I guess the same incredibly naive people who come up with it in the first place, and also, thought that there was absolutely nothing wrong or fishy when valuation increases by thousands of percent *with no actual value being created*. Has absolutely everyone forgotten the years 1999-2002? That's rhetorical, of course.
Also the same people who talk about "investing" in various altcoins as well as BTC. At what point does it occur to them that cryptocurrency is the digital equivalent of the guy down the street printing his own currency, keeping half of it for himself, and then trying to persuade everyone else to use it as money? Does it sink in after they buy into the 10th altcoin? The 20th? The 30th?
At what point does one realize that he's holding the digital equivalent of Monopoly money?
And the best way to learn (for me) was to write down notes, and when an exam was coming up, I'd write anything important down.
My 25 years of teaching experience has repeatedly demonstrated to me that handing out Powerpoint slides, or distributing the instructor's lecture notes in PDF form, is a recipe for underperformance with students.
Requiring students to take their own handwritten notes (forcing them to organize and follow the material in their own minds) significantly improves their comprehension of the material. If someone else's notes are right in front of them, students tend to "zone out". That is especially true in today's classroom environment where cellphones and laptop computers compete for their attention.
For most students, electronic devices of any type are a distraction in the classroom. Paper and pen/pencil (or a really good tablet with pen entry) will beat them every time.
$100 doesn't seem a lot of compensation in exchange for performing a federal crime.
Not if you're passing on 20 names a week. An extra $100K per year (tax free) would be very tempting to some.
On top of that, the criminal justice system doesn't work in an additive way for white collar crime. If caught, your jail time for selling the details of 1000 people won't be significantly greater that selling the details of 10 people, particularly if you plea bargain. Sure, the court will give you a bigger restitution amount to pay, but it's not as if most perpetrators would ever care about that. They'll be paying only a token restitution amount each month regardless.
Sources who work for some of America's major cellphone carriers tell us how criminals are trying to recruit them to get help hacking victims.
It's not just cellphone carrier companies - it's also the employees of banks, credit bureaus, doctors' offices, hospitals, HR departments, state and federal government tax departments, and just about any other organization that would have your personal information.
My Mom was targeted by an identity theft ring last year. The only point of contact between her and the bank / credit card agencies was her home phone number. The gang sent someone with a fake driver's license to a Verizon store a hundred miles away, and that person transferred my Mom's phone number to a cell phone. Once they had control of the phone number, half a dozen crooks with fake ID hit various stores to purchase big-ticket items. Any calls for verification went straight to the cell phone. The gang even got into her personal Chase bank account. The only thing that stopped them was the credit freeze that my wife and I had persuaded her to activate the year before, otherwise she'd still be cleaning up the mess with her finances.
But what amazed us was how much they knew about her. They had all the information on her credit card and bank accounts. They were able to create a fake driver's license. So where did it all come from? Our guess is that someone at a credit bureau was earning extra money on the side by passing on dossiers of elderly people with excellent credit ratings.
It doesn't matter what security measures you put in place. The weakest link will always be the person who can be bought by a crook.
There are only so many people they can sell products too, there's a ceiling on that hardware growth.
The ceiling would go a bit higher if Apple bothered to significantly update any of its hardware (beyond the iPhone) on a regular basis.
I'm in dire need of a new Mac Pro and a new MacBook Pro. I've got several thousand dollars that I'd be more than happy to hand over to Apple, provided they could bother to market replacements that I cared to buy. There may be some hope for the Mac Pro, depending on what appears in 2019. I don't know if I'll ever buy another MacBook Pro unless someone at Apple begins making rational design decisions instead of focusing on appearance, thinness, and weight alone.
Apple is very willingly turning its product line into an iPhone / Apple services monoculture. If current trends continue, sooner or later Apple will stumble in one of those two areas, and it'll be a bloodbath in the stock market. I'm just waiting for the right time to sell my Apple stock. Right now the monoculture is still on an upward trajectory (helped in large part by the even greater incompetence of the competition), but it's not going to last.
So what you're saying is every time you talk, things like this might spill out of your mouth?
No, that's you projecting that because I pointed out that James Gunn destroyed his life and career by using Twitter, that somehow I am okay with pedophilia and rape. That says a great deal more about you than it does about me, or James Gunn.
What Gunn tweeted years ago was tasteless, provocative shock humor (to him, at least). But because he used Twitter to do it, and he put it out for the world to see, and because Twitter later evolved into a place where "thought crime" must be punished, no matter what, now his career as a filmmaker is over.
Gunn has never been charged with any crimes related to his sick tweets, he has repeatedly apologized for them, and he is by all reports a very decent person who made the mistake of saying some vile things many years ago in an ill-considered attempt at very sick humor. It doesn't matter. His career is over, and apparently you are just fine with that.
If you are happy in a world where the Internet mob can destroy a person just for saying something offensive, even when it happened years ago and the person is sincerely apologetic, then you had better fervently hope that one day someone with an axe to grind doesn't make it his or her mission to go through your own online history, or the history of your children, and look for ways to "punish" you or them as well.
Using Twitter is like playing Russian Roulette. Every time you tweet, you pull the trigger. Most of the time, nothing happens, but sooner or later you'll get unlucky and the Internet mob will destroy you for what you tweeted (latest case in point: James Gunn).
Maybe, just maybe, people are finally beginning to realize just how toxic Twitter really is. It only took a few thousand ruined lives and careers to get the point across.
... UberPool and Lyft Line are exacerbating the issue by appealing directly to customers who would otherwise have taken transit, walked, biked or not used a ride-hail service at all...
No, I would not have "taken transit", when the nearest bus line is half a mile from my house, and only runs once every 30 minutes.
No, I would not have walked two miles in bad weather, especially carrying heavy or fragile items.
No, I would not have ridden a bike in an area without dedicated bike lanes, or dealt with the hassle of locking it up and hoping it wouldn't be stolen.
Yes, I absolutely would use a ride-hail service when the more expensive alternative is to drive and park my own car.
What is it with the proponents of mass transit who can't stand the idea of people making their own decisions about transportation? So if you can't make mass transit affordable and desirable, the only alternative is to outlaw the competition?
"This occurred after the [family] connected the duplicate camera to their network and ignored the warning prompt that notified: 'Camera is already paired to an account' and left the camera running," she added.
And there's a big part of the problem: the phrase 'Camera is already paired to an account' is just so much word salad to the average user. They will look at it for a moment, briefly wonder what those words might mean, then click through and forget about them.
If you want people to take such warnings seriously, you need to make it much more explicit, as in: "WARNING: The camera is already paired to another user's account. If you continue to use this camera, that user will be able to view the images from it without your knowledge. Please contact Swann technical support at xxx-xxx-xxxx immediately."
So much for Apple's so called "best design" in the business.
I'd like to believe that someone at Apple learns from this debacle, and makes some significant design changes to the next generation of professional laptops. But I'm not hopeful. The latest generation of MacBook Pros has gone so far off the track that I continue to use my mid-2012 model despite the fact that I am very much in need of an upgrade just due to normal wear-and-tear.
I'd love to see the return of a professional Apple laptop with user-upgradable SSD and DRAM, a decent keyboard, a MagSafe power connector, and more ports than just USB-C. But the people in charge at Apple simply don't think that way any more. To them, appearance trumps every rational design decision.
If Google as a corporation didn't suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, they might be able to focus long enough to build a decent laptop with a UNIX-style OS, and grab marketshare (and mindshare) away from Apple with working professionals. But as it is, Apple (as bad as they have become) have no real competition. Until they do, or until there's a change of upper management at Apple, I have little hope that the situation will improve.
There's plenty of people out there who'd say they'd take the risk for a lower price, but would then turn around and sue you if it turned out bad.
In fact, you could be certain that some people would make a living out of doing this: accepting reduced-price or donated goods from Amazon, and then suing repeatedly.
I ordered an external battery pack for a UPS from Amazon several months back. When it arrived and I unpacked it, the case was visibly bulging on the top. Not wanting to risk plugging it in, I contacted Amazon for a return. Instead, they refunded my money on the spot and told me to take it to the nearest recycling center.
I could understand Amazon's reasoning. Why risk shipping a possibly defective battery that might pose a fire hazard? And for what I paid for it, it was hardly worth trying to repair or refurbish.
From Amazon's point of view, if it's cheaper to dispose of the goods rather than repair or refurbish them, then that's the smart move. They can't even donate them, because what happens if a lawyer sues because someone was injured by a donated item that Amazon knew was defective? The much safer route, economically and legally, is simply to destroy the returned items. It's part of the cost of doing business at their scale.
My own opinion is that "Solo" is flopping because people have finally realized the series is never going to get any better.
Some background: I saw the original "Star Wars" in college. It was a jaw-dropping movie, (unless you're old enough to remember what science fiction / fantasy movies were like before the release of SW, you really can't appreciate how amazing an experience it was to see it in the theater), and "The Empire Strikes Back" was even better. But "Return of the Jedi" was a let down, in large part because Lucas had full creative control and couldn't resist inserting "cutesy" characters like Ewoks into the story, and adding a ridiculously sappy ending.
Still, two out of three wasn't bad. And then came episodes 1 through 3, which conclusively proved that Lucas knew how to build a universe, but had no clue how to write a good story. So now it's two out of six, but there was still hope after Lucas sold the franchise to Disney. Maybe (I thought), having some new people in charge might revitalize the SW universe.
"The Force Awakens" was a reasonable reboot. J.J. Abrams isn't a great director, but he's a competent one, and he avoided a lot of pitfalls by recycling the plot of the original movie. "Rogue One" was a competent one-shot, but nothing special. Now's it four out of eight good films if you're generous.
Then came "The Last Jedi", and the painful realization that really, really bad would be the new normal for Disney, and that future "Star Wars" movies would be micro-managed by Disney execs and designed to sell overpriced merchandise. And that, for me, was the end of it. When I walked out the "The Last Jedi", I knew I wouldn't be paying to see another Star Wars movie in the theater again. Most "Star Wars" movies have ranged from mediocre to bad, and it is never going to change. Disney will never let go. It'll just be bad formula movies from now on.
I am indifferent to "Solo", which by all accounts is another painfully mediocre film. I might watch it when it hits cable, but I have about as much desire to see another "Star Wars" movie in the theater as I do to see another "Mission Impossible" or "Transformers" movie, i.e. none at all. And given how "Solo" is doing, I suspect I have a lot of company.
If they don't own it, GitHub can make changes that Microsoft doesn't like. That's the long and short of it.
Microsoft can easily afford this, and they see its continued existence and use as important. They're protecting an asset by assuming control of it.
And within 6 months, some middle-level Microsoft manager looking for a promotion will decide to "enhance" GitHub as a means of increasing visibility within the corporate structure, but to the complete detriment of everyone using it, including Microsoft's own internal dev teams.
You only have to look at Microsoft's past behavior in order to accurately predict the future with the GitHub acquisition.
Looking at the pictures of Tajmar's experiment, no wonder they are seeing nothing but Lorentz. First of all their twisted pairs do not appear to be twisted enough. There should be at least two twists per inch. In the image below it appears that there is maybe one twist per two inches or so. And then look at the location of the main amplifier and the length of the main leads!:o
At only 2W of RF power, no wonder they are only seeing Lorentz. It's almost like they designed their experiment to be susceptible to this form of error.
A sure sign of pseudoscience is the post hoc explanation that always follows a null test result by a third party. You run a test, get no results, and then someone says, "Oh, you forgot to do A and B." So you do another test following A and B, get another null result, and then you hear, "Oh, you forgot to do C and D." And it goes on and on and on...
Speaking for myself, I'd rather have a page for the series as a whole, and occasional articles for particularly note-worthy episodes-- that way the pages themselves would be more interesting to read than they would be if you let anal-retentive competists add (probably automatically generated) pages for each individual episode.
Having a series overview page and an individual page for each episode is not a mutually exclusive arrangement. Look at the Wikipedia entries for any of the Star Trek series as an example. There's an overview page, a subpage that lists the episodes from each season, and then a link to a page for each episode.
It works perfectly well, and because the Wikipedia editors overseeing the Star Trek pages are clearly fans, then they're just fine with it. The fact that Wikipedia editors of other TV shows would oppose such a format simply highlights the complete lack of consistency in how the rules are made and enforced.
... and whether individual television episodes deserve encyclopedia entries.
And why shouldn't they? The whole point of Wikipedia is that the normal rules of hardcopy encyclopedias should not apply. There are no limits to the numbers of pages that can be added. If there is someone out there who is passionate enough to create a wiki page for every single episode of a 30-year-old sitcom, then why not? Wikipedia had more value back in the days before it began pretending to be a "real" encyclopedia. You could lose yourself for hours following one link after another through some obscure aspects of pop culture.
Then suddenly Wikipedia changed, with editors who would arbitrarily decide what was "notable" and what was not, with no consistency whatsoever from one subject to another. Thousands upon thousands of wiki pages were deleted for no other reason than "an encyclopedia shouldn't have an entry on an obscure topic like this". But why not? How does having a separate wiki entry for every manga character ever created damage the wiki entries for heads of state, or historical events?
The people running Wikipedia want everyone to believe that that Wikipedia is a "serious" online reference. Of course, that will never be true as long as anyone with an agenda and an Internet connection can edit any page. Instead, the editors' fruitless efforts to enforce their collective delusion has significantly degraded the overall value of the site.
You could try letting recipients provide instructions in their own voice, but parsing plainly-spoken numbers/letters from arbitrary voices is not particularly difficult for bots to do, so it wouldn't be much of a setback either.
I think that a voice recognition program parsing a challenge in my own voice along the lines of "press the number below 5 on your keypad to continue" or "press the number you get when you add 2 and 1 to continue" wouldn't have much success. Give app writers access to a call screener API, and I would bet that you'd see some even more sophisticated solutions that wouldn't be so readily parsed by the scammers.
"Perfect" is the enemy of "good enough". You're right, CAPTCHAs aren't perfect, but they are generally "good enough", at least to the point where they are still used very successfully. The point isn't to eliminate every possible scam call, but to make it much more difficult for the scammers to do business.
The way to address this is either through the carriers (they should know where these calls are coming from and have the ability to block them, regardless of whatever spoofed data the caller may be putting in the caller ID header)
Since the carriers haven't done this yet, despite the current robocall epidemic, then you can be confident it will never happen.
or else through market forces
Agreed. And part of those "market forces" would be for Apple and Google to give end users another tool to use against robocallers. If it doesn't work, we'll all find out soon enough. But I think it certainly would work... not perfectly, but "good enough".
Yes, the scams are surging. Some scammers are even calling in the middle of the night. But if you're waiting for the telcos (or the government) to fix this, you'll be waiting for a very, very long time. Caller ID is completely broken, and it will clearly never be fixed.
But robocalling can be tackled on the user end. Robocalling requires a delay of several seconds between you answering the phone and the call being routed to a live human at a call center. I've got an Obi110 on my home telephone, configured with a "Press 1 to continue" screening message. By the time the robocaller switches the call over, the scammer hears nothing but silence. And unless the "1" is pressed, the Obi110 will not ring my home phone. In three years, not one robocaller has made it past the Obi110.
Obviously you can't put an Obi110 on a cell phone. However, Apple and Google could build a call screening function into iOS and Android. Give users the ability to activate a "challenge before ringing" function, give them the ability to customize the challenge and the response (with whitelisting of numbers in the phone directory), and you'd seriously cripple the robocalling industry. With every phone having different challenges / responses, the only solution for the scammers will be for a human being to listen to every call, at least until someone comes up with an AI smart enough to answer any challenge.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better to fight back than do nothing.
It was originally meant to be a feature, else why would the telcos allow spoofing? Problem was, it has long outlived its usefulness, and the feature has become a bug.
One of the original arguments for Caller ID spoofing (besides business case uses) was to allow abused women staying at women's shelters to "hide" their location, so that husbands and boyfriends couldn't track them down from the Caller ID number. You could block your own Caller ID number when calling out, but many people paid for "Caller ID Block", because it was automatically assumed that someone blocking their phone number was up to no good. So the only way to guarantee that a phone on the other end would ring, yet still hide the caller, was a spoofed number.
Of course, that was decades ago. No one back then foresaw the advent of ultra-cheap overseas long distance that could enable call centers outside the country to run multi-billion dollar scams, or the creation of cell phones that would make landlines largely obsolete. So the feature has become a flaw, without a doubt.
And as we all know, it is a flaw that the telcos clearly have no interest whatsoever in fixing. That's why the solution has to come from the handset makers. Apple, Google, and Samsung need to provide the tools for call-screening functionality within the phone OS, independent of the wireless providers.
Sadly, the obi solution only works for land lines. And I have only a cellphone. So I only answer calls from people I already know, or if I am expecting a call.
And yet it could be made to work for cell phones, if only Apple, Google, or Samsung chose to lead the way.
All they have to do is provide an "answer but don't ring" option in iOS or Android. Allow the end user to generate a custom challenge and response, or give programmers an API to write call screening apps, and then you have the equivalent of an Obi110 for a cell phone. Plus it would be trivial to whitelist numbers in the phone's directory.
Of course, some people will argue that this will only cause an arms race between spammers and end users. But so what? I'd rather fight back than surrender.
How do I use this Obihai Obi110 device? Is it something that needs special land line wiring in the home? This is new to me and would very much like the setup you have for my home phone.
Buy one on Amazon, and read the reviews for instructions on how to set it up.
That doesn't require the ability to substitute arbitrary numbers â" only numbers in a block of numbers owned/rented by the company in question. The flaw is that there is no sanity checking or filtering at the telecom level to determine whether the caller ID data is plausible. If the telephone company detected bogus caller ID messages and immediately terminated the call, we wouldn't have this problem.
Agreed, the telcos could most certainly fix Caller ID, or at the very least dramatically reduce the ability for scammers to exploit it.
But if current epidemic of scam calls isn't enough to motivate them to do something, then I don't think anything ever will. My Obi110 works, it works for my Mom and Dad, and it works for some friends who have also bought and configured them. It's not a perfect solution, but it beats nothing at all.
This system is great if your house is wired the right way. You need to have one wire into the house that the Obi plugs into and then all your other phones plug into the Obi.
Most houses are wired the way yours are. That's why I bought a wireless phone system with a base station and multiple handsets. The Obi110 plugs into the base station (which includes an answering machine). None of my handsets ring unless a human calls me. I do have a couple of plug-in phones on a couple of extensions, but the ringers are off.
They wouldn't need to. All they need is the software that already exists -- voice recognition. The same voice recognition that already listens for "hello" from you and detects when it is hearing an answering machine. The same voice recognition that listens for your answers when it is an automated spam call. Program it to listen for "press N" and then it sends "N".
Right, so you make the challenge "press the number that comes after the number 3", or "press the number that 1 plus 1 equals", or "press the number 9 three times", or any one of a million different variants that simple voice recognition can't deal with. Sure, at some point someone might deploy an AI robocaller that could handle such challenges, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
I would prefer that the phone companies fix Caller ID (which certainly could be done), but I have no faith in it ever happening. If the current mess with Caller ID isn't enough to convince the telcos to do something, then they clearly never will. User-end solutions are the only alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
Also the same people who talk about "investing" in various altcoins as well as BTC. At what point does it occur to them that cryptocurrency is the digital equivalent of the guy down the street printing his own currency, keeping half of it for himself, and then trying to persuade everyone else to use it as money? Does it sink in after they buy into the 10th altcoin? The 20th? The 30th?
At what point does one realize that he's holding the digital equivalent of Monopoly money?
My 25 years of teaching experience has repeatedly demonstrated to me that handing out Powerpoint slides, or distributing the instructor's lecture notes in PDF form, is a recipe for underperformance with students.
Requiring students to take their own handwritten notes (forcing them to organize and follow the material in their own minds) significantly improves their comprehension of the material. If someone else's notes are right in front of them, students tend to "zone out". That is especially true in today's classroom environment where cellphones and laptop computers compete for their attention.
For most students, electronic devices of any type are a distraction in the classroom. Paper and pen/pencil (or a really good tablet with pen entry) will beat them every time.
Not if you're passing on 20 names a week. An extra $100K per year (tax free) would be very tempting to some.
On top of that, the criminal justice system doesn't work in an additive way for white collar crime. If caught, your jail time for selling the details of 1000 people won't be significantly greater that selling the details of 10 people, particularly if you plea bargain. Sure, the court will give you a bigger restitution amount to pay, but it's not as if most perpetrators would ever care about that. They'll be paying only a token restitution amount each month regardless.
It's not just cellphone carrier companies - it's also the employees of banks, credit bureaus, doctors' offices, hospitals, HR departments, state and federal government tax departments, and just about any other organization that would have your personal information.
My Mom was targeted by an identity theft ring last year. The only point of contact between her and the bank / credit card agencies was her home phone number. The gang sent someone with a fake driver's license to a Verizon store a hundred miles away, and that person transferred my Mom's phone number to a cell phone. Once they had control of the phone number, half a dozen crooks with fake ID hit various stores to purchase big-ticket items. Any calls for verification went straight to the cell phone. The gang even got into her personal Chase bank account. The only thing that stopped them was the credit freeze that my wife and I had persuaded her to activate the year before, otherwise she'd still be cleaning up the mess with her finances.
But what amazed us was how much they knew about her. They had all the information on her credit card and bank accounts. They were able to create a fake driver's license. So where did it all come from? Our guess is that someone at a credit bureau was earning extra money on the side by passing on dossiers of elderly people with excellent credit ratings.
It doesn't matter what security measures you put in place. The weakest link will always be the person who can be bought by a crook.
The ceiling would go a bit higher if Apple bothered to significantly update any of its hardware (beyond the iPhone) on a regular basis.
I'm in dire need of a new Mac Pro and a new MacBook Pro. I've got several thousand dollars that I'd be more than happy to hand over to Apple, provided they could bother to market replacements that I cared to buy. There may be some hope for the Mac Pro, depending on what appears in 2019. I don't know if I'll ever buy another MacBook Pro unless someone at Apple begins making rational design decisions instead of focusing on appearance, thinness, and weight alone.
Apple is very willingly turning its product line into an iPhone / Apple services monoculture. If current trends continue, sooner or later Apple will stumble in one of those two areas, and it'll be a bloodbath in the stock market. I'm just waiting for the right time to sell my Apple stock. Right now the monoculture is still on an upward trajectory (helped in large part by the even greater incompetence of the competition), but it's not going to last.
No, that's you projecting that because I pointed out that James Gunn destroyed his life and career by using Twitter, that somehow I am okay with pedophilia and rape. That says a great deal more about you than it does about me, or James Gunn.
What Gunn tweeted years ago was tasteless, provocative shock humor (to him, at least). But because he used Twitter to do it, and he put it out for the world to see, and because Twitter later evolved into a place where "thought crime" must be punished, no matter what, now his career as a filmmaker is over.
Gunn has never been charged with any crimes related to his sick tweets, he has repeatedly apologized for them, and he is by all reports a very decent person who made the mistake of saying some vile things many years ago in an ill-considered attempt at very sick humor. It doesn't matter. His career is over, and apparently you are just fine with that.
If you are happy in a world where the Internet mob can destroy a person just for saying something offensive, even when it happened years ago and the person is sincerely apologetic, then you had better fervently hope that one day someone with an axe to grind doesn't make it his or her mission to go through your own online history, or the history of your children, and look for ways to "punish" you or them as well.
Using Twitter is like playing Russian Roulette. Every time you tweet, you pull the trigger. Most of the time, nothing happens, but sooner or later you'll get unlucky and the Internet mob will destroy you for what you tweeted (latest case in point: James Gunn).
Maybe, just maybe, people are finally beginning to realize just how toxic Twitter really is. It only took a few thousand ruined lives and careers to get the point across.
No, I would not have "taken transit", when the nearest bus line is half a mile from my house, and only runs once every 30 minutes.
No, I would not have walked two miles in bad weather, especially carrying heavy or fragile items.
No, I would not have ridden a bike in an area without dedicated bike lanes, or dealt with the hassle of locking it up and hoping it wouldn't be stolen.
Yes, I absolutely would use a ride-hail service when the more expensive alternative is to drive and park my own car.
What is it with the proponents of mass transit who can't stand the idea of people making their own decisions about transportation? So if you can't make mass transit affordable and desirable, the only alternative is to outlaw the competition?
"Modern" mass transit can't die quickly enough.
And there's a big part of the problem: the phrase 'Camera is already paired to an account' is just so much word salad to the average user. They will look at it for a moment, briefly wonder what those words might mean, then click through and forget about them.
If you want people to take such warnings seriously, you need to make it much more explicit, as in: "WARNING: The camera is already paired to another user's account. If you continue to use this camera, that user will be able to view the images from it without your knowledge. Please contact Swann technical support at xxx-xxx-xxxx immediately."
I'd like to believe that someone at Apple learns from this debacle, and makes some significant design changes to the next generation of professional laptops. But I'm not hopeful. The latest generation of MacBook Pros has gone so far off the track that I continue to use my mid-2012 model despite the fact that I am very much in need of an upgrade just due to normal wear-and-tear.
I'd love to see the return of a professional Apple laptop with user-upgradable SSD and DRAM, a decent keyboard, a MagSafe power connector, and more ports than just USB-C. But the people in charge at Apple simply don't think that way any more. To them, appearance trumps every rational design decision.
If Google as a corporation didn't suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder, they might be able to focus long enough to build a decent laptop with a UNIX-style OS, and grab marketshare (and mindshare) away from Apple with working professionals. But as it is, Apple (as bad as they have become) have no real competition. Until they do, or until there's a change of upper management at Apple, I have little hope that the situation will improve.
In fact, you could be certain that some people would make a living out of doing this: accepting reduced-price or donated goods from Amazon, and then suing repeatedly.
Do a search on "Gersh Zavodnik" as an exemplar.
I ordered an external battery pack for a UPS from Amazon several months back. When it arrived and I unpacked it, the case was visibly bulging on the top. Not wanting to risk plugging it in, I contacted Amazon for a return. Instead, they refunded my money on the spot and told me to take it to the nearest recycling center.
I could understand Amazon's reasoning. Why risk shipping a possibly defective battery that might pose a fire hazard? And for what I paid for it, it was hardly worth trying to repair or refurbish.
From Amazon's point of view, if it's cheaper to dispose of the goods rather than repair or refurbish them, then that's the smart move. They can't even donate them, because what happens if a lawyer sues because someone was injured by a donated item that Amazon knew was defective? The much safer route, economically and legally, is simply to destroy the returned items. It's part of the cost of doing business at their scale.
My own opinion is that "Solo" is flopping because people have finally realized the series is never going to get any better.
Some background: I saw the original "Star Wars" in college. It was a jaw-dropping movie, (unless you're old enough to remember what science fiction / fantasy movies were like before the release of SW, you really can't appreciate how amazing an experience it was to see it in the theater), and "The Empire Strikes Back" was even better. But "Return of the Jedi" was a let down, in large part because Lucas had full creative control and couldn't resist inserting "cutesy" characters like Ewoks into the story, and adding a ridiculously sappy ending.
Still, two out of three wasn't bad. And then came episodes 1 through 3, which conclusively proved that Lucas knew how to build a universe, but had no clue how to write a good story. So now it's two out of six, but there was still hope after Lucas sold the franchise to Disney. Maybe (I thought), having some new people in charge might revitalize the SW universe.
"The Force Awakens" was a reasonable reboot. J.J. Abrams isn't a great director, but he's a competent one, and he avoided a lot of pitfalls by recycling the plot of the original movie. "Rogue One" was a competent one-shot, but nothing special. Now's it four out of eight good films if you're generous.
Then came "The Last Jedi", and the painful realization that really, really bad would be the new normal for Disney, and that future "Star Wars" movies would be micro-managed by Disney execs and designed to sell overpriced merchandise. And that, for me, was the end of it. When I walked out the "The Last Jedi", I knew I wouldn't be paying to see another Star Wars movie in the theater again. Most "Star Wars" movies have ranged from mediocre to bad, and it is never going to change. Disney will never let go. It'll just be bad formula movies from now on.
I am indifferent to "Solo", which by all accounts is another painfully mediocre film. I might watch it when it hits cable, but I have about as much desire to see another "Star Wars" movie in the theater as I do to see another "Mission Impossible" or "Transformers" movie, i.e. none at all. And given how "Solo" is doing, I suspect I have a lot of company.
And within 6 months, some middle-level Microsoft manager looking for a promotion will decide to "enhance" GitHub as a means of increasing visibility within the corporate structure, but to the complete detriment of everyone using it, including Microsoft's own internal dev teams.
You only have to look at Microsoft's past behavior in order to accurately predict the future with the GitHub acquisition.
GitHub is dead. Leave now.
A sure sign of pseudoscience is the post hoc explanation that always follows a null test result by a third party. You run a test, get no results, and then someone says, "Oh, you forgot to do A and B." So you do another test following A and B, get another null result, and then you hear, "Oh, you forgot to do C and D." And it goes on and on and on ...
Cold fusion is so last century. Modern pseudoscientists all use vacuum-energy generators for their star drives.
Get with the program!
Having a series overview page and an individual page for each episode is not a mutually exclusive arrangement. Look at the Wikipedia entries for any of the Star Trek series as an example. There's an overview page, a subpage that lists the episodes from each season, and then a link to a page for each episode.
It works perfectly well, and because the Wikipedia editors overseeing the Star Trek pages are clearly fans, then they're just fine with it. The fact that Wikipedia editors of other TV shows would oppose such a format simply highlights the complete lack of consistency in how the rules are made and enforced.
And why shouldn't they? The whole point of Wikipedia is that the normal rules of hardcopy encyclopedias should not apply. There are no limits to the numbers of pages that can be added. If there is someone out there who is passionate enough to create a wiki page for every single episode of a 30-year-old sitcom, then why not? Wikipedia had more value back in the days before it began pretending to be a "real" encyclopedia. You could lose yourself for hours following one link after another through some obscure aspects of pop culture.
Then suddenly Wikipedia changed, with editors who would arbitrarily decide what was "notable" and what was not, with no consistency whatsoever from one subject to another. Thousands upon thousands of wiki pages were deleted for no other reason than "an encyclopedia shouldn't have an entry on an obscure topic like this". But why not? How does having a separate wiki entry for every manga character ever created damage the wiki entries for heads of state, or historical events?
The people running Wikipedia want everyone to believe that that Wikipedia is a "serious" online reference. Of course, that will never be true as long as anyone with an agenda and an Internet connection can edit any page. Instead, the editors' fruitless efforts to enforce their collective delusion has significantly degraded the overall value of the site.
I think that a voice recognition program parsing a challenge in my own voice along the lines of "press the number below 5 on your keypad to continue" or "press the number you get when you add 2 and 1 to continue" wouldn't have much success. Give app writers access to a call screener API, and I would bet that you'd see some even more sophisticated solutions that wouldn't be so readily parsed by the scammers.
"Perfect" is the enemy of "good enough". You're right, CAPTCHAs aren't perfect, but they are generally "good enough", at least to the point where they are still used very successfully. The point isn't to eliminate every possible scam call, but to make it much more difficult for the scammers to do business.
Since the carriers haven't done this yet, despite the current robocall epidemic, then you can be confident it will never happen.
Agreed. And part of those "market forces" would be for Apple and Google to give end users another tool to use against robocallers. If it doesn't work, we'll all find out soon enough. But I think it certainly would work ... not perfectly, but "good enough".
Yes, the scams are surging. Some scammers are even calling in the middle of the night. But if you're waiting for the telcos (or the government) to fix this, you'll be waiting for a very, very long time. Caller ID is completely broken, and it will clearly never be fixed.
But robocalling can be tackled on the user end. Robocalling requires a delay of several seconds between you answering the phone and the call being routed to a live human at a call center. I've got an Obi110 on my home telephone, configured with a "Press 1 to continue" screening message. By the time the robocaller switches the call over, the scammer hears nothing but silence. And unless the "1" is pressed, the Obi110 will not ring my home phone. In three years, not one robocaller has made it past the Obi110.
Obviously you can't put an Obi110 on a cell phone. However, Apple and Google could build a call screening function into iOS and Android. Give users the ability to activate a "challenge before ringing" function, give them the ability to customize the challenge and the response (with whitelisting of numbers in the phone directory), and you'd seriously cripple the robocalling industry. With every phone having different challenges / responses, the only solution for the scammers will be for a human being to listen to every call, at least until someone comes up with an AI smart enough to answer any challenge.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's better to fight back than do nothing.
It was originally meant to be a feature, else why would the telcos allow spoofing? Problem was, it has long outlived its usefulness, and the feature has become a bug.
One of the original arguments for Caller ID spoofing (besides business case uses) was to allow abused women staying at women's shelters to "hide" their location, so that husbands and boyfriends couldn't track them down from the Caller ID number. You could block your own Caller ID number when calling out, but many people paid for "Caller ID Block", because it was automatically assumed that someone blocking their phone number was up to no good. So the only way to guarantee that a phone on the other end would ring, yet still hide the caller, was a spoofed number.
Of course, that was decades ago. No one back then foresaw the advent of ultra-cheap overseas long distance that could enable call centers outside the country to run multi-billion dollar scams, or the creation of cell phones that would make landlines largely obsolete. So the feature has become a flaw, without a doubt.
And as we all know, it is a flaw that the telcos clearly have no interest whatsoever in fixing. That's why the solution has to come from the handset makers. Apple, Google, and Samsung need to provide the tools for call-screening functionality within the phone OS, independent of the wireless providers.
And yet it could be made to work for cell phones, if only Apple, Google, or Samsung chose to lead the way.
All they have to do is provide an "answer but don't ring" option in iOS or Android. Allow the end user to generate a custom challenge and response, or give programmers an API to write call screening apps, and then you have the equivalent of an Obi110 for a cell phone. Plus it would be trivial to whitelist numbers in the phone's directory.
Of course, some people will argue that this will only cause an arms race between spammers and end users. But so what? I'd rather fight back than surrender.
Buy one on Amazon, and read the reviews for instructions on how to set it up.
Agreed, the telcos could most certainly fix Caller ID, or at the very least dramatically reduce the ability for scammers to exploit it.
But if current epidemic of scam calls isn't enough to motivate them to do something, then I don't think anything ever will. My Obi110 works, it works for my Mom and Dad, and it works for some friends who have also bought and configured them. It's not a perfect solution, but it beats nothing at all.
Most houses are wired the way yours are. That's why I bought a wireless phone system with a base station and multiple handsets. The Obi110 plugs into the base station (which includes an answering machine). None of my handsets ring unless a human calls me. I do have a couple of plug-in phones on a couple of extensions, but the ringers are off.
Right, so you make the challenge "press the number that comes after the number 3", or "press the number that 1 plus 1 equals", or "press the number 9 three times", or any one of a million different variants that simple voice recognition can't deal with. Sure, at some point someone might deploy an AI robocaller that could handle such challenges, but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
I would prefer that the phone companies fix Caller ID (which certainly could be done), but I have no faith in it ever happening. If the current mess with Caller ID isn't enough to convince the telcos to do something, then they clearly never will. User-end solutions are the only alternative.