Isn't this a perfect example of monopolistic behaviour? Use your large size to sell a service at zero or even below cost to drive anyone not using your service out of business?
No, at the end of the first series they defeat Sauron. It's the second series where they have to defeat someone even greater. However, Tolkien has that covered because Sauron was only a servant of Melkor so it will only be the third series when they have to get really creative!
To take a cherished series that already has a complete movie adaption?
I sort of see your point but the films skipped over large chunks of story (e.g. Saruman in the Shire), completely changed characters and rewrote events and locations so the timeline became impossible. If the TV adaption was more like the BBC radio series and less like the Hollywood action film trilogy it would be something quite different...although it's still probably a bit too soon after the films.
We are talking about very different things. You are talking about giving IT support which doesn't usually involve more than two people: the person needing help and the person giving it. Meetings are about getting large groups of people together and in fact, the need to have physical meetings is for exactly the opposite reason. It is to ensure that people working are communicating to others what they are doing to ensure that there is no overlap and so that their results can be incorporated into others' work.
These investigators were hired by the same board that hired a team of executives who had no clue about computer security and apparently had no idea that one of the largest failures of computer security ever had occurred several days earlier. With that sort of hiring record, I'm not sure I'd trust anyone they hired.
No, this is not a pointy-haired boss point of view. I'm a professor working in a large international collaboration and while we do have regular phone/video meetings we also arrange to all meet in person a few times a year because being physically present increases both the communication bandwidth but also the ease of communication which means that things get discussed which would not if the only meetings were virtual.
Given that the cost of travel to these meetings means that we have less money for grad students, postdocs and equipment shows that the majority think that there is a clear benefit to these meetings and with the state of modern air travel there is no way you can accuse us of "just liking to take trips" - academic grants all require cheap, economy class travel (and even if they didn't most of us would because every dollar saved is more for people and equipment) so many of us now hate getting on a plane! We use virtual meetings where possible to reduce travel costs and avoid air travel but there are somethings for which you need a physical meeting.
So technically if this really is the "discovery of the century" you could also accurately describe it as the "discovery of the millennium" too. Someone clearly missed the opportunity for maximum hype.
If this is important for Universities, maybe they can take some of all that lovely guaranteed student loan money and direct it towards salaries
A university is never going to be able to compete on salary with companies like Apple. Instead universities compete on interest. You can work on groundbreaking, curiosity-driven research that industry usually cannot afford to take a risk on. For example, I'm a particle physicist and get to work at places like CERN trying to understand the fundamental nature of matter while my brother, who is also a physicist, builds better hair dryers. He earns far more than I do and has a huge research budget but it's nowhere near enough to make me even vaguely consider a career change. The reward for my job is not
However, in a few cases like AI the upside potential is so huge that companies like Apple can take a risk on these types of project which, with the higher salaries they can offer, will make them irresistible. I don't really see how this is a problem though. It might make things harder in the short term for university researchers but in the longer term, it will mean more students choose to take CompSci giving them a larger supply of students so that they can cope with losing a few.
So to be clear, you believe the Union was wrong in the civil war?
So to be clear you think the US was wrong to declare independence from the UK? Each situation is different and if we look at historical situations where this has happened nobody will think that those declaring independence were always wrong or always right: the context matters.
Wow, I had no idea that extrasolar object were so rare. I thought it was pretty common.
Since "extrasolar" means outside the solar system every star, except the sun, we see is an "extrasolar object" and even if you exclude stars for some reason the exoplanets observed would still count. Then there are all the cosmic rays which are extrasolar objects too. So what you can say is that it is the first non-subatomic, extrasolar object observed in the solar system.
The gradual change of your biometrics over time is the least problematical of the issues with biometrics. While this is annoying it is easy to fix by rescanning the information after first proving who you are by some other, manual, means.
The problem with biometrics is that if my information gets hacked the only way I can change it is via surgery and I'm simply not willing to have eye surgery to change my iris if my iris pattern is hacked when I can change a password simply by thinking of a new one.
If I don't have a phone and laptop on my destination, the aircraft might as well never have taken off.
So put them in your cabin baggage. It's safer AND you are far more likely to have them when you get there since checked bags don't always arrive on time. They are only wanting to ban laptops in checked baggage.
It might be mixed but it would be both honest and completely consistent with what they already do. They know nothing about the long-term reliability of the products which they do recommend so it would be completely consistent to recommend or not based on what they can test and then make a comment on "be aware of past history of reliability from this company" (either good or bad).
As long as they explain their reasoning, I think not recommending it at this time is a good alternative to waiting for a year's worth of repair data...
Not when their reasoning is just "Microsoft has had problems with reliability in the past so we refuse to recommend anything from them". The reliability of a product is not known until it has had a year of repair data by which time the product will be out of date. So it is fine for them to say that "like every review, we have no way to test longer-term product reliability and MS has had problems with this in the past". It is not reasonable to say that we refuse to recommend any product from a company because in the past they have had some issues with reliability. Do they refuse to recommend Samsung Galaxy products because they may burst into flames?
It is important to be able to travel with your cell phone and laptop on either checked or carry-on luggage as you need
It is also important that the plane does not catch fire mid-flight. As an air passenger I tend to rate this higher in importance than your preference to put a laptop in a checked bag. You can still take a laptop with you in carry-on so it's no different from something like a pen-knife which you can only take in checked luggage and not in a carry-on.
The problem with this is that the costs will probably not be large enough to motivate a significant change in behaviour because hackers go after the details of customers not the money of the company being hacked. A faster and better way to do this would be to have legislated statutory minimum damages for each individual's details which are hacked. Say $10k for sensitive data like a credit card number with lower amounts for just an email address or name etc.
This will immediately establish the financial cost for being hacked and ensure that those most at the risk of damage from the hack have at least some compensation without having to go through the huge effort and expense of suing the company.
The Encyclopedia Britannica in its prime was written for the adult general reader and not the specialist scholar or professional
The Encyclopedia Britannica was useless. Many of the articles were far too brief (especially those on British history which was bizarre given its name) being equivalent to the first few paragraphs of the Wikipedia article linked by the OP. The technical articles which did go into more depth were just like the Wikipedia article - extremely hard to understand without the right maths background. So regardless of what their aims were they effectively just like Wikipedia but with some articles being just the introductory text of the Wikipedia article.
The Wikipedia article linked is exactly what you would expect from an encyclopedia entry. A few paragraphs of introduction about what the electroweak force is, the people who wrote the theory and the experimental evidence which backed it up. Then it launches into a more detailed description of what EW interactions are, EW symmetry breaking etc. which has to be at a more technical level because otherwise you are leaving out information which is not what an encyclopedia is supposed to do.
If you want explanations of topics which are accessible to the general public then you do not go out and read an encyclopedia you go and read a book designed to simplify complex topics enough that non-scientists can digest them. So if you want a general public level explanation of EW interactions on the web go to something like the particle adventure and they'll have what you want there.
Global Warming and Mass Extinction, are slow disasters
That depends on what causes the mass extinction or global climate change. A large asteroid impact can cause a mass extinction and a global shift in temperatures on a very short timescale. Similarly, large volcanic eruptions can cool the climate very rapidly causing crops to fail etc.
Why would any professional using Windows Workstation move to Linux? All of the productivity professional applications run on the Windows platform.
It depends on your profession. Lots of scientists and mathematicians use Linux on their desktop because their productivity professional applications - like LaTeX, Python, analysis code etc. run better under Linux.
Actually, it would be a lot more effective if the people who had their details exposed were the heads of major financial companies. These are the people who choose to share our details with companies like Equifax and perhaps if they have their own personal details exposed they may be a lot more careful with whom they share our data in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this a perfect example of monopolistic behaviour? Use your large size to sell a service at zero or even below cost to drive anyone not using your service out of business?
No, at the end of the first series they defeat Sauron. It's the second series where they have to defeat someone even greater. However, Tolkien has that covered because Sauron was only a servant of Melkor so it will only be the third series when they have to get really creative!
To take a cherished series that already has a complete movie adaption?
I sort of see your point but the films skipped over large chunks of story (e.g. Saruman in the Shire), completely changed characters and rewrote events and locations so the timeline became impossible. If the TV adaption was more like the BBC radio series and less like the Hollywood action film trilogy it would be something quite different...although it's still probably a bit too soon after the films.
Found the person who has never tried to communicate complex topics involving maths via email.
We are talking about very different things. You are talking about giving IT support which doesn't usually involve more than two people: the person needing help and the person giving it. Meetings are about getting large groups of people together and in fact, the need to have physical meetings is for exactly the opposite reason. It is to ensure that people working are communicating to others what they are doing to ensure that there is no overlap and so that their results can be incorporated into others' work.
What fucking CIO wants to be kept in the dark about something like that?
One that would like a chance to offload some shares before they tank?
These investigators were hired by the same board that hired a team of executives who had no clue about computer security and apparently had no idea that one of the largest failures of computer security ever had occurred several days earlier. With that sort of hiring record, I'm not sure I'd trust anyone they hired.
No, this is not a pointy-haired boss point of view. I'm a professor working in a large international collaboration and while we do have regular phone/video meetings we also arrange to all meet in person a few times a year because being physically present increases both the communication bandwidth but also the ease of communication which means that things get discussed which would not if the only meetings were virtual.
Given that the cost of travel to these meetings means that we have less money for grad students, postdocs and equipment shows that the majority think that there is a clear benefit to these meetings and with the state of modern air travel there is no way you can accuse us of "just liking to take trips" - academic grants all require cheap, economy class travel (and even if they didn't most of us would because every dollar saved is more for people and equipment) so many of us now hate getting on a plane! We use virtual meetings where possible to reduce travel costs and avoid air travel but there are somethings for which you need a physical meeting.
So technically if this really is the "discovery of the century" you could also accurately describe it as the "discovery of the millennium" too. Someone clearly missed the opportunity for maximum hype.
If this is important for Universities, maybe they can take some of all that lovely guaranteed student loan money and direct it towards salaries
A university is never going to be able to compete on salary with companies like Apple. Instead universities compete on interest. You can work on groundbreaking, curiosity-driven research that industry usually cannot afford to take a risk on. For example, I'm a particle physicist and get to work at places like CERN trying to understand the fundamental nature of matter while my brother, who is also a physicist, builds better hair dryers. He earns far more than I do and has a huge research budget but it's nowhere near enough to make me even vaguely consider a career change. The reward for my job is not
However, in a few cases like AI the upside potential is so huge that companies like Apple can take a risk on these types of project which, with the higher salaries they can offer, will make them irresistible. I don't really see how this is a problem though. It might make things harder in the short term for university researchers but in the longer term, it will mean more students choose to take CompSci giving them a larger supply of students so that they can cope with losing a few.
This, there is a lot of phrases and words in languages that are grammatically incorrect...
I hope the irony was deliberate.
So to be clear, you believe the Union was wrong in the civil war?
So to be clear you think the US was wrong to declare independence from the UK? Each situation is different and if we look at historical situations where this has happened nobody will think that those declaring independence were always wrong or always right: the context matters.
Wow, I had no idea that extrasolar object were so rare. I thought it was pretty common.
Since "extrasolar" means outside the solar system every star, except the sun, we see is an "extrasolar object" and even if you exclude stars for some reason the exoplanets observed would still count. Then there are all the cosmic rays which are extrasolar objects too. So what you can say is that it is the first non-subatomic, extrasolar object observed in the solar system.
The gradual change of your biometrics over time is the least problematical of the issues with biometrics. While this is annoying it is easy to fix by rescanning the information after first proving who you are by some other, manual, means.
The problem with biometrics is that if my information gets hacked the only way I can change it is via surgery and I'm simply not willing to have eye surgery to change my iris if my iris pattern is hacked when I can change a password simply by thinking of a new one.
If I don't have a phone and laptop on my destination, the aircraft might as well never have taken off.
So put them in your cabin baggage. It's safer AND you are far more likely to have them when you get there since checked bags don't always arrive on time. They are only wanting to ban laptops in checked baggage.
It might be mixed but it would be both honest and completely consistent with what they already do. They know nothing about the long-term reliability of the products which they do recommend so it would be completely consistent to recommend or not based on what they can test and then make a comment on "be aware of past history of reliability from this company" (either good or bad).
As long as they explain their reasoning, I think not recommending it at this time is a good alternative to waiting for a year's worth of repair data...
Not when their reasoning is just "Microsoft has had problems with reliability in the past so we refuse to recommend anything from them". The reliability of a product is not known until it has had a year of repair data by which time the product will be out of date. So it is fine for them to say that "like every review, we have no way to test longer-term product reliability and MS has had problems with this in the past". It is not reasonable to say that we refuse to recommend any product from a company because in the past they have had some issues with reliability. Do they refuse to recommend Samsung Galaxy products because they may burst into flames?
It is important to be able to travel with your cell phone and laptop on either checked or carry-on luggage as you need
It is also important that the plane does not catch fire mid-flight. As an air passenger I tend to rate this higher in importance than your preference to put a laptop in a checked bag. You can still take a laptop with you in carry-on so it's no different from something like a pen-knife which you can only take in checked luggage and not in a carry-on.
The problem with this is that the costs will probably not be large enough to motivate a significant change in behaviour because hackers go after the details of customers not the money of the company being hacked. A faster and better way to do this would be to have legislated statutory minimum damages for each individual's details which are hacked. Say $10k for sensitive data like a credit card number with lower amounts for just an email address or name etc.
This will immediately establish the financial cost for being hacked and ensure that those most at the risk of damage from the hack have at least some compensation without having to go through the huge effort and expense of suing the company.
The Encyclopedia Britannica in its prime was written for the adult general reader and not the specialist scholar or professional
The Encyclopedia Britannica was useless. Many of the articles were far too brief (especially those on British history which was bizarre given its name) being equivalent to the first few paragraphs of the Wikipedia article linked by the OP. The technical articles which did go into more depth were just like the Wikipedia article - extremely hard to understand without the right maths background. So regardless of what their aims were they effectively just like Wikipedia but with some articles being just the introductory text of the Wikipedia article.
I'm sure that will have no impact on the final product.
Of course not because all the best programmers avoid commenting their code.
The Wikipedia article linked is exactly what you would expect from an encyclopedia entry. A few paragraphs of introduction about what the electroweak force is, the people who wrote the theory and the experimental evidence which backed it up. Then it launches into a more detailed description of what EW interactions are, EW symmetry breaking etc. which has to be at a more technical level because otherwise you are leaving out information which is not what an encyclopedia is supposed to do.
If you want explanations of topics which are accessible to the general public then you do not go out and read an encyclopedia you go and read a book designed to simplify complex topics enough that non-scientists can digest them. So if you want a general public level explanation of EW interactions on the web go to something like the particle adventure and they'll have what you want there.
Global Warming and Mass Extinction, are slow disasters
That depends on what causes the mass extinction or global climate change. A large asteroid impact can cause a mass extinction and a global shift in temperatures on a very short timescale. Similarly, large volcanic eruptions can cool the climate very rapidly causing crops to fail etc.
Why would any professional using Windows Workstation move to Linux? All of the productivity professional applications run on the Windows platform.
It depends on your profession. Lots of scientists and mathematicians use Linux on their desktop because their productivity professional applications - like LaTeX, Python, analysis code etc. run better under Linux.
Actually, it would be a lot more effective if the people who had their details exposed were the heads of major financial companies. These are the people who choose to share our details with companies like Equifax and perhaps if they have their own personal details exposed they may be a lot more careful with whom they share our data in the future.