Boston has had an app like this; it's called "Citizens Connect."
Essentially, it's a very half-assed ticketing system. You open a ticket, and that's it - you can't provide any further information, or challenge a request, or re-open it. There is only one action city worker can do - "close" the ticket. About the only thing they got right was not forcing people to select a category; a team of staffers handle that.
What people quickly discovered was that city workers would just close tickets, regardless of whether the work actually got done or not. So, what you saw increasingly were tickets that said "STOP CLOSING MY REQUESTS WITHOUT FIXING IT."
That said...it beats Cambridge, MA's system, which has horrendously poor geotagging and only accepts requests in a few limited, narrow issue categories.
I have three or four of these apps for the various cities I spend time in now. It's stupid. There is a national service set up, but cities don't like it because it provides a lot of reporting to the public. City workers don't like Joe Q Public seeing how long requests take to clear and stuff like that. Makes 'em look bad....
This seems like a dig at Sarah Sharp, implying that she hasn't contributed anything, and further implying that one's argument is wrong or unworthy if you haven't contributed work.
This is basically ad hominem. Whether someone has contributed work is irrelevant to whether their argument is sound or not.
Sadly I predict that many comments here won't get that. They will instead call him a pussy because he couldn't stand the heat, and acted like a girl by leaving. Let's see if I'm right.
If people sling misogynistic, sexist comments like that at him, then I'd say he was absolutely right.
Referring to women's genitals or their gender to insult a man is doubly sexist and inappropriate.
Aren't many emoji combinations or modifications of other emoji? I seem to recall this was done (for among other reasons) to accommodate different skin colors and such?
This was the best I could find after a bunch of googling:
I've never seen a serious, credible libertarian advocate pure absolute 100% anarchy, just like I've never seen a serious, credible businessperson advocate 100% unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. What I have seen is such people making arguments for a step closer to those things, an alteration or rethinking of the current balance or list of priorities.
What I've seen time and time again is that "libertarians" vocally object to regulation that hurts their profits and government programs that don't benefit them, and are very quiet about regulation and programs that do benefit or protect them.
See: industrialists who want to dump shit in the local river, but also want the police to bust down the doors of someone who is making copies of their widgets.
See: rich people who don't want social welfare programs, but want the city to plow their private drive.
See: the handicapped guy at my local makerspace whose rear window is covered in libertarian/Ayn-Randian stickers, but parks in the handicapped parking spot, and filed a complaint with the state when his space wasn't cleared fast enough last year, costing the makerspace $6,000 in fines.
See: rural residents who hate "tax and spend liberals" and demand their representatives vote against any sort of social programs or things that benefit cities.....but live in revenue-negative states and are more than happy to take from the public till for the thousands of miles of roads one or two people a day drive down, huge fancy new medical and community centers, etc...not to mention the massive farm subsidies. Rural politicians survive mostly by pointing a grubby finger at other politicians for supporting programs that don't benefit Joe Midwesterner, while quietly making sure Joe has smooth roads everywhere he drives his assault-vehicle-sized pickup and a nice football stadium for Joe's kids to play in, and the shiniest fire trucks with NBC gear in case the "towelheads" decide to dirty-bomb his town.
(Seriously: DHS pays for fire trucks in the middle of nowhere to get positive-pressure, nuke/bio/chem filtration systems. It's insane.)
These "baby with the bathwater" excuses for argumentation really get tiresome. They don't remotely represent what any thinking person actually believes. Thus, they are strawmen.
And you've created your own strawman: libertarians who don't act out of pure selfishness.
Gmail caches any images in an email, and serves them through their own servers, in order to prevent tracking bugs from having any effect.
The greater concern for me is what happens when you hover over a link that causes action by virtue of the URL being hit? I assume they must have done some filtering-out GET URLs, but...what about URLs that are prettified? Jesus, this is such a bad idea all around.
There's always posturing for PR before BlackHat and DEFCON. This was to get the researcher's name on people's radar.
Many a competent unix sysadmin could come up with something similar.
What's hilarious is that despite how easy it would be to make something like this, the "researcher" just bought a yagi antenna and posed for a picture. They didn't even bother to point the yagi antenna towards the ground, for that matter.
It's preferable for the car that is struck to not release its brakes. Basic physics. The more the struck car moves, the more injuries from the passengers in it. Also, the struck car moves and hits another car, etc.
The struck car's momentum is what mitigates the impact for its occupants. Ideal would be deploying a system to keep the struck car from moving at all. Mercedes has a braking system they've been testing that would probably do the job. It's basically an airbag on the bottom of the car, with a very high friction surface.
Wire transfers are extremely common in Europe; virtually instantaneous, cheap, etc. Customers can do them themselves, person to person.
Here in the US? Anywhere from a day to WEEKS for absolutely no legitimate reason. You generally need a teller or branch manager to do it. At least $5; $40 if the transaction ends up going through the Fed.
It's 2015. Why does transferring money in the US take more than a minute and a few cents?
I personally would've rather seen cleaner, faster, quieter and more reliable subways than more advert-bikes. But it's not so sexy for citibank to donate a tiny fraction of the MTA's budget for some billboards/posters.
Thank goodness we have urban transit planners, people with degrees in this stuff. They are heavily, heavily pushing bicycle transit and bike shares. Not because it's 'sexy', but because it works.
You can plop down a bike share station in a matter of days or weeks (the biggest hassle are the community meetings) which affords enormous flexibility; it takes months to redo a bus route, and decades to plan a subway line. Bike share bikes convert a fair number of people over to bike ownership, too - and the presence or more bike riders on the city's streets makes the streets safer for everyone.
Not only am I well aware of how an endowment is operated -- this is a regular topic of faculty meetings, for god's sake
Then don't say ignorant things like this:
"A bit of data: Harvard's endowment amounts to $1.7 million per student. With a reasonable return on endowment investment, hey could quite literally abolish tuition forever if they wanted to"
You could also demonstrate some basic knowledge on the subject by showing that you understand "Harvard University" isn't "undergraduate" - that's Harvard COLLEGE. Here you go again:
A 3.5% return on Harvard's 1.7 million per student endowment would give an annual income of $60,000, which is equal to Harvard's tuition plus room and board.
Why do you think room and board at Harvard College is $60K?
What do you think will happen when you direct all the investment income into student tuition and board?
Well? Here's a big hint (oooo, am I being "condescending" again?): paying everyone's tuition via the investment income doesn't change REVENUE. So what pays for all the things the endowment income WAS paying for, but isn't anymore?
Huh?
Well, Mr. Fucking I Teach Physics? Ever heard the expression "rob Peter to pay Paul"?
A bit of data: Harvard's endowment amounts to $1.7 million per student. With a reasonable return on endowment investment, hey could quite literally abolish tuition forever if they wanted to.
"Full disclosure: I'm a professor at a liberal arts college whose endowment per student is mediocre at best.
Clearly not a professor of finance, math, etc. given you don't understand that investment income on the endowment is what the school uses to help with operating and capital expenses. You avoid at all costs spending the endowment; you spend some of the investment income. Or, to put it in simpler terms a "liberal arts professor" might understand: selling the cow instead of the milk has enormous long-term impact.
Also, given Harvard is older than the United States (in fact, older than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) - "forever" is a really strong word.
Harvard has a huge number of full-boat scholarships and when the endowment tanked, none of the schools dropped their scholarship levels. Several raised them.
So there's eight or ten clients for android that support some sort of editing, which is precisely why I asked. Which of them actually has a usable interface for simply and quickly adding POI's?
I'm not going to go through the trouble of installing almost a dozen clients just to answer this question.
On a slightly related note: I wanted to add minor resources like bike repair stations and water fountains in my city, and figured there MUST be an android app that would make this about as simple as "hold your phone over it for a bit to get an averaged position, now click this and then "water fountain".
Nothing that I could see was remotely this simple? Even the web editor is a nightmare of trying to figure out exactly how to do things...and the wiki didn't help much, either, with poor documentation on the various properties one can assign to an object.
> Translation: We can't afford (read: won't pay) for real security personnel,
Eh, not really. I guarantee you they have a lot of "real" security personnel.
This is about taking over control of the story; it's a sort of "pay no attention to the thing we don't want you to hear about" (ie the fact that their onboard infotainment/networking and satellite uplink systems are ludicrously insecure) and "pay attention to this other thing."
Now when you search for "united hacking", you'll get a billion stories about the bug bounty, and few about the original problem - that a passenger was able to walk all over stuff he shouldn't have been able to. It's already starting to work, a few hours in:
After the incredible piece of shit that my TF700T was, never will I buy an Asus tablet again.
Nice screen (it was one of the first android tablets to have a really high-res screen), the graphics processor and CPU are fast...but they completely screwed the pooch on the flash architecture, making the thing crippled; any sort of disk IO causes it to slow to a crawl. There are all sorts of hacks to make just web browsing bearable, by using a ram disk to completely avoid the flash. People also put in the fastest SD cards they can find.
Didn't the Nexus 7, which they OEM'd, have similar issues?
Ford Explorer roof pillars were initially spec'd with a fairly high-grade steel. Citing costs, management refused to use the high-grade steel and instead used a weaker steel.
Result? Lots of roof-cave-ins on a vehicle that was prone to roll over.
Malcom Gladwell is the product of conservative institutes and think tanks; he has worked for racists, the tobacco industry, oil companies, big pharma, and more. His books popularize the kind of thinking that said industries have used to defend their practices.
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Boston has had an app like this; it's called "Citizens Connect."
Essentially, it's a very half-assed ticketing system. You open a ticket, and that's it - you can't provide any further information, or challenge a request, or re-open it. There is only one action city worker can do - "close" the ticket. About the only thing they got right was not forcing people to select a category; a team of staffers handle that.
What people quickly discovered was that city workers would just close tickets, regardless of whether the work actually got done or not. So, what you saw increasingly were tickets that said "STOP CLOSING MY REQUESTS WITHOUT FIXING IT."
That said...it beats Cambridge, MA's system, which has horrendously poor geotagging and only accepts requests in a few limited, narrow issue categories.
I have three or four of these apps for the various cities I spend time in now. It's stupid. There is a national service set up, but cities don't like it because it provides a lot of reporting to the public. City workers don't like Joe Q Public seeing how long requests take to clear and stuff like that. Makes 'em look bad....
This seems like a dig at Sarah Sharp, implying that she hasn't contributed anything, and further implying that one's argument is wrong or unworthy if you haven't contributed work. This is basically ad hominem. Whether someone has contributed work is irrelevant to whether their argument is sound or not.
Sadly I predict that many comments here won't get that. They will instead call him a pussy because he couldn't stand the heat, and acted like a girl by leaving. Let's see if I'm right.
If people sling misogynistic, sexist comments like that at him, then I'd say he was absolutely right.
Referring to women's genitals or their gender to insult a man is doubly sexist and inappropriate.
It certainly made sense in Korea, where Samsung has a 46% market share and Apple ~24%.
In the US? It's almost exactly the opposite - Apple has nearly a 50% market share, and Apple half that.
What the hell were they thinking?
Aren't many emoji combinations or modifications of other emoji? I seem to recall this was done (for among other reasons) to accommodate different skin colors and such?
This was the best I could find after a bunch of googling:
http://www.unicode.org/reports...
Or you can just switch off notifications all the stuff you don't care about, and set it to sync rarely. Problem solved.
I have a wakelock analysis program installed and Facebook is never in the top ten.
I've never seen a serious, credible libertarian advocate pure absolute 100% anarchy, just like I've never seen a serious, credible businessperson advocate 100% unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. What I have seen is such people making arguments for a step closer to those things, an alteration or rethinking of the current balance or list of priorities.
What I've seen time and time again is that "libertarians" vocally object to regulation that hurts their profits and government programs that don't benefit them, and are very quiet about regulation and programs that do benefit or protect them.
See: industrialists who want to dump shit in the local river, but also want the police to bust down the doors of someone who is making copies of their widgets.
See: rich people who don't want social welfare programs, but want the city to plow their private drive.
See: the handicapped guy at my local makerspace whose rear window is covered in libertarian/Ayn-Randian stickers, but parks in the handicapped parking spot, and filed a complaint with the state when his space wasn't cleared fast enough last year, costing the makerspace $6,000 in fines.
See: rural residents who hate "tax and spend liberals" and demand their representatives vote against any sort of social programs or things that benefit cities.....but live in revenue-negative states and are more than happy to take from the public till for the thousands of miles of roads one or two people a day drive down, huge fancy new medical and community centers, etc...not to mention the massive farm subsidies. Rural politicians survive mostly by pointing a grubby finger at other politicians for supporting programs that don't benefit Joe Midwesterner, while quietly making sure Joe has smooth roads everywhere he drives his assault-vehicle-sized pickup and a nice football stadium for Joe's kids to play in, and the shiniest fire trucks with NBC gear in case the "towelheads" decide to dirty-bomb his town.
(Seriously: DHS pays for fire trucks in the middle of nowhere to get positive-pressure, nuke/bio/chem filtration systems. It's insane.)
These "baby with the bathwater" excuses for argumentation really get tiresome. They don't remotely represent what any thinking person actually believes. Thus, they are strawmen.
And you've created your own strawman: libertarians who don't act out of pure selfishness.
The dude was head of a company that made one of the top-selling software packages of all time. He sold the company to Microsoft.
When someone googles your name and they get "minecraft creator sells to MS for $2BN", there is no way to not tell people.
Furthermore, when you're worth that kind of money, you *have* to change your lifestyle for personal safety.
CC companies and their clients aren't that stupid. If you try and sign up for zipcar with a prepaid credit card, it won't work.
Ditto for any recurring billing CC service.
Wuala is also something I've *never* heard of despite being generally well informed in this arena.
When you have virtually zero brand recognition, that's not a good sign.
Gmail caches any images in an email, and serves them through their own servers, in order to prevent tracking bugs from having any effect.
The greater concern for me is what happens when you hover over a link that causes action by virtue of the URL being hit? I assume they must have done some filtering-out GET URLs, but...what about URLs that are prettified? Jesus, this is such a bad idea all around.
It's amazing that Doctorow is so thick as to not understand his privilege.
The FBI agent probably dropped it as soon as he realized who Boing Boing was.
Your average home user or small business running a tor exit node is not going to be treated with anywhere near that kind of kindness.
Hackaday is pretty much spot on: http://hackaday.com/2015/07/14...
There's always posturing for PR before BlackHat and DEFCON. This was to get the researcher's name on people's radar.
Many a competent unix sysadmin could come up with something similar.
What's hilarious is that despite how easy it would be to make something like this, the "researcher" just bought a yagi antenna and posed for a picture. They didn't even bother to point the yagi antenna towards the ground, for that matter.
It's preferable for the car that is struck to not release its brakes. Basic physics. The more the struck car moves, the more injuries from the passengers in it. Also, the struck car moves and hits another car, etc.
The struck car's momentum is what mitigates the impact for its occupants. Ideal would be deploying a system to keep the struck car from moving at all. Mercedes has a braking system they've been testing that would probably do the job. It's basically an airbag on the bottom of the car, with a very high friction surface.
Wire transfers are extremely common in Europe; virtually instantaneous, cheap, etc. Customers can do them themselves, person to person.
Here in the US? Anywhere from a day to WEEKS for absolutely no legitimate reason. You generally need a teller or branch manager to do it. At least $5; $40 if the transaction ends up going through the Fed.
It's 2015. Why does transferring money in the US take more than a minute and a few cents?
Most Citi bikes go ununsed as far as I can tell.
You tell wrong. There are 6,000 bikes in the system and there's roughly 35,000 daily users.
I personally would've rather seen cleaner, faster, quieter and more reliable subways than more advert-bikes. But it's not so sexy for citibank to donate a tiny fraction of the MTA's budget for some billboards/posters.
Thank goodness we have urban transit planners, people with degrees in this stuff. They are heavily, heavily pushing bicycle transit and bike shares. Not because it's 'sexy', but because it works.
You can plop down a bike share station in a matter of days or weeks (the biggest hassle are the community meetings) which affords enormous flexibility; it takes months to redo a bus route, and decades to plan a subway line. Bike share bikes convert a fair number of people over to bike ownership, too - and the presence or more bike riders on the city's streets makes the streets safer for everyone.
Not only am I well aware of how an endowment is operated -- this is a regular topic of faculty meetings, for god's sake
Then don't say ignorant things like this:
"A bit of data: Harvard's endowment amounts to $1.7 million per student. With a reasonable return on endowment investment, hey could quite literally abolish tuition forever if they wanted to"
You could also demonstrate some basic knowledge on the subject by showing that you understand "Harvard University" isn't "undergraduate" - that's Harvard COLLEGE. Here you go again:
A 3.5% return on Harvard's 1.7 million per student endowment would give an annual income of $60,000, which is equal to Harvard's tuition plus room and board.
Why do you think room and board at Harvard College is $60K?
What do you think will happen when you direct all the investment income into student tuition and board?
Well? Here's a big hint (oooo, am I being "condescending" again?): paying everyone's tuition via the investment income doesn't change REVENUE. So what pays for all the things the endowment income WAS paying for, but isn't anymore?
Huh?
Well, Mr. Fucking I Teach Physics? Ever heard the expression "rob Peter to pay Paul"?
A bit of data: Harvard's endowment amounts to $1.7 million per student. With a reasonable return on endowment investment, hey could quite literally abolish tuition forever if they wanted to.
"Full disclosure: I'm a professor at a liberal arts college whose endowment per student is mediocre at best.
Clearly not a professor of finance, math, etc. given you don't understand that investment income on the endowment is what the school uses to help with operating and capital expenses. You avoid at all costs spending the endowment; you spend some of the investment income. Or, to put it in simpler terms a "liberal arts professor" might understand: selling the cow instead of the milk has enormous long-term impact.
Also, given Harvard is older than the United States (in fact, older than the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) - "forever" is a really strong word.
Harvard has a huge number of full-boat scholarships and when the endowment tanked, none of the schools dropped their scholarship levels. Several raised them.
So there's eight or ten clients for android that support some sort of editing, which is precisely why I asked. Which of them actually has a usable interface for simply and quickly adding POI's?
I'm not going to go through the trouble of installing almost a dozen clients just to answer this question.
On a slightly related note: I wanted to add minor resources like bike repair stations and water fountains in my city, and figured there MUST be an android app that would make this about as simple as "hold your phone over it for a bit to get an averaged position, now click this and then "water fountain".
Nothing that I could see was remotely this simple? Even the web editor is a nightmare of trying to figure out exactly how to do things...and the wiki didn't help much, either, with poor documentation on the various properties one can assign to an object.
> Translation: We can't afford (read: won't pay) for real security personnel,
Eh, not really. I guarantee you they have a lot of "real" security personnel.
This is about taking over control of the story; it's a sort of "pay no attention to the thing we don't want you to hear about" (ie the fact that their onboard infotainment/networking and satellite uplink systems are ludicrously insecure) and "pay attention to this other thing."
Now when you search for "united hacking", you'll get a billion stories about the bug bounty, and few about the original problem - that a passenger was able to walk all over stuff he shouldn't have been able to. It's already starting to work, a few hours in:
https://imgur.com/0rGuKaL
It also helps them look, to shareholders/the market/the public, like they're "responding" and making an effort to "improve security."
After the incredible piece of shit that my TF700T was, never will I buy an Asus tablet again.
Nice screen (it was one of the first android tablets to have a really high-res screen), the graphics processor and CPU are fast...but they completely screwed the pooch on the flash architecture, making the thing crippled; any sort of disk IO causes it to slow to a crawl. There are all sorts of hacks to make just web browsing bearable, by using a ram disk to completely avoid the flash. People also put in the fastest SD cards they can find.
Didn't the Nexus 7, which they OEM'd, have similar issues?
Why couldn't Henson even be bothered to respond to the request for an interview, much less be interviewed?
For fuck's sakes, man. You're now fully employed for OpenSSL. Would it kill you to do an interview?
Ford Explorer roof pillars were initially spec'd with a fairly high-grade steel. Citing costs, management refused to use the high-grade steel and instead used a weaker steel.
Result? Lots of roof-cave-ins on a vehicle that was prone to roll over.
http://www.autosafety.org/memo...
http://shameproject.com/report...
http://mikethemadbiologist.com...
Malcom Gladwell is the product of conservative institutes and think tanks; he has worked for racists, the tobacco industry, oil companies, big pharma, and more. His books popularize the kind of thinking that said industries have used to defend their practices.