it's pointless, ridiculously hard to accomplish (and yet only works) on a global scale, and somehow manages to give the abstract notion of time even less meaning.
When I'm trying to coordinate a call with someone in Europe, it's a royal pain in the ass as we have to figure out our GMT offset plus/minus DST. I'd much rather say, "I work 1pm until 10pm" and have them reply, "I come in at 10am and stay until 6pm, so anytime between 1pm and 5pm would be fine". That's easy. Its even easy if I decide to shift my working hours to 12pm-9pm in the winter - I just let them know that. What's not easy is 9am-5pm local minus 5 time zones minus DST vs 8am-6pm local plus one time zone with no DST this week, but DST two weeks from now. Given we now have the internet, I'd rather be able to search for when someone will be available and be able to instantly compare it to the times I'm available than have to do some complex calculation involving looking up time zones and DST status.
It doesn't abstract the notion of time, as you said. What it abstracts is the cultural notion of what should be done at what local time.
I touch down in Sydney at 10:45am, great! What do people do here midmorning?
The issue is that you're stuck on 'morning' as being 6am-12pm local time. Lets suppose you live somewhere where you eat breakfast at 12pm UT. You say to your buddy in Sydney, "I'm touching down at 10:45am about an hour before my normal breakfast time. What time is that for you?" "Hey buddy, it's going to be about bedtime here. We'll get you some barbie shrimp but then you'll have to try to take a nap."
If anything, UT would reinforce the notion that the earth is a sphere that rotates, and that our concept of time, originally tied to the solar day, is not what time really is.
There was an article awhile back that found that a massive amount of the removable batteries on Amazon (like 90%) were cheap knock-offs. I used to be on the removable battery train, but I realized after I bought a replacement battery that looked 95% identical to the real thing that I had gotten scammed. (However, for $10, I just limited use of it and payed close attention when charging it.) Unless Samsung can get Amazon to crack down on the knock-offs, there are likely going to be far more problems with exploding batteries than if they just fix their issue and keep the glued-in one.
I completely agree. But if we can change that, everything changes.
I'd love to see UBI result in a few green-thumb parents growing gardens at the local school and feeding the kids based on what they grew there. UBI could actually make that possible. If you're staying home for the kids anyway, might as well volunteer at school.
I want to see the local crazy artist create sculptures for every yard on the block that wants them, making a themed neighborhood and differentiating it from all the rest.
I personally want to run an after-school STEM program, costing minimal amounts for parents, and enriching kids with a window into the crazy universe we live in.
I want to be part of the cray UBI experiment, for good or bad. Because I really think, that once we get over our puritan culture, we can seriously change the world.
Security through obscurity doesn't work when the attacker can anonymously probe the security. Security through obscurity works quite well when you have to show your face to figure out the security. Sure, I could try to figure out where they keep the voting machines. But it would be really hard to do that discretely. Unlike a piece of hardware I could buy and tear down, or some software I could sandbox and probe, physical security really does stand up to security through obscurity.
Tell me: When you hop the fence into the Rose Garden, how long do you have to reach a door to the White House?
You don't know, and neither do I. And that's a fucking deterrent for everyone but someone mentally handicapped. Yes, you could send someone else to probe that, and observe the result, but that raises the alarm, and security heightens.
Note that you haven't pointed to any reason to think at all that this information is being kept secret....
And you haven't given any reason to think it's readily available. I think your mission impossible script is a bit shit, and you think it's possible. If that's the case, pick a city, do the research, and lay out how easy it would be. If you can do that, you're on tap for either Gitmo or an award.
To get physical access to the machines, you just need to get a key to the warehouse that they're kept in.....And you don't need to alter all the machines-- just a few.
I think you're overstating the ease of this. I have absolutely no idea where they keep the voting machines in my city between elections. I don't know if it's in one location or many. I don't know if they are somewhat distributed based on where they are used, or all in one central location. I'm guessing that only a small handful of people know these details. How do you propose figuring that out without arousing suspicion? Take all the janitors out for drinks and ask them about the warehouse contents? How do you know what janitor to ask out for drinks? Are you going to plant spies outside the voting location to watch them load the machines onto the truck, and then trail them back to the storage location?
So lets suppose you figure out where they keep them, the models, and you have your nefarious software ready to go. Which ones do you alter? How do you know? How can you be sure that they won't update the software before the next election?
You can't be doing this a week before the election - people are already likely starting to put the logistics in place. Dusting off the machines, running the start-up procedures and test units, moving them to more secure locations. You need to do this well before the election, but at that point, you don't necessarily know what machines will be moved to what location, and whether or not you're just rigging a vote for the person who is going to win anyway in that district, or flipping the vote in a way that would be blatantly obvious based on the previous voting records. You likely don't know if this is going to matter at all, because who could have picked the one district in FL in 2000 that would have made the difference? You're as likely to end up flipping a very blue district slightly red, or vice-versa, as much as you are to flip a near 50/50 split just to your side. Do the first, and it's clear that there was tampering. Do you then design more complicated software to do a statistical analysis on the final vote tally and then adjust or not?
It really is harder than you're making it out to be. Not impossible, but not trivial in the least.
I heard an amazingly simple argument for UBI once, that has stuck with me:
Do we have enough wealth in the US to provide everyone with a decent quality of life? Yes. Then the only thing left to do is to figure out how to redistribute it so that we end poverty and suffering.
We're one of the more wealthy countries on earth, and we have plenty to go around. The only barrier is the cultural issue you so eloquently pointed out: [it] bothers a lot of people who like to take the position that the only moral way to survive is to work.
I have a decent job, but I'd really think twice about coming into cube-land every day if I could have my basic needs met while pursuing my hobbies and trying to make them into a business. I bet a large number of other people would be in the same boat, and I can't imagine the entrepreneurial boom if that happened. We used to be a visionary country, but lately it seems like we've become hyper-focused on determining what people are worth and what they deserve. I think UBI would reverse that, if we could ever implement it. Pay people for what they could be, not for what they are now. Like all investments many won't be profitable, but I bet in the long run enough would be that it would more than make up for it.
If anything it should encourage private enterprise because you don't risk having zero money to eat and make rent
I think this is one of the critical pieces that everyone seems to ignore. It seems that most everyone thinks that UBI means more welfare and nothing changes culturally. I'd be shocked if that was the case.
I'm a decent writer, pretty solid cook, and I make pretty good beer. All of those things I do as hobbies because the risk in trying to do them as a job is too high for me. If I was given 2/3 or 3/4 of what I make now as UBI, I'd have to have a long talk with my wife about potentially quitting my job, being stay-at-home dad, and pursuing those hobbies as business ventures.
I can hardly imagine the boom in arts and culture that we'd see with UBI. All the starving musicians and artists who give up the dream to pay the mortgage would no longer have to. The sidewalk musician brightening our day would head home to a comfortable house, richer from the donations, but not starving if they are low for a day. I could see gardens and civic beautification projects exploding, as people with free time could invest it in their community. Kids would no longer be shipped off to day care with strangers. Parents could be more deeply involved in schools. Everyone with a crazy idea could pursue it, unlike now where most don't, because they can't afford to fail.
The parental engagement with kids may be the most significant impact financially. Kids who grow up in stable homes with involved parents do better in life than those who don't. They stay in school longer, stay out of trouble more, and, in general, become more productive members of society. If we can prevent 25% of the kids who get tangled up in the legal system and ER from doing that, either as kids or adults, that's a big savings for communities. If we can prevent 25% of the violent crime from happening, that's huge. And it could be more than that - most of the crime in my area is gang-driven, and the gangs form because the kids in them are desperate for a better life. If you can get paid enough to have a decent place to live, smoke weed, play video games, and shoot some hoops, being part of a gang is going to be a hard sell. And while the aforementioned weed smoker isn't going to be a productive member of society, if the choice is that or a gang-banger, I'll take the weed-smoker any day. The alternative is a serious negative impact on society, both in terms of happiness and overall financial well-being.
UBI will drive cultural change, the likes we haven't seen since abandoning agrarian society and moving into the mechanized one. I really think that with less poverty we'll see less chronic health issues (which increase hospital/ER costs tremendously) less crime (police and incarceration budgets are huge) more entrepreneurs (less organized labor and more individual and unique efforts, but potentially a broader tax-base) and there will be more people with expendable income to invest in those entrepreneurs.
My last two phones were in the 2-3 year old range when the micro USB port failed. I jumped on wireless charging for that reason alone. I'd have happily kept one as a throw-around mini-computer if I could still charge it. I'm hopeful that by the time I'm ready to replace this phone I haven't broken it and I can keep it for random dorky uses.
I posted pretty much the exact same comment, including current laptop model, earlier this week. I'm leaning System 76 at this point. At bare minimum, while the hardware isn't quite as nice as Apple's, I can configure a real MBP replacement for half the cost of the current generation of MBPs with 2x the hardware capacity. And ports galore. And a real battery. And a matte screen.
I've been waiting on a MBP that's worth replacing my mid-2012 with fully upgraded HD and memory. (my own - not apple's $1k upgrade) Every MBP since then has been flat or downhill in terms of hardware. I think I'm going to go System 76 when I finally can't stand my old MBP anymore and need the hardware upgrades.
Discount? AT&T has to do this, they're forced to. Otherwise they wouldn't make as much money. So since they are forced to do this, you're going to have to get charged for it. Sorry, but that's the only way.
AND will encourage social interaction... unlike Pokey-Go
Well, I'm not so sure about that. I'm in a young little city, with lots of families and college kids. It's not uncommon to hear someone of any age under about 40 call out some pokemon name in the common poke-areas of the city, only to have a few other people of varying ages say, "Oooh, cool. Where?" I'm not sure that outside the game that college kids would be making any sort of contact with 10 year olds.
This weekend the wife and I went to people watch at what was rumored to be a ridiculous gathering of players. We were not disappointed. A little park on the outskirts of the city had like 100 people there all milling around playing the game. Some camped out in chairs and on benches, some just wandering up and down the waterfront, people with dogs, kids in strollers.... It was insane. And they were talking to each other. Probably even splits of ages between middle school, high school, college kids, and nerdy 20-40 year old and parents. Somebody from one end of the park would shout that they found some pokemon, and half the people would wander down there, occasionally high-fiving random strangers when they caught it.
It was wild. I've never seen anything like it in my life. I'm guessing small towns are different, but around here, it really is a social game.
At some point, it stops being fun. It becomes a chore.
I can't count how many games I've just up and dropped because of this reason. I'm pretty immune to the sunk-cost fallacy. Plus, since I never drop more than about $20-$30 into a game until I'm deep into it, it's never enough to care about. Everything from MMOs to single player RPGs, a fair number of community-based online text-based RPGs, etc. As I've gotten older, my patience for drudge-work has dropped off tremendously. My free time is nothing like it used to be, so if I spend more than 10-15 minutes not having fun, I'm done. I don't have the time to "invest" in bullshit on the promise that I'll be entertained later. Too many broken promises over the years for that to work on me any more.
Slashdot forgets that not all businesses are IT businesses. The beauty of a fax is that it's machine-to-machine. While you can intercept a fax, you need to be in the position of being able to tap a physical phone line. Unlike email, and unlike the dodgy windows computer used to send email, faxes are pretty secure. I've worked in multiple businesses where sensitive information gets faxed. Everything else can go over email, but personnel records, anything with a SSN or other bit of personal information such as medical or educational records, and any sort of invoicing/billing gets faxed.
Is this a perfect system? Nope. Is it the best system? Well, that depends. If you don't have the IT and professional development staff to set up, maintain, and teach administrative assistants how to use a proper encrypted file transfer protocol, and to ensure that they don't compromise their machines, and to monitor their use of it to ensure they're not taking shortcuts, then simply buying a printer that can handle faxes is not the worst idea.
Individual plane owners also couldn't decide to replace the battery with a $4 knock-off from China that was more dangerous.
If the battery was replaceable, there's no guarantee that it would get replaced with a non-dangerous battery. And even if it was replaced with a good one at Samsung's expense, it's entirely possible for some sizable subset of owners to pair THAT one with a dangerous spare. That leads to even greater problems, because then, even if the battery that's lighting on fire is a cheap knock-off, the perception is that the replacements were bad too. There's no easy way to recover from a failure like this.
That amazes me. Why do you still suffer that? I haven't had a land-line in almost a decade, and I can't fathom ever having one again. Well, I guess I can fathom it if I was motivated to build a call-screening system with ring-only-on-whitelist, but since I can't fathom having that motivation.....
I wonder if this doesn't drive a secondary effect as well. It's not uncommon for a limited number of individuals to be the source of many police interactions. If a lot of those interactions are hostile, on the part of one or the other party, (or both) it creates a toxic relationship. If these interactions have a damper, such as a camera and some better behavior some percentage of the time, I wonder if that doesn't have a calming effect.
Whether or not it's my fault, if I'm getting harassed by the cops all the time, I'm likely going to be an asshole when I see them. But if half the time they are friendly and respectful, just doing their job, it dampens the hate. If half of the time I see that I'm on camera and I bite my tongue and say, "Yeah, sure officer. No problems here." those officers are less fired up and cautious the next time we meet. I could easily see this being a positive behavior feedback loop, where before we had a negative behavior feedback loop.
Until you have something that absolutely, definitely works, let's just teach kids with teachers who are masters of their subject.
That sounds good, but in practice it's not good. Why? To be a master of your subject, you have to live and breathe your subject. To be a good teacher you need to be a bit of a generalist. You can't be so hyper-focused on one thing that everything else in life gets excluded.
I've got an education degree and some teaching experience, and I've also spent a fair bit of time working in and around grad-school STEM programs. The experts in those programs are the shittest teachers, for the most part. Why? They never learned about how kids learn, because they were busy becoming experts. They never learned the basics of assessing learning because they were becoming experts. They never learned motivational strategies because they were hyper-motivated on an exclusive topic, and it never occurred to them that some students need some motivation the way they would for any other topic.
What we need are not masters of their subjects, but communicators and collaborators who can give kids access to people who are masters of their subjects. I once filled that role, connecting NASA scientists to middle school science classrooms. The NASA scientists weren't teachers and didn't know the first thing about it, and the middle school science teachers weren't scientists and engineers. But when we set up the communication and collaboration between the kids and the experts, amazing stuff happened.
That's one thing we need. The other is equitable funding. I think that it's Germany that does the opposite of what the US does. They still have standardized tests, but the results are secret. The lowest performing schools get more money, and the highest performing schools get less. That makes all of the schools roughly the same, and parents don't know which ones are better, so the rich parents can't move their kids out, leaving behind the poor (minority) kids. The US does the opposite - we openly publish our assessment scores, and we threaten to withhold funds from poorly performing schools. Since we also have wacky local funding, parents create these "ghetto schools", as rich parents move their kids to the best performing schools, and work to ensure that they don't need to pay for the schools they left behind. Great for their kids, but terrible for all the other kids. But who cares when you can live in a gated community with a guard to keep the rabble out, right?
Why didn't you just post a video? But more seriously:
I would've preferred it to have happened in your browser which could automatically poll certain bookmarked sites every x hours, and put any of those pages updated since your last visit into a special folder (would be really handy for the list of web comics I follow).
Congratulations, you just described an RSS reader, and the way I've been using it for two decades now. INOReader, for one, can even poll some social media sites. Did you seriously never learn about RSS? I mean, it's decades old and designed to do exactly what you're describing.
That was my thought as well. Hell, you could even allow the user to input some pathing for the last little bit, in the case of the map being inaccurate or to access a slightly different area than the exact address.
One place where I lived the house was on a steep hill, with no real access between the front door and the road. Yet the street address was directly in front of the house. To get picked up at my doorstep, I'd need to set the path so the car would drive past the house, around the building next door, and up the driveway behind it.
Google maps already lets you do this. I don't see a reason you couldn't port that technology to the self-drving car app.
Slashdot Mirror
it's pointless, ridiculously hard to accomplish (and yet only works) on a global scale, and somehow manages to give the abstract notion of time even less meaning.
When I'm trying to coordinate a call with someone in Europe, it's a royal pain in the ass as we have to figure out our GMT offset plus/minus DST. I'd much rather say, "I work 1pm until 10pm" and have them reply, "I come in at 10am and stay until 6pm, so anytime between 1pm and 5pm would be fine". That's easy. Its even easy if I decide to shift my working hours to 12pm-9pm in the winter - I just let them know that. What's not easy is 9am-5pm local minus 5 time zones minus DST vs 8am-6pm local plus one time zone with no DST this week, but DST two weeks from now. Given we now have the internet, I'd rather be able to search for when someone will be available and be able to instantly compare it to the times I'm available than have to do some complex calculation involving looking up time zones and DST status.
It doesn't abstract the notion of time, as you said. What it abstracts is the cultural notion of what should be done at what local time.
I touch down in Sydney at 10:45am, great! What do people do here midmorning?
The issue is that you're stuck on 'morning' as being 6am-12pm local time. Lets suppose you live somewhere where you eat breakfast at 12pm UT. You say to your buddy in Sydney, "I'm touching down at 10:45am about an hour before my normal breakfast time. What time is that for you?" "Hey buddy, it's going to be about bedtime here. We'll get you some barbie shrimp but then you'll have to try to take a nap."
If anything, UT would reinforce the notion that the earth is a sphere that rotates, and that our concept of time, originally tied to the solar day, is not what time really is.
There was an article awhile back that found that a massive amount of the removable batteries on Amazon (like 90%) were cheap knock-offs. I used to be on the removable battery train, but I realized after I bought a replacement battery that looked 95% identical to the real thing that I had gotten scammed. (However, for $10, I just limited use of it and payed close attention when charging it.) Unless Samsung can get Amazon to crack down on the knock-offs, there are likely going to be far more problems with exploding batteries than if they just fix their issue and keep the glued-in one.
I completely agree. But if we can change that, everything changes.
I'd love to see UBI result in a few green-thumb parents growing gardens at the local school and feeding the kids based on what they grew there. UBI could actually make that possible. If you're staying home for the kids anyway, might as well volunteer at school.
I want to see the local crazy artist create sculptures for every yard on the block that wants them, making a themed neighborhood and differentiating it from all the rest.
I personally want to run an after-school STEM program, costing minimal amounts for parents, and enriching kids with a window into the crazy universe we live in.
I want to be part of the cray UBI experiment, for good or bad. Because I really think, that once we get over our puritan culture, we can seriously change the world.
Security through obscurity doesn't work when the attacker can anonymously probe the security. Security through obscurity works quite well when you have to show your face to figure out the security. Sure, I could try to figure out where they keep the voting machines. But it would be really hard to do that discretely. Unlike a piece of hardware I could buy and tear down, or some software I could sandbox and probe, physical security really does stand up to security through obscurity.
Tell me: When you hop the fence into the Rose Garden, how long do you have to reach a door to the White House?
You don't know, and neither do I. And that's a fucking deterrent for everyone but someone mentally handicapped. Yes, you could send someone else to probe that, and observe the result, but that raises the alarm, and security heightens.
Note that you haven't pointed to any reason to think at all that this information is being kept secret....
And you haven't given any reason to think it's readily available. I think your mission impossible script is a bit shit, and you think it's possible. If that's the case, pick a city, do the research, and lay out how easy it would be. If you can do that, you're on tap for either Gitmo or an award.
To get physical access to the machines, you just need to get a key to the warehouse that they're kept in.....And you don't need to alter all the machines-- just a few.
I think you're overstating the ease of this. I have absolutely no idea where they keep the voting machines in my city between elections. I don't know if it's in one location or many. I don't know if they are somewhat distributed based on where they are used, or all in one central location. I'm guessing that only a small handful of people know these details. How do you propose figuring that out without arousing suspicion? Take all the janitors out for drinks and ask them about the warehouse contents? How do you know what janitor to ask out for drinks? Are you going to plant spies outside the voting location to watch them load the machines onto the truck, and then trail them back to the storage location?
So lets suppose you figure out where they keep them, the models, and you have your nefarious software ready to go. Which ones do you alter? How do you know? How can you be sure that they won't update the software before the next election?
You can't be doing this a week before the election - people are already likely starting to put the logistics in place. Dusting off the machines, running the start-up procedures and test units, moving them to more secure locations. You need to do this well before the election, but at that point, you don't necessarily know what machines will be moved to what location, and whether or not you're just rigging a vote for the person who is going to win anyway in that district, or flipping the vote in a way that would be blatantly obvious based on the previous voting records. You likely don't know if this is going to matter at all, because who could have picked the one district in FL in 2000 that would have made the difference? You're as likely to end up flipping a very blue district slightly red, or vice-versa, as much as you are to flip a near 50/50 split just to your side. Do the first, and it's clear that there was tampering. Do you then design more complicated software to do a statistical analysis on the final vote tally and then adjust or not?
It really is harder than you're making it out to be. Not impossible, but not trivial in the least.
I heard an amazingly simple argument for UBI once, that has stuck with me:
Do we have enough wealth in the US to provide everyone with a decent quality of life? Yes. Then the only thing left to do is to figure out how to redistribute it so that we end poverty and suffering.
We're one of the more wealthy countries on earth, and we have plenty to go around. The only barrier is the cultural issue you so eloquently pointed out: [it] bothers a lot of people who like to take the position that the only moral way to survive is to work.
I have a decent job, but I'd really think twice about coming into cube-land every day if I could have my basic needs met while pursuing my hobbies and trying to make them into a business. I bet a large number of other people would be in the same boat, and I can't imagine the entrepreneurial boom if that happened. We used to be a visionary country, but lately it seems like we've become hyper-focused on determining what people are worth and what they deserve. I think UBI would reverse that, if we could ever implement it. Pay people for what they could be, not for what they are now. Like all investments many won't be profitable, but I bet in the long run enough would be that it would more than make up for it.
If anything it should encourage private enterprise because you don't risk having zero money to eat and make rent
I think this is one of the critical pieces that everyone seems to ignore. It seems that most everyone thinks that UBI means more welfare and nothing changes culturally. I'd be shocked if that was the case.
I'm a decent writer, pretty solid cook, and I make pretty good beer. All of those things I do as hobbies because the risk in trying to do them as a job is too high for me. If I was given 2/3 or 3/4 of what I make now as UBI, I'd have to have a long talk with my wife about potentially quitting my job, being stay-at-home dad, and pursuing those hobbies as business ventures.
I can hardly imagine the boom in arts and culture that we'd see with UBI. All the starving musicians and artists who give up the dream to pay the mortgage would no longer have to. The sidewalk musician brightening our day would head home to a comfortable house, richer from the donations, but not starving if they are low for a day. I could see gardens and civic beautification projects exploding, as people with free time could invest it in their community. Kids would no longer be shipped off to day care with strangers. Parents could be more deeply involved in schools. Everyone with a crazy idea could pursue it, unlike now where most don't, because they can't afford to fail.
The parental engagement with kids may be the most significant impact financially. Kids who grow up in stable homes with involved parents do better in life than those who don't. They stay in school longer, stay out of trouble more, and, in general, become more productive members of society. If we can prevent 25% of the kids who get tangled up in the legal system and ER from doing that, either as kids or adults, that's a big savings for communities. If we can prevent 25% of the violent crime from happening, that's huge. And it could be more than that - most of the crime in my area is gang-driven, and the gangs form because the kids in them are desperate for a better life. If you can get paid enough to have a decent place to live, smoke weed, play video games, and shoot some hoops, being part of a gang is going to be a hard sell. And while the aforementioned weed smoker isn't going to be a productive member of society, if the choice is that or a gang-banger, I'll take the weed-smoker any day. The alternative is a serious negative impact on society, both in terms of happiness and overall financial well-being.
UBI will drive cultural change, the likes we haven't seen since abandoning agrarian society and moving into the mechanized one. I really think that with less poverty we'll see less chronic health issues (which increase hospital/ER costs tremendously) less crime (police and incarceration budgets are huge) more entrepreneurs (less organized labor and more individual and unique efforts, but potentially a broader tax-base) and there will be more people with expendable income to invest in those entrepreneurs.
My last two phones were in the 2-3 year old range when the micro USB port failed. I jumped on wireless charging for that reason alone. I'd have happily kept one as a throw-around mini-computer if I could still charge it. I'm hopeful that by the time I'm ready to replace this phone I haven't broken it and I can keep it for random dorky uses.
I posted pretty much the exact same comment, including current laptop model, earlier this week. I'm leaning System 76 at this point. At bare minimum, while the hardware isn't quite as nice as Apple's, I can configure a real MBP replacement for half the cost of the current generation of MBPs with 2x the hardware capacity. And ports galore. And a real battery. And a matte screen.
I've been waiting on a MBP that's worth replacing my mid-2012 with fully upgraded HD and memory. (my own - not apple's $1k upgrade) Every MBP since then has been flat or downhill in terms of hardware. I think I'm going to go System 76 when I finally can't stand my old MBP anymore and need the hardware upgrades.
Discount? AT&T has to do this, they're forced to. Otherwise they wouldn't make as much money. So since they are forced to do this, you're going to have to get charged for it. Sorry, but that's the only way.
Prime membership with one-click turned on.
AND will encourage social interaction... unlike Pokey-Go
Well, I'm not so sure about that. I'm in a young little city, with lots of families and college kids. It's not uncommon to hear someone of any age under about 40 call out some pokemon name in the common poke-areas of the city, only to have a few other people of varying ages say, "Oooh, cool. Where?" I'm not sure that outside the game that college kids would be making any sort of contact with 10 year olds.
This weekend the wife and I went to people watch at what was rumored to be a ridiculous gathering of players. We were not disappointed. A little park on the outskirts of the city had like 100 people there all milling around playing the game. Some camped out in chairs and on benches, some just wandering up and down the waterfront, people with dogs, kids in strollers.... It was insane. And they were talking to each other. Probably even splits of ages between middle school, high school, college kids, and nerdy 20-40 year old and parents. Somebody from one end of the park would shout that they found some pokemon, and half the people would wander down there, occasionally high-fiving random strangers when they caught it.
It was wild. I've never seen anything like it in my life. I'm guessing small towns are different, but around here, it really is a social game.
At some point, it stops being fun. It becomes a chore.
I can't count how many games I've just up and dropped because of this reason. I'm pretty immune to the sunk-cost fallacy. Plus, since I never drop more than about $20-$30 into a game until I'm deep into it, it's never enough to care about. Everything from MMOs to single player RPGs, a fair number of community-based online text-based RPGs, etc. As I've gotten older, my patience for drudge-work has dropped off tremendously. My free time is nothing like it used to be, so if I spend more than 10-15 minutes not having fun, I'm done. I don't have the time to "invest" in bullshit on the promise that I'll be entertained later. Too many broken promises over the years for that to work on me any more.
Gotta go. Kids on my lawn again....
Or that could have made it worse as customers bought $5 Chinese knock-off batteries as spares.
Slashdot forgets that not all businesses are IT businesses. The beauty of a fax is that it's machine-to-machine. While you can intercept a fax, you need to be in the position of being able to tap a physical phone line. Unlike email, and unlike the dodgy windows computer used to send email, faxes are pretty secure. I've worked in multiple businesses where sensitive information gets faxed. Everything else can go over email, but personnel records, anything with a SSN or other bit of personal information such as medical or educational records, and any sort of invoicing/billing gets faxed.
Is this a perfect system? Nope. Is it the best system? Well, that depends. If you don't have the IT and professional development staff to set up, maintain, and teach administrative assistants how to use a proper encrypted file transfer protocol, and to ensure that they don't compromise their machines, and to monitor their use of it to ensure they're not taking shortcuts, then simply buying a printer that can handle faxes is not the worst idea.
Individual plane owners also couldn't decide to replace the battery with a $4 knock-off from China that was more dangerous.
If the battery was replaceable, there's no guarantee that it would get replaced with a non-dangerous battery. And even if it was replaced with a good one at Samsung's expense, it's entirely possible for some sizable subset of owners to pair THAT one with a dangerous spare. That leads to even greater problems, because then, even if the battery that's lighting on fire is a cheap knock-off, the perception is that the replacements were bad too. There's no easy way to recover from a failure like this.
That amazes me. Why do you still suffer that? I haven't had a land-line in almost a decade, and I can't fathom ever having one again. Well, I guess I can fathom it if I was motivated to build a call-screening system with ring-only-on-whitelist, but since I can't fathom having that motivation.....
I wonder if this doesn't drive a secondary effect as well. It's not uncommon for a limited number of individuals to be the source of many police interactions. If a lot of those interactions are hostile, on the part of one or the other party, (or both) it creates a toxic relationship. If these interactions have a damper, such as a camera and some better behavior some percentage of the time, I wonder if that doesn't have a calming effect.
Whether or not it's my fault, if I'm getting harassed by the cops all the time, I'm likely going to be an asshole when I see them. But if half the time they are friendly and respectful, just doing their job, it dampens the hate. If half of the time I see that I'm on camera and I bite my tongue and say, "Yeah, sure officer. No problems here." those officers are less fired up and cautious the next time we meet. I could easily see this being a positive behavior feedback loop, where before we had a negative behavior feedback loop.
Will Facebook be on the list? He did say all diseases.....
Until you have something that absolutely, definitely works, let's just teach kids with teachers who are masters of their subject.
That sounds good, but in practice it's not good. Why? To be a master of your subject, you have to live and breathe your subject. To be a good teacher you need to be a bit of a generalist. You can't be so hyper-focused on one thing that everything else in life gets excluded.
I've got an education degree and some teaching experience, and I've also spent a fair bit of time working in and around grad-school STEM programs. The experts in those programs are the shittest teachers, for the most part. Why? They never learned about how kids learn, because they were busy becoming experts. They never learned the basics of assessing learning because they were becoming experts. They never learned motivational strategies because they were hyper-motivated on an exclusive topic, and it never occurred to them that some students need some motivation the way they would for any other topic.
What we need are not masters of their subjects, but communicators and collaborators who can give kids access to people who are masters of their subjects. I once filled that role, connecting NASA scientists to middle school science classrooms. The NASA scientists weren't teachers and didn't know the first thing about it, and the middle school science teachers weren't scientists and engineers. But when we set up the communication and collaboration between the kids and the experts, amazing stuff happened.
That's one thing we need. The other is equitable funding. I think that it's Germany that does the opposite of what the US does. They still have standardized tests, but the results are secret. The lowest performing schools get more money, and the highest performing schools get less. That makes all of the schools roughly the same, and parents don't know which ones are better, so the rich parents can't move their kids out, leaving behind the poor (minority) kids. The US does the opposite - we openly publish our assessment scores, and we threaten to withhold funds from poorly performing schools. Since we also have wacky local funding, parents create these "ghetto schools", as rich parents move their kids to the best performing schools, and work to ensure that they don't need to pay for the schools they left behind. Great for their kids, but terrible for all the other kids. But who cares when you can live in a gated community with a guard to keep the rabble out, right?
Have you emailed them and told them this? Also, why do you need them open on Saturday? The ones I use I can do just about everything online.
Koch Brothers, Clinton Foundation. At this point what difference does it make?
At least two orders of magnitude more cash on hand. That's rather a lot.
tl;dr
Why didn't you just post a video? But more seriously:
I would've preferred it to have happened in your browser which could automatically poll certain bookmarked sites every x hours, and put any of those pages updated since your last visit into a special folder (would be really handy for the list of web comics I follow).
Congratulations, you just described an RSS reader, and the way I've been using it for two decades now. INOReader, for one, can even poll some social media sites. Did you seriously never learn about RSS? I mean, it's decades old and designed to do exactly what you're describing.
That was my thought as well. Hell, you could even allow the user to input some pathing for the last little bit, in the case of the map being inaccurate or to access a slightly different area than the exact address.
One place where I lived the house was on a steep hill, with no real access between the front door and the road. Yet the street address was directly in front of the house. To get picked up at my doorstep, I'd need to set the path so the car would drive past the house, around the building next door, and up the driveway behind it.
Google maps already lets you do this. I don't see a reason you couldn't port that technology to the self-drving car app.