I love telecommuting, saves a lot of time and hassle fighting rush hour traffic and maintain a car. Not to mention that it can be far away so one doesn't have to move, a very expensive and life disruptive process. I'm willing to accept quite a bit less pay for a telecommuting position. But it is against most employers' religion, even progressive seeming technology employers such as Google.
Many cling hard to the mindset that workers are lazy slackers who have to be closely monitored to ensure they're working instead of goofing off. Instead of leading and inspiring workers, they use the slave driver approach and push and prod workers. Much harder to push telecommuters, so they simply don't allow it. No doubt many workers would abuse the situation. But it wouldn't last. If the telecommuter doesn't do any work, this is going to be noticed pretty fast. Telecommuters can't get away with much more slacking than office workers, often even less because of the necessity to counter the higher levels of suspicion by working harder.
Then there are the managers who believe a work environment and the close communication it enables is necessary to be highly productive. And, yes there are environments, home environments especially, where doing any work is very difficult thanks to loud, needy family members. But it's hardly an insurmountable problem.
Businesses will be businesses, huh? Poisonous snakes will be poisonous snakes, too. Employers do pay a high price for treating employees like cogs. That kills moral. Word does get around. It's been so pervasive that rather than a few companies getting bad reputations, the entire corporate world has a bad reputation. The company that treats employees fairly and well is the exception, not the rule.
There are reasons why people don't deal with each other the way companies do. Mostly, it does not work. Bad actors are quickly ostracized. In recent times, employers have been able to get away with treating employees like dirt is the huge imbalance in power. The job market has been an employer's market since before the Great Recession. Before the Dot Com crash is the last time employees had some leverage.
The pushy upgrade was a stupid idea for more than one reason, and this was well known before Microsoft did it. There's the old saw "don't fix it if it ain't broke". Some hardware would quit working. The upgrades were most cavalierly programmed to happen without regard to the customer's needs, able to take a computer out of service for hours, and that could be just when the owner had scheduled some important work. And of course for those with limited, expensive bandwidth, it's damned rude of Microsoft to pig out on such a precious resource without asking. That's stooping to the level of online advertisers, who deserve to be blocked because they just can't lay off the obnoxious loud, flashing animated video advertising that eats gobs of bandwidth and CPU time. Not that Microsoft was ever much above that level.
Speaking from my experience as a system administrator, doing a major upgrade on production systems for the heck of it was a major no-no. We only upgraded if we had to, for some crucial new functionality, and we'd spend at least a week preparing for it with tests on identical equipment if available, dry runs, and the like. We'd document how long it was going to take, and if too long we might set up a temporary system. We were not going to risk taking down the website of our company. Uptime is critically important. Stunts like this pushy, opt out upgrade assure that Windows will stay permanently banned from the server room.
That Microsoft apparently can't grasp any of this or just doesn't care shows, again, how stupid their leadership is. Meh, they've been unbelievably stupid for 15 years now. Getting in bed with the MAFIAA of all people, and deferring to those idiots on technical matters around DRM, wow, just wow. MS doesn't deserve to be regarded as a tech company, not while they're willing to defer to tech morons on the areas they're supposed to be the experts on.
Let me amend what I said. Actually, I am impressed by what smart TVs could do. But I am disgusted at the intentional crippling. No, I don't think Vizio is alone, I think the whole smart TV market is corporate Internet. Alternatives? Since the market isn't for whatever reason finding it profitable to give consumers more, only real alternative at this time is to use a computer. Include a video card with a TV tuner, and hardware to receive signals from universal remote controls. I know there are some nice programs that basically turn a PC with such equipment into a TV and a DVR, though I can't name any offhand.
That said, a remote with a full keyboard would be nice. But if that's too many buttons, why not at least employ the numeric keypad? Could type 2 digits for each letter, 01 for 'a', 20 for 't', and so on.
I'm not that impressed with the small Vizio smart TV I got a couple of years ago. (24 inch, the smallest, cheapest model they offered.) It's got a lot of capabilities, but it could have a lot more if it wasn't intentionally crippled with corporate style restrictions. There's no reason whatsoever it can't surf to any web site on the Internet, but they omitted such capability. You can only access a very small set of approved sites: Youtube, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and about a dozen others. Use it for Youtube, and it subjects you to ads, because it doesn't do ad blocking of course. The interface is miserably slow, have to use arrow buttons on the remote to walk a cursor over an alphabet to type in words. Would it really be so hard to put an alphabetic keyboard on the remote control?. Compared to an old PC, the smart TV stinks at accessing the Internet.
I'm guessing other brands of so called smart TVs are no better. Meh, I very rarely watch TV anyway.
I would like to see this crap end, and it be established once and for all that copying is a natural right. Freedom to Copy ought to rank right up there with Freedom of Speech and Religion, and the Freedom to Assemble.
Copying is a far more intimate part of our lives and existence than people realize. Copying is inherent in nature, with any action broadcasting echoes in all directions. That is the ability public speakers, radio stations, lighthouses, and all manner of broadcasting depends upon. The copyright propagandists have people mostly convinced that copying certain kinds of data, in certain ways, is somehow morally wrong and equivalent to stealing, and that copyright is the fairest, best, and only way to compensate the poor starving artists and scientists. Think of the starving artists! But that's not so. Our entire education system is a massive copying of centuries of accumulated knowledge to the next generation. We don't and shouldn't have to pay a very few who are trying very hard to elevate themselves to the position of gatekeepers of all knowledge, calling themselves "publishers", for permission to teach our children. Libraries have existed for thousands of years, the Gutenberg press for 500 years, and now, we have the Internet and digital storage on a scale orders of magnitude greater than anything in history. The entire contents of a small branch library can be stored on a few hard drives. There may be good reasons to be cautious, but the enrichment of a few slimy publishers isn't one.
It doesn't have to be painful. It could be the opposite, a great freeing of nearly everyone from wage slavery. We'll all have much more time to devote to leisure, community, and self-improvement.
The big question is of course distributing the wealth from these robotic advances. It won't be good so long as a few people manage to convince the rest of us that it's only fair that they should reap all the gains from the massive savings on costs. Competition will see to it that savings are passed on to customers, unless these restaurants successfully employ some of the many means to block competition. In which case, the restaurant owners get it all, while the inventors and designers of the robots get paid a tiny fixed amount on a "work for hire" basis, and the rest of us see no price drop?
Goodreads, huh? Haven't heard of them before. Thank you, but I found it easier to turn to other forms of entertainment, and got burned out on MMORPGs in the naughts. These days I prefer more participatory forms of entertainment. Reading or watching TV/movies is so passive.
I haven't paid much attention to SF/Fantasy or any other printed fiction since the mid 90s. I used to know the SF/Fantasy section of private bookstores very well. then as prices went up faster than inflation ($2 for a paperback in the early 80s, up to $5 by 1990, and it kept right on climbing) I got more conservative in my choices, buying only the latest of a series from a big name author, not taking a chance on a new author. Tried relying on lists of award winners. Finally I quit. Had enough of the publishing industry's crap, such as the practice of putting out an expensive hardback edition first, delaying the paperback for a year. I was also very annoyed with the fanatic Scientologists for gaming the system to boost L. Ron Hubbard's garbage to #1 bestseller status, and I heard recent Hugos are similarly compromised?
Most damning of all is for SF to deliberately inject bad propaganda about print publishing itself. We can read about all kinds of fantastically futuristic technologies, unless it's something that replaces the printing press or copyright law? Maybe it's okay for other genres to ignore this issue, but SF must not if it wishes to remain good, insightful, and relevant. The Internet and the ability to copy massive amounts of text rapidly and easily hasn't been futuristic SF for at least 20 years now, and any SF that pretends otherwise can't help but be stupid. The "I, Mudd" Star Trek episode has a little dialog about death being the penalty for violating intellectual property rights. Yeah, Hollywood wishes!
I wonder if the SF awards even look at works that are available online only, no printed edition. Took the music world entirely too long to warm up to video game music.
Engaging in massive crony capitalism is not going to improve things.
Of course not. How do you propose to deal with Global Warming, since you evidently find all forms of market intervention distasteful?
the fact that they aren't free is the fault of people like you.
You conflate freedom and anarchy. Maybe you'd prefer sports without any rules? Rules are, after all, restrictions on the freedom of the players' actions. Without rules, it wouldn't be long before a game like football degenerated into brawling, or just stopped altogether because the players aren't idiots and don't want to play if they risk high odds of permanent injury or death. A city could save hugely on the budget if they shut down their police departments, and expected the citizens to all buy guns and self-police. How well would that work? Well, we have a historic example: 19th century Dodge City Kansas, before Wyatt Earp brought the law to town.
You talk as if government intervention is largely the will of the people or at least of our politicians and bureaucrats. Too often, it's not, thanks to corruption. Any more, government is merely a cover for entrenched industry intervention, who have our public funds used and abused to prop themselves up with massive subsidies.
Big Oil is one of the biggest corrupters and abusers. Why are we so hot to intervene in the Middle East, but not central Africa, specifically Rwanda in 1994? Oil, of course. Why is the gas tax a fixed amount per gallon, rather than a percentage like every other sales tax? Been 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. Has not been adjusted for inflation for 23 years and counting. That little subtlety in taxation is a huge, huge giveaway to Big Oil. Don't believe for a second that they "pass the savings on" to the public. The biggest giveaway of all is the external cost. They don't pay for the mess the use of their products creates. Big Oil's mess is going to be the Mother of all Messes if things keep on as they are. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 will be a mosquito bite compared to drowning the coasts across the entire planet.
Your faith in markets is touching. Too bad they aren't as free and wise as we like to think. We can't autopilot problems like this, we have to do something. For one, change the incentives so other forms of energy are more attractive than oil.
You despise piracy? Why? Do you feel that the people behind Pirate Bay deserved jail time? Do you think copyright law is fair? How long should copyright last? There are many other ways to earn a living from art, copyright is no necessity for that.
Laws aren't holy. They can be bad and wrong, and have unintended negative consequences. They can be solely for profiteering, to force everyone to purchase some product or service that is unnecessary and only available through a few or even just one vendor. Consider Prohibition in the US. The ban on alcohol was based on the view that drunkenness was solely the fault of the drunkard, a moral failing, and should be outlawed and punishable as if having a drink was a crime. One factor they overlooked was that new manufacturing methods had unintentionally raised the percentage of alcohol in alcoholic drinks, and people who weren't drunkards became so on the same amount of drink they'd always had. Prohibition was eventually repealed, but those who profited from Prohibition suddenly saw their cash flow shut down and struck back by whipping up public hysteria over other drugs, eventually morphing Prohibition into the War on Drugs. Another widely unpopular and frequently violated law was the national 55 mph speed limit. People simply wanted to drive faster. In such cases, mass violation is one of the most powerful ways to force a change in the law.
Look back at circa 1900. Much travel and agriculture was by horse. Horse manure in city streets was a constant presence and problem, causing disease.
Today, horses are much reduced. Horse population in the US peaked at 25 million in the 1920s, then began a steady decline. By the 1960s, the population was down to 3 million. Since then the population has grown to about 7 million today, a far cry from the peak. For agriculture, tractors have all kinds of advantages. Not least is that the tractor can be shut off and forgotten when not in use, for long periods such as the entire winter season. The tractor eliminated one of the major uses for horses. The weren't needed or wanted for agricultural work any more.
What happened to horses will happen to jobs. We'll have to adjust. I've been thinking that calls for a guaranteed minimum income, rather than raising the minimum wage, may be the way forward.
And sloshes back up to The Hill. These Congressional leaders know what they know and don't listen to no scientists! The contempt and fear is palpable. When reality doesn't conform, they resort to threats, blame games and force.
So the FBI can't find talented people to help them with imaginary, badly conceived, and wrongheaded problems. I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!
No, people like rules. We bathe in rules the same as frogs live in water. Lawmaking is like applying heat to the water. Nice at first, then uncomfortable. The powerful are always testing the people, seeing what outrageous rulemaking they can get away with. It's up to us to push back. There's little choice but to boil or rebel.
But there is so much to oppose that it's difficult to keep up with it all. There's the TPP and copyright extremism, the War on Drugs and high prescription drug prices (which extreme intellectual property laws empower), rackets that target automobile owners such as parking meter enforcement, speed traps, and red light cameras, telecoms monopolies on Internet service, and so on. Redflex, one of the major red light camera service providers, is Australian.
Plus, every jurisdiction has their own peculiar home grown racket. The US state of Virginia has a little extra requirement for automobiles: no cracked windshields. The excuse is safety. Healthcare is a big racket in the US. Australia has an especially weird one: cemetery lots. Yes, one of the top nations in the world for unused space claims there isn't enough room for the dead, there is no ownership of grave sites, there is only rental, and descendants must renew the leases of their dead ancestors every 50 years, or the grave sites will be reused. To add to the insult, if unpaid, the markers with the names of the dead are removed.
Think my Apple ][+ clone I got when my real Apple started failing still works, but I haven't booted it up in a decade. It's just easier to use an emulator. On both machines, some of the keys have broken off. Seems those stems get brittle with age. The genuine Apple is also suffering electrical disconnects in its chip sockets, making the BASIC ROM no longer reliable. Still runs assembly language programs without a problem, but when running a BASIC program anything can happen. Usually just crashes, but once it jumped to the DOS format routine. I heard the characteristic sound the floppy drive makes when it is formatting, and leaped to stop it, but was too late, it had already erased enough to make it unrecoverable.
Also have my brother's old Commodore 64, which I believe still works. Decades ago, the video display subsystem went out, and we had it repaired. Wasn't worth doing, really, should've trashed it and moved on.
I believe the problem is deeper Copying is easy, been getting easier and easier for years, but it's not that. Seriously, one of the main protections of the audio CD when it first came out in the early 1980s was simply that it contained too much data for easy handling, 700M at a time when hard drives weren't even 40M, there was no mp3 format, and wide area networking for the masses was done on 2400 baud modems, which would need days to transmit all the data on one CD. Also no CD ROM drive, though no doubt an audio CD player could have been hacked to rip CDs. Anyway, it's not that, not that copying is easy, and enforcement of copyright against millions of individuals is all but hopeless, it's that copying should be a basic human right.
Sharing of knowledge should be a basic human right Perhaps sharing could be regarded as a form of speech, and therefore protected under the 1st Amendment. But if not, sharing deserves no less protection, maybe should be even better protected. A system that attempts to compensate artists by regulating and restricting the sharing of knowledge in order to impose a toll, is fundamentally broken. There is no essential difference between teaching children the 3 R's, and copying songs. Both are a transmission of knowledge. Sharing of knowledge is fundamental to civilization and humanity. Our ability to communicate and cooperate better than any other animal put us on top of the animal kingdom. We sure can't compete with most animals on hardiness, strength, or any purely physical measure. One man, naked, no weapons or clothes, just bare hands, vs one lion is going to end in victory for the lion 99% or more of the time. But with the knowledge to build weapons, now it's the other way around. The lion has no chance whatsoever against a man backed with modern weapons tech. To give control of that power into the hands of a few is to put the rest of us in the same fix as any wild beast, utterly helpless to resist their will whenever it conflicts with our own. The 2nd Amendment is the right to bear arms. Maybe it should've been the right to bear pens, since The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword.
A typical objection to removing these tolls and restrictions on the sharing of knowledge is that artists will starve. How can any artists make any money without copyright? Well, there are other business models. Patronage is one. The usual objection to patronage is that it doesn't work, can't possibly work, which ignores that patronage has been around for centuries. The next objection I usually hear is based on the thinking that patronage has not changed, only the wealthy can afford it, which overlooks that now, thanks to the awesome expansion of communication the Internet has made possible, we can "crowdfund", as it has been called.
So, please, when you call copying a crime, think of piracy as a moral wrong, you are merely parroting the propaganda of the copyright extremists.
The really sad thing is 100k/year is actually not so much, not compared to the wealth we have. School pay has taken a beating in recent years, but a high school principal is still earning on average about 85k. School administrator pay varies widely, sometimes being as little as 40k. Some of these charter schools are more for lining the pockets of top officials than educating students, and there the pay can be well over 100k. Sometimes the most overpaid person is the football coach. College football is completely out of hand, enjoys far, far too much popularity and money, and this influences the high school level. I have no sympathy for whines that there aren't enough STEM graduates, not while they can lavish that kind of money on something as frivolous as football.
Outside of school, upper management has been on a long running high compensation spree. Pay themselves millions, and have the nerve to complain we are greedy for asking for a mere 80k, keep trying to cut us down to 60k, or less, classify us as junior technicians or whatever other justification they can hoke up.
Depends on the creditor. Some debts I regard as a badge of honor. Anyone who manages to obtain vital medicinal pills that can be produced for under $1 but which have been priced at $750 each, on a "bill me later" basis, and then stiffs the pharmaceutical business by paying only $1 per pill, is a hero.
Don't pay tolls of a private road that was public but which was sold far too cheaply to a private company in a sweetheart deal? Hero. Bonus points if you find out the license plate numbers of the offending politicians who made the sale, and charge the tolls to them. Also, don't pay the red light camera ticket. Maybe throw the notice in the trash, but now I think such things may be better used on a wall of shame, for shaming cities.
And, ISPs? Well, let's see. Is Comcast a reputable business? How about AOL? I don't know of any US ISP or telecoms company that have not pulled some underhanded stunt to bilk the public. Maybe it's different in Canada, and this poor, poor ISP really is being cheated by the public.
They could have waited. Should have let Pluto stay a planet, officially, until after New Horizons' visit. Could have said that they would wait on the data from New Horizons before making a decision. What was the harm in that, or, why did they want to refine the definition when they did? What was so urgent that they couldn't wait?
Rushing to demote Pluto ahead of the New Horizon's visit is a slap to the US. Pluto is the only planet discovered by the US. It is largely because of that, and because Pluto was regarded as a planet, that there was enough backing from American public for the New Horizons mission to happen at all. What is the IAU trying to do, discourage space exploration?
Yes, this! None of this info is private! And so, there was no data breach. Not only is the poor employee being blamed for an action that he didn't do, it wasn't or shouldn't even be problematic.
Further, if the info was thought so sensitive, why was it evidently stored without encryption? Who didn't encrypt the data? For decades, passwords have been transformed with secure one way hashes, and not even the system admins can view the originals. (May still be crackable, but that's another issue.) User names, user IDs, on the other hand, are still stored plainly, as they should be, because they aren't private, aren't meant to be private, no matter how much banks and others try to tell everyone to keep your user name a big secret. The systems can't function if there is no way to match actions to identities. How the heck is a citizen to renew a driver's license without an ID? Some sort of ID is essential, or we will be unable to keep records of who has what, and, who is allowed to drive. Don't want people incapable of driving trying to do so, and causing wrecks and injuries.
No, this firing is total political and security theater. It's also one of the downsides to being recognized as smart. You're easier to blame mistakes on. You should have known better, because you're so smart.
A university degree wasn't supposed to be for only getting a better job. Education is its own reward. Education helps people understand themselves and the world, which helps avoid tragically wrong thinking and unwarranted harshness. It makes life better, it allows us to see more options. Speaking of the old days, what were WWI and WWII but completely unnecessary, senseless, and brutal events that could have been avoided if only the world leaders and peoples of those times weren't fools? We did not have an overpopulation problem, or mass starvation, or some other compelling reason. No, WWI ignited because of a lack of communication, fantasies of the glory of war and a sort of promise that the most powerful statement men can make concerning their worth is to serve in the military, and greed for the spoils, and fear and contempt of other peoples. Perhaps we did have a problem, mass stupidity, and it took a few wars to kill off the idiots. Now maybe we're drifting back into that problem, not having had any massive events capable of sorting out the idiots, handing out Darwin Awards en masse.
Everyone who is capable of earning a degree should have the opportunity to do so. Maybe, if most of the public had degrees, the world wars would have been impossible to start because the soldiers would have been unwilling to fight, and indeed it would have been tough to recruit soldiers because the people wouldn't hold them in much esteem and desire to become soldiers.
Thanks to my education, I can think intelligently about the problems. Why aren't there enough jobs? Has pay stagnated, and if so, why? Are universities not serving the purposes for which they exist? It's a complicated set of closely linked issues with a lot of different reasons, and possible answers. Despite the stagnation of pay, we in the West still live very well. Therefore places like India can easily undercut our workers. And yet, we also see that the superrich are hoarding the wealth, and gaming our system to do it. There is enough wealth for us all to live even better. So, why aren't we stopping the supperrich? We're not yet starving, that's why. Another factor is the advance of technology. We really need to rethink how education should be acquired. The high costs of textbooks is an excellent example of the corruption currently present in schools at all grade levels, from 1st grade to grad school. There is zero reason to subject students to the textbook racket, when our technology has empowered us to go entirely free, open and digital. Free and open publishing for textbooks is such an obviously superior model that there should be no question of whether to do it. Something else that technology makes more possible is telecommuting. We're not making full use of that either, and why? The MOOC is a challenge to organized education of the sort universities practice. Then there's the issue of automation. Will all menial work eventually be automated, leaving us with no manual labor to do so that education is even more important? It's a disruptive, exciting time to be alive.
That's an excellent example of security creep. User names were never intended to be secret, in fact, they were public so the users could message each other. Today with spam being a big problem, that seems quaint and naive. Nevertheless, the basic model is still correct, it is the password and only the password that must stay secret.
Why the login screen in its current form has become such a fixture is a bit if a puzzle. Why ask for user id first, why not ask for the password first? Why even ask for the user name at all? So that two or more users can use the same password?? I investigated, and traced the login screen back to Compatible Time-Sharing System, the ancestor of UNIX, first operational in 1961. Amazing how something like that can become an unchangeable tradition.
A big reason I don't use OpenSUSE is its seemingly trivial limitation that usernames have to be at least 2 characters. I like to use "u" as the main user, "g" for guest, and "p" for porn. Why did SUSE ban single character usernames? I see no good reason for that limitation. It sure doesn't enhance security! If the SUSE developers are going to dictate a trivial matter like that, what else do they force on users?
It becomes rather less trivial and more annoying if you have installed some other distro, and set up with single character user names, and now you want to switch to SUSE. You can't just keep/home, you have to do something more. If you're lucky, it may be only "mv/home/u/home/u1", as both end up as user id 1000. If not, then maybe "chown -R u1/home/u1" is enough more, if you don't have any funky links, hidden files, and the like. But the old username may have snuck into configuration files in the home directory and in/etc, flash drives, boot options, defaults, and who knows where else. Changing usernames also can mess with backups. Rsync can handle a change of user ids, but the problem is it's a little more work to check that the change of username has not broken anything, say, in your backup scripts..
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I love telecommuting, saves a lot of time and hassle fighting rush hour traffic and maintain a car. Not to mention that it can be far away so one doesn't have to move, a very expensive and life disruptive process. I'm willing to accept quite a bit less pay for a telecommuting position. But it is against most employers' religion, even progressive seeming technology employers such as Google.
Many cling hard to the mindset that workers are lazy slackers who have to be closely monitored to ensure they're working instead of goofing off. Instead of leading and inspiring workers, they use the slave driver approach and push and prod workers. Much harder to push telecommuters, so they simply don't allow it. No doubt many workers would abuse the situation. But it wouldn't last. If the telecommuter doesn't do any work, this is going to be noticed pretty fast. Telecommuters can't get away with much more slacking than office workers, often even less because of the necessity to counter the higher levels of suspicion by working harder.
Then there are the managers who believe a work environment and the close communication it enables is necessary to be highly productive. And, yes there are environments, home environments especially, where doing any work is very difficult thanks to loud, needy family members. But it's hardly an insurmountable problem.
Businesses will be businesses, huh? Poisonous snakes will be poisonous snakes, too. Employers do pay a high price for treating employees like cogs. That kills moral. Word does get around. It's been so pervasive that rather than a few companies getting bad reputations, the entire corporate world has a bad reputation. The company that treats employees fairly and well is the exception, not the rule.
There are reasons why people don't deal with each other the way companies do. Mostly, it does not work. Bad actors are quickly ostracized. In recent times, employers have been able to get away with treating employees like dirt is the huge imbalance in power. The job market has been an employer's market since before the Great Recession. Before the Dot Com crash is the last time employees had some leverage.
The pushy upgrade was a stupid idea for more than one reason, and this was well known before Microsoft did it. There's the old saw "don't fix it if it ain't broke". Some hardware would quit working. The upgrades were most cavalierly programmed to happen without regard to the customer's needs, able to take a computer out of service for hours, and that could be just when the owner had scheduled some important work. And of course for those with limited, expensive bandwidth, it's damned rude of Microsoft to pig out on such a precious resource without asking. That's stooping to the level of online advertisers, who deserve to be blocked because they just can't lay off the obnoxious loud, flashing animated video advertising that eats gobs of bandwidth and CPU time. Not that Microsoft was ever much above that level.
Speaking from my experience as a system administrator, doing a major upgrade on production systems for the heck of it was a major no-no. We only upgraded if we had to, for some crucial new functionality, and we'd spend at least a week preparing for it with tests on identical equipment if available, dry runs, and the like. We'd document how long it was going to take, and if too long we might set up a temporary system. We were not going to risk taking down the website of our company. Uptime is critically important. Stunts like this pushy, opt out upgrade assure that Windows will stay permanently banned from the server room.
That Microsoft apparently can't grasp any of this or just doesn't care shows, again, how stupid their leadership is. Meh, they've been unbelievably stupid for 15 years now. Getting in bed with the MAFIAA of all people, and deferring to those idiots on technical matters around DRM, wow, just wow. MS doesn't deserve to be regarded as a tech company, not while they're willing to defer to tech morons on the areas they're supposed to be the experts on.
Let me amend what I said. Actually, I am impressed by what smart TVs could do. But I am disgusted at the intentional crippling. No, I don't think Vizio is alone, I think the whole smart TV market is corporate Internet. Alternatives? Since the market isn't for whatever reason finding it profitable to give consumers more, only real alternative at this time is to use a computer. Include a video card with a TV tuner, and hardware to receive signals from universal remote controls. I know there are some nice programs that basically turn a PC with such equipment into a TV and a DVR, though I can't name any offhand.
That said, a remote with a full keyboard would be nice. But if that's too many buttons, why not at least employ the numeric keypad? Could type 2 digits for each letter, 01 for 'a', 20 for 't', and so on.
I'm not that impressed with the small Vizio smart TV I got a couple of years ago. (24 inch, the smallest, cheapest model they offered.) It's got a lot of capabilities, but it could have a lot more if it wasn't intentionally crippled with corporate style restrictions. There's no reason whatsoever it can't surf to any web site on the Internet, but they omitted such capability. You can only access a very small set of approved sites: Youtube, Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, and about a dozen others. Use it for Youtube, and it subjects you to ads, because it doesn't do ad blocking of course. The interface is miserably slow, have to use arrow buttons on the remote to walk a cursor over an alphabet to type in words. Would it really be so hard to put an alphabetic keyboard on the remote control?. Compared to an old PC, the smart TV stinks at accessing the Internet.
I'm guessing other brands of so called smart TVs are no better. Meh, I very rarely watch TV anyway.
I would like to see this crap end, and it be established once and for all that copying is a natural right. Freedom to Copy ought to rank right up there with Freedom of Speech and Religion, and the Freedom to Assemble.
Copying is a far more intimate part of our lives and existence than people realize. Copying is inherent in nature, with any action broadcasting echoes in all directions. That is the ability public speakers, radio stations, lighthouses, and all manner of broadcasting depends upon. The copyright propagandists have people mostly convinced that copying certain kinds of data, in certain ways, is somehow morally wrong and equivalent to stealing, and that copyright is the fairest, best, and only way to compensate the poor starving artists and scientists. Think of the starving artists! But that's not so. Our entire education system is a massive copying of centuries of accumulated knowledge to the next generation. We don't and shouldn't have to pay a very few who are trying very hard to elevate themselves to the position of gatekeepers of all knowledge, calling themselves "publishers", for permission to teach our children. Libraries have existed for thousands of years, the Gutenberg press for 500 years, and now, we have the Internet and digital storage on a scale orders of magnitude greater than anything in history. The entire contents of a small branch library can be stored on a few hard drives. There may be good reasons to be cautious, but the enrichment of a few slimy publishers isn't one.
It doesn't have to be painful. It could be the opposite, a great freeing of nearly everyone from wage slavery. We'll all have much more time to devote to leisure, community, and self-improvement.
The big question is of course distributing the wealth from these robotic advances. It won't be good so long as a few people manage to convince the rest of us that it's only fair that they should reap all the gains from the massive savings on costs. Competition will see to it that savings are passed on to customers, unless these restaurants successfully employ some of the many means to block competition. In which case, the restaurant owners get it all, while the inventors and designers of the robots get paid a tiny fixed amount on a "work for hire" basis, and the rest of us see no price drop?
Goodreads, huh? Haven't heard of them before. Thank you, but I found it easier to turn to other forms of entertainment, and got burned out on MMORPGs in the naughts. These days I prefer more participatory forms of entertainment. Reading or watching TV/movies is so passive.
I haven't paid much attention to SF/Fantasy or any other printed fiction since the mid 90s. I used to know the SF/Fantasy section of private bookstores very well. then as prices went up faster than inflation ($2 for a paperback in the early 80s, up to $5 by 1990, and it kept right on climbing) I got more conservative in my choices, buying only the latest of a series from a big name author, not taking a chance on a new author. Tried relying on lists of award winners. Finally I quit. Had enough of the publishing industry's crap, such as the practice of putting out an expensive hardback edition first, delaying the paperback for a year. I was also very annoyed with the fanatic Scientologists for gaming the system to boost L. Ron Hubbard's garbage to #1 bestseller status, and I heard recent Hugos are similarly compromised?
Most damning of all is for SF to deliberately inject bad propaganda about print publishing itself. We can read about all kinds of fantastically futuristic technologies, unless it's something that replaces the printing press or copyright law? Maybe it's okay for other genres to ignore this issue, but SF must not if it wishes to remain good, insightful, and relevant. The Internet and the ability to copy massive amounts of text rapidly and easily hasn't been futuristic SF for at least 20 years now, and any SF that pretends otherwise can't help but be stupid. The "I, Mudd" Star Trek episode has a little dialog about death being the penalty for violating intellectual property rights. Yeah, Hollywood wishes!
I wonder if the SF awards even look at works that are available online only, no printed edition. Took the music world entirely too long to warm up to video game music.
Engaging in massive crony capitalism is not going to improve things.
Of course not. How do you propose to deal with Global Warming, since you evidently find all forms of market intervention distasteful?
the fact that they aren't free is the fault of people like you.
You conflate freedom and anarchy. Maybe you'd prefer sports without any rules? Rules are, after all, restrictions on the freedom of the players' actions. Without rules, it wouldn't be long before a game like football degenerated into brawling, or just stopped altogether because the players aren't idiots and don't want to play if they risk high odds of permanent injury or death. A city could save hugely on the budget if they shut down their police departments, and expected the citizens to all buy guns and self-police. How well would that work? Well, we have a historic example: 19th century Dodge City Kansas, before Wyatt Earp brought the law to town.
You talk as if government intervention is largely the will of the people or at least of our politicians and bureaucrats. Too often, it's not, thanks to corruption. Any more, government is merely a cover for entrenched industry intervention, who have our public funds used and abused to prop themselves up with massive subsidies.
Big Oil is one of the biggest corrupters and abusers. Why are we so hot to intervene in the Middle East, but not central Africa, specifically Rwanda in 1994? Oil, of course. Why is the gas tax a fixed amount per gallon, rather than a percentage like every other sales tax? Been 18.4 cents per gallon since 1993. Has not been adjusted for inflation for 23 years and counting. That little subtlety in taxation is a huge, huge giveaway to Big Oil. Don't believe for a second that they "pass the savings on" to the public. The biggest giveaway of all is the external cost. They don't pay for the mess the use of their products creates. Big Oil's mess is going to be the Mother of all Messes if things keep on as they are. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 will be a mosquito bite compared to drowning the coasts across the entire planet.
Your faith in markets is touching. Too bad they aren't as free and wise as we like to think. We can't autopilot problems like this, we have to do something. For one, change the incentives so other forms of energy are more attractive than oil.
You despise piracy? Why? Do you feel that the people behind Pirate Bay deserved jail time? Do you think copyright law is fair? How long should copyright last? There are many other ways to earn a living from art, copyright is no necessity for that.
Laws aren't holy. They can be bad and wrong, and have unintended negative consequences. They can be solely for profiteering, to force everyone to purchase some product or service that is unnecessary and only available through a few or even just one vendor. Consider Prohibition in the US. The ban on alcohol was based on the view that drunkenness was solely the fault of the drunkard, a moral failing, and should be outlawed and punishable as if having a drink was a crime. One factor they overlooked was that new manufacturing methods had unintentionally raised the percentage of alcohol in alcoholic drinks, and people who weren't drunkards became so on the same amount of drink they'd always had. Prohibition was eventually repealed, but those who profited from Prohibition suddenly saw their cash flow shut down and struck back by whipping up public hysteria over other drugs, eventually morphing Prohibition into the War on Drugs. Another widely unpopular and frequently violated law was the national 55 mph speed limit. People simply wanted to drive faster. In such cases, mass violation is one of the most powerful ways to force a change in the law.
Look back at circa 1900. Much travel and agriculture was by horse. Horse manure in city streets was a constant presence and problem, causing disease.
Today, horses are much reduced. Horse population in the US peaked at 25 million in the 1920s, then began a steady decline. By the 1960s, the population was down to 3 million. Since then the population has grown to about 7 million today, a far cry from the peak. For agriculture, tractors have all kinds of advantages. Not least is that the tractor can be shut off and forgotten when not in use, for long periods such as the entire winter season. The tractor eliminated one of the major uses for horses. The weren't needed or wanted for agricultural work any more.
What happened to horses will happen to jobs. We'll have to adjust. I've been thinking that calls for a guaranteed minimum income, rather than raising the minimum wage, may be the way forward.
And sloshes back up to The Hill. These Congressional leaders know what they know and don't listen to no scientists! The contempt and fear is palpable. When reality doesn't conform, they resort to threats, blame games and force.
So the FBI can't find talented people to help them with imaginary, badly conceived, and wrongheaded problems. I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked!
No, people like rules. We bathe in rules the same as frogs live in water. Lawmaking is like applying heat to the water. Nice at first, then uncomfortable. The powerful are always testing the people, seeing what outrageous rulemaking they can get away with. It's up to us to push back. There's little choice but to boil or rebel.
But there is so much to oppose that it's difficult to keep up with it all. There's the TPP and copyright extremism, the War on Drugs and high prescription drug prices (which extreme intellectual property laws empower), rackets that target automobile owners such as parking meter enforcement, speed traps, and red light cameras, telecoms monopolies on Internet service, and so on. Redflex, one of the major red light camera service providers, is Australian.
Plus, every jurisdiction has their own peculiar home grown racket. The US state of Virginia has a little extra requirement for automobiles: no cracked windshields. The excuse is safety. Healthcare is a big racket in the US. Australia has an especially weird one: cemetery lots. Yes, one of the top nations in the world for unused space claims there isn't enough room for the dead, there is no ownership of grave sites, there is only rental, and descendants must renew the leases of their dead ancestors every 50 years, or the grave sites will be reused. To add to the insult, if unpaid, the markers with the names of the dead are removed.
Think my Apple ][+ clone I got when my real Apple started failing still works, but I haven't booted it up in a decade. It's just easier to use an emulator. On both machines, some of the keys have broken off. Seems those stems get brittle with age. The genuine Apple is also suffering electrical disconnects in its chip sockets, making the BASIC ROM no longer reliable. Still runs assembly language programs without a problem, but when running a BASIC program anything can happen. Usually just crashes, but once it jumped to the DOS format routine. I heard the characteristic sound the floppy drive makes when it is formatting, and leaped to stop it, but was too late, it had already erased enough to make it unrecoverable.
Also have my brother's old Commodore 64, which I believe still works. Decades ago, the video display subsystem went out, and we had it repaired. Wasn't worth doing, really, should've trashed it and moved on.
I believe the problem is deeper Copying is easy, been getting easier and easier for years, but it's not that. Seriously, one of the main protections of the audio CD when it first came out in the early 1980s was simply that it contained too much data for easy handling, 700M at a time when hard drives weren't even 40M, there was no mp3 format, and wide area networking for the masses was done on 2400 baud modems, which would need days to transmit all the data on one CD. Also no CD ROM drive, though no doubt an audio CD player could have been hacked to rip CDs. Anyway, it's not that, not that copying is easy, and enforcement of copyright against millions of individuals is all but hopeless, it's that copying should be a basic human right.
Sharing of knowledge should be a basic human right Perhaps sharing could be regarded as a form of speech, and therefore protected under the 1st Amendment. But if not, sharing deserves no less protection, maybe should be even better protected. A system that attempts to compensate artists by regulating and restricting the sharing of knowledge in order to impose a toll, is fundamentally broken. There is no essential difference between teaching children the 3 R's, and copying songs. Both are a transmission of knowledge. Sharing of knowledge is fundamental to civilization and humanity. Our ability to communicate and cooperate better than any other animal put us on top of the animal kingdom. We sure can't compete with most animals on hardiness, strength, or any purely physical measure. One man, naked, no weapons or clothes, just bare hands, vs one lion is going to end in victory for the lion 99% or more of the time. But with the knowledge to build weapons, now it's the other way around. The lion has no chance whatsoever against a man backed with modern weapons tech. To give control of that power into the hands of a few is to put the rest of us in the same fix as any wild beast, utterly helpless to resist their will whenever it conflicts with our own. The 2nd Amendment is the right to bear arms. Maybe it should've been the right to bear pens, since The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword.
A typical objection to removing these tolls and restrictions on the sharing of knowledge is that artists will starve. How can any artists make any money without copyright? Well, there are other business models. Patronage is one. The usual objection to patronage is that it doesn't work, can't possibly work, which ignores that patronage has been around for centuries. The next objection I usually hear is based on the thinking that patronage has not changed, only the wealthy can afford it, which overlooks that now, thanks to the awesome expansion of communication the Internet has made possible, we can "crowdfund", as it has been called.
So, please, when you call copying a crime, think of piracy as a moral wrong, you are merely parroting the propaganda of the copyright extremists.
The really sad thing is 100k/year is actually not so much, not compared to the wealth we have. School pay has taken a beating in recent years, but a high school principal is still earning on average about 85k. School administrator pay varies widely, sometimes being as little as 40k. Some of these charter schools are more for lining the pockets of top officials than educating students, and there the pay can be well over 100k. Sometimes the most overpaid person is the football coach. College football is completely out of hand, enjoys far, far too much popularity and money, and this influences the high school level. I have no sympathy for whines that there aren't enough STEM graduates, not while they can lavish that kind of money on something as frivolous as football.
Outside of school, upper management has been on a long running high compensation spree. Pay themselves millions, and have the nerve to complain we are greedy for asking for a mere 80k, keep trying to cut us down to 60k, or less, classify us as junior technicians or whatever other justification they can hoke up.
Depends on the creditor. Some debts I regard as a badge of honor. Anyone who manages to obtain vital medicinal pills that can be produced for under $1 but which have been priced at $750 each, on a "bill me later" basis, and then stiffs the pharmaceutical business by paying only $1 per pill, is a hero.
Don't pay tolls of a private road that was public but which was sold far too cheaply to a private company in a sweetheart deal? Hero. Bonus points if you find out the license plate numbers of the offending politicians who made the sale, and charge the tolls to them. Also, don't pay the red light camera ticket. Maybe throw the notice in the trash, but now I think such things may be better used on a wall of shame, for shaming cities.
And, ISPs? Well, let's see. Is Comcast a reputable business? How about AOL? I don't know of any US ISP or telecoms company that have not pulled some underhanded stunt to bilk the public. Maybe it's different in Canada, and this poor, poor ISP really is being cheated by the public.
They could have waited. Should have let Pluto stay a planet, officially, until after New Horizons' visit. Could have said that they would wait on the data from New Horizons before making a decision. What was the harm in that, or, why did they want to refine the definition when they did? What was so urgent that they couldn't wait?
Rushing to demote Pluto ahead of the New Horizon's visit is a slap to the US. Pluto is the only planet discovered by the US. It is largely because of that, and because Pluto was regarded as a planet, that there was enough backing from American public for the New Horizons mission to happen at all. What is the IAU trying to do, discourage space exploration?
Yes, this! None of this info is private! And so, there was no data breach. Not only is the poor employee being blamed for an action that he didn't do, it wasn't or shouldn't even be problematic.
Further, if the info was thought so sensitive, why was it evidently stored without encryption? Who didn't encrypt the data? For decades, passwords have been transformed with secure one way hashes, and not even the system admins can view the originals. (May still be crackable, but that's another issue.) User names, user IDs, on the other hand, are still stored plainly, as they should be, because they aren't private, aren't meant to be private, no matter how much banks and others try to tell everyone to keep your user name a big secret. The systems can't function if there is no way to match actions to identities. How the heck is a citizen to renew a driver's license without an ID? Some sort of ID is essential, or we will be unable to keep records of who has what, and, who is allowed to drive. Don't want people incapable of driving trying to do so, and causing wrecks and injuries.
No, this firing is total political and security theater. It's also one of the downsides to being recognized as smart. You're easier to blame mistakes on. You should have known better, because you're so smart.
Who is JPG? It's the Holy Trinity: Jesus, Photos, and God. Come to us, learn more!
Our motto: Pics or it didn't happen!
A university degree wasn't supposed to be for only getting a better job. Education is its own reward. Education helps people understand themselves and the world, which helps avoid tragically wrong thinking and unwarranted harshness. It makes life better, it allows us to see more options. Speaking of the old days, what were WWI and WWII but completely unnecessary, senseless, and brutal events that could have been avoided if only the world leaders and peoples of those times weren't fools? We did not have an overpopulation problem, or mass starvation, or some other compelling reason. No, WWI ignited because of a lack of communication, fantasies of the glory of war and a sort of promise that the most powerful statement men can make concerning their worth is to serve in the military, and greed for the spoils, and fear and contempt of other peoples. Perhaps we did have a problem, mass stupidity, and it took a few wars to kill off the idiots. Now maybe we're drifting back into that problem, not having had any massive events capable of sorting out the idiots, handing out Darwin Awards en masse.
Everyone who is capable of earning a degree should have the opportunity to do so. Maybe, if most of the public had degrees, the world wars would have been impossible to start because the soldiers would have been unwilling to fight, and indeed it would have been tough to recruit soldiers because the people wouldn't hold them in much esteem and desire to become soldiers.
Thanks to my education, I can think intelligently about the problems. Why aren't there enough jobs? Has pay stagnated, and if so, why? Are universities not serving the purposes for which they exist? It's a complicated set of closely linked issues with a lot of different reasons, and possible answers. Despite the stagnation of pay, we in the West still live very well. Therefore places like India can easily undercut our workers. And yet, we also see that the superrich are hoarding the wealth, and gaming our system to do it. There is enough wealth for us all to live even better. So, why aren't we stopping the supperrich? We're not yet starving, that's why. Another factor is the advance of technology. We really need to rethink how education should be acquired. The high costs of textbooks is an excellent example of the corruption currently present in schools at all grade levels, from 1st grade to grad school. There is zero reason to subject students to the textbook racket, when our technology has empowered us to go entirely free, open and digital. Free and open publishing for textbooks is such an obviously superior model that there should be no question of whether to do it. Something else that technology makes more possible is telecommuting. We're not making full use of that either, and why? The MOOC is a challenge to organized education of the sort universities practice. Then there's the issue of automation. Will all menial work eventually be automated, leaving us with no manual labor to do so that education is even more important? It's a disruptive, exciting time to be alive.
That's an excellent example of security creep. User names were never intended to be secret, in fact, they were public so the users could message each other. Today with spam being a big problem, that seems quaint and naive. Nevertheless, the basic model is still correct, it is the password and only the password that must stay secret.
Why the login screen in its current form has become such a fixture is a bit if a puzzle. Why ask for user id first, why not ask for the password first? Why even ask for the user name at all? So that two or more users can use the same password?? I investigated, and traced the login screen back to Compatible Time-Sharing System, the ancestor of UNIX, first operational in 1961. Amazing how something like that can become an unchangeable tradition.
A big reason I don't use OpenSUSE is its seemingly trivial limitation that usernames have to be at least 2 characters. I like to use "u" as the main user, "g" for guest, and "p" for porn. Why did SUSE ban single character usernames? I see no good reason for that limitation. It sure doesn't enhance security! If the SUSE developers are going to dictate a trivial matter like that, what else do they force on users?
It becomes rather less trivial and more annoying if you have installed some other distro, and set up with single character user names, and now you want to switch to SUSE. You can't just keep /home, you have to do something more. If you're lucky, it may be only "mv /home/u /home/u1", as both end up as user id 1000. If not, then maybe "chown -R u1 /home/u1" is enough more, if you don't have any funky links, hidden files, and the like. But the old username may have snuck into configuration files in the home directory and in /etc, flash drives, boot options, defaults, and who knows where else. Changing usernames also can mess with backups. Rsync can handle a change of user ids, but the problem is it's a little more work to check that the change of username has not broken anything, say, in your backup scripts..