I'd say there is a concept involved, and not just surface area. There's also the fact that authenticating certs is an additional step, that the system will appear to work without doing it, and that there exist programmers who are some combination of lazy and incompetent. It's the same concept involved when people write their own auth systems, or credential databases--they fuck it up because they don't understand the danger of storing plaintext passwords, or they invent their own "encryption," or any number of other bad ideas.
I don't know if it's intentionally designed into the system, or if it's just a happy accident for them. The pattern seems to be to continue charging people for things like modems and set-top boxes and hope that they don't notice for six months, and then offer to refund three months of charges as a "goodwill gesture" or some other nonsense that makes it sound like they're doing you a favor.
I haven't had this myself, but my brother cancelled his cable TV service and gathered up the equipment and turned it in to the local office. For the first couple of months, they continued to bill him full price, apparently having neglected to actually cancel his account. Unfortunately, he had given them access to his checking account, so they just took the money. When he called to complain, they said they had now cancelled his account and it would take 6-8 weeks to refund him. This happened a few times, and then they finally agreed that his account was cancelled, but then started charging him for not returning the equipment. This went on for another couple of months. In all of this, they managed to overdraft his checking account at least once. It was a mess.
Fine. But the answer isn't for the legislature to pass a law. It's for teachers to pick up a great program that works some programming skills into their normal lessons. Get a little bit of coding into a few lessons that actually mean something to the kids, rather than having a special hour where you baffle them with programming bullshit. And in that scenario, all we need to do is spend a little money developing classroom curricula for teachers who can use them to teach a lesson+programming.
The other problem with sharing things from my home connection is that my home upload speed is about 1 Mb/s. I do, in fact, run a VPS for this very reason.
I don't spend a lot of money on apps in a given year. Most often, $0. But I don't think it's because I'm cheap; I just don't spend a lot of time interacting with my phone. Most of my data usage is from tethering my laptop while traveling. I've had the (Android) phone for around 3-4 years. In that time, I have installed roughly seven apps that didn't come with the phone. They were all free, but four of them were created by megacorps and the other three are rarely used, tiny freebies that never advertise or ask for money. I just don't have any motivation to go out and browse the app marketplace to find and purchase software that I'm unlikely to use.
Yeah, so my taxes, including all relevant forms sent to me and a PDF of my final return, are stored on my primary computer's hard drive. In order to steal them, someone has to come to my house and steal my computer. And probably everything else of value that I own. And most burglars probably aren't that interested in income tax fraud schemes. They're making their money hocking my TV, not committing secondary white-collar crimes.
The first documented instance of the Vulgaris Aerae (Vulgar Era, meaning “Common Era”) being used interchangeably with Anno Domini was featured in Latin works by Johannes Kepler in 1615, 1616, and 1617. The English version of phrase later appeared in 1635 in an English translation of Kepler’s 1615 work. (In the mid-seventeenth century the English “vulgar” took on a new definition of “coarse,” but it wouldn’t be until this “coarse/unrefined” definition would become more common in the 20th century that referring to the Vulgar Era would cease.) [1]
It's not like this is a new thing. And it really doesn't matter in ordinary conversation, at least for most of us. But when publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, it makes sense to use the terminology of science, which does not recognize Jesus as "Christ" with all of the associated baggage.
In 1977, the median income for a 30-year-old man was about $10,000, or $41,500 adjusted for inflation [1]. Today, the median income for a 30-year-old man is about $35,000 [1]. The median home sale price in 1977 was about $49,000, or $203,000 inflation-adjusted [2]. The median home sale price today is about $325,000 [2]. In 1977, a 4-year college degree at an in-state, public institution cost less than $4,000, or about $16,000 inflation-adjusted for tuition and fees [3]. Today, that's $38,600.
These are only a few rough indicators, but the point is this: a millennial or gen-xer today makes 84% in real terms of what his counterpart did in 1977; his education costs more than twice as much and has gone from something he could pay for completely with a summer job to more than a full year's salary; the house he's looking at has gone from 4 years' salary to nearly 10 years', and a 20% down payment has gone from about 3 months' salary to about two years'.
These, for example, are reasons that millennials have it tougher than previous generations.
I am a scientist who has done some work on climate change issues. I usually completely ignore Slashdot stories about climate because I know that the whole comment thread will be people repeating the same arguments to each other about whether or not climate change exists, or is anthropogenic, or is a bad thing, or whatever. What value is there in repeating these stale talking points to each other over and over again? How many of the deniers are just trolls who don't care one way or another, but enjoy baiting others with long-debunked claims and other alternative facts?
At any rate, that may be one reason you see so many deniers here. Many of us who are persuaded by the evidence are already so far past the Slashdot-level conversation, there's practically no point in participating.
Is there really a use case for having data while in a phone call?
I often tether my laptop to my phone while traveling. While tethered, and using data on my laptop, I'd still like to be able to make and receive phone calls.
I think it'll be a super hard sell to get them to do a hard reboot on their whole system. But why not begin introducing a service oriented architecture that could be gradually rolled out and replace systems incrementally? Start with the most fragile systems and linkages and rebuild the whole system in situ?
I mean, I know it'll be more complicated than that simple statement, but at least it's a better plan than trying to install better and better windproofing to prevent the house of cards from toppling.
In fact, to enhance upon my reply from a few minutes ago, it appears that in 2006, Delta outsourced its IT operations to IBM [1]. It was a seven year agreement, so I don't know who does it now. But I doubt it's Delta.
Assuming this is still the situation: I don't know on what continent Delta's IT people are stationed at this point, but that's hardly the issue. The issue is, wherever they are, they aren't competently managing Delta's IT infrastructure. They had a similarly airline-grounding outage in August, about six months ago.
If management were able to recognize the value of investment in IT, they could have taken steps over the years to develop a system that isn't this fragile. Presumably, back in 2006, when they went into bankruptcy, someone convinced them that IT wasn't a "core competency" because it would save the airline a bunch of money to outsource it. Since then, they've been accumulating tech debt because nobody at HQ actually owns IT anymore... they think it's just a service that they pay for. It doesn't appear to be working out for them.
How long can the airlines go on like this? Somewhere in office buildings around the country, there are MBAs and accountants working for various airlines who have compared the cost of in-house IT with the cost of outsourcing, and they all once decided that outsourcing was best. Somehow, I doubt they've included in their calculations the true frequency (and therefore cost) of IT failures that ground the entire airline for days. As these events stack up, these guys are going to have to re-evaluate their models for predicting the frequency and severity of failures, and at some point it's going to look like a good idea to have a real IT staff on-hand to keep systems working in the first place, and to deal with it when shit hits the fan.
Add to your list of people, the ones like me who purchased Office 2010 for Windows many years ago, purchased some version of Office for Mac a few years ago (2012 maybe?) and are completely satisfied with the features available. I have no reason to buy Office as a subscription because I already have almost everything of any use that it can do. The costs I paid are amortized for as long as I keep using the software, which at this rate is likely to be more than ten years for both packages. Before I bought 2010, for example, the previous version I bought was 97.
What about products that have no benefit? I was standing in the supermarket checkout line last night, and there was a display of giant foam fingers (more elaborate and sculpted than the ones I've seen before--called Ultimate Hands, apparently). The whole lot of it is completely landfill-ready. There is no conceivable benefit to our society from this junk. How much money do we send to China (and other places) every year in exchange for plastic and other non-recyclable trash that from the moment it's created is destined for a municipal waste transfer station, where we'll mash it up with the rest of our trash and ship it back overseas? What was the point?
Without even considering privacy issues, I still don't want one. Maybe I'm more of a visual learner/interactor, but I don't really want Alexa to read me my email. I mean, I don't even like voicemail that much, I'd rather have an email or a text. I guess it would be kind of nice to be able to command a particular album to start playing, but I don't mind just using the remote control on the Apple TV. What Alexa needs for me to care about it is a killer app, and it's not there yet, for me. It's like smart watches in that way.
I've been doing some cloud-based processing for statistical modeling on some fairly large datasets. My residential internet speed is 1Mb/s up, which make it literally faster for me to copy my data onto an external hard drive, drive with it to my university campus where they have decent upload speed, and upload it from there.
I like that I can get access to a machine that has hundreds of gigs of RAM, but transfer speed is becoming the limiting factor for me to get work done, and US broadband providers aren't helping much.
For some reason, Slashdot attracts a lot of armchair experts who read an article summary, immediately think up a trivial reason that a new bit of science or engineering can't possibly work, assume that the scientists/engineers never thought of this obvious flaw, and dismiss the whole project out of hand as a waste of time and money. But this has been the case for some years--I remember an article in 2010 about my then desk-neighbor's NASA-funded PhD work that the majority of posters just shat on without knowing anything about it. I'd helped him out a bit here and there with data analysis, so it was clear to me that clueless posters' objections were based on bad assumptions. I'm not sure why so many people here are set on auto-hate for new science and tech.
First, I think it's important to point out that positive moderation on Slashdot doesn't necessarily mean you're right about what you said, it just means that your opinion is popular.
Second, it's also important for us all to understand that Slashdot mod points are not rare or valuable, they do not make or break a person's reputation, and nobody cares what your Slashdot karma score is.
Third, literally revising history to retroactively alter a person's karma score is actually crazy for a few reasons... the two listed above, plus the reason that going back and changing the mod points doesn't mean it actually happened that way. Even making the suggestion that this is what should happen seems to indicate a profound misunderstanding of cause and effect, and of the world in general.
Jesus, we don't just erase our past when people say things that turn out to be incorrect. You're advocating a fucking sci-fi dystopia.
It would have to be a price that starts out extremely high -- high enough to more than offset the losses resulting from decreased theater attendance and piracy -- then decays exponentially, asymptotically approaching what one currently pays for an iTunes rental.
Of course, that's the reasonable way to do it. It makes great use of statistical mathematics and economics. It's also terribly practical, and would appeal to most consumers. Therefore, this is not what they will do.
First, I made an error in my math (I amortized over 9 months, not 12). $19,500 / 12 is actually $1,625 gross.
Second, the cost of college. $10,000 for tuition and fees, plus another $10,000 room and board are the US average for in-state public schools. Voila, the $19,500 is gone, and without considering incidental expenses (or taxes... they'll net more like $18,500). It's gone even faster if you're out-of-state or attending a private school. Maybe they have scholarships, or maybe their parents are paying, but most are not in that situation.
So... if you look at an internship that lasts 3 months and pays ~20,000 dollars, and multiply that by 4 regardless of the fact that the internship cannot actually be extended to be a year long, then in that hypothetical world (where nobody else's salary was also multiplied by 4, only the interns), interns would make $78,000 per year, and would therefore be making more than a lot of other people. But in the real world, where we all actually live, that person made a little less than $20,000 and is at the same time paying to attend college, so they're not actually all that wealthy.
Could I somehow counteract the article by pointing out that if you amortize the interns' salary over 12 months, they would be grossing about $2,150 per month, and that's a pretty low wage?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say there is a concept involved, and not just surface area. There's also the fact that authenticating certs is an additional step, that the system will appear to work without doing it, and that there exist programmers who are some combination of lazy and incompetent. It's the same concept involved when people write their own auth systems, or credential databases--they fuck it up because they don't understand the danger of storing plaintext passwords, or they invent their own "encryption," or any number of other bad ideas.
I don't know if it's intentionally designed into the system, or if it's just a happy accident for them. The pattern seems to be to continue charging people for things like modems and set-top boxes and hope that they don't notice for six months, and then offer to refund three months of charges as a "goodwill gesture" or some other nonsense that makes it sound like they're doing you a favor.
I haven't had this myself, but my brother cancelled his cable TV service and gathered up the equipment and turned it in to the local office. For the first couple of months, they continued to bill him full price, apparently having neglected to actually cancel his account. Unfortunately, he had given them access to his checking account, so they just took the money. When he called to complain, they said they had now cancelled his account and it would take 6-8 weeks to refund him. This happened a few times, and then they finally agreed that his account was cancelled, but then started charging him for not returning the equipment. This went on for another couple of months. In all of this, they managed to overdraft his checking account at least once. It was a mess.
Fine. But the answer isn't for the legislature to pass a law. It's for teachers to pick up a great program that works some programming skills into their normal lessons. Get a little bit of coding into a few lessons that actually mean something to the kids, rather than having a special hour where you baffle them with programming bullshit. And in that scenario, all we need to do is spend a little money developing classroom curricula for teachers who can use them to teach a lesson+programming.
One hour of code between grades 4-12.
So, a fourth grader can learn to move the turtle to make a shape.
Or, a twelfth grader can learn how to make html, head, body, and a few divs.
Surely, this will save us from our dire STEM shortage.
The other problem with sharing things from my home connection is that my home upload speed is about 1 Mb/s. I do, in fact, run a VPS for this very reason.
I don't spend a lot of money on apps in a given year. Most often, $0. But I don't think it's because I'm cheap; I just don't spend a lot of time interacting with my phone. Most of my data usage is from tethering my laptop while traveling. I've had the (Android) phone for around 3-4 years. In that time, I have installed roughly seven apps that didn't come with the phone. They were all free, but four of them were created by megacorps and the other three are rarely used, tiny freebies that never advertise or ask for money. I just don't have any motivation to go out and browse the app marketplace to find and purchase software that I'm unlikely to use.
Yeah, so my taxes, including all relevant forms sent to me and a PDF of my final return, are stored on my primary computer's hard drive. In order to steal them, someone has to come to my house and steal my computer. And probably everything else of value that I own. And most burglars probably aren't that interested in income tax fraud schemes. They're making their money hocking my TV, not committing secondary white-collar crimes.
It's not like this is a new thing. And it really doesn't matter in ordinary conversation, at least for most of us. But when publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, it makes sense to use the terminology of science, which does not recognize Jesus as "Christ" with all of the associated baggage.
[1] http://www.todayifoundout.com/...
In 1977, the median income for a 30-year-old man was about $10,000, or $41,500 adjusted for inflation [1]. Today, the median income for a 30-year-old man is about $35,000 [1]. The median home sale price in 1977 was about $49,000, or $203,000 inflation-adjusted [2]. The median home sale price today is about $325,000 [2]. In 1977, a 4-year college degree at an in-state, public institution cost less than $4,000, or about $16,000 inflation-adjusted for tuition and fees [3]. Today, that's $38,600.
These are only a few rough indicators, but the point is this: a millennial or gen-xer today makes 84% in real terms of what his counterpart did in 1977; his education costs more than twice as much and has gone from something he could pay for completely with a summer job to more than a full year's salary; the house he's looking at has gone from 4 years' salary to nearly 10 years', and a 20% down payment has gone from about 3 months' salary to about two years'.
These, for example, are reasons that millennials have it tougher than previous generations.
[1] https://cps.ipums.org/cps/
[2] https://www.census.gov/const/u...
[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/d...
[4] http://www.collegedata.com/cs/...
The odd thing is, they revised the summary but still left the word 'pubic' there.
I am a scientist who has done some work on climate change issues. I usually completely ignore Slashdot stories about climate because I know that the whole comment thread will be people repeating the same arguments to each other about whether or not climate change exists, or is anthropogenic, or is a bad thing, or whatever. What value is there in repeating these stale talking points to each other over and over again? How many of the deniers are just trolls who don't care one way or another, but enjoy baiting others with long-debunked claims and other alternative facts?
At any rate, that may be one reason you see so many deniers here. Many of us who are persuaded by the evidence are already so far past the Slashdot-level conversation, there's practically no point in participating.
I often tether my laptop to my phone while traveling. While tethered, and using data on my laptop, I'd still like to be able to make and receive phone calls.
I think it'll be a super hard sell to get them to do a hard reboot on their whole system. But why not begin introducing a service oriented architecture that could be gradually rolled out and replace systems incrementally? Start with the most fragile systems and linkages and rebuild the whole system in situ?
I mean, I know it'll be more complicated than that simple statement, but at least it's a better plan than trying to install better and better windproofing to prevent the house of cards from toppling.
In fact, to enhance upon my reply from a few minutes ago, it appears that in 2006, Delta outsourced its IT operations to IBM [1]. It was a seven year agreement, so I don't know who does it now. But I doubt it's Delta.
Assuming this is still the situation: I don't know on what continent Delta's IT people are stationed at this point, but that's hardly the issue. The issue is, wherever they are, they aren't competently managing Delta's IT infrastructure. They had a similarly airline-grounding outage in August, about six months ago.
If management were able to recognize the value of investment in IT, they could have taken steps over the years to develop a system that isn't this fragile. Presumably, back in 2006, when they went into bankruptcy, someone convinced them that IT wasn't a "core competency" because it would save the airline a bunch of money to outsource it. Since then, they've been accumulating tech debt because nobody at HQ actually owns IT anymore... they think it's just a service that they pay for. It doesn't appear to be working out for them.
[1] http://www.informationweek.com...?
I said nothing about abroad.
How long can the airlines go on like this? Somewhere in office buildings around the country, there are MBAs and accountants working for various airlines who have compared the cost of in-house IT with the cost of outsourcing, and they all once decided that outsourcing was best. Somehow, I doubt they've included in their calculations the true frequency (and therefore cost) of IT failures that ground the entire airline for days. As these events stack up, these guys are going to have to re-evaluate their models for predicting the frequency and severity of failures, and at some point it's going to look like a good idea to have a real IT staff on-hand to keep systems working in the first place, and to deal with it when shit hits the fan.
Add to your list of people, the ones like me who purchased Office 2010 for Windows many years ago, purchased some version of Office for Mac a few years ago (2012 maybe?) and are completely satisfied with the features available. I have no reason to buy Office as a subscription because I already have almost everything of any use that it can do. The costs I paid are amortized for as long as I keep using the software, which at this rate is likely to be more than ten years for both packages. Before I bought 2010, for example, the previous version I bought was 97.
We keep the benefit of that product forever.
What about products that have no benefit? I was standing in the supermarket checkout line last night, and there was a display of giant foam fingers (more elaborate and sculpted than the ones I've seen before--called Ultimate Hands, apparently). The whole lot of it is completely landfill-ready. There is no conceivable benefit to our society from this junk. How much money do we send to China (and other places) every year in exchange for plastic and other non-recyclable trash that from the moment it's created is destined for a municipal waste transfer station, where we'll mash it up with the rest of our trash and ship it back overseas? What was the point?
Without even considering privacy issues, I still don't want one. Maybe I'm more of a visual learner/interactor, but I don't really want Alexa to read me my email. I mean, I don't even like voicemail that much, I'd rather have an email or a text. I guess it would be kind of nice to be able to command a particular album to start playing, but I don't mind just using the remote control on the Apple TV. What Alexa needs for me to care about it is a killer app, and it's not there yet, for me. It's like smart watches in that way.
I've been doing some cloud-based processing for statistical modeling on some fairly large datasets. My residential internet speed is 1Mb/s up, which make it literally faster for me to copy my data onto an external hard drive, drive with it to my university campus where they have decent upload speed, and upload it from there.
I like that I can get access to a machine that has hundreds of gigs of RAM, but transfer speed is becoming the limiting factor for me to get work done, and US broadband providers aren't helping much.
For some reason, Slashdot attracts a lot of armchair experts who read an article summary, immediately think up a trivial reason that a new bit of science or engineering can't possibly work, assume that the scientists/engineers never thought of this obvious flaw, and dismiss the whole project out of hand as a waste of time and money. But this has been the case for some years--I remember an article in 2010 about my then desk-neighbor's NASA-funded PhD work that the majority of posters just shat on without knowing anything about it. I'd helped him out a bit here and there with data analysis, so it was clear to me that clueless posters' objections were based on bad assumptions. I'm not sure why so many people here are set on auto-hate for new science and tech.
First, I think it's important to point out that positive moderation on Slashdot doesn't necessarily mean you're right about what you said, it just means that your opinion is popular.
Second, it's also important for us all to understand that Slashdot mod points are not rare or valuable, they do not make or break a person's reputation, and nobody cares what your Slashdot karma score is.
Third, literally revising history to retroactively alter a person's karma score is actually crazy for a few reasons... the two listed above, plus the reason that going back and changing the mod points doesn't mean it actually happened that way. Even making the suggestion that this is what should happen seems to indicate a profound misunderstanding of cause and effect, and of the world in general.
Jesus, we don't just erase our past when people say things that turn out to be incorrect. You're advocating a fucking sci-fi dystopia.
Of course, that's the reasonable way to do it. It makes great use of statistical mathematics and economics. It's also terribly practical, and would appeal to most consumers. Therefore, this is not what they will do.
First, I made an error in my math (I amortized over 9 months, not 12). $19,500 / 12 is actually $1,625 gross.
Second, the cost of college. $10,000 for tuition and fees, plus another $10,000 room and board are the US average for in-state public schools. Voila, the $19,500 is gone, and without considering incidental expenses (or taxes... they'll net more like $18,500). It's gone even faster if you're out-of-state or attending a private school. Maybe they have scholarships, or maybe their parents are paying, but most are not in that situation.
What's the Price Tag for a College Education?
So... if you look at an internship that lasts 3 months and pays ~20,000 dollars, and multiply that by 4 regardless of the fact that the internship cannot actually be extended to be a year long, then in that hypothetical world (where nobody else's salary was also multiplied by 4, only the interns), interns would make $78,000 per year, and would therefore be making more than a lot of other people. But in the real world, where we all actually live, that person made a little less than $20,000 and is at the same time paying to attend college, so they're not actually all that wealthy.
Could I somehow counteract the article by pointing out that if you amortize the interns' salary over 12 months, they would be grossing about $2,150 per month, and that's a pretty low wage?