Robots are not taking over the world," the diplomat leading the first official talks on autonomous weapons assured on Friday, seeking to head off criticism over slow progress towards restricting the use of so-called "killer robots."
That is precisely what a killer robot would say. By the time people figure out there is a problem, it is too late and SkyNet has taken over.
Release notes should generally be functional. Save the marketing for a new update for a press release.
This falls under "know your audience."
A style of release notes that might be functional for a typing tutor for children may not be suitable for an encryption library. That is, you have to keep in mind who your users are how they use your product. You also have to balance with how open your ecosystem is. For a completely closed source, closed process product I would expect a very verbose and detailed changelog. For an open source project, some short one or two line bullet points with links to bug tracker, mailing list, and/or commits in online VCS are more than adequate. There are lots of other issues to consider as well, including the volume of change. Even if it was just one liners the changelog for the Linux kernel or LibreOffice would be too large for a mere mortal.
If I use Google, I expect that I should be able to get my data back at some point. Perhaps when I log in to GMail, and maybe at other times. Providing that service without a few calls to read() seems infeasible.
the effect of the current subsidy system is to transfer tax dollars to the already well-off.
Of all the things wrong with a subsidy, this is the least problematic for the electric vehicle subsidy. By your logic, the people receiving the subsidy are those who actually pay federal income taxes. Remember, the bottom 50% of wage earners have effectively no federal income tax burden. So, this isn't a wealth transfer to the wealthy. At worst, it is a discount on the taxes that they are actually paying.
The real problem I see with subsidies like this is that they tend to artificially raise the price of the product being subsidized. This happens with college tuition, agricultural produce, and even happened with low end fuel-efficient cars during the cash for clunkers program.
The real problem for subsidies is that they create a market distortion. There are certain limited occassions where that sort of thing makes sense and electric cars, even those which only the "well off" can afford might be one of the few good occassions, owing to the potential long term environmental benefit. I would rather the market function well without government interference, but there is still a way to go until electric vehicles become truly cost competitive.
Among the changes to the current tax code would be an end to the Plug-In Electric Drive Vehicle Credit.
I can't say that I disagree. However, I would really like to see an end to agrictulture subsidies. While electric vehicle tax credits will probably have a net long-term impact on the environment, agriculture subsidies just smack of make-work.
... says he was tricked by fellow co-schemers who told him they were not doing anything wrong by infecting computers with malware because they were not accessing private information such as banking or financial records.
I might have believed that claim 30 or so years ago. However, anyone having anything at all even remotely to do with technology would have to be living under a rock in order to not understand that infecting computers that you do not own is considered a serious crime.
That would be like claiming that you thought it was OK to drive yourself home after 6 drinks because you were careful not hit any parked cars or pedestrians and you made it home.
I would call that wilful ignorance.
I was originally going to say that this whole thing sounds like a case of #4 from "The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security". Then I reconsidered because it seemed like he had "good" intentions. However, I cannot imagine who would hire this guy after the claim that he made that he did not know what he was doing was wrong. Definitely sounds like a case of #4.
You could travel from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, a distance of about 125 miles with Denver in the middle, in less than 20 minutes.
There was an effort in Florida to try to get light rail from Miami to Tampa. In my mind the biggest obstacle was transportation once you get to the destination. I could understand something like this between two major cities with top notch mass transit, like New York and Boston. However, I don't think Fort Collins and Colorado Springs fit the bill, same as Miami and Tampa. Tell people "we can get you from CIty A to City B and then all you have to do is rent a car when you get there" is not going to get a ton of support. It works for air travel because the cost of a rental car is usually a small fraction of the airfare. However, for an economical light rail/hyperloop setup, the rental car cost now probably exceeds the long haul transport cost.
Chigurupati said his goal is not to enable people to drink more, but to drink with less physical harm
Alfred Nobel would like a word with you. No matter your intentions, people, both good and bad, will find uses and applications for your invention that you cannot possibly imagine. Worse, they will find uses and applications that you have imagined. That is human nature.
As with anything the government does, there is a considerable tooth-to-tail ratio. For every person with a security clearance doing actual intelligence work (including cyber), there are least 10 others who have a clearance without doing that sort of work. For instance, the secretaries and administrative assistants, the HR personnel, the maintenance personnel, the groundskeepers, the managers who sit in meetings all day, the budget analysts, the financial personnel, the IT support staff, the janitorial staff, etc.
I point it out so that people understand that the pool from which the tech and defense firms are trying to hire is not of size N, but probably of size 0.2 * N. They might benefit from having some support staff with clearances, though they can certainly get by without it where the government cannot (support staff in classified facilities have to be cleared). The real challenge is that they are all competing for a small number of experienced intelligence professionals with active clearances.
BTW, you will not see them outsourcing these jobs to H1B workers.
In fact, that is an interesting thing about being a contractor for the government. If you are a worker bee, then you are practically immune from outsourcing. If another company gets awarded the contract you are working on, you can bet that with nearly 100% certainty the new winner of the contract will attempt to hire away all the workers that were on the old contract. Not only are you effectively immune from outsourcing, but you have a high likelihood of being able to continue working in the same geographic area (and maybe the same office/project) through any of a number of changes of employer. Try that in the civilian world. The tech companies will have to pony up, because the defense contractors already do.
There is definitely a need to balance free speech with anonymity. Placing political ads should should require some amount of disclosure. What will be interesting will be to see how the big tech companies, who tend to be pretty vocal supporters of lots of Democrat politicians, will react to this. It is easy to fight against something supported by your ideological opponents, but what about when it is the people who you just helped win elections?
That said, two Democrats and John McCain hardly qualifies as "bipartisan." I'm just saying.
But this isn't a flaw in IOS. It's like saying Android is insecure because of fake emails I get asking me to reset my gmail password
That all depends. If the users are conditioned to respond to those sorts of pop-ups because of the OS itself or because of apps bundled by Apple, then it could be considered an iOS flaw at least in the sense that poor design choices condition the user to be more susceptible to this sort of exploitation.
It was like Microsoft's UAC in the early days. So many apps were written in such a way that they unnecessarily triggered the UAC pop-up. Users just wanted it to go away so they could get on with what they were doing. As a result, users just became conditioned to always allow it. Bad actors who wished to exploit users could count on the fact that the vast majority of users would just OK whatever it was to make the pop-up go away. Think about that for a minute. The goal was to stop unwanted changes to the system. If I double-click an installer then I want to change the system and there is no need to ask me. However, if something that I did not launch myself fires up in the background and wants to change my system, that is not OK. The way Microsoft executed UAC was such that the user could not easily distinguish between the two and the user in haste to make the pop-up go away will allow whatever.
Back to Apple. If the user cannot distinguish between something like the two use cases I have described then there may be a flaw to be addressed. It may also just be a problem with the application ecosystem itself or a manifestation of the user community's predisposition for convenience. In any case, I think that calling it a "fundamental flaw in iOS" is hyperbole.
Want to learn to program? Start with C. You can expand to whatever you want after that, but you have to master C first.
I used to say this a lot; however, I was given an analogy that made me change my mind. When we teach people to drive, we don't make them learn on snow and ice. So why should we make them do that with programming?
In an upper division undergraduate CompSci/CompEng course that I teach, I always tell the students, "spent more time reading code than writing code, being able to read code is more important and valuable to a programmer than being able to write code." I have has several students disagree strongly with that assertion. However, I use the example of learning a foreign language.
I know that programming and human language are different. However, I think that the same principle of learning the language structure (e.g., grammar, syntax, etc.) in order to first master reading holds for both sorts of languages. That is, one does not claim to be proficient in Spanish, French, or Japanese based on being able to speak it but not read it.
I was a terrible programmer for a very long time and what finally made the difference for me was to learn how to really read code. Once I had mastered that, I feel like I improved by leaps and bounds. I really wish that reading code had been emphasized as a core programming skill more when I was in school.
I don't trust any browser to store even my Slashdot login password. Why in the world would I trust it with my credit card? In fact, I don't even let merchants store my credit card if at all possible (I either choose the option not to save the card or manually delete the card after the purchase).
It seems like nobody who understands and actually values privacy and security would do this.
Suppose Verizon covers Dallas county and Loving county. T-Mobile covers Dallas county, but not Loving. T-Mobile would then cover roughly HALF the geographic area that Verizon does, while covering 99.996% of the people.
I get this and I get how in certain localized examples it might be the case. However, I don't really see how this can be the case on a national scale.
Also, as I understand, they are not claiming to serve 99,7% of the areas served by Verizon, rather they are claiming to serve 99,7% of the people served by Verizon. The latter would be a true statement in the example you cited.
The reality is that numbers can be sliced and diced many ways to seem impressive. "He has a batting average of.397 when batting against left-handers whose primary uniform color is blue whenever the most recent weather forecast has called for a greater than 40% chance of precipitation, except on Mondays." Or something like that. This just seems like another case of that.
In addition, the NAD also told T-Mobile to modify its claim that it covered 99.7 percent of Verizon customers to make clear that the coverage is by population and not geographic area.
That sentence made me do a double-take. How can T-Mobile cover 99,7 percent of Verizon customers without also covering 99,7 percent (or something very close) of the same geographic area? I suppose if Verizon had a small number of customers spread over a very large area it would be possible to cover 99,7 percent of Verizon customers but only, for example, 75 percent of the geographic area covered by Verizon. Still, I just do not understand how it can be in practice anything beyond a rounding error difference. If Verizon's customer base were so skewed in that way, they would be spending very large amounts of money to serve a very small customer population across a very large area. It does not strike me as something that a big company like Verizon would do.
You will note that it was during the Obama administration. I am not making a value judgment on the practice, I am just pointing out that the previous administration did or tried to do something substantially similar.
Knowledge, intelligence, cognition, and thought are all distinct things. I studied AI as an undergraduate, rule-based expert systems to be precise. Those are very much considered a form of AI yet most people do not think "expert system" when they hear "AI".
The examples you cite might or might not involve original thought, but then it might appear that they do to a human user.
I think part of the confusion is that in the field, AI can mean lots of different things, while in popular culture people think of AI as Commander Data from Star Trek, or the doctor from Voyager, or some other system which is capable of simulating or approximating human intelligence in a wide variety of subject areas. Most people would not consider, for example, a typical chess machine to be AI, yet it almost certainly fits the description in terms of what is academically considered to be AI.
If you want the non MS kernel you can still use it by not using Microsoft's cloud platform in the first place
There. FTFY.
Now, this is a serious question, but what reason could someone have for running Linux on Azure? Are there not any of a multitude of other better platforms out there for running Linux? I mean, I certainly understand if you are all in for Microsoft with things like Exchange, SQL server, AD, Sharepoint, etc., their cloud platform sort of make sense. But this, Ubuntu (or any other Linux) on Azure is something that simply does not make sense to me.
So, this isn't exactly the same thing, but I have a ~2.5 year old HP business laptop. It came with a standard HDD and a few weeks ago the HDD began to fail. I bought a new SSD and transferred the data over (I caught the failure early enough thanks to a misbehaving VM and SMART that I had only minor corruption in a few spots and I was able to correct everything I needed). After making the switch, it feels like I have a brand new laptop. I am absolutely amazed at how much of a difference just the HDD->SSD change makes.
I have another small Dell that came with SSD, but I only use it when I travel or when I need something very light and small. It also replaced a much older machine so I attributed the speed up mostly to the better CPU, more memory, and probably motherboard improvements. For everyday work I tend to use the larger HP I referred to above. However, since I have a very recent comparison of the exact same machine with HDD and then SSD, I can honestly say that I am all about SSDs now.
What steps can the average Joe take to protect their identity? Accepting Equifax's help forfeits your right to sue; it's the same with applying for protection at TransUnion (not sure about Experian). Extra services at those companies also cost money, but that's putting even more of your data in their hands, and it's not clear whether the protection/help they provide is worth it (leaving aside not wanting to reward bad behavior).
There is no reason for the vast majority of people to leave their credit open. Seriously, most people apply for new credit maybe once every few years, if that. Leaving your credit open is simply asking for trouble.
As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (or their SI equivalents if you don't like conventional weights and measures).
So is the reason that "blockchain technology" always comes up for no reason in slashdot posts because the site is owned by BizX? I suspect this is the case.
I don't even know what BizX is, so I suspect that was not my motivation for bringing it up. My motivation was more in the observation that this particular application might actually be suitable, as opposed to most every other time I have seen it proposed where the application is not suitable.
Because, as has been shown time and again, peer-review publications are not acting as the gatekeepers they make themselves out to be.
...because having people reviewing your work in order for it to be accepted has been shown to not work.
Which is not what I said. The problem is not the peer reviewers themselves, it is the publications. There are enough scientific publications who claim to have a robust peer review process, but which have been shown to be far below the standard they claim, as to make them suspect. There have been stories of researches that have used machine-generated nonsense papers as submissions to supposedly peer-reviewed publications where the submissions were accepted.
One of the deficiencies with peer review is that is usually done blind. That does have benefits, when executed properly, but again that is usually the problem. If I trust Dr. Soandso at the University of Nowhere in Particular and he accepts something, then I am more likely to accept it. Versus, a paper that got published after being reviewed (or not reviewed) by an unknown number and population of reviewers of unknown qualification, I would rather base my acceptance on the evaluation done by someone I know and trust. It's not perfect, but I think it has to be better than what we have now.
I know blockchain is a bit tired at this point, but this sounds like the right sort of application for it. In order to successfully publish you would have to get enough people to accept your contribution. Because, as has been shown time and again, peer-review publications are not acting as the gatekeepers they make themselves out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Robots are not taking over the world," the diplomat leading the first official talks on autonomous weapons assured on Friday, seeking to head off criticism over slow progress towards restricting the use of so-called "killer robots."
That is precisely what a killer robot would say. By the time people figure out there is a problem, it is too late and SkyNet has taken over.
Release notes should generally be functional. Save the marketing for a new update for a press release.
This falls under "know your audience."
A style of release notes that might be functional for a typing tutor for children may not be suitable for an encryption library. That is, you have to keep in mind who your users are how they use your product. You also have to balance with how open your ecosystem is. For a completely closed source, closed process product I would expect a very verbose and detailed changelog. For an open source project, some short one or two line bullet points with links to bug tracker, mailing list, and/or commits in online VCS are more than adequate. There are lots of other issues to consider as well, including the volume of change. Even if it was just one liners the changelog for the Linux kernel or LibreOffice would be too large for a mere mortal.
If I use Google, I expect that I should be able to get my data back at some point. Perhaps when I log in to GMail, and maybe at other times. Providing that service without a few calls to read() seems infeasible.
Oh, did you mean something else by the headline?
the effect of the current subsidy system is to transfer tax dollars to the already well-off.
Of all the things wrong with a subsidy, this is the least problematic for the electric vehicle subsidy. By your logic, the people receiving the subsidy are those who actually pay federal income taxes. Remember, the bottom 50% of wage earners have effectively no federal income tax burden. So, this isn't a wealth transfer to the wealthy. At worst, it is a discount on the taxes that they are actually paying.
The real problem I see with subsidies like this is that they tend to artificially raise the price of the product being subsidized. This happens with college tuition, agricultural produce, and even happened with low end fuel-efficient cars during the cash for clunkers program.
The real problem for subsidies is that they create a market distortion. There are certain limited occassions where that sort of thing makes sense and electric cars, even those which only the "well off" can afford might be one of the few good occassions, owing to the potential long term environmental benefit. I would rather the market function well without government interference, but there is still a way to go until electric vehicles become truly cost competitive.
Among the changes to the current tax code would be an end to the Plug-In Electric Drive Vehicle Credit.
I can't say that I disagree. However, I would really like to see an end to agrictulture subsidies. While electric vehicle tax credits will probably have a net long-term impact on the environment, agriculture subsidies just smack of make-work.
... says he was tricked by fellow co-schemers who told him they were not doing anything wrong by infecting computers with malware because they were not accessing private information such as banking or financial records.
I might have believed that claim 30 or so years ago. However, anyone having anything at all even remotely to do with technology would have to be living under a rock in order to not understand that infecting computers that you do not own is considered a serious crime.
That would be like claiming that you thought it was OK to drive yourself home after 6 drinks because you were careful not hit any parked cars or pedestrians and you made it home.
I would call that wilful ignorance.
I was originally going to say that this whole thing sounds like a case of #4 from "The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security". Then I reconsidered because it seemed like he had "good" intentions. However, I cannot imagine who would hire this guy after the claim that he made that he did not know what he was doing was wrong. Definitely sounds like a case of #4.
You could travel from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, a distance of about 125 miles with Denver in the middle, in less than 20 minutes.
There was an effort in Florida to try to get light rail from Miami to Tampa. In my mind the biggest obstacle was transportation once you get to the destination. I could understand something like this between two major cities with top notch mass transit, like New York and Boston. However, I don't think Fort Collins and Colorado Springs fit the bill, same as Miami and Tampa. Tell people "we can get you from CIty A to City B and then all you have to do is rent a car when you get there" is not going to get a ton of support. It works for air travel because the cost of a rental car is usually a small fraction of the airfare. However, for an economical light rail/hyperloop setup, the rental car cost now probably exceeds the long haul transport cost.
Chigurupati said his goal is not to enable people to drink more, but to drink with less physical harm
Alfred Nobel would like a word with you. No matter your intentions, people, both good and bad, will find uses and applications for your invention that you cannot possibly imagine. Worse, they will find uses and applications that you have imagined. That is human nature.
As with anything the government does, there is a considerable tooth-to-tail ratio. For every person with a security clearance doing actual intelligence work (including cyber), there are least 10 others who have a clearance without doing that sort of work. For instance, the secretaries and administrative assistants, the HR personnel, the maintenance personnel, the groundskeepers, the managers who sit in meetings all day, the budget analysts, the financial personnel, the IT support staff, the janitorial staff, etc.
I point it out so that people understand that the pool from which the tech and defense firms are trying to hire is not of size N, but probably of size 0.2 * N. They might benefit from having some support staff with clearances, though they can certainly get by without it where the government cannot (support staff in classified facilities have to be cleared). The real challenge is that they are all competing for a small number of experienced intelligence professionals with active clearances.
BTW, you will not see them outsourcing these jobs to H1B workers.
In fact, that is an interesting thing about being a contractor for the government. If you are a worker bee, then you are practically immune from outsourcing. If another company gets awarded the contract you are working on, you can bet that with nearly 100% certainty the new winner of the contract will attempt to hire away all the workers that were on the old contract. Not only are you effectively immune from outsourcing, but you have a high likelihood of being able to continue working in the same geographic area (and maybe the same office/project) through any of a number of changes of employer. Try that in the civilian world. The tech companies will have to pony up, because the defense contractors already do.
There is definitely a need to balance free speech with anonymity. Placing political ads should should require some amount of disclosure. What will be interesting will be to see how the big tech companies, who tend to be pretty vocal supporters of lots of Democrat politicians, will react to this. It is easy to fight against something supported by your ideological opponents, but what about when it is the people who you just helped win elections?
That said, two Democrats and John McCain hardly qualifies as "bipartisan." I'm just saying.
But this isn't a flaw in IOS. It's like saying Android is insecure because of fake emails I get asking me to reset my gmail password
That all depends. If the users are conditioned to respond to those sorts of pop-ups because of the OS itself or because of apps bundled by Apple, then it could be considered an iOS flaw at least in the sense that poor design choices condition the user to be more susceptible to this sort of exploitation.
It was like Microsoft's UAC in the early days. So many apps were written in such a way that they unnecessarily triggered the UAC pop-up. Users just wanted it to go away so they could get on with what they were doing. As a result, users just became conditioned to always allow it. Bad actors who wished to exploit users could count on the fact that the vast majority of users would just OK whatever it was to make the pop-up go away. Think about that for a minute. The goal was to stop unwanted changes to the system. If I double-click an installer then I want to change the system and there is no need to ask me. However, if something that I did not launch myself fires up in the background and wants to change my system, that is not OK. The way Microsoft executed UAC was such that the user could not easily distinguish between the two and the user in haste to make the pop-up go away will allow whatever.
Back to Apple. If the user cannot distinguish between something like the two use cases I have described then there may be a flaw to be addressed. It may also just be a problem with the application ecosystem itself or a manifestation of the user community's predisposition for convenience. In any case, I think that calling it a "fundamental flaw in iOS" is hyperbole.
Want to learn to program? Start with C. You can expand to whatever you want after that, but you have to master C first.
I used to say this a lot; however, I was given an analogy that made me change my mind. When we teach people to drive, we don't make them learn on snow and ice. So why should we make them do that with programming?
In an upper division undergraduate CompSci/CompEng course that I teach, I always tell the students, "spent more time reading code than writing code, being able to read code is more important and valuable to a programmer than being able to write code." I have has several students disagree strongly with that assertion. However, I use the example of learning a foreign language.
I know that programming and human language are different. However, I think that the same principle of learning the language structure (e.g., grammar, syntax, etc.) in order to first master reading holds for both sorts of languages. That is, one does not claim to be proficient in Spanish, French, or Japanese based on being able to speak it but not read it.
I was a terrible programmer for a very long time and what finally made the difference for me was to learn how to really read code. Once I had mastered that, I feel like I improved by leaps and bounds. I really wish that reading code had been emphasized as a core programming skill more when I was in school.
... just like they currently do with passwords
I don't trust any browser to store even my Slashdot login password. Why in the world would I trust it with my credit card? In fact, I don't even let merchants store my credit card if at all possible (I either choose the option not to save the card or manually delete the card after the purchase).
It seems like nobody who understands and actually values privacy and security would do this.
These companies are the most powerful information gatekeepers...
(Emphasis added)
This is what is commonly referred to as a flawed assumption. Everything that proceeds after it is therefore suspect.
Suppose Verizon covers Dallas county and Loving county. T-Mobile covers Dallas county, but not Loving. T-Mobile would then cover roughly HALF the geographic area that Verizon does, while covering 99.996% of the people.
I get this and I get how in certain localized examples it might be the case. However, I don't really see how this can be the case on a national scale.
Also, as I understand, they are not claiming to serve 99,7% of the areas served by Verizon, rather they are claiming to serve 99,7% of the people served by Verizon. The latter would be a true statement in the example you cited.
The reality is that numbers can be sliced and diced many ways to seem impressive. "He has a batting average of .397 when batting against left-handers whose primary uniform color is blue whenever the most recent weather forecast has called for a greater than 40% chance of precipitation, except on Mondays." Or something like that. This just seems like another case of that.
In addition, the NAD also told T-Mobile to modify its claim that it covered 99.7 percent of Verizon customers to make clear that the coverage is by population and not geographic area.
That sentence made me do a double-take. How can T-Mobile cover 99,7 percent of Verizon customers without also covering 99,7 percent (or something very close) of the same geographic area? I suppose if Verizon had a small number of customers spread over a very large area it would be possible to cover 99,7 percent of Verizon customers but only, for example, 75 percent of the geographic area covered by Verizon. Still, I just do not understand how it can be in practice anything beyond a rounding error difference. If Verizon's customer base were so skewed in that way, they would be spending very large amounts of money to serve a very small customer population across a very large area. It does not strike me as something that a big company like Verizon would do.
Before people go losing their minds again about how Trump is a xenophobic racist, please have a look at this Slashdot article from 15 months ago:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/06/28/005202/us-customs-wants-to-know-travelers-social-media-account-names
You will note that it was during the Obama administration. I am not making a value judgment on the practice, I am just pointing out that the previous administration did or tried to do something substantially similar.
Knowledge, intelligence, cognition, and thought are all distinct things. I studied AI as an undergraduate, rule-based expert systems to be precise. Those are very much considered a form of AI yet most people do not think "expert system" when they hear "AI".
The examples you cite might or might not involve original thought, but then it might appear that they do to a human user.
I think part of the confusion is that in the field, AI can mean lots of different things, while in popular culture people think of AI as Commander Data from Star Trek, or the doctor from Voyager, or some other system which is capable of simulating or approximating human intelligence in a wide variety of subject areas. Most people would not consider, for example, a typical chess machine to be AI, yet it almost certainly fits the description in terms of what is academically considered to be AI.
If you want the non MS kernel you can still use it by not using Microsoft's cloud platform in the first place
There. FTFY.
Now, this is a serious question, but what reason could someone have for running Linux on Azure? Are there not any of a multitude of other better platforms out there for running Linux? I mean, I certainly understand if you are all in for Microsoft with things like Exchange, SQL server, AD, Sharepoint, etc., their cloud platform sort of make sense. But this, Ubuntu (or any other Linux) on Azure is something that simply does not make sense to me.
HP doesn't believe in SSDs.
So, this isn't exactly the same thing, but I have a ~2.5 year old HP business laptop. It came with a standard HDD and a few weeks ago the HDD began to fail. I bought a new SSD and transferred the data over (I caught the failure early enough thanks to a misbehaving VM and SMART that I had only minor corruption in a few spots and I was able to correct everything I needed). After making the switch, it feels like I have a brand new laptop. I am absolutely amazed at how much of a difference just the HDD->SSD change makes.
I have another small Dell that came with SSD, but I only use it when I travel or when I need something very light and small. It also replaced a much older machine so I attributed the speed up mostly to the better CPU, more memory, and probably motherboard improvements. For everyday work I tend to use the larger HP I referred to above. However, since I have a very recent comparison of the exact same machine with HDD and then SSD, I can honestly say that I am all about SSDs now.
CREDIT FREEZE
What steps can the average Joe take to protect their identity? Accepting Equifax's help forfeits your right to sue; it's the same with applying for protection at TransUnion (not sure about Experian). Extra services at those companies also cost money, but that's putting even more of your data in their hands, and it's not clear whether the protection/help they provide is worth it (leaving aside not wanting to reward bad behavior).
Here is a good guide on freezing your credit: http://clark.com/personal-fina...
There is no reason for the vast majority of people to leave their credit open. Seriously, most people apply for new credit maybe once every few years, if that. Leaving your credit open is simply asking for trouble.
As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure (or their SI equivalents if you don't like conventional weights and measures).
Why won't Facebook show the public the propagandistic ads that a so-called Russian troll farm bought last year to target American voters?
Because views cost money. That Russian troll farm is going to have to pay for the privilege of having you see the ad.
(Note: that is meant to be sarcastic; I shouldn't have to point that out, but a surprising number of people have defective sarcasm detectors)
So is the reason that "blockchain technology" always comes up for no reason in slashdot posts because the site is owned by BizX? I suspect this is the case.
I don't even know what BizX is, so I suspect that was not my motivation for bringing it up. My motivation was more in the observation that this particular application might actually be suitable, as opposed to most every other time I have seen it proposed where the application is not suitable.
Because, as has been shown time and again, peer-review publications are not acting as the gatekeepers they make themselves out to be.
...because having people reviewing your work in order for it to be accepted has been shown to not work.
Which is not what I said. The problem is not the peer reviewers themselves, it is the publications. There are enough scientific publications who claim to have a robust peer review process, but which have been shown to be far below the standard they claim, as to make them suspect. There have been stories of researches that have used machine-generated nonsense papers as submissions to supposedly peer-reviewed publications where the submissions were accepted.
One of the deficiencies with peer review is that is usually done blind. That does have benefits, when executed properly, but again that is usually the problem. If I trust Dr. Soandso at the University of Nowhere in Particular and he accepts something, then I am more likely to accept it. Versus, a paper that got published after being reviewed (or not reviewed) by an unknown number and population of reviewers of unknown qualification, I would rather base my acceptance on the evaluation done by someone I know and trust. It's not perfect, but I think it has to be better than what we have now.
I know blockchain is a bit tired at this point, but this sounds like the right sort of application for it. In order to successfully publish you would have to get enough people to accept your contribution. Because, as has been shown time and again, peer-review publications are not acting as the gatekeepers they make themselves out to be.