By requiring a Facebook account for registration, Spotify ensures their future customer base is already on board with having their demographic information sold in return for "free" services.
In the Washington DC metro area, there are three major airports within a 50 mile radius (Reagan National, Dulles, BWI), and if they were allowed to compete on sanity in screening procedures, they would.
Information collecting companies love opt-out - they know that the vast majority of their contributors won't bother. Google isn't the only one - every financial company I deal with sends me "You can opt out of us sharing your information" brochures, safe in the knowledge that I won't bother calling the toll-free number and punching in my account ID. They encourage this by making it hard to tell whether you've opted out previously or not.
If my information is valuable to them, they should be required to ask me before using it for gain.
They should also be liable if they let my information out without my permission. These days, if a company sets you up for identity theft, all they have to do is say "Oops" and offer to flag your accounts in the credit score databases (which costs them next to nothing, and makes your life more difficult until the block is removed).
If the default was no sharing without permission, I guarantee there would be a line near the top of every account statement saying "You have not OPTED IN to our wonderful partner info sharing offer! Call 1-800-OPT-IN-PLEASE now for a special gift!"
I hear the plaintive cry of a developer who sweat blood learning the ins and outs of making the "mobile web" work, only to have it all made obsolete by real mobile browsers and faster mobile networks.
Compared to the mainstream of Java/C++, JavaScript's prototype-based OO is pretty strange.
People put up with language weirdness for two reasons:
* It's the only game in town (JavaScript and browser extension, Emacs Lisp, tcl/tk and X GUIs) * It has something you really need/want (Lisp macros, Java JVM, C++ low-level access)
Neither of those can really be used to drive a universal GNU extension language. Wishing for it is like wishing for something to displace the x86 architecture.
You should also read this blog post commenting on the Microsoft post. Money quote:
Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?
Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.
EVERYONE has to stop judging people on irrelevant factors.
This means that government and academia has to stop having lower standards for people in oppressed groups.
It also means people like you have to stop assuming that the person in front of you was a beneficiary of those lower standards just because they are a member of an oppressed group.
Your reasoning above is correct statistically, but may be doing an injustice to the individual standing in front of you - an injustice that has the same effect as the racism that started the whole mess.
Their performance varies a lot, depending on factors you don't or can't know. The back-of-the-envelope computation example in the article goes through a much longer chain of deduction these days:
Fortran statement x86 instructions RISC-ish micro-ops full-speed until:
* cache empties
* branch prediction fails
* speculative execution runs out
Which is why, absent mega-watt-hour storage for electric power, wind and PV solar are not useful sources of grid electricity. Once they get above a few percent of the capacity of the grid, their instability currently(*) requires another source of energy that can react quickly when they go up or down in contribution to the grid.
compared to licensed closed-source software. Price a Microsoft back-office solution some time - the cheaper hardware is quickly swamped by the per-user fees for the software.
Aren't you just annoyed that Apple (of all companies) has found a way to make money off supporting open-source software?
The ISS is run by an international partnership, under various Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs). Any bets that the Russians won't submit lots and Lots and LOTS of "safety concerns" documents, to maximize the time they are the sole means of access to the ISS?
I work for a group at NASA. One of our group's tasks is to take scientist-written code and wrap it for distribution to hundreds of remote sites around the world. We try our damnedest to run the code as-is, but fairly often have to modify it to remove stuff like:
* Hard-coded input and output file and directory names * Small and arbitrary length limitations on file pathnames - I've run into buffers that were declared as 53 characters in length, probably because that was what they needed on their system * Large arrays being allocated on the stack - Linux distros have different default stack sizes
Most of the problems stem from the picky crap that C makes users go through for simple stuff like string manipulation. Both the scientists and the downstream developers like me would be MUCH happier if the scientists worked in something more forgiving (Matlab/IDL/Mathematica, or a flexible scripting language with a decent interface to heavy duty math libraries).
Clemson University. One room, sixteen ASR-33 110-baud TTYs attached to a PDP-8, thirty-two high-schoolers. After a few days in that room, your ears would interpret any low-frequency thumping as TTY noise - half the campers were convinced they were piping printer sounds into our dorm rooms at night (it was just the air conditioner).
Ended up writing a Spacewar game as my senior science project.
Apple has traditionally overcharged for more capacity (RAM and hard drive space). You ALWAYS buy the smallest model and upgrade it yourself.
1. Buy a 500GB Time Capsule from a third party ($100 and up) 2. Open it up and replace the hard drive with a bigger SATA drive 3. Be amazed as the Time Capsule formats and uses the bigger drive 4. Buy a cheap USB notebook cooling fan and put the Time Capsule on top of it, to make sure the new drive doesn't overheat
Actually, #4 is a good idea with a stock Time Capsule, too.
Slashdot Mirror
The SI base unit is the Ampere. The Coulomb is a derived unit (Ampere-seconds).
Which is definitely silly - the base unit is charge flow, and the derived unit is charge?
Get the basics right (UI, wifi, app store, media store) first.
Next year it gets the camera/microphone, tempting people to upgrade.
By requiring a Facebook account for registration, Spotify ensures their future customer base is already on board with having their demographic information sold in return for "free" services.
In the Washington DC metro area, there are three major airports within a 50 mile radius (Reagan National, Dulles, BWI), and if they were allowed to compete on sanity in screening procedures, they would.
Information collecting companies love opt-out - they know that the vast majority of their contributors won't bother. Google isn't the only one - every financial company I deal with sends me "You can opt out of us sharing your information" brochures, safe in the knowledge that I won't bother calling the toll-free number and punching in my account ID. They encourage this by making it hard to tell whether you've opted out previously or not.
If my information is valuable to them, they should be required to ask me before using it for gain.
They should also be liable if they let my information out without my permission. These days, if a company sets you up for identity theft, all they have to do is say "Oops" and offer to flag your accounts in the credit score databases (which costs them next to nothing, and makes your life more difficult until the block is removed).
If the default was no sharing without permission, I guarantee there would be a line near the top of every account statement saying "You have not OPTED IN to our wonderful partner info sharing offer! Call 1-800-OPT-IN-PLEASE now for a special gift!"
A Z-19 and a US Robotics modem got me through graduate school in the early 1980's. Wrote most of my dissertation at home (in troff, yet).
I never had to modify the Z-19, but the Z80 processor would have been a piece of cake to hack if necessary.
I hear the plaintive cry of a developer who sweat blood learning the ins and outs of making the "mobile web" work, only to have it all made obsolete by real mobile browsers and faster mobile networks.
As a hacker, I feel your pain.
As a user, I say *&^%$#@! the mobile web.
Compared to the mainstream of Java/C++, JavaScript's prototype-based OO is pretty strange.
People put up with language weirdness for two reasons:
* It's the only game in town (JavaScript and browser extension, Emacs Lisp, tcl/tk and X GUIs)
* It has something you really need/want (Lisp macros, Java JVM, C++ low-level access)
Neither of those can really be used to drive a universal GNU extension language. Wishing for it is like wishing for something to displace the x86 architecture.
... 3.5" floppy images - that's how old this idea is.
You should also read this blog post commenting on the Microsoft post. Money quote:
Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?
Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.
Take the proposals back, scrub them of names and institutions, and have them re-evaluated.
If the black-sounding ones move up when presented neutrally, that would be pretty damning.
The way to make racism like this go away is:
EVERYONE has to stop judging people on irrelevant factors.
This means that government and academia has to stop having lower standards for people in oppressed groups.
It also means people like you have to stop assuming that the person in front of you was a beneficiary of those lower standards just because they are a member of an oppressed group.
Your reasoning above is correct statistically, but may be doing an injustice to the individual standing in front of you - an injustice that has the same effect as the racism that started the whole mess.
The tree design can catch the light that's reflected off the wall behind it, at least in the image shown.
He says he moved the test location around - I'd like to see the other locations.
Although in The Marching Morons it was "Would you buy that for a quarter?" which reflects inflation between 1951 and today.
Their performance varies a lot, depending on factors you don't or can't know. The back-of-the-envelope computation example in the article goes through a much longer chain of deduction these days:
Fortran statement
x86 instructions
RISC-ish micro-ops
full-speed until:
* cache empties
* branch prediction fails
* speculative execution runs out
Which is why, absent mega-watt-hour storage for electric power, wind and PV solar are not useful sources of grid electricity. Once they get above a few percent of the capacity of the grid, their instability currently(*) requires another source of energy that can react quickly when they go up or down in contribution to the grid.
(*) Sorry...
compared to licensed closed-source software. Price a Microsoft back-office solution some time - the cheaper hardware is quickly swamped by the per-user fees for the software.
Aren't you just annoyed that Apple (of all companies) has found a way to make money off supporting open-source software?
Granted, by bundling it with their hardware...
It's a scare-the-voters-silly-to-expand-surveillance-powers issue. The Democratic administration won't veto this.
... would be jobs/megabuck moved. To maximize that measure, we should replace all thoss ATMs with human tellers.
Right?
The ISS is run by an international partnership, under various Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs). Any bets that the Russians won't submit lots and Lots and LOTS of "safety concerns" documents, to maximize the time they are the sole means of access to the ISS?
I work for a group at NASA. One of our group's tasks is to take scientist-written code and wrap it for distribution to hundreds of remote sites around the world. We try our damnedest to run the code as-is, but fairly often have to modify it to remove stuff like:
* Hard-coded input and output file and directory names
* Small and arbitrary length limitations on file pathnames - I've run into buffers that were declared as 53 characters in length, probably because that was what they needed on their system
* Large arrays being allocated on the stack - Linux distros have different default stack sizes
Most of the problems stem from the picky crap that C makes users go through for simple stuff like string manipulation. Both the scientists and the downstream developers like me would be MUCH happier if the scientists worked in something more forgiving (Matlab/IDL/Mathematica, or a flexible scripting language with a decent interface to heavy duty math libraries).
Is it legal for me to put a webcam at the end of my driveway, and have it recognize and record license plates of passing cars?
Is it legal for me to put a laptop/GPS in my car which does the same thing?
Is it legal for lots of people in Massachusetts to do this, and share their data?
Clemson University. One room, sixteen ASR-33 110-baud TTYs attached to a PDP-8, thirty-two high-schoolers. After a few days in that room, your ears would interpret any low-frequency thumping as TTY noise - half the campers were convinced they were piping printer sounds into our dorm rooms at night (it was just the air conditioner).
Ended up writing a Spacewar game as my senior science project.
Apple has traditionally overcharged for more capacity (RAM and hard drive space). You ALWAYS buy the smallest model and upgrade it yourself.
1. Buy a 500GB Time Capsule from a third party ($100 and up)
2. Open it up and replace the hard drive with a bigger SATA drive
3. Be amazed as the Time Capsule formats and uses the bigger drive
4. Buy a cheap USB notebook cooling fan and put the Time Capsule on top of it, to make sure the new drive doesn't overheat
Actually, #4 is a good idea with a stock Time Capsule, too.
There are two typical justifications for sales taxes:
* Businesses use state services, so they should collect taxes per transaction
* Customers use state services, ditto.
Use taxes have only the second reason above.
If use taxes are ethically and civically sound, the state should have no trouble enforcing them.