We're fortunate the storm is grazing land along its left side (relative to the direction it's moving). The right side has the higher wind speeds and bigger storm surge.
Credit cards were first implemented in the U.S., so the U.S. has a much larger installed base of the older magstripe credit card readers than any other country. That means a lot more inertia against change.
Countries which implemented credit cards after the U.S. had the benefit of the lessons learned in the U.S. - like the security problems - which eventually led to chipped cards. It's the same reason why Africa has the highest ratio of cellular to landline phones. They basically got to skip the landline phone stage entirely because everyone else went through it.
Then maybe game companies will stop trying to control how everyone plays by forcing them to play on company servers only. And they'll put LAN gameplay capability back into games (which ironically was the only way multiplayer Doom could be played), where you can physically confirm who you're playing with and that they are not cheating.
Why does it have to be either/or? Why can't they both be guilty of revealing state secrets? Just because Johnny threw rocks off a freeway overpass, does that mean it's ok for you to throw rocks off an overpass, even if it's for the explicit purpose of demonstrating to the public how easy it is to throw rocks off of overpasses? I remember a couple decades ago a local reporter ran a story where he registered at multiple precincts and voted in each one (tearing up his unmarked ballot on camera before dropping it in each box so they wouldn't be counted), just to demonstrate how easy it was. He still got a few months in jail for voting fraud.
Personally I think Snowden did the morally right thing. But legally, oversight of secret programs is supposed to be done by elected legislators appointed to committees where they're briefed on these secret activities. Snowden's argument was that these committees were ineffective at controlling unconstitutional behavior, and the public needed to be informed that this sort of stuff was going on. But I've seen precious little media and public attention devoted to addressing that problem. Instead most of the focus has been on the symptoms - the actual programs themselves, as well as on Snowden.
The discussion he wanted us to have was: how do we keep such secret programs "honest", if that's even possible? If we're going to operate these secret programs, what sort of checks and balances are needed since obviously the existing ones are insufficient? I haven't seen that discussion. Instead all I've seen is three years of righteous indignation by both sides - either over how terrible these programs were, or how terrible Snowden was for revealing them.
The subsidies the phone companies receive are for maintaining copper wires on telephone poles and leading up to houses. Verizon is only responsible for the copper wire leading up to the side of your house. You own the copper in your house, and are responsible for maintaining it. If you are having problems with the in-house copper wiring, then you are responsible for fixing it.
You can hire Verizon to fix it for you, or you can call any electrician or telecom/networking technician to fix it. Most contractors are able to fix it too. If you hire Verizon to do it, you should not be surprised that they try to foist their proprietary wireless service onto you, unless you specified in the repair contract that they are only supposed to repair the existing copper lines, not simply "restore" phone service.
The idea that the phone company is responsible for the phone lines in your house is a holdover from the Bell Telephone monopoly days pre-1982. It's a misconception the phone companies are all to happy to propagate since it keeps people from considering competing repair companies. That's why when you order land line phone service, they will often fix simple problems (like repairing outlets) for free. They're not doing it out of generosity, they're doing it in the hopes you'll only think of calling them if you run into major in-house line problems in the future.
I've got a 2-year old Nexus 5 with the plastic still on the lens cover (I forgot about it, then never bothered removing it since the pictures seemed fine). The plastic is not scratched. So the scratch resistance is not meant to be protect against everyday damage - normal Gorilla Glass is probably good enough for that (considering I don't have any protection for the front screen and it's not scratched either). It's meant to protect against the outliers - the rare cases when a grit of sand (likely quartz) happens to rub between the glass and a hard object just so.
For another example of the rare events mattering more than everyday use, the Note 7 worked just fine for 99.99% of owners. Samsung recalled all of them because of only about 100 battery failures. That rare failure was deemed too be unacceptable, warranting a recall of over a million phones.
Basically, you/Apple are paying extra for a better insurance policy on the camera glass to protect against rare catastrophic events. The video simulates those rare events by deliberately rubbing mohs' hardness picks across the surface. The results say the insurance policy doesn't protect you as well as you'd expect based on the advertised material. From the analysis in the video, it seems like the cover is indeed aluminum oxide, but it's too thin. The flexing it experiences when something sharp but slightly softer than it is rubbed across causes the surface to chip and flake.
Does this really matter? Isn't it good enough that using body cameras results in a 93% drop in complaints? The only people who care why are those sensitive about having their pre-conceived notions invalidated (that police officers are bad, or that certain citizens like to file false complaints).
Why should we conduct an experiment which risks more police abuse or false complaints resulting in possible unjust deaths or unjust suspensions, just so people with a political axe to grind can say "I told you so"?
The point of chip-and-pin is to enhance security by requiring something you have (card with a chip) and something you know (PIN) to process a transaction.
The CVV number is a poor attempt to secure the "something you have" part of the equation. Early implimentations were just printed on the opposite side of the card, so someone taking a photo of or copying the card couldn't make a fraudulent charge (because they only had one side of the card). The changing CVV code in TFA is a bit better in that even if you get a photo of the code on the back of the card, it is only valid for an hour. A chip is the ultimate solution - you cannot process a transaction unless you have the physical chip. The only reason to use the changing code in TFA is for online/telephone transactions which can't accept a chip, so has to be done the old way by relaying numbers.
So this has nothing to do with the PIN - the "something you know" half of the security equation. Putting the PIN on the card, even in the form of a number which changes every hour, would defeat the whole purpose of using a PIN for security since it would no longer be something you know that a thief does not.
And the U.S. doesn't even use chip-and-pin. It uses chip-and-sign. A weaker form of security the card companies foisted on the country so they could keep merchants paying for fraud. With chip-and-pin, either the customer gave away the card and PIN and so is liable for the purchase, or the card company screwed up authentication and is liable for the purchase. The merchant is absolved of responsibility for fraud in all cases. But the current credit card company empire is built upon forcing the merchants to pay for fraud, so they watered it down to chip-and-sign. The merchant has to verify the customer's signature matches that on the card. If there's a fraudulent purchase and the signatures don't match, the merchant has to pay for the fraud.
Exactly. Moving the audio port from a headphone jack to USB or Lightning connector doesn't improve the sound. All it does is move the DAC (digital to analog converter) from the phone to an external dongle (headphone jack adapter), or to your headphones (wireless). The digital signal still needs to be converted to analog at some point before you can hear it.
Actually, based on my experience as an amateur piano tuner, it sounds like whatever they were using as a resonator to generate the sound initially started at one frequency, then changed frequencies slightly as the sound decayed. I frequently run across piano strings which do the same thing on the crappier/older pianos. They're a PITA because they sound bad no matter how you tune them. If you tune the initial (attack) frequency right, the decay frequency is wrong. If you tune the decay frequency right, the attack frequency is wrong.
Contracts are not iron-clad agreements. If they contain a mistake, one or both parties can ask a court to relieve them of having to honor the contract. Price mistakes on website are a common example. If Amazon lists a $1000 laptop for $100 on its website and you place an order, even though the order constitutes a contract between Amazon and you, Amazon is not obligated to honor the price because obviously it was a mistake. They might choose to honor the price in the interest of good customer relations if their losses (number of people who saw the error and placed an order) are not too great. But they are under no legal obligation to do so.
I'm not familiar with Japanese contract law, and there's not enough detail in TFA to determine exactly what's going on anyway. But generally, business contracts which would cause one party to lose massive amounts of money if anyone tried to honor the terms (i.e. "nobody in their right mind would sign such a deal") can usually be legally tossed out as a mistake. Even if the mistake was on Amazon's part in not doing their due diligence and fully considering and understanding the terms that they were agreeing to.
A snowplow moves the snow off the road. De-icing with salt lowers the freezing point, putting the (now saline) water into a permanent liquid state despite freezing temperatures.
Melting the snow with a heater turns it into fresh water, which will flow until it reaches a non-heated section of the road, then re-freeze into ice. So this is going to create patches of black ice on any sections of road where the heating element has broken, or turn the unpaved shoulders of the road into ice for anyone unfortunate enough to accidentally run off the paved section.
The write-up equates "incentivized" with "fake" and that's just not true.
If it's not true, there wold be no statistical difference between the average rating of incentivized and regular reviews. The inceitives would only be increasing the number of reviews, not affecting the ratings themselves..
Summary says these incentivized reviews were "overwhelmingly biased in favor of the product" - that would indicate a significant deviation between the two averages. So yeah the incentivized reviews are for all intents and purposes fake.
Bricking the device negatively impacts the end-user, who frequently has zero control over security flaws in the firmware. Instead, the malware should figure out who the manufacturer is of the device it's infected, then start DDoSing that manufacturer's website. Minimal impact to the end-user, but the manufacturer's problem scales with the number of insecure devices they sell and leave unfixed.
That is beside the point. Films from that era weren't like published books or modern DVDs, which are sold to the public and so there are lots of copies floating around out there that you can duplicate. Copyright means the copyright owner controls distribution. And their distribution policy at the time was to make copies of the newsreels, distribute them to theaters where they were to be viewed for a few weeks or months, then the copies had to be destroyed or returned to them. Consequently, the only existing copies are usually in the copyright holders' film vaults. And if they're not interested in preserving it...
The situation is different for radio broadcasts of that era. Audio recording equipment was much more available to the public. So there are plenty of illegal recordings (copyright violations) which have allowed us to recover some of that history. The WWII news broadcasts are particularly good. As you listen to them, it dawns on you that our grandparents and great-grandparents didn't know if they were going to win the war. In retrospect that is obvious, but that uncertainty is not conveyed when you just read about the war in history books.
It's still subject to the whims of copyright holders. AuthenTec used to make the fingerprint scanner on most laptops. Some time after Apple bought AuthenTec, they shut down its support website without warning. I discovered this after I had to reinstall Win 7 on my laptop (laptop came with Vista drivers which for some reason didn't work in Win 7). I tried to download them from AuthenTec's site, only to find a message saying they were withdrawing support for their fingerprint products and to contact my laptop vendor (who only had Vista drivers).
I managed to scrounge up a copy from archive.org's mirror which got it working; not the latest version, but at least it made it functional. I was surprised they'd mirrored a downloadable file, but apparently they sometimes do that if the HTML is configured a certain way. A few weeks later it occurred to me I'd be really screwed if I wasn't able to find it on archive.org again. So I tried to download it again, only to find the file was now gone.
Unless the thing that should be preserved is under copyright, and the copyright owner decides rather than paying for extra space to store it, they'll just destroy it. A lot of the recovered lost Dr. Who episodes are from "illegal" copies made by fans, or from broadcast studios in other countries who were supposed to destroy or return the tapes to the BBC (the copyright holder) after airing, but either forgot to or didn't bother.
A very common business tax tactic is, if you are making a lot of profit, you buy an asset which is (initially) losing a lot of money, and link the two together. Basically the excess profit you're making gets shifted over (tax free) to be spent fixing up the money-losing asset. You don't end up having to use your personal money (from which taxes have already been taken out) to fix up the money-losing asset.
The net result is you personally don't make as much money (lower overall profit). But you gain ownership of another asset which, once its fixed up, can be quite a bit more valuable than what you paid (because it was broken initially), and thus is worth more than the profit you gave up. This is especially true in real estate, where the land and property value tends to appreciate, but the debts and losses of the business sitting on the land may make it too toxic for a buyer without the financial resources to survive the initial fixing-up period.
And therein lies the problem. Programming tools are not interchangeable. Once a programming project starts using one set of tools, everyone working on it then and in the future has to use that same set of tools. A lot of the craftsmen writing software aren't very good. Many of them are self-taught with very little formal training in programming or algorithms. A lot of the "popular" tools are the ones chosen by these poor craftsmen. It's like making science decisions by democracy, when 80% of the population doesn't know squat about science.
I once wasted half a day tracking down a bug in PHP. It turned out I'd made a typo in a variable name and hit zero (0) while pressing shift too lightly, instead of typing the capital letter O. Very easy to miss. PHP doesn't require you to declare variables. It automatically turned the typo into a new variable, which caused a formula to modify this new variable instead of the original one, causing the bug. The better programming languages force you to declare variables to avoid insidious bugs like this . But PHP grew organically, and some lazy/ignorant person decided it was too much work to declare variables, unaware of the consequences of removing that safety check.
PHP is a terrible, terrible language. Even the original author admits there is no rhyme or reason to it. It is basically a hodgepodge of patches and kludges tied together by string and glue. But because it arrived first on the scene, it reached critical mass first. A huge number of programmers in the past made contributions to expanding and improving it, so new programmers feel compelled to use it. It has become The scripting language for web programming.
You have to have PHP in your toolbox. It doesn't matter if you're the greatest craftsman/programmer to ever graduate from Stanford or MIT. If you're hired to help fix someone's website and it's written in PHP, you gotta write your fix in PHP. You might be tempted to code the fix in a better language and have the PHP script call it, but that destroys the maintainability of the code for future programmers. So you're stuck with PHP.
In programming, the good craftsman has his tools chosen by the person who began the project. Which usually was 10 years ago when the company owner decided he needed a website, and his son in jr. high offered to make it for him.
Average profit margin for all companies is about 7%. The average profit margin in the HDD industry pre-floods was about 1.5%. A lot of the HDD vendors were actually losing money.
There were simply too many HDD manufacturers - every time one cut a deal with a major buyer (like Dell) by offering a lower price, the others felt compelled to do the same just to stay in business. I know people are upset that HDD prices stopped dropping and manufacturers started merging, but it needed to happen. HDD manufacturers weren't making enough money to spend a healthy amount in R&D with those profit margins. In the past when HDDs were pretty much the only storage game in town, the industry would've consolidated into more players. But 2011 was right when SSDs started becoming popular (enterprise SSDs were more widespread, so everyone knew their potential). And with another major and growing competitor in the storage market, there wasn't enough room in HDDs to support more than 2-3 companies.
This is one of the things I've never understood about restaurants in the U.S. and Europe. In Korea (and I suspect a lot of other Asian countries), each table in the restaurant has a button. When you want a waiter, you push the button. It adds your table number to a list of tables requesting service, and the waiter(s) simply goes to each one in the order their button was pressed. No wasted trips by the waiter just to ask if you need anything when you don't, no wasted time waiting for a waiter to randomly wander by just so you can ask for a glass of water.
They feel compelled to share their experience online. This is starting to sound like people who like to point out they don't own a TV. (And yes I know that's a satire site. It's funny because it hints at the true motivation of people who claim they like to buck the trend.)
Lots of people go offline for an extended period of time. Hikers, campers, sailors, hunters, etc. They just don't make a big deal about it (online) as the folks who do it so they can brag about it online. That's the key difference, not whether or not you choose to go offline for a while. Are you doing it to participate in an activity you can enjoy without having to be online? Or are you doing it so you can brag about it online (e.g. post selfies you took while touring Yellowstone)? That's the point musicians are trying to make at concerts when they tell people to put away their phones. It's not that phones or the Internet is evil and you need to take time away from them. It's that you have this wonderful event going on right in front of you in real life, and you're missing it because you're too busy staring at your phone. You're trying to record the experience so you can "re-live" it later, but in doing so you're missing out on the actual experience, which defeats the whole purpose.
That's the important thing - that you prioritize your enjoyment of that real-world experience while it's happening over your ability to re-live it later or share the experience online. Not how many hours or days you can go while offline.
The right of self-determination. The freedom for you to live your life as you wish, making choices for yourself as you see fit, not as someone else thinks you should live.
So it boils down to which of these noble rights you think is greater. The right of self-determination, or the right for society to attempt to rid itself of certain diseases. Unfortunately, when resolving conflicts between two noble rights, most people stack the deck. They pick a scenario which supports their predetermined conclusion. For those supporting vaccination (note: I support vaccination), this usually means proffering the scenario of someone refusing to vaccinate their children, resulting in their children getting sick and the disease spreading to others because of lack of herd immunity.
Just to play devil's advocate, someone arguing the opposite extreme would bring up the case of a corrupt government staying in control by locking up and drugging "troublemakers" (aka dissidents). The reality usually lies somewhere between these two extremes.
As I said, I believe in and support vaccination. However, I cannot in good conscience support forcing people who don't believe in it to be vaccinated. At least not with our current system of government. If you do not grant that right of self-determination to others, on what basis can you argue that others should grant it to you? If there were less corruption in government, if I were more confident about the safeguards build into it, then I would probably go the other way. But based on what I've seen, no. History is replete with those in power doing harmful things to others against their wishes with the best of intentions. Our current government simply should not have the power to require everyone be injected with medicines of its choosing. If that makes me fall within your definition of an anti-vaxxer, then so be it.
The way I see it, the anti-vaxxer problem needs to be solved by educating people so they will make the correct decision on their own. Not by subjugating refusers and forcing them to do something against their will. Yes I know that's the hard way. But the easiest way would be to simply put a bullet in their heads. Denying them the right of self-determination is halfway to denying them their life. (It's interesting to note that people who've grown up in or have experienced repressive governments tend to think the right of individual self-determination is paramount. While those who have lived all their lives under a benign government tend to be the ones who think society's rights should overrule the individual's. I'll leave it to you to figure out which of these groups is deciding based on experience and evidence, and which is deciding based on naive idealism.)
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We're fortunate the storm is grazing land along its left side (relative to the direction it's moving). The right side has the higher wind speeds and bigger storm surge.
Credit cards were first implemented in the U.S., so the U.S. has a much larger installed base of the older magstripe credit card readers than any other country. That means a lot more inertia against change.
Countries which implemented credit cards after the U.S. had the benefit of the lessons learned in the U.S. - like the security problems - which eventually led to chipped cards. It's the same reason why Africa has the highest ratio of cellular to landline phones. They basically got to skip the landline phone stage entirely because everyone else went through it.
Then maybe game companies will stop trying to control how everyone plays by forcing them to play on company servers only. And they'll put LAN gameplay capability back into games (which ironically was the only way multiplayer Doom could be played), where you can physically confirm who you're playing with and that they are not cheating.
Why does it have to be either/or? Why can't they both be guilty of revealing state secrets? Just because Johnny threw rocks off a freeway overpass, does that mean it's ok for you to throw rocks off an overpass, even if it's for the explicit purpose of demonstrating to the public how easy it is to throw rocks off of overpasses? I remember a couple decades ago a local reporter ran a story where he registered at multiple precincts and voted in each one (tearing up his unmarked ballot on camera before dropping it in each box so they wouldn't be counted), just to demonstrate how easy it was. He still got a few months in jail for voting fraud.
Personally I think Snowden did the morally right thing. But legally, oversight of secret programs is supposed to be done by elected legislators appointed to committees where they're briefed on these secret activities. Snowden's argument was that these committees were ineffective at controlling unconstitutional behavior, and the public needed to be informed that this sort of stuff was going on. But I've seen precious little media and public attention devoted to addressing that problem. Instead most of the focus has been on the symptoms - the actual programs themselves, as well as on Snowden.
The discussion he wanted us to have was: how do we keep such secret programs "honest", if that's even possible? If we're going to operate these secret programs, what sort of checks and balances are needed since obviously the existing ones are insufficient? I haven't seen that discussion. Instead all I've seen is three years of righteous indignation by both sides - either over how terrible these programs were, or how terrible Snowden was for revealing them.
The subsidies the phone companies receive are for maintaining copper wires on telephone poles and leading up to houses. Verizon is only responsible for the copper wire leading up to the side of your house. You own the copper in your house, and are responsible for maintaining it. If you are having problems with the in-house copper wiring, then you are responsible for fixing it.
You can hire Verizon to fix it for you, or you can call any electrician or telecom/networking technician to fix it. Most contractors are able to fix it too. If you hire Verizon to do it, you should not be surprised that they try to foist their proprietary wireless service onto you, unless you specified in the repair contract that they are only supposed to repair the existing copper lines, not simply "restore" phone service.
The idea that the phone company is responsible for the phone lines in your house is a holdover from the Bell Telephone monopoly days pre-1982. It's a misconception the phone companies are all to happy to propagate since it keeps people from considering competing repair companies. That's why when you order land line phone service, they will often fix simple problems (like repairing outlets) for free. They're not doing it out of generosity, they're doing it in the hopes you'll only think of calling them if you run into major in-house line problems in the future.
I've got a 2-year old Nexus 5 with the plastic still on the lens cover (I forgot about it, then never bothered removing it since the pictures seemed fine). The plastic is not scratched. So the scratch resistance is not meant to be protect against everyday damage - normal Gorilla Glass is probably good enough for that (considering I don't have any protection for the front screen and it's not scratched either). It's meant to protect against the outliers - the rare cases when a grit of sand (likely quartz) happens to rub between the glass and a hard object just so.
For another example of the rare events mattering more than everyday use, the Note 7 worked just fine for 99.99% of owners. Samsung recalled all of them because of only about 100 battery failures. That rare failure was deemed too be unacceptable, warranting a recall of over a million phones.
Basically, you/Apple are paying extra for a better insurance policy on the camera glass to protect against rare catastrophic events. The video simulates those rare events by deliberately rubbing mohs' hardness picks across the surface. The results say the insurance policy doesn't protect you as well as you'd expect based on the advertised material. From the analysis in the video, it seems like the cover is indeed aluminum oxide, but it's too thin. The flexing it experiences when something sharp but slightly softer than it is rubbed across causes the surface to chip and flake.
Does this really matter? Isn't it good enough that using body cameras results in a 93% drop in complaints? The only people who care why are those sensitive about having their pre-conceived notions invalidated (that police officers are bad, or that certain citizens like to file false complaints).
Why should we conduct an experiment which risks more police abuse or false complaints resulting in possible unjust deaths or unjust suspensions, just so people with a political axe to grind can say "I told you so"?
The point of chip-and-pin is to enhance security by requiring something you have (card with a chip) and something you know (PIN) to process a transaction.
The CVV number is a poor attempt to secure the "something you have" part of the equation. Early implimentations were just printed on the opposite side of the card, so someone taking a photo of or copying the card couldn't make a fraudulent charge (because they only had one side of the card). The changing CVV code in TFA is a bit better in that even if you get a photo of the code on the back of the card, it is only valid for an hour. A chip is the ultimate solution - you cannot process a transaction unless you have the physical chip. The only reason to use the changing code in TFA is for online/telephone transactions which can't accept a chip, so has to be done the old way by relaying numbers.
So this has nothing to do with the PIN - the "something you know" half of the security equation. Putting the PIN on the card, even in the form of a number which changes every hour, would defeat the whole purpose of using a PIN for security since it would no longer be something you know that a thief does not.
And the U.S. doesn't even use chip-and-pin. It uses chip-and-sign. A weaker form of security the card companies foisted on the country so they could keep merchants paying for fraud. With chip-and-pin, either the customer gave away the card and PIN and so is liable for the purchase, or the card company screwed up authentication and is liable for the purchase. The merchant is absolved of responsibility for fraud in all cases. But the current credit card company empire is built upon forcing the merchants to pay for fraud, so they watered it down to chip-and-sign. The merchant has to verify the customer's signature matches that on the card. If there's a fraudulent purchase and the signatures don't match, the merchant has to pay for the fraud.
In all fairness, for self-driving cars to live up to the claims of their proponents, they just have to do this less frequently than people do it.
Exactly. Moving the audio port from a headphone jack to USB or Lightning connector doesn't improve the sound. All it does is move the DAC (digital to analog converter) from the phone to an external dongle (headphone jack adapter), or to your headphones (wireless). The digital signal still needs to be converted to analog at some point before you can hear it.
Actually, based on my experience as an amateur piano tuner, it sounds like whatever they were using as a resonator to generate the sound initially started at one frequency, then changed frequencies slightly as the sound decayed. I frequently run across piano strings which do the same thing on the crappier/older pianos. They're a PITA because they sound bad no matter how you tune them. If you tune the initial (attack) frequency right, the decay frequency is wrong. If you tune the decay frequency right, the attack frequency is wrong.
Contracts are not iron-clad agreements. If they contain a mistake, one or both parties can ask a court to relieve them of having to honor the contract. Price mistakes on website are a common example. If Amazon lists a $1000 laptop for $100 on its website and you place an order, even though the order constitutes a contract between Amazon and you, Amazon is not obligated to honor the price because obviously it was a mistake. They might choose to honor the price in the interest of good customer relations if their losses (number of people who saw the error and placed an order) are not too great. But they are under no legal obligation to do so.
I'm not familiar with Japanese contract law, and there's not enough detail in TFA to determine exactly what's going on anyway. But generally, business contracts which would cause one party to lose massive amounts of money if anyone tried to honor the terms (i.e. "nobody in their right mind would sign such a deal") can usually be legally tossed out as a mistake. Even if the mistake was on Amazon's part in not doing their due diligence and fully considering and understanding the terms that they were agreeing to.
A snowplow moves the snow off the road. De-icing with salt lowers the freezing point, putting the (now saline) water into a permanent liquid state despite freezing temperatures.
Melting the snow with a heater turns it into fresh water, which will flow until it reaches a non-heated section of the road, then re-freeze into ice. So this is going to create patches of black ice on any sections of road where the heating element has broken, or turn the unpaved shoulders of the road into ice for anyone unfortunate enough to accidentally run off the paved section.
This is a disaster waiting to happen.
If it's not true, there wold be no statistical difference between the average rating of incentivized and regular reviews. The inceitives would only be increasing the number of reviews, not affecting the ratings themselves..
Summary says these incentivized reviews were "overwhelmingly biased in favor of the product" - that would indicate a significant deviation between the two averages. So yeah the incentivized reviews are for all intents and purposes fake.
Bricking the device negatively impacts the end-user, who frequently has zero control over security flaws in the firmware. Instead, the malware should figure out who the manufacturer is of the device it's infected, then start DDoSing that manufacturer's website. Minimal impact to the end-user, but the manufacturer's problem scales with the number of insecure devices they sell and leave unfixed.
That is beside the point. Films from that era weren't like published books or modern DVDs, which are sold to the public and so there are lots of copies floating around out there that you can duplicate. Copyright means the copyright owner controls distribution. And their distribution policy at the time was to make copies of the newsreels, distribute them to theaters where they were to be viewed for a few weeks or months, then the copies had to be destroyed or returned to them. Consequently, the only existing copies are usually in the copyright holders' film vaults. And if they're not interested in preserving it...
The situation is different for radio broadcasts of that era. Audio recording equipment was much more available to the public. So there are plenty of illegal recordings (copyright violations) which have allowed us to recover some of that history. The WWII news broadcasts are particularly good. As you listen to them, it dawns on you that our grandparents and great-grandparents didn't know if they were going to win the war. In retrospect that is obvious, but that uncertainty is not conveyed when you just read about the war in history books.
It's still subject to the whims of copyright holders. AuthenTec used to make the fingerprint scanner on most laptops. Some time after Apple bought AuthenTec, they shut down its support website without warning. I discovered this after I had to reinstall Win 7 on my laptop (laptop came with Vista drivers which for some reason didn't work in Win 7). I tried to download them from AuthenTec's site, only to find a message saying they were withdrawing support for their fingerprint products and to contact my laptop vendor (who only had Vista drivers).
I managed to scrounge up a copy from archive.org's mirror which got it working; not the latest version, but at least it made it functional. I was surprised they'd mirrored a downloadable file, but apparently they sometimes do that if the HTML is configured a certain way. A few weeks later it occurred to me I'd be really screwed if I wasn't able to find it on archive.org again. So I tried to download it again, only to find the file was now gone.
Unless the thing that should be preserved is under copyright, and the copyright owner decides rather than paying for extra space to store it, they'll just destroy it. A lot of the recovered lost Dr. Who episodes are from "illegal" copies made by fans, or from broadcast studios in other countries who were supposed to destroy or return the tapes to the BBC (the copyright holder) after airing, but either forgot to or didn't bother.
A very common business tax tactic is, if you are making a lot of profit, you buy an asset which is (initially) losing a lot of money, and link the two together. Basically the excess profit you're making gets shifted over (tax free) to be spent fixing up the money-losing asset. You don't end up having to use your personal money (from which taxes have already been taken out) to fix up the money-losing asset.
The net result is you personally don't make as much money (lower overall profit). But you gain ownership of another asset which, once its fixed up, can be quite a bit more valuable than what you paid (because it was broken initially), and thus is worth more than the profit you gave up. This is especially true in real estate, where the land and property value tends to appreciate, but the debts and losses of the business sitting on the land may make it too toxic for a buyer without the financial resources to survive the initial fixing-up period.
And therein lies the problem. Programming tools are not interchangeable. Once a programming project starts using one set of tools, everyone working on it then and in the future has to use that same set of tools. A lot of the craftsmen writing software aren't very good. Many of them are self-taught with very little formal training in programming or algorithms. A lot of the "popular" tools are the ones chosen by these poor craftsmen. It's like making science decisions by democracy, when 80% of the population doesn't know squat about science.
I once wasted half a day tracking down a bug in PHP. It turned out I'd made a typo in a variable name and hit zero (0) while pressing shift too lightly, instead of typing the capital letter O. Very easy to miss. PHP doesn't require you to declare variables. It automatically turned the typo into a new variable, which caused a formula to modify this new variable instead of the original one, causing the bug. The better programming languages force you to declare variables to avoid insidious bugs like this . But PHP grew organically, and some lazy/ignorant person decided it was too much work to declare variables, unaware of the consequences of removing that safety check.
PHP is a terrible, terrible language. Even the original author admits there is no rhyme or reason to it. It is basically a hodgepodge of patches and kludges tied together by string and glue. But because it arrived first on the scene, it reached critical mass first. A huge number of programmers in the past made contributions to expanding and improving it, so new programmers feel compelled to use it. It has become The scripting language for web programming.
You have to have PHP in your toolbox. It doesn't matter if you're the greatest craftsman/programmer to ever graduate from Stanford or MIT. If you're hired to help fix someone's website and it's written in PHP, you gotta write your fix in PHP. You might be tempted to code the fix in a better language and have the PHP script call it, but that destroys the maintainability of the code for future programmers. So you're stuck with PHP.
In programming, the good craftsman has his tools chosen by the person who began the project. Which usually was 10 years ago when the company owner decided he needed a website, and his son in jr. high offered to make it for him.
Average profit margin for all companies is about 7%. The average profit margin in the HDD industry pre-floods was about 1.5%. A lot of the HDD vendors were actually losing money.
There were simply too many HDD manufacturers - every time one cut a deal with a major buyer (like Dell) by offering a lower price, the others felt compelled to do the same just to stay in business. I know people are upset that HDD prices stopped dropping and manufacturers started merging, but it needed to happen. HDD manufacturers weren't making enough money to spend a healthy amount in R&D with those profit margins. In the past when HDDs were pretty much the only storage game in town, the industry would've consolidated into more players. But 2011 was right when SSDs started becoming popular (enterprise SSDs were more widespread, so everyone knew their potential). And with another major and growing competitor in the storage market, there wasn't enough room in HDDs to support more than 2-3 companies.
This is one of the things I've never understood about restaurants in the U.S. and Europe. In Korea (and I suspect a lot of other Asian countries), each table in the restaurant has a button. When you want a waiter, you push the button. It adds your table number to a list of tables requesting service, and the waiter(s) simply goes to each one in the order their button was pressed. No wasted trips by the waiter just to ask if you need anything when you don't, no wasted time waiting for a waiter to randomly wander by just so you can ask for a glass of water.
They feel compelled to share their experience online. This is starting to sound like people who like to point out they don't own a TV. (And yes I know that's a satire site. It's funny because it hints at the true motivation of people who claim they like to buck the trend.)
Lots of people go offline for an extended period of time. Hikers, campers, sailors, hunters, etc. They just don't make a big deal about it (online) as the folks who do it so they can brag about it online. That's the key difference, not whether or not you choose to go offline for a while. Are you doing it to participate in an activity you can enjoy without having to be online? Or are you doing it so you can brag about it online (e.g. post selfies you took while touring Yellowstone)? That's the point musicians are trying to make at concerts when they tell people to put away their phones. It's not that phones or the Internet is evil and you need to take time away from them. It's that you have this wonderful event going on right in front of you in real life, and you're missing it because you're too busy staring at your phone. You're trying to record the experience so you can "re-live" it later, but in doing so you're missing out on the actual experience, which defeats the whole purpose.
That's the important thing - that you prioritize your enjoyment of that real-world experience while it's happening over your ability to re-live it later or share the experience online. Not how many hours or days you can go while offline.
The right of self-determination. The freedom for you to live your life as you wish, making choices for yourself as you see fit, not as someone else thinks you should live.
So it boils down to which of these noble rights you think is greater. The right of self-determination, or the right for society to attempt to rid itself of certain diseases. Unfortunately, when resolving conflicts between two noble rights, most people stack the deck. They pick a scenario which supports their predetermined conclusion. For those supporting vaccination (note: I support vaccination), this usually means proffering the scenario of someone refusing to vaccinate their children, resulting in their children getting sick and the disease spreading to others because of lack of herd immunity.
Just to play devil's advocate, someone arguing the opposite extreme would bring up the case of a corrupt government staying in control by locking up and drugging "troublemakers" (aka dissidents). The reality usually lies somewhere between these two extremes.
As I said, I believe in and support vaccination. However, I cannot in good conscience support forcing people who don't believe in it to be vaccinated. At least not with our current system of government. If you do not grant that right of self-determination to others, on what basis can you argue that others should grant it to you? If there were less corruption in government, if I were more confident about the safeguards build into it, then I would probably go the other way. But based on what I've seen, no. History is replete with those in power doing harmful things to others against their wishes with the best of intentions. Our current government simply should not have the power to require everyone be injected with medicines of its choosing. If that makes me fall within your definition of an anti-vaxxer, then so be it.
The way I see it, the anti-vaxxer problem needs to be solved by educating people so they will make the correct decision on their own. Not by subjugating refusers and forcing them to do something against their will. Yes I know that's the hard way. But the easiest way would be to simply put a bullet in their heads. Denying them the right of self-determination is halfway to denying them their life. (It's interesting to note that people who've grown up in or have experienced repressive governments tend to think the right of individual self-determination is paramount. While those who have lived all their lives under a benign government tend to be the ones who think society's rights should overrule the individual's. I'll leave it to you to figure out which of these groups is deciding based on experience and evidence, and which is deciding based on naive idealism.)