I don't think that leading, per se, is all that high on China's agenda right now. Their current method is reaping enormous profits as it is and giving them a leg up in terms of technological development. I don't think they can overtake the US in terms of innovation using their current methods, but they certainly help China catch up. Once they are on par with nations like the US, Germany and so on, then they can shift strategies and foster more domestic innovation.
Bringing us back to the original topic, such tactics also dovetail nicely with the key Chinese goal of centralized control. The Chinese government inserts itself into every major deal with western corporations wanting to do business in China. From the west, they force the companies to help boost the domestic economy. For the Chinese people and businesses, they become the source (or choke point) for all that western money and IP. That also means that, as in the article, the government is first in line to start using the latest technology to support its ideology.
First it says the page was taken down without an explanation, but then it goes on to say that the company did release a statement explaining their reasoning.
This sort of self contradictory reporting bugs me a lot more than it probably should....
Unity of purpose pretty much assumes homogenized thought as well, which explicitly suppresses diversity of ideas and creativity. From China's point of view, that isn't as crippling as one might think, since they have such a long standing tradition of stealing intellectual property from other countries and businesses that want to do business in China. As long as they are such a huge market and seemingly inexhaustible source of dirt-cheap labour, they don't need to foster domestic innovation, international businesses will beat a path to their door bringing innovation with them.
But pulling your kids out of school would be scored negatively (and likely harshly negatively) on your own social credit score, resulting in you being banned for any travel, loans and an ever increasing range of jobs. The Chinese government has been very clear that it wants to exert enough influence as to become coercion on all members of its society, coercion to make everybody conform to committee derived ideals of model citizenry.
Pretty soon you'd be homeless and destitute. And with the social credit system being understood and accepted by the majority, the homeless will become seen as deserving their homeless status because it will be assumed they got that way by refusal to conform.
And just how long will it be before the central authorities decide to add school attentiveness scores to the social credit scores they are already using on adults to control their movements? And clearly getting good grades won't be enough for the advanced students who can handle the course work without paying a lot of attention to the teacher during regular class hours. The top scorers are going to be those who get tops grades and manage to keep an expression on their face that passes the automated criteria.
According to news reports, already millions of Chinese have been blacklisted for travel. (and not even international travel, but internal travel for the Lunar New Year which is kind of a big deal in China with traveller numbers in the millions)
It's probably only a matter of time before "you're a lazy student, you don't qualify to go home to see your parents and grandparents this year..." becomes a reality.
Note that things like jaywalking, being a no-show for restaurant reservations and giving fake reviews online are already included and the official government stance is that this social credit system and related punishment/reward system will cover the whole of Chinese society by 2020.
Slashdot is a news aggregation site, so by design it will post, and link to, news articles that already exist on other sites. Thus, it is inevitable that some portion of the articles will be news items that you or I will have already seen. But this behaviour isn't simple traffic whoring like it might appear at first glance, since the articles are just the foundation for a well established community to discuss and debate not only the facts presented in the articles, but the broader implications and impact on society that those news articles bring up. In addition, the majority of articles posted will be things the majority of slashdotter members have yet to see elsewhere. Just as CNN, NBC et all cover the same major stories, people are going to see the same stories again and again on various channels and forms of media.
My complaint about how Slashdot operates relies on the fact that, despite having a well established user base who are arguably more educated and science savvy than your average person, it doesn't take that as an opportunity to do a more in-depth article than the major news outlets can achieve. In the past, we have had many successful Ask Me Anything (AMA) style posts from notable figures in the tech industry. I'd like to see Slashdot expand on that. Any time a new study comes out or a new tech is getting hyped, I think the Slashdot editors should try and approach the original authors/researchers/developers and ask them if they'd be willing to participate in an AMA session. Instead of endless debating the points that appear in the necessarily condensed news articles, go straight to the horses mouth and get the facts that the news articles left out, get corrections or clarifications for what those news articles published.
This is a meta-study, a little under 200,000 participants across 26 studies that specifically includes "all causes" which means it includes on-the-job accidents. Physically demanding jobs also tend to be physically risky jobs as well. How often does an office worker to work at heights or in cramped, enclosed spaces? White collar workers also only travel to and from work about twice a day. Your average plumber/electrician/contractor/etc is travelling to multiple places everyday. (and couriers even more so) A fact which dramatically increases the risk of being in a motor vehicle accident. (MVA's being one of the top if not *the* top cause of accidental death in industrialized countries.)
I note that, in this study, they did attempt to control for age, smoker or non and socio-economic factors, but there is no mention of controlling for level of risk inherent in those jobs. A better follow up study would take that same data set and control for established accident rates within each occupation. I believe that once you control for the accident rate the plumber/electrician/contractor fields have, the difference in life expectancy will shrink or even disappear altogether.
I think it would be better; although much more expensive to implement, to drop waste into an active subduction zone. Doing so would pull the waste down into the mantle, not only effectively breaking it down, but also trapping everything at the same time. This would be ideal for certain types of nuclear waste as well. Not the partially used rods and pellets of nuclear fuel mind you. If we ever smarten up and finally start building thorium reactors, the rods and pellets from uranium fission plants can easily be fully consumed in a thorium molten salts reactor. I read somewhere that used fuel rods or pellets are barely used up in terms of reactivity when they are removed from use. (which is why they get sequestered in cooling ponds for so long)
Along the same lines other, things we can't recycle today might well be recyclable in the near future. For the numerous rare earths used in electronics particularly, I can easily believe that a process can be developed that is more cost efficient as a source of rare earths than mining for new supplies. Viewed as ore, most electronics are actually richer sources of rare earths than the native ores they came from. In that light, any disposal method that leaves the elements inside basically irretrievable would short sighted,
I agree with you about the double space after the end of a sentence, and for the same reason(s) as you. I was given my first typing instruction on an IBM manual and then an IBM Selectric typewriter. We were taught to always double space at the end of sentences and to use multiple spaces at the beginning of paragraphs. (IIRC, five spaces for the beginning of the very first paragraph, two for subsequent paragraphs on the same subject and four for subsequent paragraphs on new subjects.) We were also taught to avoid using the tab key. My memory is hazy, but I think this was all stuff dictated by the Chicago Manual of Style. The whole point of that manual was to maximise legibility and encourage consistency in style.
To be honest though; once passing those classes, I stopped adhering to that for anything except the most formal of composition. (job cover letters, school assignments etc)
I quote: "go away or I shall replace you with a small shell script"
Automatically setting a flag on a web form submission is trivial, but only the most oblivious of PHB's would ever think of doing so. Sure Mozilla will sometimes refuse to address a complaint a user had, but a few points for you to ponder:
1)Mozilla is doing this essentially free for the user community. They are fortunate to have funding and revenue streams that allow them to do that. But it does require that they focus very carefully on what it is they want to achieve and to carefully weigh whether chasing every little bug is worth the manhours.
2)Sometimes things can't be fixed, not without breaking something else that large numbers of users depend on. My own experience is a case in point. Firefox 59.0.2 drastically changed huge amounts of the stuff "under the hood", so as to provide the increased security and faster browsing the majority of the user base was clamouring for. However, that meant that all my loved add-ons broke and in most cases, it just isn't possible to find anything that really replaces them because the underlying API's just don't exist in the new Firefox.
3) This is not unique to Mozilla by any means. Every major tech vendors do this to some degree, the only exceptions I know of are cases like Microsoft where they never tell you the status of a bug report at all. Mozilla is at least doing a good job of being transparent about their software maintenance.
4) Have you ever sat down and read a large number of those bug reports? Near as I can tell, the hostility of the tone in the bug report is inversely proportional to a) The severity of the bug and b) the technical savvy of the submitter. Every business has to deal with ignorant, stupid or just plain asshole customers. That doesn't mean any business has to waste any more time than the bare minimum satisfying them.
There have been a few times over the years where conversation threads on Slashdot have have debated what Google's next big project is, or what it should be. More than once I have said that I think one thing Google should do is send out research students to all the temples, monasteries, churches and so on to scan and digitize the vast amount of historical they collectively have stored in their archives. The Vatican is the biggest and most well known examples of course, but all over the world are texts which probably haven't been taken down from the shelf and read in generations, possibly hundreds of years. There is so much of it, and so little resources available to deal with them, that we literally have no clue just what we have in those collections.
As an obvious requirement, the teams sent out to harvest this data would need to be equipped with something a little more advanced that your typical desktop scanner.Right now, when dealing with ancient texts, scans are done in the visual range, UV and IR, (full spectrum imaging) with more specialized scans (such as x-ray, x-ray fluorescence and hyper spectral imaging) being done in very few places. The Lazarus Project already has a portable multispectrum scanning set up, but they don't do any of the X-ray or gamma ray imaging stuff. There are many texts which are too fragile, or too precious to be transported to a European or North American University. so the ability to image in x-ray, thermal IR and gamma rays would be pretty important.
As others have said, a lack of support from China and Trump's perceived willingness to be aggressive in his dealings with North Korea may be the reason(s) Kim Jung-Un is willing to be so conciliatory.
However; there is another factor going on that most Slashdotters don't seem to be aware of: According to multiple sources, the nuclear test site at Punggye-ri has collapsed and has been experiencing landslides. Apparently the whole mountain is caving in on itself. What I think happened is that the test explosions combined with an unforeseen fault in the mountain, catching the researchers off guard. There is no information regarding the fate of the researchers and all of their painfully acquired equipment of course, but it seems quite possible that a lot of un-replaceable equipment and perhaps even some key researchers were lost in the process.
Kim Jung-Un can't rattle the nuclear sabre if the sabre has been taken away. Much of the resources needed to pursue a nuclear program, both materials and know how, had to be smuggled in over the course of years or even decades. Anything North Korea lost in the geological event(s) will take years to replace. And, after rattling the nuclear sabre and having at least partial success in test explosions, the economic sanctions and blockades are going to be more carefully enforced. It may be impossible for North Korea to resume its research and testing in time to save it. Because...
Other reports last year hinted that North Korea was forecasting yet another massive famine for its people. The phrase that sticks in my mind was "A year when The People ate grass". Last summer, when the sabre rattling started to ramp up coincided with yet another drought in North Korea. I thought then, and still think now, that North Korea resorted to sabre rattling again to try and extort more famine relief from the west like it had done many times in the past. (Which the North Korean gov't has always spun as being "war reparations" to its people.)
The west has been predicting the collapse of North Korea for decades, only to be proven wrong again and again as the North Korean people prove just how much can be endured. However, this time I think the North Korean government is the one predicting a collapse.
In my opinion, the only barrier to North Korea formally surrendering and re-uniting the people is bargaining for some kind of escape and immunity for the upper echelons so that they can avoid justice for the massive toll of crimes and human rights violations they have perpetrated against their own people. I predict that we are going to see rumours of special arrangements for the top officials floated about to test public reception just before they make that a formal point in the peace talks.
Well; there were and still are, good reasons to go with a key card system over a traditional key system.
1) Traditional keys are far more expensive, per unit, than the cards used by these systems. Most use small paper-based cards with a mag strip, which cost mere pennies each. These is offset by the expense of the locks of course, but that's a capital expense rather than an operating expense.
2) Because of the need for master keys for hotel staff, locks need to have three piece pins rather than the common two piece. Changing these requires a locksmith and changing all the locks invalidates all the keys, master and non. On the other hand, a key card system can not only let staff have master keys, it can let every staff member have their own unique "master key". So if you have to fire Agnes the room cleaner, you can invalidate her key card at the same time, ditto if she just lost her current one.
3) Similar to the problem with Agnes, guests are constantly losing keys. It is trivial to run off as many extra keys as needed. (which also allows multiple keys when dealing with double occupancy)
4) Many lock systems communicate with the central server over wi-fi, allowing front desk staff to disable a guests access if they want to make sure he comes down to the front desk to talk to them.
5) As the summary says, it allows granular control. If you fill a batch of rooms with a commercial client (like a work crew for example), you can give them the discounted commercial bulk rate and disable their access to the pool and so on. For special guests who require a lot of privacy, such as celebrities, politicians and people in hiding from an abusive spouse, you can disable the staff master key access if needed. The logic is the same as using permission based security in the IT world
6) Finally, traditional tumbler and wafer locks using keys are no more secure than these key cards, even in the vulnerable state the article describes. Lock picking is well known these days and a set of picks can be had or made even cheaper than the hand held mag strip writing device. You can't quite pick a lock using paper clips as easily as the movies suggest (paper clips aren't hard and springy enough) but it can be done with some locks. And a skill in picking locks and a basic set of picks opens far more doors and padlocks around the world than this key card exploit can. Note that master keyed traditional locks are often *easier* to pick than standard keyed locks, because you have two breaks, hence two chances per pin to get that pin unlocked. To open a lock only requires that every barrel have a break in the pins lined up in the cylinder, there is nothing preventing you from picking or creating a key which uses some of the master key bitting and some of the standard key bitting.
First, Janssen and Phamacyclics partnered with Johnson and Johnson to market the drug, then they got acquired by Abbvie who continued the partnership. So address all complaints to Johnson and Johnson or Abbvie.
Second, as far as I know, every pharmaceutical marketer has a drug affordability of some kind. In fact I think it might be a little known requirement under US FDA regulations. Here is the official drug affordability site for the drug: Imbruvica cost support Any one who needs this drug (or any other life saving medication really) should look into these programs.
this is offtopic, and, a quote without a referent, leaving some Slashdotters in the dark. But it's important enough that I don't think it should get voted down.
Sinclair Broadcast group is a huge player in the USA local TV station business. At present it owns over 25 stations across the country. Recently; every single station broadcast an editorial as part of their evening news show. They all used the exact same script. Every. Single. Station. Youtube has supercuts of this remarkable "coincidence" for those interested.
This obviously orchestrated piece raises serious questions about editorial independence in the news departments of those stations. I don't consider myself Right wing or part of the "You are Fake News!" crowd by any means , I don't even live in the US. But This troubles me. Yes, there is fake news going on, especially at the popular blog level, there is shoddy journalism no doubt. But I think the biggest problem is the echo chamber effect. People tend to get their information from only one source, almost always a source that already caters to their beliefs and preconceptions. After the fact corrections by the source don't carry nearly the same weight as the original story and corrections from other sources backed up by facts get attacked as Fake News or an attack on the person themselves. Having big media groups so obviously pulling the strings of newscasters only makes it easier for people to cling to their chosen echo chambers.
Our news sources must not only be fair, accurate and transparent, they must be SEEN to be such. This act by the Sinclair group shoots the entire US news industry in the foot. The less people feel they can trust traditional media sources, the more trust they'll put into overtly biased and hostile sources like The Daily Stormer.
I read the blog entry that TFS points to and noticed an odd omission, namely the respondents were not asked if they even have a Facebook page in the first place. Which means that someone who was privacy aware enough to not have a Facebook page or had already deleted theirs years ago when the first scandals came out (such as myself) could only chose "no" or not respond at all. I'd be really interested to see the numbers of tech savvy users who forgo Facebook altogether or abandoned it long ago. It also doesn't say what percentage of people the question was posed to chose not to respond at all.
I didn't like Facebook much even before the first scandals years ago, mainly because the social interaction between friends and family seemed so...high school in nature. Juvenile and puerile comments, unnecessary drama and annoying flash games were not something I was interested in participating in. I kept a profile only because it let me keep in touch with a few family members who had no other social media presence. After the Facebook Beacon scandal, I decided that keeping in touch with those people wasn't worth it. I carefully crafted a short message explaining my privacy concerns and reasons for deleting my profile and sent them to everyone I thought merited notice. Ironically, that set off a flame-fest where I got accused of spamming people. (ironic because most of the most vocal complainers were folks who had constantly filled my box with Farmville, Mafiawars and some Family Tree application spam...)
I've seen suggestions like making a building that cell signals can't escape from and simply fining Apple large amounts in order to force them to do more to solve the problem. Thing is, turning the whole building into a Faraday cage is likely to be expensive, more expensive than my own solution (see below). Paying fines, as far as I know, are tax deductible, so there is less of a motivation there than one might think. While I'm talking the financial aspects, does anyone know of this facility is actually owned and operated by Apple or is it, like so many things these days, actually a contracted service provider doing the repairs on Apple's behalf?
My solution I think is the easiest and cheapest option: Install a "stingray" fake cell tower inside the building that routes all calls to the cell phone equivalent of/dev/null unless and until a code # is entered like your bog standard PBX uses to direct calls. That would allow these phones to actually make test 911 calls that don't reach the local 911 operators. But real 911 calls from within the building could get through by basically doing "please dial 7 for an outside line". Given the need to test many functions of a cell phone, including dialling calls, making Bluetooth, GPS and possibly FM connections, setting up a test environment that creates false signals on all those frequencies and channel access methods should have been a no-brainer when building the initial facility.
It's no doubt cynical of me, but this sounds like Facebook Inc. getting all pissy because someone else was making the profit (measured in votes rather than dollars) instead of them. Apparently, Facebook can give away or sell that data, Farmville and Mafia Wars can do so because Facebook is getting a piece of that. But Facebook doesn't directly profit from a political group "getting out the vote" more effectively, so that is a no-no.
Sure, it is wrong for one political group to have such a decided advantage and I am far from being a Republican, still less a Trump supporter, but having a political organization show a bit more Internet savvy isn't a matter for private corporations to regulate. If the Republicans and Trump team got an advantage in the last election by doing this, you can be sure it is going to become an important part of the Democratic Party's strategy in the next election.
One last cynical note: Tactics like this help a party get insight into the will of the collective people. Which in turn allows them to say the right things to their target demographic and make the most effective attacks on the opposition. As noted above, it helps "get out the vote". I just see zero evidence that any of this actually affects the behaviour of political figures once they are elected.
First off, as well known and respected Wikipedia is, it is not considered an authoritative source on anything, even by its own admins. Thus, that Akha couple wouldn't be used as a type exemplar by anyone seriously working in the AI field on image recognition. Nor would it be used as such by anyone in the field of anthropology. Google has already been making great strides in image recognition, partly from machine learning based on image tags and captions found with images, partly from all of us filling in those re-captcha fields. Any researcher who wants to train their system on human recognition can easily get what amounts to a curated list of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of humans.
Second, the Pioneer plaque is very simplified line art. Except for being able to say that neither being represented has an afro as is common among African and African descended peoples, claiming a specific ethnicity for either one is an exercise in projection by the viewer. To me, the couple looks like the main might be Hindi or Pakistani, the woman could be anything from Mongolian to Hawaiian. (I am small-m metis but can easily pass as white because "white" covers so many ethnic backgrounds) Being mere scratches on a gold plated piece of aluminium, there is no skin/eye colour information AT ALL. Nor is there enough detail to clearly say if an epicanthic fold is present on either person. (BTW: epicanthic folds are not uniquely Asian) While I'm at it, let me mention the fact that ethnic groups as we recognize them, are not hard and clear distinctions. Humanity is more like a spectrum, with ethnicities occupying overlapping areas of that spectrum.
Third; overall, this article and the questions it raises feel like a subtle attempt to politicize a subject that should be considered above politics. Who should represent Humanity for machine learning? The answer is "Use ALL of us!" There is no need to force a selection of some sub-set of humanity when doing this. Use as many images as you can to teach the machines. Any time and place we need to use a single example, like men's rooms, space probes etc, just use simplified line art like the Pioneer plaque does. (the team behind that plaques design knew the political ramifications of choosing a specific and identifiable ethnicity, so did their best to come up with the most general, simplified example they could.)
So, Windows 10 S will be locked down, with only one channel for new software and updates. And it might cost more. How does this differ from simply having your users in the business or educational markets being given a guest account for free? Any I.T. admin is already going to prefer guest or regular user accounts for the people they support. There is already a large and well established ecosystem of best practices, AD policies, scripts and third party software all intended to limit the harm a clueless user can do to a machine.
I'm retired now, but at my last job there was a well understood policy in place that locked down users machines, white-listed applications and sent emails to the admins when certain conditions were met or failed to be met. No one, except the owners of the business we served (and the legendary "brother in the sales dept") had permission to install anything or even change anything of any real substance. And all of that was effected by built in tools that came with the OS.
People are accustomed to being limited to a walled garden for Apple and Google since both have done so since day one. But Windows users are not. I think they are going to get a lot of push back from home desktop users and as I said above, it's really of no use to the professional market.
1) I believe that a *reputable* VPN service would encrypt everything over their network so that while they can tell where you are browsing to, even they can't tell what you're doing once there. With current state of the art, only onion routing gives any real measure of privacy and even then, only if you stay in the network. As far as I know, given control of enough exit nodes and the ability to capture traffic at the ISP you can tie exiting traffic to specific users/machines.
2) Facebook, like any other company, must and will turn over logs when required to by legal authorities. Where they operate in locked down countries, like China, failure to do so would only result in that application getting red-flagged in the great firewalls those countries filter all traffic through. In addition, the nation can and would seize any assets held in that country. How can a VPN like Facebooks "onnahole" operate if all connections are blocked at the national firewall, any one attempting to use it are automatically flagged for investigation and any and all Chinese Facebook assets are confiscated? Of greater concern would be when Facebook is pro-actively sharing traffic of interest with the relevant authorities. We've all seen the news stories about various major players on the Internet including backdoors and secret access to user traffic without even the flimsy excuse of a national security letter. Cooperating with authorities in a legal investigation is one thing, actively acting as a informer in advance of any investigation is another.
The only way I can someone to maintain browsing privacy would be to use an onion/garlic routing service like Tor or I2P and even then, only as long as the exit node (which the user can't choose) isn't in his or own country. But that leads to the problems of a) Such traffic is easy to detect at the ISP level, leading to possible investigation by authorities and b) such services are closely associated with straight up criminal behaviour like drugs, guns, stolen credit cards and child porn. That association with criminal activities means someone would have to hide possession of the application even from friends and family, lest they be branded a paedophile or drug dealer.
Maybe we can all start referring to it as the onnahole service? (we the users being the thing that gets fucked, rather than the person doing the fucking) It seems pretty obvious that this, like pretty much everything Facebook does, is designed from the ground up as a privacy raping source of ad revenue.
To be fair though, he was 53 at the time, making the mistress in her mid 30's. Cheating on your spouse is a slimy thing sure, but it's not in the same league as grooming and molesting "jailbait" youths. (which itself technically not pedophilia but rather ehebophilia.) Whether the youth is 8 or 14, the online predators are still deliberately and with great focus taking advantage of the youths naivete for their own pleasures.
Personally, as far as age of consent laws go, I favour "close in age exemption" for young people under 18. I don't think a 14 and 16 yr old having sexual activity with each other is inherently wrong, but a legal adult being sexual with someone under 16 (where the nominal age of consent is 18) very much is.
In my experience, once a person is old enough to want to, they are going to, if they get the opportunity. Our duty as parents and as members of our society is to make sure our youths are educated early and thoroughly so that, if they choose to be sexually active, they can do so safely and ethically.
Slashdot Mirror
Bringing us back to the original topic, such tactics also dovetail nicely with the key Chinese goal of centralized control. The Chinese government inserts itself into every major deal with western corporations wanting to do business in China. From the west, they force the companies to help boost the domestic economy. For the Chinese people and businesses, they become the source (or choke point) for all that western money and IP. That also means that, as in the article, the government is first in line to start using the latest technology to support its ideology.
This sort of self contradictory reporting bugs me a lot more than it probably should....
Unity of purpose pretty much assumes homogenized thought as well, which explicitly suppresses diversity of ideas and creativity. From China's point of view, that isn't as crippling as one might think, since they have such a long standing tradition of stealing intellectual property from other countries and businesses that want to do business in China. As long as they are such a huge market and seemingly inexhaustible source of dirt-cheap labour, they don't need to foster domestic innovation, international businesses will beat a path to their door bringing innovation with them.
Pretty soon you'd be homeless and destitute. And with the social credit system being understood and accepted by the majority, the homeless will become seen as deserving their homeless status because it will be assumed they got that way by refusal to conform.
And just how long will it be before the central authorities decide to add school attentiveness scores to the social credit scores they are already using on adults to control their movements? And clearly getting good grades won't be enough for the advanced students who can handle the course work without paying a lot of attention to the teacher during regular class hours. The top scorers are going to be those who get tops grades and manage to keep an expression on their face that passes the automated criteria.
According to news reports, already millions of Chinese have been blacklisted for travel. (and not even international travel, but internal travel for the Lunar New Year which is kind of a big deal in China with traveller numbers in the millions)
It's probably only a matter of time before "you're a lazy student, you don't qualify to go home to see your parents and grandparents this year..." becomes a reality.
Note that things like jaywalking, being a no-show for restaurant reservations and giving fake reviews online are already included and the official government stance is that this social credit system and related punishment/reward system will cover the whole of Chinese society by 2020.
My complaint about how Slashdot operates relies on the fact that, despite having a well established user base who are arguably more educated and science savvy than your average person, it doesn't take that as an opportunity to do a more in-depth article than the major news outlets can achieve. In the past, we have had many successful Ask Me Anything (AMA) style posts from notable figures in the tech industry. I'd like to see Slashdot expand on that. Any time a new study comes out or a new tech is getting hyped, I think the Slashdot editors should try and approach the original authors/researchers/developers and ask them if they'd be willing to participate in an AMA session. Instead of endless debating the points that appear in the necessarily condensed news articles, go straight to the horses mouth and get the facts that the news articles left out, get corrections or clarifications for what those news articles published.
I note that, in this study, they did attempt to control for age, smoker or non and socio-economic factors, but there is no mention of controlling for level of risk inherent in those jobs. A better follow up study would take that same data set and control for established accident rates within each occupation. I believe that once you control for the accident rate the plumber/electrician/contractor fields have, the difference in life expectancy will shrink or even disappear altogether.
Along the same lines other, things we can't recycle today might well be recyclable in the near future. For the numerous rare earths used in electronics particularly, I can easily believe that a process can be developed that is more cost efficient as a source of rare earths than mining for new supplies. Viewed as ore, most electronics are actually richer sources of rare earths than the native ores they came from. In that light, any disposal method that leaves the elements inside basically irretrievable would short sighted,
To be honest though; once passing those classes, I stopped adhering to that for anything except the most formal of composition. (job cover letters, school assignments etc)
Automatically setting a flag on a web form submission is trivial, but only the most oblivious of PHB's would ever think of doing so. Sure Mozilla will sometimes refuse to address a complaint a user had, but a few points for you to ponder:
1)Mozilla is doing this essentially free for the user community. They are fortunate to have funding and revenue streams that allow them to do that. But it does require that they focus very carefully on what it is they want to achieve and to carefully weigh whether chasing every little bug is worth the manhours.
2)Sometimes things can't be fixed, not without breaking something else that large numbers of users depend on. My own experience is a case in point. Firefox 59.0.2 drastically changed huge amounts of the stuff "under the hood", so as to provide the increased security and faster browsing the majority of the user base was clamouring for. However, that meant that all my loved add-ons broke and in most cases, it just isn't possible to find anything that really replaces them because the underlying API's just don't exist in the new Firefox.
3) This is not unique to Mozilla by any means. Every major tech vendors do this to some degree, the only exceptions I know of are cases like Microsoft where they never tell you the status of a bug report at all. Mozilla is at least doing a good job of being transparent about their software maintenance.
4) Have you ever sat down and read a large number of those bug reports? Near as I can tell, the hostility of the tone in the bug report is inversely proportional to a) The severity of the bug and b) the technical savvy of the submitter. Every business has to deal with ignorant, stupid or just plain asshole customers. That doesn't mean any business has to waste any more time than the bare minimum satisfying them.
As an obvious requirement, the teams sent out to harvest this data would need to be equipped with something a little more advanced that your typical desktop scanner.Right now, when dealing with ancient texts, scans are done in the visual range, UV and IR, (full spectrum imaging) with more specialized scans (such as x-ray, x-ray fluorescence and hyper spectral imaging) being done in very few places. The Lazarus Project already has a portable multispectrum scanning set up, but they don't do any of the X-ray or gamma ray imaging stuff. There are many texts which are too fragile, or too precious to be transported to a European or North American University. so the ability to image in x-ray, thermal IR and gamma rays would be pretty important.
However; there is another factor going on that most Slashdotters don't seem to be aware of: According to multiple sources, the nuclear test site at Punggye-ri has collapsed and has been experiencing landslides. Apparently the whole mountain is caving in on itself. What I think happened is that the test explosions combined with an unforeseen fault in the mountain, catching the researchers off guard. There is no information regarding the fate of the researchers and all of their painfully acquired equipment of course, but it seems quite possible that a lot of un-replaceable equipment and perhaps even some key researchers were lost in the process.
Kim Jung-Un can't rattle the nuclear sabre if the sabre has been taken away. Much of the resources needed to pursue a nuclear program, both materials and know how, had to be smuggled in over the course of years or even decades. Anything North Korea lost in the geological event(s) will take years to replace. And, after rattling the nuclear sabre and having at least partial success in test explosions, the economic sanctions and blockades are going to be more carefully enforced. It may be impossible for North Korea to resume its research and testing in time to save it. Because...
Other reports last year hinted that North Korea was forecasting yet another massive famine for its people. The phrase that sticks in my mind was "A year when The People ate grass". Last summer, when the sabre rattling started to ramp up coincided with yet another drought in North Korea. I thought then, and still think now, that North Korea resorted to sabre rattling again to try and extort more famine relief from the west like it had done many times in the past. (Which the North Korean gov't has always spun as being "war reparations" to its people.)
The west has been predicting the collapse of North Korea for decades, only to be proven wrong again and again as the North Korean people prove just how much can be endured. However, this time I think the North Korean government is the one predicting a collapse.
In my opinion, the only barrier to North Korea formally surrendering and re-uniting the people is bargaining for some kind of escape and immunity for the upper echelons so that they can avoid justice for the massive toll of crimes and human rights violations they have perpetrated against their own people. I predict that we are going to see rumours of special arrangements for the top officials floated about to test public reception just before they make that a formal point in the peace talks.
1) Traditional keys are far more expensive, per unit, than the cards used by these systems. Most use small paper-based cards with a mag strip, which cost mere pennies each. These is offset by the expense of the locks of course, but that's a capital expense rather than an operating expense.
2) Because of the need for master keys for hotel staff, locks need to have three piece pins rather than the common two piece. Changing these requires a locksmith and changing all the locks invalidates all the keys, master and non. On the other hand, a key card system can not only let staff have master keys, it can let every staff member have their own unique "master key". So if you have to fire Agnes the room cleaner, you can invalidate her key card at the same time, ditto if she just lost her current one.
3) Similar to the problem with Agnes, guests are constantly losing keys. It is trivial to run off as many extra keys as needed. (which also allows multiple keys when dealing with double occupancy) 4) Many lock systems communicate with the central server over wi-fi, allowing front desk staff to disable a guests access if they want to make sure he comes down to the front desk to talk to them.
5) As the summary says, it allows granular control. If you fill a batch of rooms with a commercial client (like a work crew for example), you can give them the discounted commercial bulk rate and disable their access to the pool and so on. For special guests who require a lot of privacy, such as celebrities, politicians and people in hiding from an abusive spouse, you can disable the staff master key access if needed. The logic is the same as using permission based security in the IT world
6) Finally, traditional tumbler and wafer locks using keys are no more secure than these key cards, even in the vulnerable state the article describes. Lock picking is well known these days and a set of picks can be had or made even cheaper than the hand held mag strip writing device. You can't quite pick a lock using paper clips as easily as the movies suggest (paper clips aren't hard and springy enough) but it can be done with some locks. And a skill in picking locks and a basic set of picks opens far more doors and padlocks around the world than this key card exploit can. Note that master keyed traditional locks are often *easier* to pick than standard keyed locks, because you have two breaks, hence two chances per pin to get that pin unlocked. To open a lock only requires that every barrel have a break in the pins lined up in the cylinder, there is nothing preventing you from picking or creating a key which uses some of the master key bitting and some of the standard key bitting.
Second, as far as I know, every pharmaceutical marketer has a drug affordability of some kind. In fact I think it might be a little known requirement under US FDA regulations. Here is the official drug affordability site for the drug: Imbruvica cost support Any one who needs this drug (or any other life saving medication really) should look into these programs.
Sinclair Broadcast group is a huge player in the USA local TV station business. At present it owns over 25 stations across the country. Recently; every single station broadcast an editorial as part of their evening news show. They all used the exact same script. Every. Single. Station. Youtube has supercuts of this remarkable "coincidence" for those interested.
This obviously orchestrated piece raises serious questions about editorial independence in the news departments of those stations. I don't consider myself Right wing or part of the "You are Fake News!" crowd by any means , I don't even live in the US. But This troubles me. Yes, there is fake news going on, especially at the popular blog level, there is shoddy journalism no doubt. But I think the biggest problem is the echo chamber effect. People tend to get their information from only one source, almost always a source that already caters to their beliefs and preconceptions. After the fact corrections by the source don't carry nearly the same weight as the original story and corrections from other sources backed up by facts get attacked as Fake News or an attack on the person themselves. Having big media groups so obviously pulling the strings of newscasters only makes it easier for people to cling to their chosen echo chambers.
Our news sources must not only be fair, accurate and transparent, they must be SEEN to be such. This act by the Sinclair group shoots the entire US news industry in the foot. The less people feel they can trust traditional media sources, the more trust they'll put into overtly biased and hostile sources like The Daily Stormer.
I didn't like Facebook much even before the first scandals years ago, mainly because the social interaction between friends and family seemed so...high school in nature. Juvenile and puerile comments, unnecessary drama and annoying flash games were not something I was interested in participating in. I kept a profile only because it let me keep in touch with a few family members who had no other social media presence. After the Facebook Beacon scandal, I decided that keeping in touch with those people wasn't worth it. I carefully crafted a short message explaining my privacy concerns and reasons for deleting my profile and sent them to everyone I thought merited notice. Ironically, that set off a flame-fest where I got accused of spamming people. (ironic because most of the most vocal complainers were folks who had constantly filled my box with Farmville, Mafiawars and some Family Tree application spam...)
Thank you for the clarification.
My solution I think is the easiest and cheapest option: Install a "stingray" fake cell tower inside the building that routes all calls to the cell phone equivalent of /dev/null unless and until a code # is entered like your bog standard PBX uses to direct calls. That would allow these phones to actually make test 911 calls that don't reach the local 911 operators. But real 911 calls from within the building could get through by basically doing "please dial 7 for an outside line". Given the need to test many functions of a cell phone, including dialling calls, making Bluetooth, GPS and possibly FM connections, setting up a test environment that creates false signals on all those frequencies and channel access methods should have been a no-brainer when building the initial facility.
Sure, it is wrong for one political group to have such a decided advantage and I am far from being a Republican, still less a Trump supporter, but having a political organization show a bit more Internet savvy isn't a matter for private corporations to regulate. If the Republicans and Trump team got an advantage in the last election by doing this, you can be sure it is going to become an important part of the Democratic Party's strategy in the next election.
One last cynical note: Tactics like this help a party get insight into the will of the collective people. Which in turn allows them to say the right things to their target demographic and make the most effective attacks on the opposition. As noted above, it helps "get out the vote". I just see zero evidence that any of this actually affects the behaviour of political figures once they are elected.
Second, the Pioneer plaque is very simplified line art. Except for being able to say that neither being represented has an afro as is common among African and African descended peoples, claiming a specific ethnicity for either one is an exercise in projection by the viewer. To me, the couple looks like the main might be Hindi or Pakistani, the woman could be anything from Mongolian to Hawaiian. (I am small-m metis but can easily pass as white because "white" covers so many ethnic backgrounds) Being mere scratches on a gold plated piece of aluminium, there is no skin/eye colour information AT ALL. Nor is there enough detail to clearly say if an epicanthic fold is present on either person. (BTW: epicanthic folds are not uniquely Asian) While I'm at it, let me mention the fact that ethnic groups as we recognize them, are not hard and clear distinctions. Humanity is more like a spectrum, with ethnicities occupying overlapping areas of that spectrum.
Third; overall, this article and the questions it raises feel like a subtle attempt to politicize a subject that should be considered above politics. Who should represent Humanity for machine learning? The answer is "Use ALL of us!" There is no need to force a selection of some sub-set of humanity when doing this. Use as many images as you can to teach the machines. Any time and place we need to use a single example, like men's rooms, space probes etc, just use simplified line art like the Pioneer plaque does. (the team behind that plaques design knew the political ramifications of choosing a specific and identifiable ethnicity, so did their best to come up with the most general, simplified example they could.)
I'm retired now, but at my last job there was a well understood policy in place that locked down users machines, white-listed applications and sent emails to the admins when certain conditions were met or failed to be met. No one, except the owners of the business we served (and the legendary "brother in the sales dept") had permission to install anything or even change anything of any real substance. And all of that was effected by built in tools that came with the OS.
People are accustomed to being limited to a walled garden for Apple and Google since both have done so since day one. But Windows users are not. I think they are going to get a lot of push back from home desktop users and as I said above, it's really of no use to the professional market.
2) Facebook, like any other company, must and will turn over logs when required to by legal authorities. Where they operate in locked down countries, like China, failure to do so would only result in that application getting red-flagged in the great firewalls those countries filter all traffic through. In addition, the nation can and would seize any assets held in that country. How can a VPN like Facebooks "onnahole" operate if all connections are blocked at the national firewall, any one attempting to use it are automatically flagged for investigation and any and all Chinese Facebook assets are confiscated? Of greater concern would be when Facebook is pro-actively sharing traffic of interest with the relevant authorities. We've all seen the news stories about various major players on the Internet including backdoors and secret access to user traffic without even the flimsy excuse of a national security letter. Cooperating with authorities in a legal investigation is one thing, actively acting as a informer in advance of any investigation is another.
The only way I can someone to maintain browsing privacy would be to use an onion/garlic routing service like Tor or I2P and even then, only as long as the exit node (which the user can't choose) isn't in his or own country. But that leads to the problems of a) Such traffic is easy to detect at the ISP level, leading to possible investigation by authorities and b) such services are closely associated with straight up criminal behaviour like drugs, guns, stolen credit cards and child porn. That association with criminal activities means someone would have to hide possession of the application even from friends and family, lest they be branded a paedophile or drug dealer.
Maybe we can all start referring to it as the onnahole service? (we the users being the thing that gets fucked, rather than the person doing the fucking) It seems pretty obvious that this, like pretty much everything Facebook does, is designed from the ground up as a privacy raping source of ad revenue.
Personally, as far as age of consent laws go, I favour "close in age exemption" for young people under 18. I don't think a 14 and 16 yr old having sexual activity with each other is inherently wrong, but a legal adult being sexual with someone under 16 (where the nominal age of consent is 18) very much is.
In my experience, once a person is old enough to want to, they are going to, if they get the opportunity. Our duty as parents and as members of our society is to make sure our youths are educated early and thoroughly so that, if they choose to be sexually active, they can do so safely and ethically.
can someone mod this comment up?