers you sometimes see for a restaurant are actually Seamless's number, piped through their system to the restaurant. And they monitor transactions to make sure they're getting their cut.
Technology is great and all, but you should realize the ways that people use it to take advantage of those who aren't the masters of it.
Well, maybe they should do something like give everyone the equivalent of a date of birth at the end of the username, so that people can be distinguished even if they have the same core name.
Otherwise, as time goes on, won't we start to run out of names if you can never reuse them?
How do we deal with this problem for actual human beings who have similar names?
Well, in this case the depth of knowledge is not a safety issue, as it might be in someone's fireman example above. At most, it provides customers with a sense of confidence that their driver knows where they're going -- which some people value more, some people less.
I would say, let customers decide whether this knowledge is worth it by giving them the choice. Otherwise, it's a barrier to entry to a restricted group of drivers so that they enjoy a monopoly and the power to price their taxi services accordingly.
Why would Accuweather (the company who sent this) want the liability and burden of being responsible for (or even touching anything to do with) sending a life-or-death tsunami warning? Would you, as a company say "ok, the National Weather Service sends these things out, let's let them handle this the whole way"? Why would you think it good to take on that role?