"...the "who did it" does not matter as much as "what the emails say".
Really? It seems to me that, compared with "what the emails say", the fact that the Russians might be colluding with, or even simply manipulating a US election in favor of Trump is the lede here. I mean, it's not like the emails are telling us anything we didn't already know. Of course the DNC wants a party member for the nomination, and would do anything they could towards that end. They didn't want to end up like the Republicans, who lost control of their own party. The Democratic Party is not a public, democratic, institution. It just seems that way to the uninformed.
A journalist (of the WSJ no less) has no idea what is going on in their country?
Journalists ain't what they used to be. It used to be a working-class gig, but now it's been given over to college-educated, middle-class people, who get there with the experience of the world you'd expect. I mean, look at the kind of reporting you get when the topic is recreational drugs. Don't get me wrong. There are still good reporters. They're just fewer and further between. You're absolutely right - this is old news. But, I have to admit, I really enjoy the outrage of middle-class people when they get the same treatment from law enforcement as the rest of us for the first time! I forget which NPR show it was, but one of their producers got the special treatment at the US/Canadian border, and, for me, who used to cross that border quite often, and spent many an hour as their guest, it made for a most enjoyable podcast.
"...there's a general perception that the world's getting worse..."
Well, yeah, amongst people lacking any historical perspective. And maybe amongst politicians, although I'm not always certain they actually believe what they're demagoguing about. I mean, there are people - many people - who think that crime is worse today, when it's actually at record lows. Whether it's you, me, or Kurzweil saying it, these people's minds won't be changed. Let's face it, most people are not all that educated, and get most of their knowledge about the World through the television.
So does real stuff. Not that I'd ever lend someone a record again, but at least I can play my records on any, and as many, turntables as I want. I can even sell 'em if I want. Digital data simply has no intrinsic value because it can be reproduced endlessly for nothing. If you want people to pay for it, it'd better be really cheap, and really convenient, because that's all it has going for it.
Instead of trying to bring real world convenience to digital, they're trying to bring digital inconvenience to real objects. Call me old-fashioned, but I want to own the crap I buy.
there are armed police at all UK commercial airports now, have been since 9/11. (source: asked an armed police officer at Nottingham East Midlands Airport last month as I was passing through).
Yes, but, guns do not kill people, people do. That is the difference between the US and the UK, particularly when it comes to police.
Where it most definitely does not make sense is in passenger cars, where the moronic part of our population (that is, most of it) will assume it to be far more capable than it really is, and who will choose simply to ignore the system once it is operating. In passenger cars, nothing less than a 100% reliable, full-time autopilot function is acceptable, and we're not even slightly close to that being a reality.
This. Like the first idiot, who circumvented the Tesla's inability to play movies while driving, (why do we even have video players in cars?), people will quickly get the notion that they don't have to pay attention. They will get bored sitting there with nothing to do. Shit, nowadays people can't concentrate on anything, and play with their phones even when they're supposed to be in control of their vehicles. And we're going to put people in a vehicle that can miss a 13'5" high, 70' long vehicle because the Sun is shining? BTW, I drive trucks. I do about 130,000 miles per year, so I see every kind of idiocy, about five times per day. I would love to see driving taken out of the hands of most car drivers. But we'll never have a system that is one-hundred-percent fool-proof. Even if the technology were there, people have a genius for fucking stuff up.
I don't see what intelligence has to do with it, unless you mean the ones who got caught. I agree, that wasn't too bright. As far as I can tell from having personally known a few cops, (in the US), they've always accessed the information at their disposal for their own purposes. It's just human nature. They've certainly done it for me when asked. I think the lede here is that there is simply gobs more information for them to play with, and thus misuse.
Republicans/Democrats can only give you more of the same old shit.
So true. I mean, they're in the business of maintaining the status quo. People worry about "throwing away their vote", but your vote is already wasted if you're voting for the slightly less worse candidate instead of the best candidate, whoever you might think that is. It's almost never a Democrat/Republican, am I right? As Eugene Debs once said, "It's better to vote for something you want, and not get it, than to vote for something you don't want, and get it", (apologies if the quote isn't verbatim).
Also, not entirely unrelated but, isn't "Gluecifer" the coolest band name, ever? "Guccifer" isn't bad, either.
Two things. Number one, I can't understand why "thin" is so damn desirable for a phone. I mean, up to a point - you don't want to carry a brick in your pocket - but they're already plenty thin enough for me. As for the mini-jack, this is a problem for me. For one thing, I won't be able to connect the thing to my stereo, which is analog. Presumably, I'd have to buy a DAC, or some kind of wireless receiver, neither of which I'm planning on doing. Nor would it be convenient, perhaps not even possible, to use the iPhone with my truck's stereo. In my Peterbilt, the stereo, GPS, and other things are all integrated into one touch-screen display. It does have an interface to operate an MP3 player, but it's not designed for Apple devices, and it's a pretty piss-poor interface. It has no way to deal with podcasts, except as MP3 files, so I already have to work around that. Much easier to use the mini-jack and the Apple device's interface. Here's another thing. I'm glad my old iPod "Classic" is still working. I looked at getting a new iPod, but the hard drive sizes are all smaller. As it is, I can't fit all my music on the 160 GB hard drive I have. Aren't we supposed to be getting more storage with newer devices, not less? It seems people either love to bash Apple, or they're fawning fanboys, but here's my take after using their products for thirty years: Great products, (usually), bad corporation. I've always hated Apple, but I certainly wouldn't switch to Windows.
Seeing as how the proposed images are primarily hunting rifles(1 is in fact a target shooting rifle and the other appears to be a Winchester-type lever action rifle which has historical significance and connotations), which are generally legal even in cities and countries with very strict firearm legislation, isn't this a bit of an overreaction? It is important to note that it appears to be in a set of Olympic-themed emojis, of which target shooting has been a participating sport for over a century. And of course hunting with firearms has been a hobby if not vital means of survival for centuries as well.
I like how you innocently took a rational view of the matter. This is about the highly politicized and emotional gun control issue. For some reason, if you consider yourself a liberal, you must take a conservative position on gun laws. Conversely, if you call yourself a conservative, you must take a liberal view of gun ownership. Logic doesn't enter into it. All guns are either good, or bad, depending on your politics.
Are we talking about real assault rifles, or the ones that are a legislative fiction? Well, let's talk about all three...
A real assault rifle is a fully automatic rifle, a.k.a., a machine gun. These are already forbidden to the general public. A legislative or political assault rifle looks like a real assault rifle, and is often modeled after real assault rifles, (like the AR-15), but otherwise functions the same as any other semi-automatic weapon. That is, you pull the trigger and it fires one round, and reloads the chamber. You fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, just like a revolver, or a semi-automatic pistol, or many hunting rifles. A hunting rifle is any rifle you go hunting with. They may, or may not, look like an assault rifle. Some of the banned accessories, or those proposed to be banned in some legislation, are folding stocks, (which make the over-all length shorter), larger clips, flash suppressors, (which lengthen the barrel and disperse hot gases to reduce blinding), and certain types of grips. The legislative rational for prohibiting folding stocks and large clips seems clear - folding stocks can make it easier to conceal a rifle, and larger clips mean you don't have to change clips so often - but the other items simply make the weapon look scarier, or more military-looking, and do nothing to make them more deadly or dangerous. Since eighty-percent of the time mass shooters choose handguns for their work anyway, it's hard to see how these bans will have any effect upon them. Then again, they banned certain types of drugs, like marijuana and heroin, and that's been very effective, so who knows?
So with Siri you call an ambulance, and with Google you search for the symptoms of a heart attack. Minor difference there.
I assume you're being sarcastic here. Obviously it would make a huge difference whether you could get your phone to make an emergency call if you couldn't reach, or operate, your phone, than being able to use voice commands to run a web search, (a function which, incidentally, Macs have had since OS 8, at least). It seems to me that the latter is primarily useful to people who wish to continue playing with their phones as they drive, and then to the minority of people who are handicapped in some way. OTOH, I can envision a number of situations in which the Siri's functions could save your life.
I don't use Android, so I don't know, but if OK Google can be used to command the phone, then yes, it's comparable. Otherwise, I don't know what some people are getting at with their criticism. You know, I've never liked Apple, the corporation. But their products, especially their OS's, are undeniable. Particularly when compared to the competition, which always seems to be a copy of the Apple product. There are a lot of valid complaints to level at Apple. This isn't one of them.
That would only deal with half the problem. Less than half, really. And, although I agree with your point about end to end encryption, there's already a solution to that, in the form of VPNs. The commercialization of the web, and the advertising-based economic model these commercial entities adopted, are the bigger problem in terms of spying. I think the best thing we can do on our end is make advertising, and therefore data collection, unprofitable. We can do this by blocking ads and trackers, and blocking most cookies. Don't use those sites that force you to drop your defenses to use them. Support sites you care about with a small donation, let the rest wither away. Encourage others to do the same. That's how you get the internet back.
Yet another reason to use a password manager, if you needed one. It'll calculate the entropy for you. I mean, a web-based entropy calculator would make a great honeypot, no? Not directly useful, but it would generate an interesting wordlist.
You can use common words - you simply have to string them together in unpredictable (so to speak) ways. A password like "Bombay97!sweltering", which might mean something to you, is then easy to remember, and has 86.7 bits of entropy, (according to Rumkin). Two words of medium length, a couple of symbols, and you have a strong and easy to remember password. Use a password manager, (incidentally, if you encrypt your cloud backups, you shouldn't have any concerns - a password manager's database should be encrypted to begin with), and you can have hundreds of strong, unique passwords, while only having to memorize a handful that you use away from your own devices. Let's not forget, most incidents of password "hacking" involve guessing. The rest, of trying a wordlist of commonly used passwords, perhaps with John the Ripper, but only if they have the downloaded/captured data to work with.
What surprises me is that no one seems surprised that anyone would be so obsessed about getting "likes". Just goes to show how common this mania is nowadays. I'm always a bit shocked at how far people go to get you to say something positive about them on social media, whether they're begging for "likes" or hounding you to review your transaction. I sold something on eBay recently. The guy sent me the money, and I sent him the item. End of story. We had no communication. Yet, I was compelled (by eBay) to "say something" about it. Just marking it "positive" wasn't good enough. God help you if you say anything negative! I bought a simple item online recently. The company sent me five emails, asking me to "review the product". No news is good news, I want to tell them.
Now, would you kindly take a moment to mod up my comment? Thank you!
"The argument for lowercasing 'Internet' is that is has become wholly generic, like electricity and the telephone."
Except that there's only one Internet, not dozens of different kinds or brands of the internet. It depends on how you're using the word. While you can use these words in a generic sense, if you're talking about the Internet, it is a proper noun. Same with the Web, short for the World Wide Web.
Slashdot Mirror
"...the "who did it" does not matter as much as "what the emails say".
Really? It seems to me that, compared with "what the emails say", the fact that the Russians might be colluding with, or even simply manipulating a US election in favor of Trump is the lede here. I mean, it's not like the emails are telling us anything we didn't already know. Of course the DNC wants a party member for the nomination, and would do anything they could towards that end. They didn't want to end up like the Republicans, who lost control of their own party. The Democratic Party is not a public, democratic, institution. It just seems that way to the uninformed.
A journalist (of the WSJ no less) has no idea what is going on in their country?
Journalists ain't what they used to be. It used to be a working-class gig, but now it's been given over to college-educated, middle-class people, who get there with the experience of the world you'd expect. I mean, look at the kind of reporting you get when the topic is recreational drugs. Don't get me wrong. There are still good reporters. They're just fewer and further between.
You're absolutely right - this is old news. But, I have to admit, I really enjoy the outrage of middle-class people when they get the same treatment from law enforcement as the rest of us for the first time! I forget which NPR show it was, but one of their producers got the special treatment at the US/Canadian border, and, for me, who used to cross that border quite often, and spent many an hour as their guest, it made for a most enjoyable podcast.
"...there's a general perception that the world's getting worse..."
Well, yeah, amongst people lacking any historical perspective. And maybe amongst politicians, although I'm not always certain they actually believe what they're demagoguing about. I mean, there are people - many people - who think that crime is worse today, when it's actually at record lows. Whether it's you, me, or Kurzweil saying it, these people's minds won't be changed. Let's face it, most people are not all that educated, and get most of their knowledge about the World through the television.
Piracy lets you share with unlimited users.
So does real stuff. Not that I'd ever lend someone a record again, but at least I can play my records on any, and as many, turntables as I want. I can even sell 'em if I want. Digital data simply has no intrinsic value because it can be reproduced endlessly for nothing. If you want people to pay for it, it'd better be really cheap, and really convenient, because that's all it has going for it.
Instead of trying to bring real world convenience to digital, they're trying to bring digital inconvenience to real objects. Call me old-fashioned, but I want to own the crap I buy.
there are armed police at all UK commercial airports now, have been since 9/11.
(source: asked an armed police officer at Nottingham East Midlands Airport last month as I was passing through).
Yes, but, guns do not kill people, people do. That is the difference between the US and the UK, particularly when it comes to police.
Where it most definitely does not make sense is in passenger cars, where the moronic part of our population (that is, most of it) will assume it to be far more capable than it really is, and who will choose simply to ignore the system once it is operating. In passenger cars, nothing less than a 100% reliable, full-time autopilot function is acceptable, and we're not even slightly close to that being a reality.
This. Like the first idiot, who circumvented the Tesla's inability to play movies while driving, (why do we even have video players in cars?), people will quickly get the notion that they don't have to pay attention. They will get bored sitting there with nothing to do. Shit, nowadays people can't concentrate on anything, and play with their phones even when they're supposed to be in control of their vehicles. And we're going to put people in a vehicle that can miss a 13'5" high, 70' long vehicle because the Sun is shining?
BTW, I drive trucks. I do about 130,000 miles per year, so I see every kind of idiocy, about five times per day. I would love to see driving taken out of the hands of most car drivers. But we'll never have a system that is one-hundred-percent fool-proof. Even if the technology were there, people have a genius for fucking stuff up.
I'm sure they're on it. They've gotten some interesting data recently.
I don't see what intelligence has to do with it, unless you mean the ones who got caught. I agree, that wasn't too bright. As far as I can tell from having personally known a few cops, (in the US), they've always accessed the information at their disposal for their own purposes. It's just human nature. They've certainly done it for me when asked. I think the lede here is that there is simply gobs more information for them to play with, and thus misuse.
Republicans/Democrats can only give you more of the same old shit.
So true. I mean, they're in the business of maintaining the status quo. People worry about "throwing away their vote", but your vote is already wasted if you're voting for the slightly less worse candidate instead of the best candidate, whoever you might think that is. It's almost never a Democrat/Republican, am I right? As Eugene Debs once said, "It's better to vote for something you want, and not get it, than to vote for something you don't want, and get it", (apologies if the quote isn't verbatim).
Also, not entirely unrelated but, isn't "Gluecifer" the coolest band name, ever? "Guccifer" isn't bad, either.
I stopped using Google a long time ago. Aside from privacy issues, I don't want a search engine trying to guess what I want in my results.
Two things. Number one, I can't understand why "thin" is so damn desirable for a phone. I mean, up to a point - you don't want to carry a brick in your pocket - but they're already plenty thin enough for me.
As for the mini-jack, this is a problem for me. For one thing, I won't be able to connect the thing to my stereo, which is analog. Presumably, I'd have to buy a DAC, or some kind of wireless receiver, neither of which I'm planning on doing. Nor would it be convenient, perhaps not even possible, to use the iPhone with my truck's stereo. In my Peterbilt, the stereo, GPS, and other things are all integrated into one touch-screen display. It does have an interface to operate an MP3 player, but it's not designed for Apple devices, and it's a pretty piss-poor interface. It has no way to deal with podcasts, except as MP3 files, so I already have to work around that. Much easier to use the mini-jack and the Apple device's interface.
Here's another thing. I'm glad my old iPod "Classic" is still working. I looked at getting a new iPod, but the hard drive sizes are all smaller. As it is, I can't fit all my music on the 160 GB hard drive I have. Aren't we supposed to be getting more storage with newer devices, not less?
It seems people either love to bash Apple, or they're fawning fanboys, but here's my take after using their products for thirty years: Great products, (usually), bad corporation. I've always hated Apple, but I certainly wouldn't switch to Windows.
Why not. It's not like anyone thinks search results are simply searches of an index of what's on the web anymore.
IQ scores are more or less meaningless in this context. A nation does not have an "IQ".
In this context, at best it is a measure of how well the country's culture conditions people to taking standardized tests.
There's that, and how this national IQ quotient correlates to higher wages/better jobs. That is to say, more money.
where is the emoji for that?
Here: U+1F988
Seeing as how the proposed images are primarily hunting rifles(1 is in fact a target shooting rifle and the other appears to be a Winchester-type lever action rifle which has historical significance and connotations), which are generally legal even in cities and countries with very strict firearm legislation, isn't this a bit of an overreaction? It is important to note that it appears to be in a set of Olympic-themed emojis, of which target shooting has been a participating sport for over a century. And of course hunting with firearms has been a hobby if not vital means of survival for centuries as well.
I like how you innocently took a rational view of the matter. This is about the highly politicized and emotional gun control issue. For some reason, if you consider yourself a liberal, you must take a conservative position on gun laws. Conversely, if you call yourself a conservative, you must take a liberal view of gun ownership. Logic doesn't enter into it. All guns are either good, or bad, depending on your politics.
If I put a rifle emoji next to the shit emoji, I clearly want to shoot the shit. If I put it next to the cow emoji, I want a steak dinner.
Yes, and a rifle emoji next to a horse emoji means: shoot heroin.
As a 46YO, 5'11" and 350-pound white male, I'm not going to eat my cellphone because someone sends me a cake emoji. How stupid can you be?
Are you implying that you'd shoot your phone if someone sent you a rifle emoji?
Are we talking about real assault rifles, or the ones that are a legislative fiction? Well, let's talk about all three...
A real assault rifle is a fully automatic rifle, a.k.a., a machine gun. These are already forbidden to the general public.
A legislative or political assault rifle looks like a real assault rifle, and is often modeled after real assault rifles, (like the AR-15), but otherwise functions the same as any other semi-automatic weapon. That is, you pull the trigger and it fires one round, and reloads the chamber. You fire as fast as you can pull the trigger, just like a revolver, or a semi-automatic pistol, or many hunting rifles.
A hunting rifle is any rifle you go hunting with. They may, or may not, look like an assault rifle.
Some of the banned accessories, or those proposed to be banned in some legislation, are folding stocks, (which make the over-all length shorter), larger clips, flash suppressors, (which lengthen the barrel and disperse hot gases to reduce blinding), and certain types of grips. The legislative rational for prohibiting folding stocks and large clips seems clear - folding stocks can make it easier to conceal a rifle, and larger clips mean you don't have to change clips so often - but the other items simply make the weapon look scarier, or more military-looking, and do nothing to make them more deadly or dangerous. Since eighty-percent of the time mass shooters choose handguns for their work anyway, it's hard to see how these bans will have any effect upon them. Then again, they banned certain types of drugs, like marijuana and heroin, and that's been very effective, so who knows?
So with Siri you call an ambulance, and with Google you search for the symptoms of a heart attack. Minor difference there.
I assume you're being sarcastic here. Obviously it would make a huge difference whether you could get your phone to make an emergency call if you couldn't reach, or operate, your phone, than being able to use voice commands to run a web search, (a function which, incidentally, Macs have had since OS 8, at least). It seems to me that the latter is primarily useful to people who wish to continue playing with their phones as they drive, and then to the minority of people who are handicapped in some way. OTOH, I can envision a number of situations in which the Siri's functions could save your life.
I don't use Android, so I don't know, but if OK Google can be used to command the phone, then yes, it's comparable. Otherwise, I don't know what some people are getting at with their criticism. You know, I've never liked Apple, the corporation. But their products, especially their OS's, are undeniable. Particularly when compared to the competition, which always seems to be a copy of the Apple product. There are a lot of valid complaints to level at Apple. This isn't one of them.
That would only deal with half the problem. Less than half, really. And, although I agree with your point about end to end encryption, there's already a solution to that, in the form of VPNs.
The commercialization of the web, and the advertising-based economic model these commercial entities adopted, are the bigger problem in terms of spying. I think the best thing we can do on our end is make advertising, and therefore data collection, unprofitable. We can do this by blocking ads and trackers, and blocking most cookies. Don't use those sites that force you to drop your defenses to use them. Support sites you care about with a small donation, let the rest wither away. Encourage others to do the same. That's how you get the internet back.
What could possibly go wrong??
If it's as fast, reliable, and intuitive as Qualcomm's systems in commercial vehicles, it'll propel the auto industry into the 1990's!
Yet another reason to use a password manager, if you needed one. It'll calculate the entropy for you. I mean, a web-based entropy calculator would make a great honeypot, no? Not directly useful, but it would generate an interesting wordlist.
You can use common words - you simply have to string them together in unpredictable (so to speak) ways. A password like "Bombay97!sweltering", which might mean something to you, is then easy to remember, and has 86.7 bits of entropy, (according to Rumkin). Two words of medium length, a couple of symbols, and you have a strong and easy to remember password.
Use a password manager, (incidentally, if you encrypt your cloud backups, you shouldn't have any concerns - a password manager's database should be encrypted to begin with), and you can have hundreds of strong, unique passwords, while only having to memorize a handful that you use away from your own devices. Let's not forget, most incidents of password "hacking" involve guessing. The rest, of trying a wordlist of commonly used passwords, perhaps with John the Ripper, but only if they have the downloaded/captured data to work with.
What surprises me is that no one seems surprised that anyone would be so obsessed about getting "likes". Just goes to show how common this mania is nowadays. I'm always a bit shocked at how far people go to get you to say something positive about them on social media, whether they're begging for "likes" or hounding you to review your transaction. I sold something on eBay recently. The guy sent me the money, and I sent him the item. End of story. We had no communication. Yet, I was compelled (by eBay) to "say something" about it. Just marking it "positive" wasn't good enough. God help you if you say anything negative!
I bought a simple item online recently. The company sent me five emails, asking me to "review the product". No news is good news, I want to tell them.
Now, would you kindly take a moment to mod up my comment? Thank you!
"The argument for lowercasing 'Internet' is that is has become wholly generic, like electricity and the telephone."
Except that there's only one Internet, not dozens of different kinds or brands of the internet. It depends on how you're using the word. While you can use these words in a generic sense, if you're talking about the Internet, it is a proper noun. Same with the Web, short for the World Wide Web.