We don't get mugged often while walking down the street, but I guarantee that if you leave your wallet or purse out on the street in whatever neighborhood this idiot rented her apartment out in, it will be stolen 99.99% of the time. The same way her home probably wouldn't have been trashed if she was letting someone stay there while she was there, but was completely fucking trashed when she let a random jackass she knew nothing about stay there while she was thousands of miles away.
It's one thing to rent out a room in a house that you own and live in. It's another to rent out your entire home to a stranger while you are ten thousand miles away. The whole "couch-surfing" concept is dumb, but reasonable. Short of the person being a rapist or an axe-wielding killer, letting someone crash on my couch while I'm in the room down the hall isn't nearly as big of a risk as letting someone stay at my home for a week or two while I'm on the other side of the planet. Although, even then, I sure would give my house a thorough once-over and lock everything I give a damn up lest it disappear in the night.
Airbnb should have no liability to this idiot, but Airbnb should lose most of its valuation. Of all the stupid fucking concepts that have had enormous price tags attached to them by morons in tech and finance industries in the last three years, this might take the cake.
When I was renting an apartment, they would come in several times a year just to inspect every unit. And several more times a year to spray for pests, test alarms, and so on. They would often not give more than about 24hrs notice. I still made sure to be home each and every time they did this, even though it meant sitting around the entire day waiting for them. The idea that you'd let a complete stranger into your home without being there - even if they own the property itself - is just stupid.
In fact, I had something similar to your experience. The last apartment I lived in before I bought a house decided to paint every single apartment door. They instructed tenants that they would be doing this, but that after they painted the doors, they would have to be left wide open for 6-12hrs while the paint dried. I was fucking floored. They seriously expected everyone to just go about their business and allow someone from the leasing office to open every door in the middle of the week while renters were at work and then leave the doors fucking wide open on 600 units, so that anyone could just walk in?
I stayed home when they intended to do this. They came around and opened the doors. Then waited for the painters to come and do their thing. I waited for hours. And hours. And hours. They never came and the doors were never painted. Ever. Not that day. Not that week. Not for the rest of my entire lease, until I moved out.
Oh, and a few months later? I was the victim of a home invasion, while sleeping the sleep of death like only someone who has worked almost 48hrs straight can sleep, in the middle of the day. Someone (clearly with a key to my place - which left only someone affiliated with the apartment complex, since I lived alone and knew nobody in the state at that time) let themselves in, took my stuff quietly, and let themselves back out. Even locking the door back up on their way out.
Needless to say, I left right after my lease was up and bought a house, instead.
Therefore - reasonably if somewhat naively - EJ assumed that this was pretty close to a traditional letting agency - and Airbnb would have done these checks themselves. After all, they charged her a fee much like any other tenant-finding service.
Since this woman also has previously rented her home to random people from Craigslist while she traveled, I would assert that she made no such assumptions. She is simply naive and stupid, as is anyone else who is dumb enough to do this.
How is it pointless? EJ is the idiot who accepted the Airbnb terms and went along with renting it out without those basic precautions. Nobody forced her to accept the terms and rent anyway. All she had to do was say "nevermind, I'm not doing this" when she found out that there is no vetting of individuals and no opportunity to get information about your potential renter.
It is entirely her fault the same way it would be her fault if this had happened from one of her random Craigslist renters.
You don't need to be pessimistic by nature to have common sense. If you told anyone "hey, I'm renting my home out to a total stranger from craigslist while I'm out of the country", they would tell you that you're an idiot. Your parents would tell you this. Your friends would. Your coworkers would. Your neighbors would. Your landlord would. There's a reason your landlord makes you fill out a lengthy application, submit a security deposit, and perform a credit check and criminal background check.
This is about as common sense as when your mother told you not to accept candy or rides from strangers when you were five years old.
I somehow doubt some random chick who spends all her time traveling is also an expert carpenter and cabinet maker on the side. Therefore, she would have to hire someone to do the work and if you hire someone to do the work, they're going to need the permission of the property owner to do it. When she moves out, she's going to have to pay whatever the company who owns her apartment complex wants for the repairs and they typically charge through the nose.
Hell, just ruined carpets in a place, say, 1,000sqft, could run you five grand or more.
I'm not even sure how one would do this. Every apartment I've ever rented forbids subletting and you can't even allow a friend or family member to stay more than a few days per year without being required to register them with the leasing office or even put them on your lease. Certainly not for an entire week.
It's unfortunate that this happened, but people need to exercise a little common sense. I have rooms to rent in my house, but I haven't done it because it's a high-risk endeavor and you never know what kind of person you'll end up with and what kind of problems you'll be inviting. Hell, I'm careful about who I invite into my home and what I have visible from my front door, so that when I answer the door people can't be scanning my home for things worth coming back and stealing at a later time. (I live in a neighborhood where you have people come by almost every week trying to sell you roofing, siding, floor work, insulation/weatherizing work, etc -- and they all want to schedule for someone to come inspect your house and give you a quote).
It's hard to imagine that a stupid business idea and stupid people ends up with stupid results.
Really? When it comes time to build a new machine, I put new huge drives in it. I don't waste that space stuffing 250gb drives or 500gb drives into slots that 3tb drives could be taking up.
That isn't reliability, to me. That's durability. Reliability, to me, is if I sit an SSD and a spinning platter drive in a machine (or for testing purposes, a hundred of each) - which one has the longer life with less failures? In this regard, I have not heard it commonly claimed that SSDs are superior, as the article's initial premise starts from.
Instead, it has almost exclusively been claimed that reliability is poor and that the SSD failure rate is huge. As I mentioned, it seems largely anecdotal to me, these claims of "high failure rates". Here's an example of "oh noes, SSD skies are falling".
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html " I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I'm talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. It's not pretty. "
So, unlike what the blurb asserts, I would say the common position is not that "SSD is more reliable than spinning disks", but that "SSD has a super high failure rate".
And as for the "less reliable" claim that people usually make (including prominent bloggers relying entirely on anecdotal data), I'm not sure I buy into it. Short of an immediate failure, the life time of an SSD should be as long as a hard drive or more. It should certainly last more than long enough that the system it's in will have been upgraded and the drive replaced with something larger by then.
it seems SSDs aren't more reliable than hard drives.
I have never ever heard a single fucking person make the claim that SSDs were more reliable. Faster, yes. Less reliable, yes. But I've never heard anyone claim they were more reliable as some sort of selling point.
I'd really like to know where this £200 ($325 USD) desktop PC is that they're talking about. Are they suggesting the government should be stocked with Walmart E-Machines? Hell, the OS license would cost a third of it.
Frankly, I couldn't care less. Go into the career; don't go into the career. Be male or female. I'm not looking to hump the colleague sitting next to me and as long as you are passionate about your field and talented and have a strong work ethic, nothing else matters. The whole idea that a certain percentage of a workforce must be of a certain sex is irrelevant and stupid.
We don't want to keep wasting all those resources developing for the PC. We're going to make DRM on the PC a complete piece of shit situation. Nobody is buying the game on the PC, now. PC gaming is dying. We can't make money on the PC. We're only making titles for consoles, now.
Bandwidth caps are fine. Data transfer caps are not. If it's 3am and nobody is online, it shouldn't matter if you're maxing your speed out. If it's during the busiest point of the day and too many people are doing too much, then throttling bandwidth a little bit to fairly serve everyone is fine, too. Either way, how much actual data you consume in a month is fucking irrelevant. At least, that's the way it would be if the industry were rational and honest and not trying to scaremonger people into believing that "oh noes, it is a finite and rare resource!".
That was a pretty awesome feature, back in 2006. I use my PS3 for netflix more than I do for gaming (because I feel that running netflix on my 360 is unnecessarily giving that piece of shit a shorter life). However, I haven't even entertained the thought of playing a blu-ray since about 2007. I have a high end home theater and all, but buying a physical disc or waiting for one to be delivered is just not worth it. I'd rather get 80% of the visual quality of a blu-ray on-demand or not at all.
Twitter is about a uni-directional attention-whore self-absorbed broadcasting medium. Let me broadcast as much inanity and bullshit about my life to tens of thousands of people who are hanging on my every word, because I have a podcast, a tech blog, an album, or a pair of tits. Twitter is about catering to attention-whores and their sycophants and as a result, there will always be a place for *any* utility that facilitates the experience of said attention-whore the broadest and easiest.
This story seems like an obvious "slowly convince people that everyone on the internet must have a registered real identity with the great ministry of government truth yadda yadda", but when it comes down to it, tolerating a bunch of assholes (mostly congregating around youtube, brietbart, and any article linked to by drudgereport) is a small price to pay for privacy and/or free speech. I know they want me to say "oh noes, we must have people use their real identity, because it will stop them from being jerks!" but that's ridiculous. The great thing about free speech is the right to be an asshole. And to be an asshole without putting your name on it. Fine with me.
Or maybe it's because some people would just rather keep going to school and going into debt than having to finally dip their toe into the real world. At this rate, people won't start their career until they hit the age of 30 for fuck's sake. It seems like I know more people every few years who are still going to school. Spend several years, then decide "gosh, I want to do something else" so then focus on another line of education. Then decide they want a masters in that thing. And next thing you know, they've been going to school for 21 years of their life.
That's obviously not the case with everyone, but it seems like the case for many. Career students and all. I'd rather you just throw me into the fray and let me prove myself. Especially at this rate. By the time you finally sack up and enter the work force, I'll have a decade of experience on you, kind of making much of your degree irrelevant in comparison.
I guess it depends on the type of LCD. On a pure flat LCD panel display, I would say that there are far fewer things that you could or would get repaired, when they fail. However, on a rear projection LCD (like my 60" Sony SXRD that is sitting upstairs), there are plenty of thing that you would have serviced and for a $4,000 display, you most certainly *would*.
On the other hand, I'm sitting in front of a 30" Apple LCD that was $1,700 last time I bought one and $3,000 the *first* time I bought one. Just a big flat display panel. If something were to go seriously wrong with it, I have no idea what the resolution would be. I guess at best, return it under warranty and they throw it out and give you a new one rather than fix a "part" . . . ?
Not to mention, CRTs last a hell of a long time. My parents still have a CRT in the household that runs just fine after at least twenty-five years. Most LCDs only have a short warranty and there are a lot of parts that will simply fail over a much shorter period of time than a CRT (like the backlight). In the lifespan of that one CRT, I would expect to go through at least three LCDs based on lifespan alone (not counting the greater frequency of replacement due to technology improvements/shifts/etc). So when it comes down to it, you're probably looking at just as much waste for the same period of time.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't get mugged often while walking down the street, but I guarantee that if you leave your wallet or purse out on the street in whatever neighborhood this idiot rented her apartment out in, it will be stolen 99.99% of the time. The same way her home probably wouldn't have been trashed if she was letting someone stay there while she was there, but was completely fucking trashed when she let a random jackass she knew nothing about stay there while she was thousands of miles away.
It's one thing to rent out a room in a house that you own and live in. It's another to rent out your entire home to a stranger while you are ten thousand miles away. The whole "couch-surfing" concept is dumb, but reasonable. Short of the person being a rapist or an axe-wielding killer, letting someone crash on my couch while I'm in the room down the hall isn't nearly as big of a risk as letting someone stay at my home for a week or two while I'm on the other side of the planet. Although, even then, I sure would give my house a thorough once-over and lock everything I give a damn up lest it disappear in the night.
Airbnb should have no liability to this idiot, but Airbnb should lose most of its valuation. Of all the stupid fucking concepts that have had enormous price tags attached to them by morons in tech and finance industries in the last three years, this might take the cake.
When I was renting an apartment, they would come in several times a year just to inspect every unit. And several more times a year to spray for pests, test alarms, and so on. They would often not give more than about 24hrs notice. I still made sure to be home each and every time they did this, even though it meant sitting around the entire day waiting for them. The idea that you'd let a complete stranger into your home without being there - even if they own the property itself - is just stupid.
In fact, I had something similar to your experience. The last apartment I lived in before I bought a house decided to paint every single apartment door. They instructed tenants that they would be doing this, but that after they painted the doors, they would have to be left wide open for 6-12hrs while the paint dried. I was fucking floored. They seriously expected everyone to just go about their business and allow someone from the leasing office to open every door in the middle of the week while renters were at work and then leave the doors fucking wide open on 600 units, so that anyone could just walk in?
I stayed home when they intended to do this. They came around and opened the doors. Then waited for the painters to come and do their thing. I waited for hours. And hours. And hours. They never came and the doors were never painted. Ever. Not that day. Not that week. Not for the rest of my entire lease, until I moved out.
Oh, and a few months later? I was the victim of a home invasion, while sleeping the sleep of death like only someone who has worked almost 48hrs straight can sleep, in the middle of the day. Someone (clearly with a key to my place - which left only someone affiliated with the apartment complex, since I lived alone and knew nobody in the state at that time) let themselves in, took my stuff quietly, and let themselves back out. Even locking the door back up on their way out.
Needless to say, I left right after my lease was up and bought a house, instead.
Therefore - reasonably if somewhat naively - EJ assumed that this was pretty close to a traditional letting agency - and Airbnb would have done these checks themselves. After all, they charged her a fee much like any other tenant-finding service.
Since this woman also has previously rented her home to random people from Craigslist while she traveled, I would assert that she made no such assumptions. She is simply naive and stupid, as is anyone else who is dumb enough to do this.
How is it pointless? EJ is the idiot who accepted the Airbnb terms and went along with renting it out without those basic precautions. Nobody forced her to accept the terms and rent anyway. All she had to do was say "nevermind, I'm not doing this" when she found out that there is no vetting of individuals and no opportunity to get information about your potential renter.
It is entirely her fault the same way it would be her fault if this had happened from one of her random Craigslist renters.
You don't need to be pessimistic by nature to have common sense. If you told anyone "hey, I'm renting my home out to a total stranger from craigslist while I'm out of the country", they would tell you that you're an idiot. Your parents would tell you this. Your friends would. Your coworkers would. Your neighbors would. Your landlord would. There's a reason your landlord makes you fill out a lengthy application, submit a security deposit, and perform a credit check and criminal background check.
This is about as common sense as when your mother told you not to accept candy or rides from strangers when you were five years old.
I somehow doubt some random chick who spends all her time traveling is also an expert carpenter and cabinet maker on the side. Therefore, she would have to hire someone to do the work and if you hire someone to do the work, they're going to need the permission of the property owner to do it. When she moves out, she's going to have to pay whatever the company who owns her apartment complex wants for the repairs and they typically charge through the nose.
Hell, just ruined carpets in a place, say, 1,000sqft, could run you five grand or more.
Let's make a more rational comparison:
This is exactly like renting your home out to a random stranger from Craigslist.
Do I need to go any further?
I'm not even sure how one would do this. Every apartment I've ever rented forbids subletting and you can't even allow a friend or family member to stay more than a few days per year without being required to register them with the leasing office or even put them on your lease. Certainly not for an entire week.
It's unfortunate that this happened, but people need to exercise a little common sense. I have rooms to rent in my house, but I haven't done it because it's a high-risk endeavor and you never know what kind of person you'll end up with and what kind of problems you'll be inviting. Hell, I'm careful about who I invite into my home and what I have visible from my front door, so that when I answer the door people can't be scanning my home for things worth coming back and stealing at a later time. (I live in a neighborhood where you have people come by almost every week trying to sell you roofing, siding, floor work, insulation/weatherizing work, etc -- and they all want to schedule for someone to come inspect your house and give you a quote).
It's hard to imagine that a stupid business idea and stupid people ends up with stupid results.
Commonly incorrect term, you mean.
Really? When it comes time to build a new machine, I put new huge drives in it. I don't waste that space stuffing 250gb drives or 500gb drives into slots that 3tb drives could be taking up.
That isn't reliability, to me. That's durability. Reliability, to me, is if I sit an SSD and a spinning platter drive in a machine (or for testing purposes, a hundred of each) - which one has the longer life with less failures? In this regard, I have not heard it commonly claimed that SSDs are superior, as the article's initial premise starts from.
Instead, it has almost exclusively been claimed that reliability is poor and that the SSD failure rate is huge. As I mentioned, it seems largely anecdotal to me, these claims of "high failure rates". Here's an example of "oh noes, SSD skies are falling".
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/05/the-hot-crazy-solid-state-drive-scale.html
" I feel ethically and morally obligated to let you in on a dirty little secret I've discovered in the last two years of full time SSD ownership. Solid state hard drives fail. A lot. And not just any fail. I'm talking about catastrophic, oh-my-God-what-just-happened-to-all-my-data instant gigafail. It's not pretty. "
So, unlike what the blurb asserts, I would say the common position is not that "SSD is more reliable than spinning disks", but that "SSD has a super high failure rate".
And as for the "less reliable" claim that people usually make (including prominent bloggers relying entirely on anecdotal data), I'm not sure I buy into it. Short of an immediate failure, the life time of an SSD should be as long as a hard drive or more. It should certainly last more than long enough that the system it's in will have been upgraded and the drive replaced with something larger by then.
it seems SSDs aren't more reliable than hard drives.
I have never ever heard a single fucking person make the claim that SSDs were more reliable. Faster, yes. Less reliable, yes. But I've never heard anyone claim they were more reliable as some sort of selling point.
I'd really like to know where this £200 ($325 USD) desktop PC is that they're talking about. Are they suggesting the government should be stocked with Walmart E-Machines? Hell, the OS license would cost a third of it.
Frankly, I couldn't care less. Go into the career; don't go into the career. Be male or female. I'm not looking to hump the colleague sitting next to me and as long as you are passionate about your field and talented and have a strong work ethic, nothing else matters. The whole idea that a certain percentage of a workforce must be of a certain sex is irrelevant and stupid.
We don't want to keep wasting all those resources developing for the PC. We're going to make DRM on the PC a complete piece of shit situation. Nobody is buying the game on the PC, now. PC gaming is dying. We can't make money on the PC. We're only making titles for consoles, now.
This needs to be addressed, immediately. If the rain is coming from it's moon, then what will happen to all the whales?
Bandwidth caps are fine. Data transfer caps are not. If it's 3am and nobody is online, it shouldn't matter if you're maxing your speed out. If it's during the busiest point of the day and too many people are doing too much, then throttling bandwidth a little bit to fairly serve everyone is fine, too. Either way, how much actual data you consume in a month is fucking irrelevant. At least, that's the way it would be if the industry were rational and honest and not trying to scaremonger people into believing that "oh noes, it is a finite and rare resource!".
That was a pretty awesome feature, back in 2006. I use my PS3 for netflix more than I do for gaming (because I feel that running netflix on my 360 is unnecessarily giving that piece of shit a shorter life). However, I haven't even entertained the thought of playing a blu-ray since about 2007. I have a high end home theater and all, but buying a physical disc or waiting for one to be delivered is just not worth it. I'd rather get 80% of the visual quality of a blu-ray on-demand or not at all.
Twitter is about a uni-directional attention-whore self-absorbed broadcasting medium. Let me broadcast as much inanity and bullshit about my life to tens of thousands of people who are hanging on my every word, because I have a podcast, a tech blog, an album, or a pair of tits. Twitter is about catering to attention-whores and their sycophants and as a result, there will always be a place for *any* utility that facilitates the experience of said attention-whore the broadest and easiest.
This story seems like an obvious "slowly convince people that everyone on the internet must have a registered real identity with the great ministry of government truth yadda yadda", but when it comes down to it, tolerating a bunch of assholes (mostly congregating around youtube, brietbart, and any article linked to by drudgereport) is a small price to pay for privacy and/or free speech. I know they want me to say "oh noes, we must have people use their real identity, because it will stop them from being jerks!" but that's ridiculous. The great thing about free speech is the right to be an asshole. And to be an asshole without putting your name on it. Fine with me.
Or maybe it's because some people would just rather keep going to school and going into debt than having to finally dip their toe into the real world. At this rate, people won't start their career until they hit the age of 30 for fuck's sake. It seems like I know more people every few years who are still going to school. Spend several years, then decide "gosh, I want to do something else" so then focus on another line of education. Then decide they want a masters in that thing. And next thing you know, they've been going to school for 21 years of their life.
That's obviously not the case with everyone, but it seems like the case for many. Career students and all. I'd rather you just throw me into the fray and let me prove myself. Especially at this rate. By the time you finally sack up and enter the work force, I'll have a decade of experience on you, kind of making much of your degree irrelevant in comparison.
I guess it depends on the type of LCD. On a pure flat LCD panel display, I would say that there are far fewer things that you could or would get repaired, when they fail. However, on a rear projection LCD (like my 60" Sony SXRD that is sitting upstairs), there are plenty of thing that you would have serviced and for a $4,000 display, you most certainly *would*.
On the other hand, I'm sitting in front of a 30" Apple LCD that was $1,700 last time I bought one and $3,000 the *first* time I bought one. Just a big flat display panel. If something were to go seriously wrong with it, I have no idea what the resolution would be. I guess at best, return it under warranty and they throw it out and give you a new one rather than fix a "part" . . . ?
Not to mention, CRTs last a hell of a long time. My parents still have a CRT in the household that runs just fine after at least twenty-five years. Most LCDs only have a short warranty and there are a lot of parts that will simply fail over a much shorter period of time than a CRT (like the backlight). In the lifespan of that one CRT, I would expect to go through at least three LCDs based on lifespan alone (not counting the greater frequency of replacement due to technology improvements/shifts/etc). So when it comes down to it, you're probably looking at just as much waste for the same period of time.