Trying to have a conversation with someone in an open-plan office while two other groups of people are already having conversations is maddening. When I worked in one of those places, I seriously found myself losing track of sentences I was speaking midway through... something going on in another conversation distracted me. I sometimes found it easier to wear noise-isolating headphones and use jabber to chat with people, even when they were sitting a few feet away.
The summary misattributes the authorship of the article to the perpetrator of the crime. The actual author is someone named Catalin Cimpanu, not Jason Needham.
Yeah, how about that, when Trump nominates people who aren't cartoonishly inappropriate for their positions, the confirmations are pretty straightforward.
My state votes 2:1 in favor of the Republican candidate, regardless of who he is. My vote does not matter. I could have voted third party. Johnson and Stein were both unqualified candidates, though slightly better than the rest of the field. Johnson was apparently so ignorant of world events that he didn't know what Aleppo was--how could that guy run foreign policy? Stein, a medical doctor, mired herself in the anti-vax controversy by hedging on the issue--what other facts would she demur on?
Should I have voted for the male stripper who advocated for solving obesity through dance? Or the candidate who believes she is a victim of 'brain and body science' that 'listens to [her] private thoughts, allows for communication directly into and out of [her] brain, controls [her] body movements through human logistics,...'? The guy who presents as his primary qualifications his high school GPA (4.0!) and an IQ test from 1976, who wants to remove fluoride from drinking water and end the use of chemtrails?
What would that have accomplished? I guess if we'd all done it, we could have had even more of a clown show in office than we have now?
I don't necessarily have a problem with the internal strife among the crew. I think that's one of the things that made DS9 great TV. Yes, it wasn't Roddenberry's grand vision of the utopian Federation, but it was a comfortable realism in which people didn't always get along and go along. The problem that I have is when that strife becomes "soapy" and the show is more about the crew's personal problems than it is about some interesting concept in science fiction.
Look at the TNG episode Relics, where Scotty comes back. There's a fair amount of personal mopery going on there, but there's also some interesting sci-fi. I think they were at times a bit ham-handed in that episode, but that's the kernel of the stuff I'd like to see--people dealing with being people as well as dealing with the crazy stuff going on around them.
Oppositely, look at the start of Voyager, where a Starfleet crew and a Maquis crew have to come together on one ship right at the end of the pilot. In the second episode (if I recall correctly) there is a bit of discomfort about merging the crews, and in episode three it's smooth sailing. (The issue comes up again, if I remember right, because of Seska, who turns out to be a Cardassian spy or something...). But they just chose to ignore all of the dramatic tension possible in the merging of the crews because Rick Berman thought it would be boring.
I want a Star Trek where a crew of real-seeming people encounter wack stuff they've never imagined and deal with the consequences both personal and larger-scale.
I ended up converting last year and it is actually a better deal all around.
Okay. I bought a retail boxed copy of Office 2010 Home some years ago. Let's say 2012, since otherwise it would be Office 2013. It specifically allows me to install it on multiple computers (three to five, I can't remember; I only have it one two). I don't remember exactly what I paid anymore, but let's pretend it was $150 (that's what a standalone copy costs now). That means I've had use of this software for five years at an amortized cost of $30/year. That cost per year continues going down every year that I still use 2010--and I will, because at the moment, I don't perceive that there have been any great advances in word processing technology in the last 7 years. The cost of Office 365 Home is $100 per year. That really doesn't sound like a better deal to me.
If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.
And if you want to be a smart grown up, you don't pay more for things than you need to, especially by paying over and over again for things you can just pay for once.
I force quit apps on my iPad because over time the list of apps that are 'running' gets cluttered with things I don't often use. I leave apps alone that I use frequently. I don't really care if this costs me some CPU cycles some day when I want to re-launch the app I quit.
This is a great idea. Maybe they could organize their 'follow' system using an existing syndication technology, say, RSS, which is already widely supported by many web sites. That way, users could subscribe to sites and have stories and other items just show up in their feed. They can then read the stories at their leisure. Google could call it something like 'Google Reader'.
One of my former coworkers accidentally created a backdoor that allowed anyone in the world to upload any file to our ~PB disk array and store it in a place where it was available for anyone else in the world to download it. When I discovered (and fixed) it, I was amazed that the disk wasn't already filled with porn and warez. Luckily, the URL wasn't linked to from anywhere easily accessible, and the service that accepted the uploads was not a standard API.
I remember actually reverting to Windows 3.11 occasionally after I'd upgraded to Windows 95. 3.11 was so much faster and at the beginning, at least, there wasn't a lot of advantage to 95. Since then, I've gone along with 98, Me, XP, and 7 (skipped Vista) and been happy with each successive version. From what I can see, Windows 10 has no benefits for me and a whole bunch of potential problems. I recognize that Windows 7 support will end one day, but I'd prefer to let them work on Windows 10 for as long as I can before I switch, to see if they're able to make it something actually desirable to have, rather than simply inevitable.
Nobody who actually knew what was going on thought the funding was in place. But this article isn't really about that. Look at the way NASA is described: "NASA Finally Admits" and the curiously phrased "[NASA] appears to have bended toward reality." The article ends with a quote from Mike Pence, "The truth is that American business is on the cutting edge of space technology." This is a hit piece on NASA written to support private space exploration.
Tangentially related, the needless complexity tends to make sites more fragile. I used to work at a place (during this decade) where we periodically had to go on a web site and fill out a form related to our work hours. The form was super simple in concept: it had a radio button array, a text box, and a submit button. It also didn't work in Chrome, and there was a big warning at the top advising users to use Internet Explorer or FireFox to access the page.
This is content that has been supported by HTML for 20 years (!) or so, but whatever dope developed the page did it so badly that its function became browser dependent. It evoked the bad old days of 'This page optimized for Netscape Navigator' and similar mantras.
Okay, so Google paid a bunch of researchers to do research related to Google. That's how most privately-funded research grants work. Groups don't pay researchers to research things that aren't relevant to the group's purpose. So this part of the article should not be particularly surprising.
As academic researchers, we have a responsibility to disclose potential conflicts of interest and sources of funding for our work. It is in our best interest to do so because our credibility can be called into question when it is revealed that we omitted this information from a paper, intentionally or not.
The article is light on details, but if one researcher failed to report a conflict and/or funding source, that's his fault, not Google's. The context is unclear, however. What paper did he publish that failed to acknowledge Google's funding support? Was it about or related to Google? Did he have reason to believe that the paper was insufficiently related to create a conflict of interest? Without this information, it's hard to estimate whether anyone in this scenario has actually done anything wrong.
I'm waiting for the second generation of VR gear, and the one I want is Vive 2.0. There's another article with some estimated sales figures for various VR things. Hard to say where they got their data, but at least you can get an idea about the relative popularity of the things.
Even simpler: whitelist for allowable items. Items must be contained within a specified, relatively flat, transparent plastic zipper bag. All items must be clearly visible. Put maybe a couple dozen items on the list. One phone per person, a keychain with maybe three keys. A limited amount of medication. A transparent plastic wallet fitting within certain dimensions and containing a limited number of cards and bills. Anything not on the list gets confiscated or disposed of without notice or consultation.
We'll be so safe, it'll usher in a new utopian era.
If I keep inviting someone to meet up and they flake out repeatedly, I just stop asking them. I'm not worried about it--if they can't bring themselves to participate, then I suppose they're not that interested and I move on. I'd rather invite people who will actually show up, and the ones who don't are obviously happier doing whatever they do, possibly including vegging on their couch. Not my problem. It's a win-win, right?
They absolutely can't impose this rule and maintain the current rate of pilfering valuables from checked luggage by TSA and baggage handlers. I learned long ago not to pack anything worth stealing in a suitcase that I'm going to check. In fact, last time I flew with my girlfriend, she didn't know about the level of theft and packed some jewelry in her checked bag. This was a totally domestic itinerary. The bag that contained all of her jewelry disappeared from her luggage. Happily, it was all relatively cheap stuff, so it wasn't a huge loss, but it's sad to me that I thought not packing valuables in checked bags was just common knowledge and didn't think to mention it to her.
I absolutely would not check my own laptop. Or, for that matter, anything else that I value that some TSA loser might want to pawn.
Did it ever occur to you that If the leadership of the DNC hadn't conspired to run such a terrible candidate against Trump in the first place, then the colossal disaster could have been avoided?
Yes, of course it has. Frequently. In the run-up to the nomination, when it was clear the Hillary would win, one of the big problems I had with her was that she is probably the most disliked woman in the country, perhaps occasionally trading off with Nancy Pelosi for that honor. It was, in my opinion, a bad idea to run someone who was so unpopular. And what if she'd gotten elected? She talked big about what she wanted to do in office, but how would she have gotten anything through the Congress? To some extent, the Republicans obstructed Obama's agenda just because he was a Democrat. But Hillary is not only a Democrat, but also an historic nemesis of the Republicans, and they have been attacking her for decades. I didn't see her presidency working very well, even if it happened.
Does the actions of the DNC ever factor into your blame game, or would that require the slightest amount of honesty and accountability?
Yes, of course it does. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was crooked and abused the power of the DNC to disproportionately support Hillary. Donna Brazile was as bad or worse, leaking debate questions to the Hillary team and then lying about it repeatedly. I don't particularly like Tom Perez as DNC chair, either. I think he represents the same political philosophy that gave us Hillary as candidate.
The Democratic party right now has to deal with a growing lunatic fringe on the far left and an entrenched cadre of obsolete uncharismatics like Hillary Clinton. If they could slough off those groups, they may have a group that actually represents a more mainstream population of Americans.
I feel like what they're getting at is some version of the Letter of Marque, which in old sailing days allowed a privateer vessel to go around attacking enemy ships with the blessing of the government. With some modern version, the government could authorize certain security firms to go after hackers, and businesses could contract with these firms to protect them from attack and/or retaliate against attackers. I can't see most businesses, even large corporations, setting up their own retaliation corps--the expertise is rare, expensive, and would probably go mostly unused.
I'm not saying that's a good idea, but it's certainly far more realistic than giving, say, Colgate-Palmolive carte blanche to hack anyone who they thought hacked them first. That just seems like it would lead to chaos. At least with Letters of Marque, the chaos would be contained to some smaller group of security-related companies that maybe would have to go through some certification to get that status. That way leads to digital Blackwater, though, and is that really that much better?
Hulu:
$40 for service
$4 for ad-free on some items
$20 for DVR
$64 total
Right now, I get cable internet and no TV. If I add TV to my subscription, I'd only be paying an extra $30-$40 per month for essentially the same crappy, ad-riddled cable package that Hulu is selling. Why would I bother ordering cable TV from Hulu instead of from my cable company? To whom is this product supposed to appeal?
I can see downloading for research purposes as being ok.
In an academic environment, at least, you'd have to run that plan by the Institutional Review Board and maybe the Human Studies Review Board. You're collecting personally identifying data about people. Even though the information is available on a publicly accessible website, does that make the data public? It's against the TOS of the web site to scrape it, so unless you made a deal with Tinder to get the data, I'd guess that the Board would reject your proposal. They're pretty strict about research ethics, especially with human subjects.
For some reason, I am still surprised when people automatically discount the skill, ability, or stamina required to do jobs that they think are beneath them. I sit at a desk all day. I make more money in a few hours than a picker makes in their ~12 hour day. I try to exercise when I can. But I doubt I'd be able to get out of bed on day 2 of being a picker, and that's on top of having made dismal wages on day 1 because I didn't know what I was doing.
Just because you don't need an advanced degree to do it doesn't mean it's not a real job.
I certainly hope automation is the future of these jobs and others. We'll need to figure out what to do with all the unemployed people over time, but that's a reality that we need to face. I suspect that it's technically possible right now to assemble a set of machines that could produce and deliver to a customer every piece of the McDonald's menu on demand, though it may be too expensive to deploy at the moment. I doubt this moment will last too much longer. Many other jobs, quite possibly mine included, will follow. Hopefully, the pace of this change remains slow enough for us to adapt without too much chaos.
If my full time job allowed me to take a couple of weeks sabbatical I would gladly go work in an orchard to decrease my stress level
Picking fruit in a commercial production orchard is not like wandering in a pleasant garden and occasionally reaching out to pluck an apple. It is a grueling, dawn-to-dusk exertion in which you position a ladder, fill a container as fast as you can, carry the now 50lb+ container to the truck or drop point, and then repeat over and over again. For each ton of apples you pick, you get around $30. There is a reason that American teenagers aren't working in orchards... if growers paid enough to get teens to take the jobs, nobody would be able to afford fruit.
Slashdot Mirror
Trying to have a conversation with someone in an open-plan office while two other groups of people are already having conversations is maddening. When I worked in one of those places, I seriously found myself losing track of sentences I was speaking midway through... something going on in another conversation distracted me. I sometimes found it easier to wear noise-isolating headphones and use jabber to chat with people, even when they were sitting a few feet away.
The summary misattributes the authorship of the article to the perpetrator of the crime. The actual author is someone named Catalin Cimpanu, not Jason Needham.
Yeah, how about that, when Trump nominates people who aren't cartoonishly inappropriate for their positions, the confirmations are pretty straightforward.
My state votes 2:1 in favor of the Republican candidate, regardless of who he is. My vote does not matter. I could have voted third party. Johnson and Stein were both unqualified candidates, though slightly better than the rest of the field. Johnson was apparently so ignorant of world events that he didn't know what Aleppo was--how could that guy run foreign policy? Stein, a medical doctor, mired herself in the anti-vax controversy by hedging on the issue--what other facts would she demur on?
Should I have voted for the male stripper who advocated for solving obesity through dance? Or the candidate who believes she is a victim of 'brain and body science' that 'listens to [her] private thoughts, allows for communication directly into and out of [her] brain, controls [her] body movements through human logistics, ...'? The guy who presents as his primary qualifications his high school GPA (4.0!) and an IQ test from 1976, who wants to remove fluoride from drinking water and end the use of chemtrails?
What would that have accomplished? I guess if we'd all done it, we could have had even more of a clown show in office than we have now?
I don't necessarily have a problem with the internal strife among the crew. I think that's one of the things that made DS9 great TV. Yes, it wasn't Roddenberry's grand vision of the utopian Federation, but it was a comfortable realism in which people didn't always get along and go along. The problem that I have is when that strife becomes "soapy" and the show is more about the crew's personal problems than it is about some interesting concept in science fiction.
Look at the TNG episode Relics, where Scotty comes back. There's a fair amount of personal mopery going on there, but there's also some interesting sci-fi. I think they were at times a bit ham-handed in that episode, but that's the kernel of the stuff I'd like to see--people dealing with being people as well as dealing with the crazy stuff going on around them.
Oppositely, look at the start of Voyager, where a Starfleet crew and a Maquis crew have to come together on one ship right at the end of the pilot. In the second episode (if I recall correctly) there is a bit of discomfort about merging the crews, and in episode three it's smooth sailing. (The issue comes up again, if I remember right, because of Seska, who turns out to be a Cardassian spy or something...). But they just chose to ignore all of the dramatic tension possible in the merging of the crews because Rick Berman thought it would be boring.
I want a Star Trek where a crew of real-seeming people encounter wack stuff they've never imagined and deal with the consequences both personal and larger-scale.
In the long history of Star Trek, that knowledge has never stopped them before... and I say this as a fan of the franchise.
Okay. I bought a retail boxed copy of Office 2010 Home some years ago. Let's say 2012, since otherwise it would be Office 2013. It specifically allows me to install it on multiple computers (three to five, I can't remember; I only have it one two). I don't remember exactly what I paid anymore, but let's pretend it was $150 (that's what a standalone copy costs now). That means I've had use of this software for five years at an amortized cost of $30/year. That cost per year continues going down every year that I still use 2010--and I will, because at the moment, I don't perceive that there have been any great advances in word processing technology in the last 7 years. The cost of Office 365 Home is $100 per year. That really doesn't sound like a better deal to me.
And if you want to be a smart grown up, you don't pay more for things than you need to, especially by paying over and over again for things you can just pay for once.
I force quit apps on my iPad because over time the list of apps that are 'running' gets cluttered with things I don't often use. I leave apps alone that I use frequently. I don't really care if this costs me some CPU cycles some day when I want to re-launch the app I quit.
This is a great idea. Maybe they could organize their 'follow' system using an existing syndication technology, say, RSS, which is already widely supported by many web sites. That way, users could subscribe to sites and have stories and other items just show up in their feed. They can then read the stories at their leisure. Google could call it something like 'Google Reader'.
One of my former coworkers accidentally created a backdoor that allowed anyone in the world to upload any file to our ~PB disk array and store it in a place where it was available for anyone else in the world to download it. When I discovered (and fixed) it, I was amazed that the disk wasn't already filled with porn and warez. Luckily, the URL wasn't linked to from anywhere easily accessible, and the service that accepted the uploads was not a standard API.
I remember actually reverting to Windows 3.11 occasionally after I'd upgraded to Windows 95. 3.11 was so much faster and at the beginning, at least, there wasn't a lot of advantage to 95. Since then, I've gone along with 98, Me, XP, and 7 (skipped Vista) and been happy with each successive version. From what I can see, Windows 10 has no benefits for me and a whole bunch of potential problems. I recognize that Windows 7 support will end one day, but I'd prefer to let them work on Windows 10 for as long as I can before I switch, to see if they're able to make it something actually desirable to have, rather than simply inevitable.
Nobody who actually knew what was going on thought the funding was in place. But this article isn't really about that. Look at the way NASA is described: "NASA Finally Admits" and the curiously phrased "[NASA] appears to have bended toward reality." The article ends with a quote from Mike Pence, "The truth is that American business is on the cutting edge of space technology." This is a hit piece on NASA written to support private space exploration.
Tangentially related, the needless complexity tends to make sites more fragile. I used to work at a place (during this decade) where we periodically had to go on a web site and fill out a form related to our work hours. The form was super simple in concept: it had a radio button array, a text box, and a submit button. It also didn't work in Chrome, and there was a big warning at the top advising users to use Internet Explorer or FireFox to access the page.
This is content that has been supported by HTML for 20 years (!) or so, but whatever dope developed the page did it so badly that its function became browser dependent. It evoked the bad old days of 'This page optimized for Netscape Navigator' and similar mantras.
Okay, so Google paid a bunch of researchers to do research related to Google. That's how most privately-funded research grants work. Groups don't pay researchers to research things that aren't relevant to the group's purpose. So this part of the article should not be particularly surprising.
As academic researchers, we have a responsibility to disclose potential conflicts of interest and sources of funding for our work. It is in our best interest to do so because our credibility can be called into question when it is revealed that we omitted this information from a paper, intentionally or not.
The article is light on details, but if one researcher failed to report a conflict and/or funding source, that's his fault, not Google's. The context is unclear, however. What paper did he publish that failed to acknowledge Google's funding support? Was it about or related to Google? Did he have reason to believe that the paper was insufficiently related to create a conflict of interest? Without this information, it's hard to estimate whether anyone in this scenario has actually done anything wrong.
I'm waiting for the second generation of VR gear, and the one I want is Vive 2.0. There's another article with some estimated sales figures for various VR things. Hard to say where they got their data, but at least you can get an idea about the relative popularity of the things.
Even simpler: whitelist for allowable items. Items must be contained within a specified, relatively flat, transparent plastic zipper bag. All items must be clearly visible. Put maybe a couple dozen items on the list. One phone per person, a keychain with maybe three keys. A limited amount of medication. A transparent plastic wallet fitting within certain dimensions and containing a limited number of cards and bills. Anything not on the list gets confiscated or disposed of without notice or consultation.
We'll be so safe, it'll usher in a new utopian era.
If I keep inviting someone to meet up and they flake out repeatedly, I just stop asking them. I'm not worried about it--if they can't bring themselves to participate, then I suppose they're not that interested and I move on. I'd rather invite people who will actually show up, and the ones who don't are obviously happier doing whatever they do, possibly including vegging on their couch. Not my problem. It's a win-win, right?
They absolutely can't impose this rule and maintain the current rate of pilfering valuables from checked luggage by TSA and baggage handlers. I learned long ago not to pack anything worth stealing in a suitcase that I'm going to check. In fact, last time I flew with my girlfriend, she didn't know about the level of theft and packed some jewelry in her checked bag. This was a totally domestic itinerary. The bag that contained all of her jewelry disappeared from her luggage. Happily, it was all relatively cheap stuff, so it wasn't a huge loss, but it's sad to me that I thought not packing valuables in checked bags was just common knowledge and didn't think to mention it to her.
I absolutely would not check my own laptop. Or, for that matter, anything else that I value that some TSA loser might want to pawn.
Yes, of course it has. Frequently. In the run-up to the nomination, when it was clear the Hillary would win, one of the big problems I had with her was that she is probably the most disliked woman in the country, perhaps occasionally trading off with Nancy Pelosi for that honor. It was, in my opinion, a bad idea to run someone who was so unpopular. And what if she'd gotten elected? She talked big about what she wanted to do in office, but how would she have gotten anything through the Congress? To some extent, the Republicans obstructed Obama's agenda just because he was a Democrat. But Hillary is not only a Democrat, but also an historic nemesis of the Republicans, and they have been attacking her for decades. I didn't see her presidency working very well, even if it happened.
Yes, of course it does. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was crooked and abused the power of the DNC to disproportionately support Hillary. Donna Brazile was as bad or worse, leaking debate questions to the Hillary team and then lying about it repeatedly. I don't particularly like Tom Perez as DNC chair, either. I think he represents the same political philosophy that gave us Hillary as candidate.
The Democratic party right now has to deal with a growing lunatic fringe on the far left and an entrenched cadre of obsolete uncharismatics like Hillary Clinton. If they could slough off those groups, they may have a group that actually represents a more mainstream population of Americans.
I feel like what they're getting at is some version of the Letter of Marque, which in old sailing days allowed a privateer vessel to go around attacking enemy ships with the blessing of the government. With some modern version, the government could authorize certain security firms to go after hackers, and businesses could contract with these firms to protect them from attack and/or retaliate against attackers. I can't see most businesses, even large corporations, setting up their own retaliation corps--the expertise is rare, expensive, and would probably go mostly unused.
I'm not saying that's a good idea, but it's certainly far more realistic than giving, say, Colgate-Palmolive carte blanche to hack anyone who they thought hacked them first. That just seems like it would lead to chaos. At least with Letters of Marque, the chaos would be contained to some smaller group of security-related companies that maybe would have to go through some certification to get that status. That way leads to digital Blackwater, though, and is that really that much better?
Hulu:
$40 for service
$4 for ad-free on some items
$20 for DVR
$64 total
Right now, I get cable internet and no TV. If I add TV to my subscription, I'd only be paying an extra $30-$40 per month for essentially the same crappy, ad-riddled cable package that Hulu is selling. Why would I bother ordering cable TV from Hulu instead of from my cable company? To whom is this product supposed to appeal?
In an academic environment, at least, you'd have to run that plan by the Institutional Review Board and maybe the Human Studies Review Board. You're collecting personally identifying data about people. Even though the information is available on a publicly accessible website, does that make the data public? It's against the TOS of the web site to scrape it, so unless you made a deal with Tinder to get the data, I'd guess that the Board would reject your proposal. They're pretty strict about research ethics, especially with human subjects.
For some reason, I am still surprised when people automatically discount the skill, ability, or stamina required to do jobs that they think are beneath them. I sit at a desk all day. I make more money in a few hours than a picker makes in their ~12 hour day. I try to exercise when I can. But I doubt I'd be able to get out of bed on day 2 of being a picker, and that's on top of having made dismal wages on day 1 because I didn't know what I was doing. Just because you don't need an advanced degree to do it doesn't mean it's not a real job.
I certainly hope automation is the future of these jobs and others. We'll need to figure out what to do with all the unemployed people over time, but that's a reality that we need to face. I suspect that it's technically possible right now to assemble a set of machines that could produce and deliver to a customer every piece of the McDonald's menu on demand, though it may be too expensive to deploy at the moment. I doubt this moment will last too much longer. Many other jobs, quite possibly mine included, will follow. Hopefully, the pace of this change remains slow enough for us to adapt without too much chaos.
Picking fruit in a commercial production orchard is not like wandering in a pleasant garden and occasionally reaching out to pluck an apple. It is a grueling, dawn-to-dusk exertion in which you position a ladder, fill a container as fast as you can, carry the now 50lb+ container to the truck or drop point, and then repeat over and over again. For each ton of apples you pick, you get around $30. There is a reason that American teenagers aren't working in orchards... if growers paid enough to get teens to take the jobs, nobody would be able to afford fruit.