Of course not. A secretary is a human - one deserving of common courtesy, and more importantly, one who is presumably competent at their job. Which means the transaction is far more likely to succeed from the start.
Companies can't even get phone trees right as it is, so having them dial out is going to make things even worse. And at least if something goes horribly wrong with a human, you can tell them off and have it mean something; you can't even do that with a computer.
Because getting jerked around by a computer sucks. Doubleplus so if it's one pretending to be a human.
I legitimately feel sorry for service workers who are going to have to take orders from Duplex. It seems oddly dehumanizing to be ordered around by a machine.
It's been going on for a while now. You may only have heard of it, but your kids have been playing it since late last year.
It's gotten to the point where my sister's school is in the midst of trying to come up with a better solution to keeping the kids from playing the mobile version of the game during class. The usual threats aren't working; they just go right back to it the next day. (And if they aren't playing about it, then it's all they want to talk about)
There's no whataboutism. Both of these companies suck.
If you care about your privacy - and especially if the recent Facebook news has inspired your interest - then you should be going through Google's services as well and minimizing the amount of data you supply them. Because they have plenty of data on you to use against your best interests, and a large analytics operation to figure out how to do it.
Both Facebook and Google have too much data. Period.
At least in my sphere of the world, JustWatch has cornered the market for streaming listings. There hasn't really been a need to use anything else. So while the MPAA's effort was half-hearted to begin with, there really isn't a need to keep it up when there are other, better options.
In an extensive and unprecedented news briefing this evening, the Council of Elders announced that they have begun a new defensive campaign against the blue world that is the third body from our local star.
K'Nord, speaker for the Council of Elders' Planetary Land Defense Forces, elaborated:
"For many years the blue worlders have launched probes and other devices at our glorious home world, with little success. Even when they can land their pitiful machines we have engaged in a subtle subterfuge campaign to further hobble their ability to collect information on our planet. None the less, the Council has grown tired of the annoyance posed by the blue worlders' continued attempts to reach our sweet red soil, and the undue alarm among the populace that it has created. As a result, the Council has approved a new plan to disrupt the communications of the invaders at the source, in order to render them unable to send future probes."
Detailing the plan, K'Nord revealed that the signals intelligence arm of the Defensive Forces had successfully accessed the exceptionally primitive data networks of the blue worlders, using their own equipment against them to block communications and disrupt the ongoing functionality of the tribals' society. Several communications nodes were rendered inert in this fashion, including those identified with the codenames SourceForge and Slashdot. Defensive analysts believe that these nodes are among the most important to the invaders' society, and that with their failure, the invaders will be unable to complete even the most basic of calculations to reach the planet.
"The pathetic blue worlders have proven time and time again that they are entirely reliant on machines for even the most basic of functions. Without these they are as helpless as an infant chirocican; their natural cognitive abilities pale in comparison to even our least extraordinary younglings."
When a junior reporter noted that taking a proactive stance against the third planet could attract further undesirable attention from the invaders, K'Nord quickly isolated the traitor and had their gelsacs carefully eviscerated, for use as wetware in the construction of further communication disruption devices.
Of course they're spying devices. That's the whole bloody point.
Children are a six-figure investment these days. One that moves on two legs and isn't wholly rational. So keeping tabs on where they are and giving them the means to call for help is a very big deal to some people.
Back in the early days when most people had 3-4 OTA channels and few people had cable, more than enough people were watching each network to fund their operations. However now that it's not uncommon for a show on a broadcast network to "go fractional" - that is, get a Nielsen rating below 1.0 - OTA is no longer sustainable. Ad revenue alone isn't enough, and on top of that you have the heavy costs of operating a 1 megawatt broadcasting antenna.
The broadcast networks are slowly transitioning over to cable-style paid networks, and this is the only reason they're surviving thus far. If they weren't receiving subscriber revenue from cable companies, they'd already be dead.
The future is not in free content. It may take broadcast networks another decade or more to get out of the OTA business, but the continuing balkanizaiton of TV viewers over dozens of networks guarantees that OTA will no longer be viable in the long-run.
It sounds like the problem was internal, as Slashdot was up in read-only mode all day, and SlashdotMedia has explicitly stated it wasn't a cyberattack.
To be sure, no one is bitching about CMDA-the-technology. They're bitching about CDMA-the-Qualcomm-standard, which is an anti-consumer, vendor lock-in pain in the ass.
Because often those are the original source of a story, and when doing a meta-story like this it's good journalism (and manners) to acknowledge and link to the original source.
If Slashdot doesn't link to the original source, then they're doing readers a disfavor by linking to a second-hand account. But at the same time if the original source is paywalled, then it's not going to be accessible to everyone. So linking to the original and offering an alternative link, they're both properly citing the original source and making sure a longer story is available to everyone.
The problem here is that the Switch is a game console sold on a very limited profit margin. They can't outbid vendors of overpriced smartphones for parts.
This is exactly the case. Assuming Nintendo can even get extra assembly capacity, they're almost certainly bottlenecked by one (or more) of the following 4 components.
NAND: Outright shortage that has everyone scrambling to get chips, and has significantly driving up prices on anything that makes it to the spot market. This is a significant boom in a traditional boom/bust cycle, and won't abate until demand drops or more capacity comes online (which takes a long time, and everyone is hesitant to do for fear of starting a bust)
DRAM: The same problem as NAND, since they are complementary goods and made by the same manufacturers.
SoC: TSMC's 20nm line shares a bunch of back-end equipment with their 16nm line, which is currently running at full capacity. It is unlikely that NVIDIA can get more TX1 orders in without paying more per unit for them
MEMS: These devices aren't in an outright shortage, but they are in high demand.
At the end of the day this is all about economics. Nintendo could increase their priority, but they'd have to pay more. And given the thin margins on the hardware to start with, they'd have to increase prices. (Which I'd be okay with, but most people would not, I suspect)
The problem with taking a stance is that now you have to justify why you take action sometimes and not other times. I totally get why Cloudflare would back down here and that's their call.
But if they're going to start policing content, then why the hell are they shutting down the routing of objectionable content, but not clearly criminal content? Along with TOR, they're the haven of choice for Black Hats and other criminal groups. Brian Krebs and others have been trying to get them to stop for years, to no avail. And the people they are protecting are causing actual (criminal) damages to other groups.
If Cloudflare wants to be a true neutral party, I can respect that. Similarly, if they want to have a say over the traffic they route, I can respect that as well. But if they're going to take the latter route, then I think they need to be held more accountable for all the scumbag criminals that they provide protection for.
Oh thank goodness. I was starting to wonder if Twitter even cared about the problem. I've had bots liking & retweeting my old tweets for months now.
Their actions and profiles were always the same: a bunch of random retweets, and then a saucy profile picture and a pinned tweet talking about sex and inviting you to their dating website. There's no way this wasn't detectable.
If so, why does the secondary user of the chip (Apple) also have to pay licensing fees?
Because Qualcomm says so.
No, seriously. Qualcomm's position is that every step in the production chain that includes their IP/hardware needs to be individually licensed. Because company X makes a board that includes Qualcomm's IP, and then sells that board to company Y who makes a phone from it and sells said phone, then both X and Y need to be licensed.
It's a scenario that has been called into question many times before over the years. However no case has made it to trial to decide it and set any kind of precedent. In the meantime, because both X and Y technically have products that utilize Qualcomm's IP, both face the risk of an infringement suit if they don't pay royalties.
Probably the closest we came to that was NVIDIA's suit against Samsung and Qualcomm, which along with establishing IP infringement was attempting to sort out who is responsible for said infringement (is it the company who fabs the chips, or the company who designs the IP?). However since that case imploded spectacularly, the question was never answered.
but even less a fan of using children's books to get kids into gambling.
Meanwhile in lottery commissions across the country, government employees are trying their damnedest to figure out how to get those kids to gamble. Lottery revenues are trending down in most states, especially those that for many years got fat on the Video Poker gravy train. Millennials - but especially those for whom smartphones have been around most of their lives - aren't gambling in nearly the same numbers as their elders. And for states who rely on lottery revenue to fund basic services, this has them terrified.
Which is leading to a nationwide push to "modernize" video gambling so that the younger generations take it up. School funding depends on it.
Word was opened with administrative privileges through Windows' Task Manager
Isn't this essentially cheating? If Word is opened by a user, it's only opened at standard user privileges, even if that user is a member of the admin group.
The use of a macro is clever enough. But if it hinges on Word running as Admin, then I have to question whether this is anything more than a publicity stunt.
In place of #3, I'd like to see the court use eminent domain to take Comcast's wires and give them to the city so each customer or each neighborhood can choose their own ISP.
Unfortunately in a cable topology that's not practical at the individual level. It's a shared medium to the node. And even then, the nodes aren't the be-all end-all of the system, so having different nodes on different ISPs is not easily done.
Or for a non-inflammatory title: Microsoft Disables Faulty AV Software so Win10 Uses Can Safely Update To Latest OS
AV software is some of the worst crap to get foisted on Windows installations. I wish MS would just disallow it outright. But as the Kaspersky suit shows, AV vendors aren't going to let go of that teet if they find any way to avoid being forced to do so.
The question for me is, why would I want to pay $6/month just to watch a few episodes of Star Trek: Discovery?
Heck, it's not even paying that's the problem. It's that I'm paying for a subscription TV streaming service, so when that subscription lapses, I have nothing.
In the era of iTunes/Amazon/Google where I can buy a season pass for a couple of bucks an episode and go back and watch it any time I want, a subscription streaming service doesn't bring much to the table. I'll pay once, but I'm not going to pay twice.
And they come preloaded with addons, some of which are legal because they have substantial non-infringing use, all of which are preconfigured to grab stuff you're not authorized to watch. It's this very last part that makes them illegal. If they're not preconfigured to or advertised for the purpose of copyright infringement, then they are legal.
And to add to that, there are vendors out there explicitly advertising/selling these as piracy boxes. They're not even trying to hide behind plausible deniability, they're outright trying to sell hardware to people for the purposes of committing copyright infringement.
"But how can you watch for free? The secret to that is an app called KODI. TVFrog has completely reprogrammed and redesigned it so it works even easier. The TVFrog technology searches the internet where it will locate and stream, virtually any television show, hollywood movie, or live sports event you want to watch without having to worry about paying rental fees or monthly subscriptions."
Slashdot Mirror
Of course not. A secretary is a human - one deserving of common courtesy, and more importantly, one who is presumably competent at their job. Which means the transaction is far more likely to succeed from the start.
Companies can't even get phone trees right as it is, so having them dial out is going to make things even worse. And at least if something goes horribly wrong with a human, you can tell them off and have it mean something; you can't even do that with a computer.
Because getting jerked around by a computer sucks. Doubleplus so if it's one pretending to be a human.
I legitimately feel sorry for service workers who are going to have to take orders from Duplex. It seems oddly dehumanizing to be ordered around by a machine.
It's been going on for a while now. You may only have heard of it, but your kids have been playing it since late last year.
It's gotten to the point where my sister's school is in the midst of trying to come up with a better solution to keeping the kids from playing the mobile version of the game during class. The usual threats aren't working; they just go right back to it the next day. (And if they aren't playing about it, then it's all they want to talk about)
There's no whataboutism. Both of these companies suck.
If you care about your privacy - and especially if the recent Facebook news has inspired your interest - then you should be going through Google's services as well and minimizing the amount of data you supply them. Because they have plenty of data on you to use against your best interests, and a large analytics operation to figure out how to do it.
Both Facebook and Google have too much data. Period.
n/t
At least in my sphere of the world, JustWatch has cornered the market for streaming listings. There hasn't really been a need to use anything else. So while the MPAA's effort was half-hearted to begin with, there really isn't a need to keep it up when there are other, better options.
Prostitution and money laundering? Whelp, they're fucked.
Huh? Wouldn't not getting people sick be in their best interests?
In an extensive and unprecedented news briefing this evening, the Council of Elders announced that they have begun a new defensive campaign against the blue world that is the third body from our local star.
K'Nord, speaker for the Council of Elders' Planetary Land Defense Forces, elaborated:
"For many years the blue worlders have launched probes and other devices at our glorious home world, with little success. Even when they can land their pitiful machines we have engaged in a subtle subterfuge campaign to further hobble their ability to collect information on our planet. None the less, the Council has grown tired of the annoyance posed by the blue worlders' continued attempts to reach our sweet red soil, and the undue alarm among the populace that it has created. As a result, the Council has approved a new plan to disrupt the communications of the invaders at the source, in order to render them unable to send future probes."
Detailing the plan, K'Nord revealed that the signals intelligence arm of the Defensive Forces had successfully accessed the exceptionally primitive data networks of the blue worlders, using their own equipment against them to block communications and disrupt the ongoing functionality of the tribals' society. Several communications nodes were rendered inert in this fashion, including those identified with the codenames SourceForge and Slashdot. Defensive analysts believe that these nodes are among the most important to the invaders' society, and that with their failure, the invaders will be unable to complete even the most basic of calculations to reach the planet.
"The pathetic blue worlders have proven time and time again that they are entirely reliant on machines for even the most basic of functions. Without these they are as helpless as an infant chirocican; their natural cognitive abilities pale in comparison to even our least extraordinary younglings."
When a junior reporter noted that taking a proactive stance against the third planet could attract further undesirable attention from the invaders, K'Nord quickly isolated the traitor and had their gelsacs carefully eviscerated, for use as wetware in the construction of further communication disruption devices.
If we're going to make up fictitious quotes, maybe we should at least finish them.
"... in order to prevent devices from unintentionally shutting down due to undercurrent conditions."
Everything about the silence around the throttling is annoying. But throwing out the context of the situation strips the whole matter of any meaning.
Of course they're spying devices. That's the whole bloody point.
Children are a six-figure investment these days. One that moves on two legs and isn't wholly rational. So keeping tabs on where they are and giving them the means to call for help is a very big deal to some people.
OTA TV is on its way out anyhow.
Back in the early days when most people had 3-4 OTA channels and few people had cable, more than enough people were watching each network to fund their operations. However now that it's not uncommon for a show on a broadcast network to "go fractional" - that is, get a Nielsen rating below 1.0 - OTA is no longer sustainable. Ad revenue alone isn't enough, and on top of that you have the heavy costs of operating a 1 megawatt broadcasting antenna.
The broadcast networks are slowly transitioning over to cable-style paid networks, and this is the only reason they're surviving thus far. If they weren't receiving subscriber revenue from cable companies, they'd already be dead.
The future is not in free content. It may take broadcast networks another decade or more to get out of the OTA business, but the continuing balkanizaiton of TV viewers over dozens of networks guarantees that OTA will no longer be viable in the long-run.
No idea, but the ops team is apparently going to post a write-up later this week.
It sounds like the problem was internal, as Slashdot was up in read-only mode all day, and SlashdotMedia has explicitly stated it wasn't a cyberattack.
To be sure, no one is bitching about CMDA-the-technology. They're bitching about CDMA-the-Qualcomm-standard, which is an anti-consumer, vendor lock-in pain in the ass.
Because often those are the original source of a story, and when doing a meta-story like this it's good journalism (and manners) to acknowledge and link to the original source.
If Slashdot doesn't link to the original source, then they're doing readers a disfavor by linking to a second-hand account. But at the same time if the original source is paywalled, then it's not going to be accessible to everyone. So linking to the original and offering an alternative link, they're both properly citing the original source and making sure a longer story is available to everyone.
This is exactly the case. Assuming Nintendo can even get extra assembly capacity, they're almost certainly bottlenecked by one (or more) of the following 4 components.
At the end of the day this is all about economics. Nintendo could increase their priority, but they'd have to pay more. And given the thin margins on the hardware to start with, they'd have to increase prices. (Which I'd be okay with, but most people would not, I suspect)
So Cloudflare won't stand up for speech, but they'll stand up for black hat criminal operations? WTF?
The problem with taking a stance is that now you have to justify why you take action sometimes and not other times. I totally get why Cloudflare would back down here and that's their call.
But if they're going to start policing content, then why the hell are they shutting down the routing of objectionable content, but not clearly criminal content? Along with TOR, they're the haven of choice for Black Hats and other criminal groups. Brian Krebs and others have been trying to get them to stop for years, to no avail. And the people they are protecting are causing actual (criminal) damages to other groups.
If Cloudflare wants to be a true neutral party, I can respect that. Similarly, if they want to have a say over the traffic they route, I can respect that as well. But if they're going to take the latter route, then I think they need to be held more accountable for all the scumbag criminals that they provide protection for.
Oh thank goodness. I was starting to wonder if Twitter even cared about the problem. I've had bots liking & retweeting my old tweets for months now.
Their actions and profiles were always the same: a bunch of random retweets, and then a saucy profile picture and a pinned tweet talking about sex and inviting you to their dating website. There's no way this wasn't detectable.
Because Qualcomm says so.
No, seriously. Qualcomm's position is that every step in the production chain that includes their IP/hardware needs to be individually licensed. Because company X makes a board that includes Qualcomm's IP, and then sells that board to company Y who makes a phone from it and sells said phone, then both X and Y need to be licensed.
It's a scenario that has been called into question many times before over the years. However no case has made it to trial to decide it and set any kind of precedent. In the meantime, because both X and Y technically have products that utilize Qualcomm's IP, both face the risk of an infringement suit if they don't pay royalties.
Probably the closest we came to that was NVIDIA's suit against Samsung and Qualcomm, which along with establishing IP infringement was attempting to sort out who is responsible for said infringement (is it the company who fabs the chips, or the company who designs the IP?). However since that case imploded spectacularly, the question was never answered.
Meanwhile in lottery commissions across the country, government employees are trying their damnedest to figure out how to get those kids to gamble. Lottery revenues are trending down in most states, especially those that for many years got fat on the Video Poker gravy train. Millennials - but especially those for whom smartphones have been around most of their lives - aren't gambling in nearly the same numbers as their elders. And for states who rely on lottery revenue to fund basic services, this has them terrified.
Which is leading to a nationwide push to "modernize" video gambling so that the younger generations take it up. School funding depends on it.
Isn't this essentially cheating? If Word is opened by a user, it's only opened at standard user privileges, even if that user is a member of the admin group.
The use of a macro is clever enough. But if it hinges on Word running as Admin, then I have to question whether this is anything more than a publicity stunt.
Unfortunately in a cable topology that's not practical at the individual level. It's a shared medium to the node. And even then, the nodes aren't the be-all end-all of the system, so having different nodes on different ISPs is not easily done.
Or for a non-inflammatory title: Microsoft Disables Faulty AV Software so Win10 Uses Can Safely Update To Latest OS
AV software is some of the worst crap to get foisted on Windows installations. I wish MS would just disallow it outright. But as the Kaspersky suit shows, AV vendors aren't going to let go of that teet if they find any way to avoid being forced to do so.
Heck, it's not even paying that's the problem. It's that I'm paying for a subscription TV streaming service, so when that subscription lapses, I have nothing.
In the era of iTunes/Amazon/Google where I can buy a season pass for a couple of bucks an episode and go back and watch it any time I want, a subscription streaming service doesn't bring much to the table. I'll pay once, but I'm not going to pay twice.
And to add to that, there are vendors out there explicitly advertising/selling these as piracy boxes. They're not even trying to hide behind plausible deniability, they're outright trying to sell hardware to people for the purposes of committing copyright infringement.
In fact I just got an ad on RevContent today for one of these: https://www.freeseetv.com/prei...
"But how can you watch for free? The secret to that is an app called KODI. TVFrog has completely reprogrammed and redesigned it so it works even easier. The TVFrog technology searches the internet where it will locate and stream, virtually any television show, hollywood movie, or live sports event you want to watch without having to worry about paying rental fees or monthly subscriptions."