Most of the responses to this study are specious Slashdot crap, but this is actually a good question.
Hormone and neurotransmitter levels change in response to various stimuli; these changes in turn cause cognitive and emotional changes.
The problem becomes complicated because those cognitive and emotional changes can lead to behaviors which cause or exacerbate depression.
E.g., stress raises cortisol levels, cortisol reduces dopamine levels, and low dopamine is associated with depression.
As with many medical issues, there is substantial variation between individuals so there is no clear way to predict who will end up with depression---just as there is no clear way to predict who will get cancer, catch this year's flu, or have a heart attack.
There are a lot of statistical correlations that can provide some guidance on how to reduce the risk or how to catch the early warning signs so the person can be treated before their life deteriorates. (Because depressed people tend to become dysfunctional, dysfunction leads to personal and/or professional stress, and stress makes depression worse.)
I am skeptical that this particular method will be useful in any practical terms---either for identifying people who need treatment or for treating people who have sought help. But it could lead to better methods which do get people into a clinic when they need it.
In science and technology, there is almost always a method which is theoretically sound but practically insufficient, and that method helps us narrow in on the really good stuff. Hopefully this is part of that process.
I understand that sometimes bad things come with updates. Old bugs get back in, compatibility breaks, new bugs are introduced. It happens to every software package sooner or later.
But if Microsoft wants to make updates fully automatic and even put them outside of the user's control, then they need to perform due diligence to minimize the risk of problems. Screwing up your build process in new, exciting, and trivial ways is not cutting it.
Heck, the fastest computer can barely beat people at chess
(1) That was 20 years ago. Computers and algorithms have improved tremendously since then.
(2) It wasn't playing random people; it beat the world champion.
(3) In 2006---ten years ago---a desktop computer beat the world champion. It was a 2P Core 2 Duo system, so it would be difficult to buy something slower off the shelf today.
a game with pieces that only move here and there, not 456543233435! different ways
The technical term you're looking for is "degrees of freedom", and while cars have more than chess pieces, the problem is not as intractable as you seem to believe. The number is not infinite, and the problem is solvable even if it were.
Experiencing the real world is opposite, there is an almost infinite number of rules that need to be understood and utilized in order to understand it even on a fundamental level.
And this most of this "understanding" is irrelevant to self-driving cars.
Humans and animals aren't doing anything particularly special when they navigate terrain.
Classic games like chess and go were once considered "special" tasks that computers could not perform. And that remained true only until we developed the processing power and the algorithms necessary to perform the tasks well.
Today, a human cannot beat a standard desktop computer at chess. All of the games like Chessmaster have to deliberately reduce their performance in order for human players to have a chance.
Automated driving is more difficult, but not by much. We just haven't poured a lot of money and effort into it yet.
We can launch missiles from halfway across the country and drop them on your car in the parking lot, so I'm sure we'll get self-driving cars relatively soon. I expect to see them before I'm old enough to retire, and almost certainly before I die.
I can run 10 Gbps on fiber over a distance of 40 km using 5 watts of power. I have zero interference and can run as many lines in parallel as I want. And this is with typical enterprise equipment---I assume the telco guys have better options.
Call me when wireless can do that. Or not, as I'll probably be running 40 Gbps (or higher) by then.
People that are good at spotting bullshit are usually marginalized as negative influences.
I don't have that problem, so it's probably a question of how you identify BS or how you expose it up the chain.
The underlying issue is that you have to be right. If you call something out---even once---and it ends up doing what they wanted it for, then your credibility is shot.
There's an art to conveying uncertainty in regard to anything management wants.
I have never gotten a bad response from saying, "The suggested product does not have a perfect reputation, so here is an alternative if they can't deliver." And that alternative comes with a summary of the costs, functionality, and tradeoffs so he can justify the change if necessary.
The people I see marginalized as negative influences are the ones who talk shit about proposed solutions without offering one of their own. A business need can't go without a solution, so you're offering either a viable alternative or noise. And an alternative solution doesn't count if it can't check off all the major requirements, including the ones that might not be written down.
The original NMCI contract expired and was replaced by NGEN.
Under NGEN, the government has full network infrastructure documentation and certain hardware assets.
While this particular problem has been addressed, HP got a sweetheart deal because they were basically a shoo-in. Precisely because Navy/USMC botched the original contract.
So while the government apparently learned from its mistakes, the Navy/USMC are stuck with HP for the next few years regardless.
Most people will spend hours playing their favorite handful of games every month, and they would be better off buying the system and those games outright.
But with the subscription, they have the appearance of choice with those 400+ titles. If they never exercise that choice, well, Sony won't complain.
I can see a good point in subscribing for a month or two each year to try things out and decide what to buy. It's notoriously difficult to return unwanted games/software at most retailers, so I would use this if I wanted to try a bunch of games I couldn't borrow from friends.
I'm unconvinced that this can be classed as a user error, though. Excel is using a heuristic to determine the data type of a field
I disagree.
If you're using typed data, you have to cast it as something when it's stored. As far as I can tell, the Excel heuristic hasn't changed much since the 1990s.
With a 20+ year history, it's user error if they do not account for it.
It is dead simple to select a column and set its data type to Text, which is appropriate for gene names and will prevent any alteration of the input.
If there is an option that accomplishes exactly what the user wants and the user does not select that option, well, that's basically the definition of user error.
1. An Uber user scheduled the pickup using the app (or rarely, the web site). This means he has a reservation or a service call, which coincidentally makes Uber closer to a limousine service than a taxi service.
2. Taxis are not considered to be picking up hitchhikers even though customers may wave them down on the street---which is closer to hitchhiking than Uber rides are. In most places, stops like this require taxi medallions.
3. An Uber user is generally not wandering along the roadway, distracting drivers and impeding traffic.
4. Most anti-hitchhiking laws restrict the activity on the actual roadway or road+shoulder. Since Uber or taxi passengers can remain off the road until they are in the vehicle, the laws should almost never apply anyway.
A niche market has to accommodate itself to the larger market because there is little financial incentive for the opposite.
So, if you choose to rely on niche platforms, then you will have to deal with the consequences.
Right now, that means using the Uber web site to request a ride if you don't have iOS or Android. It may or may not work with your browser of choice, but I can almost guarantee it works with IE and Chrome.
If you want to complain about living in a digital ghetto, complain to Uber---no one is stopping them from developing a Linux package or from making publicly-accessible APIs. They just don't have an incentive to do so.
And all the laws that were designed to prevent banking meltdowns didn't stop the last meltdown
This is specifically not accurate.
The Glass-Steagall Act prevented major banking meltdowns since it was passed in the aftermath of the Great Depression. We're talking a 50-60 year track record of success.
The affiliation provisions were struck in 1999, and within a decade there was a major banking crisis. The seeds of that destruction were sown almost immediately after the law was changed. Because, surprise, banks are still run by short-sighted, overly "clever" assholes who will do anything to turn a quick buck.
Developers and admins blame users when those developers and admins can't be bothered to design (or deploy) practices and procedures that address the blind spots and habits that users pick up when they use a system.
For a few years, this was exactly my job.
The end result is always users bitching to management, and then management has to decide between what their favorite employees say and what IT says. In the absence of an intelligible business need for security, the users win.
I have seen IT security guys win most often in the finance, healthcare, and defense industries. Outside of those three, no one else cares.
So don't blame developers or admins. Developers put the security infrastructure there, and admins configured/deployed it. And the users throw fits.
Security is like preventive maintenance---there is a cost associated with it, and the benefits are not entirely tangible. Doing it is smart, but not everyone makes smart decisions. Or has the discipline to follow through once they make them.
When Windows 7 came out, the first thing a gamer did was to disable UAC.
Maybe the dim-witted ones.
Most games trigger UAC because they want to write to the Program Files directory, either to change their config files or to store saves. Installing them to any other directory avoids this problem.
Some really legacy games require admin rights because they make system calls that are privileged, write to the HKLM registry hive (instead of the user hive), or write to the Windows directory. Very very few fall into this category, and they can be tweaked by configuring them to always run with those privileges. There is an option in the Windows UI to do that.
In any case, disabling UAC is basically never necessary to get games working if you understand how it works.
For example, I recall when UAC came to Windows Vista.
The UAC prompt isn't a warning in the typical sense. It is a request for elevated privileges. The system must receive a response to determine whether or not the process is granted those privileges. The warning text is supposed to discourage users, but the prompt is necessary because the process will not be granted those privileges in the absence of user consent.
I get a warning from the browser every single time, despite selecting the "always trust applets from this publisher" (or something like that option).
Agree here. Either the browser is stupid, or the publisher is stupidly using different certificates every time.
Of course, there are lots of software packages with instructions like
They are working around false positives. Antivirus vendors are pretty much the undisputed kings of crying wolf.
In fact, I've never encountered a single person who can actually point to an occasion where a security dialog alerted them to a real threat that was then neutralized.
The malware developers generally try to avoid generating unexpected warnings, so I wouldn't be surprised if most alerts are merely noise.
I've personally declined to log into my banks' web sites when they had SSL certificate issues, but I don't know if it was caused by configuration issues on their end or a MITM. I didn't exposed my credentials, so I never bothered to follow up.
If you have network-level authentication enabled, RDP requires a certificate.
If you have an enterprise CA that the machine can autoenroll with, it will request one. If not, it will generate a self-signed cert with a 6-month expiration period.
You would have to hit TechNet and read several articles to get it squared away. There are articles that address setting up a primary/intermediate CA infrastructure, configuring autoenrollment, and using Group Policy to configure RDP.
This is for enterprise, of course. You can manually create a certificate that lasts for 100 years on one-off hosts, trust it on the other end, and you're good to go.
The regeneration only occurs because a valid certificate is required but not available---if you put one there that lasts longer, the system will continue to use it until it expires.
The reduced neural activity (when warnings interrupted a task) indicates they are ignoring/dismissing the warning rather than assessing it and deeming it unreasonable.
If they were giving it consideration like you do, there would be roughly equal activity regardless of whether it interrupted their activity.
Along those lines, if that's what you normally do then you are not a typical user.
There's usually a pretty straight line from "authorized the activity" to "liable for the outcome of the activity". So the US government would be on the hook for correcting any harm done to the ISS or its crew.
Whether the government has indemnity through its agreements with SpaceX or ULA is an issue between those two entities. By treaty, the injured parties must contact the US government for compensation or redress.
I'd suggest Project Fi if you're considering a Nexus phone, depending on your situation.
Your voice and data comes over whatever is the best connection among T-Mobile, Sprint, US Cellular, and Fi hotspots at any given location.
+ Coverage is better than any individual carrier. + Data speeds will be very good almost everywhere. + Voice, text, and data pricing are extremely competitive. + Wifi calling is automatic and preferred when available.
- No group plans - No equivalent to T-Mobile's Binge On - Only available for Nexus devices at present
T-Mobile is deploying all their new 4G towers on LTE band 12, and support for band 12 was pretty much nonexistent in devices prior to 2014/2015. Even now, budget handsets often lack it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have high karma, your posts start at +2 instead of the normal +1 for logged in users.
Most people will stop modding a post up when it has 5 points. That 5-point threshold represents a net +3 moderation above your starting value.
Your profile page only adjusts your +3 moderation with the baseline +1 value for being logged in.
If you receive excessive positive moderation, that post can show as +5 on your user page, but I expect this to be uncommon.
Most of the responses to this study are specious Slashdot crap, but this is actually a good question.
Hormone and neurotransmitter levels change in response to various stimuli; these changes in turn cause cognitive and emotional changes.
The problem becomes complicated because those cognitive and emotional changes can lead to behaviors which cause or exacerbate depression.
E.g., stress raises cortisol levels, cortisol reduces dopamine levels, and low dopamine is associated with depression.
As with many medical issues, there is substantial variation between individuals so there is no clear way to predict who will end up with depression---just as there is no clear way to predict who will get cancer, catch this year's flu, or have a heart attack.
There are a lot of statistical correlations that can provide some guidance on how to reduce the risk or how to catch the early warning signs so the person can be treated before their life deteriorates. (Because depressed people tend to become dysfunctional, dysfunction leads to personal and/or professional stress, and stress makes depression worse.)
I am skeptical that this particular method will be useful in any practical terms---either for identifying people who need treatment or for treating people who have sought help. But it could lead to better methods which do get people into a clinic when they need it.
In science and technology, there is almost always a method which is theoretically sound but practically insufficient, and that method helps us narrow in on the really good stuff. Hopefully this is part of that process.
I understand that sometimes bad things come with updates. Old bugs get back in, compatibility breaks, new bugs are introduced. It happens to every software package sooner or later.
But if Microsoft wants to make updates fully automatic and even put them outside of the user's control, then they need to perform due diligence to minimize the risk of problems. Screwing up your build process in new, exciting, and trivial ways is not cutting it.
Heck, the fastest computer can barely beat people at chess
(1) That was 20 years ago. Computers and algorithms have improved tremendously since then.
(2) It wasn't playing random people; it beat the world champion.
(3) In 2006---ten years ago---a desktop computer beat the world champion. It was a 2P Core 2 Duo system, so it would be difficult to buy something slower off the shelf today.
a game with pieces that only move here and there, not 456543233435! different ways
The technical term you're looking for is "degrees of freedom", and while cars have more than chess pieces, the problem is not as intractable as you seem to believe. The number is not infinite, and the problem is solvable even if it were.
Experiencing the real world is opposite, there is an almost infinite number of rules that need to be understood and utilized in order to understand it even on a fundamental level.
And this most of this "understanding" is irrelevant to self-driving cars.
Humans and animals aren't doing anything particularly special when they navigate terrain.
Classic games like chess and go were once considered "special" tasks that computers could not perform. And that remained true only until we developed the processing power and the algorithms necessary to perform the tasks well.
Today, a human cannot beat a standard desktop computer at chess. All of the games like Chessmaster have to deliberately reduce their performance in order for human players to have a chance.
Automated driving is more difficult, but not by much. We just haven't poured a lot of money and effort into it yet.
We can launch missiles from halfway across the country and drop them on your car in the parking lot, so I'm sure we'll get self-driving cars relatively soon. I expect to see them before I'm old enough to retire, and almost certainly before I die.
I can run 10 Gbps on fiber over a distance of 40 km using 5 watts of power. I have zero interference and can run as many lines in parallel as I want. And this is with typical enterprise equipment---I assume the telco guys have better options.
Call me when wireless can do that. Or not, as I'll probably be running 40 Gbps (or higher) by then.
People that are good at spotting bullshit are usually marginalized as negative influences.
I don't have that problem, so it's probably a question of how you identify BS or how you expose it up the chain.
The underlying issue is that you have to be right. If you call something out---even once---and it ends up doing what they wanted it for, then your credibility is shot.
There's an art to conveying uncertainty in regard to anything management wants.
I have never gotten a bad response from saying, "The suggested product does not have a perfect reputation, so here is an alternative if they can't deliver." And that alternative comes with a summary of the costs, functionality, and tradeoffs so he can justify the change if necessary.
The people I see marginalized as negative influences are the ones who talk shit about proposed solutions without offering one of their own. A business need can't go without a solution, so you're offering either a viable alternative or noise. And an alternative solution doesn't count if it can't check off all the major requirements, including the ones that might not be written down.
The original NMCI contract expired and was replaced by NGEN.
Under NGEN, the government has full network infrastructure documentation and certain hardware assets.
While this particular problem has been addressed, HP got a sweetheart deal because they were basically a shoo-in. Precisely because Navy/USMC botched the original contract.
So while the government apparently learned from its mistakes, the Navy/USMC are stuck with HP for the next few years regardless.
I think you're underestimating how weak Intel's integrated graphics were.
I'll give them credit for doing so much with limited die space and power... but your claims are utter crap.
I just don't see the value proposition here.
They're selling the illusion of choice.
Most people will spend hours playing their favorite handful of games every month, and they would be better off buying the system and those games outright.
But with the subscription, they have the appearance of choice with those 400+ titles. If they never exercise that choice, well, Sony won't complain.
I can see a good point in subscribing for a month or two each year to try things out and decide what to buy. It's notoriously difficult to return unwanted games/software at most retailers, so I would use this if I wanted to try a bunch of games I couldn't borrow from friends.
If they are reporting publicly that they do it, you can be pretty sure it's legal.
The Attorney General wrote the rules, which are available online, as stated in the article.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/...
I'm unconvinced that this can be classed as a user error, though. Excel is using a heuristic to determine the data type of a field
I disagree.
If you're using typed data, you have to cast it as something when it's stored. As far as I can tell, the Excel heuristic hasn't changed much since the 1990s.
With a 20+ year history, it's user error if they do not account for it.
It is dead simple to select a column and set its data type to Text, which is appropriate for gene names and will prevent any alteration of the input.
If there is an option that accomplishes exactly what the user wants and the user does not select that option, well, that's basically the definition of user error.
and run systemd as Just Another Daemon, akin to xinetd, supervise, or your cluster management software
This is dangerous, as systemd expects to be PID 1. If it expects to be the root of userspace and isn't, there will probably be complications.
It's better to build a distro without systemd entirely than to try to hack it into pieces without careful planning.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it will be damn hard if it can be done. Already, the first attempt (by uselessd) has been abandoned.
1. An Uber user scheduled the pickup using the app (or rarely, the web site). This means he has a reservation or a service call, which coincidentally makes Uber closer to a limousine service than a taxi service.
2. Taxis are not considered to be picking up hitchhikers even though customers may wave them down on the street---which is closer to hitchhiking than Uber rides are. In most places, stops like this require taxi medallions.
3. An Uber user is generally not wandering along the roadway, distracting drivers and impeding traffic.
4. Most anti-hitchhiking laws restrict the activity on the actual roadway or road+shoulder. Since Uber or taxi passengers can remain off the road until they are in the vehicle, the laws should almost never apply anyway.
A niche market has to accommodate itself to the larger market because there is little financial incentive for the opposite.
So, if you choose to rely on niche platforms, then you will have to deal with the consequences.
Right now, that means using the Uber web site to request a ride if you don't have iOS or Android. It may or may not work with your browser of choice, but I can almost guarantee it works with IE and Chrome.
If you want to complain about living in a digital ghetto, complain to Uber---no one is stopping them from developing a Linux package or from making publicly-accessible APIs. They just don't have an incentive to do so.
And all the laws that were designed to prevent banking meltdowns didn't stop the last meltdown
This is specifically not accurate.
The Glass-Steagall Act prevented major banking meltdowns since it was passed in the aftermath of the Great Depression. We're talking a 50-60 year track record of success.
The affiliation provisions were struck in 1999, and within a decade there was a major banking crisis. The seeds of that destruction were sown almost immediately after the law was changed. Because, surprise, banks are still run by short-sighted, overly "clever" assholes who will do anything to turn a quick buck.
Developers and admins blame users when those developers and admins can't be bothered to design (or deploy) practices and procedures that address the blind spots and habits that users pick up when they use a system.
For a few years, this was exactly my job.
The end result is always users bitching to management, and then management has to decide between what their favorite employees say and what IT says. In the absence of an intelligible business need for security, the users win.
I have seen IT security guys win most often in the finance, healthcare, and defense industries. Outside of those three, no one else cares.
So don't blame developers or admins. Developers put the security infrastructure there, and admins configured/deployed it. And the users throw fits.
Security is like preventive maintenance---there is a cost associated with it, and the benefits are not entirely tangible. Doing it is smart, but not everyone makes smart decisions. Or has the discipline to follow through once they make them.
When Windows 7 came out, the first thing a gamer did was to disable UAC.
Maybe the dim-witted ones.
Most games trigger UAC because they want to write to the Program Files directory, either to change their config files or to store saves. Installing them to any other directory avoids this problem.
Some really legacy games require admin rights because they make system calls that are privileged, write to the HKLM registry hive (instead of the user hive), or write to the Windows directory. Very very few fall into this category, and they can be tweaked by configuring them to always run with those privileges. There is an option in the Windows UI to do that.
In any case, disabling UAC is basically never necessary to get games working if you understand how it works.
For example, I recall when UAC came to Windows Vista.
The UAC prompt isn't a warning in the typical sense. It is a request for elevated privileges. The system must receive a response to determine whether or not the process is granted those privileges. The warning text is supposed to discourage users, but the prompt is necessary because the process will not be granted those privileges in the absence of user consent.
I get a warning from the browser every single time, despite selecting the "always trust applets from this publisher" (or something like that option).
Agree here. Either the browser is stupid, or the publisher is stupidly using different certificates every time.
Of course, there are lots of software packages with instructions like
They are working around false positives. Antivirus vendors are pretty much the undisputed kings of crying wolf.
In fact, I've never encountered a single person who can actually point to an occasion where a security dialog alerted them to a real threat that was then neutralized.
The malware developers generally try to avoid generating unexpected warnings, so I wouldn't be surprised if most alerts are merely noise.
I've personally declined to log into my banks' web sites when they had SSL certificate issues, but I don't know if it was caused by configuration issues on their end or a MITM. I didn't exposed my credentials, so I never bothered to follow up.
If you have network-level authentication enabled, RDP requires a certificate.
If you have an enterprise CA that the machine can autoenroll with, it will request one. If not, it will generate a self-signed cert with a 6-month expiration period.
You would have to hit TechNet and read several articles to get it squared away. There are articles that address setting up a primary/intermediate CA infrastructure, configuring autoenrollment, and using Group Policy to configure RDP.
This is for enterprise, of course. You can manually create a certificate that lasts for 100 years on one-off hosts, trust it on the other end, and you're good to go.
The regeneration only occurs because a valid certificate is required but not available---if you put one there that lasts longer, the system will continue to use it until it expires.
The reduced neural activity (when warnings interrupted a task) indicates they are ignoring/dismissing the warning rather than assessing it and deeming it unreasonable.
If they were giving it consideration like you do, there would be roughly equal activity regardless of whether it interrupted their activity.
Along those lines, if that's what you normally do then you are not a typical user.
Can anyone who has used these apps explain how exactly it differs from voice mail?
There's usually a pretty straight line from "authorized the activity" to "liable for the outcome of the activity". So the US government would be on the hook for correcting any harm done to the ISS or its crew.
Whether the government has indemnity through its agreements with SpaceX or ULA is an issue between those two entities. By treaty, the injured parties must contact the US government for compensation or redress.
I'd suggest Project Fi if you're considering a Nexus phone, depending on your situation.
Your voice and data comes over whatever is the best connection among T-Mobile, Sprint, US Cellular, and Fi hotspots at any given location.
+ Coverage is better than any individual carrier.
+ Data speeds will be very good almost everywhere.
+ Voice, text, and data pricing are extremely competitive.
+ Wifi calling is automatic and preferred when available.
- No group plans
- No equivalent to T-Mobile's Binge On
- Only available for Nexus devices at present
Which phone did you use?
T-Mobile is deploying all their new 4G towers on LTE band 12, and support for band 12 was pretty much nonexistent in devices prior to 2014/2015. Even now, budget handsets often lack it.