Ok, let me rephrase then: In retrospect, it might have been a good investment. But it was never a wise investment, any more than betting on horse races is a "wise investment".
Yeah, I think that's the right way to go about it. Get everyone using Firefox and LibreOffice, and whatever other open source applications. Once that's all done and working, swapping out the underlying OS is relatively trivial.
Bitcoin doesn't have "real value" if it's abandoned. That's what I mean when say it's "a string of essentially random bits". If it's not excepted as something that can be exchanged for money, then a bitcoin becomes no different from a random chunk of data that anyone can generate whenever they want. It becomes a defunct currency, except that a physical note from a defunct currency might still have value as a collector's item. It becomes like owning 1 share of stock in a company that went out of business.
If you want to make money, it is incumbent upon you to figure out what is a good investment and what is not, ignoring sayers.
Yes, and what I'm saying is that bitcoin is not, and never has been, a good investment. It has always been a gamble. It's been a gamble that paid off for a lot of people, but still a gamble. Calling it a "good investment" is like calling the roulette table a good investment because you happened to pay and win. It's a terrible place to invest your money, but it just happens to be paying out. For now.
Some cryptocurrency will always have value, just as tulips still sell for as much as $10.
I'm not so sure about that. When the mania fades, there's nothing to keep it from becoming totally worthless. I think it's entirely possible that, in 20 years, we'll be looking at it as a weird fad, like tulips or beanie babies. However, at least tulips are pretty flowers and beanie babies are stuffed animals, and some use can be made of them. The same can't really be said of a string of essentially random bits.
Now I think it's entirely possible that there will be some form of cryptocurrency in everyday use in 20 or 100 years. Even if so, I don't think we have any reason to think that cryptocurrency will be one that exists today, or even that it works the same way as current cryptocurrencies. I just also think it's entirely possible that some of the principles of cryptocurrencies (blockchains being used to verify transactions) could be used in various industries without an actual cryptocurrency.
Here's the thing though: The naysayers were right.
I know that'll be hard for a lot of people to understand, because they're operating in hindsight. In hindsight, yes, you can say, "I should have bought into bitcoin with everything I had as soon as possible, and then sold out when bitcoin was at its peak." However, that doesn't mean they were wrong at the time to say, "You shouldn't bother with bitcoin. It's nonsense."
It's sort of like... Imagine you're playing blackjack, and you have 20. Some idiot tells you to hit. You don't. The next card that comes up is an ace, and then the dealer gets 21. Ok, in hindsight, the idiot was correct, in a way. If you knew everything, exactly what was going to happen, you would know that if you'd taken the ace you would have won. But at the time, knowing what it was possible to know, the correct choice is to stand. When you have a blackjack hand of 20, you stand.
Admittedly, it's not exactly like that. There's not really a statistical model that makes the outcome of bitcoin so easy to predict. You can calculate the likelihood of a blackjack hand coming up, but no one can really tell you the likelihood that bitcoin will still have significant value in 2 years. With bitcoin, the idiot who's telling you to hit on 20 is also part of the system. That idiot is buying into bitcoin himself, and as long as there are enough idiots buying in, it'll keep the bubble going.
Still, it's speculation. It's gambling. At any given moment in the past several years, bitcoin was a bad bet. Putting your money into something so stupid and volatile isn't safe. However, it's also true that, in gambling, sometimes unsafe bets pay off big. If you make a big bet on a long-shot and it pays off, you end up looking like a genius. But betting on long-shots generally doesn't pay off, and if you keep going double-or-nothing on long-shots, you might run up some big winnings, but you'll eventually end up with nothing.
Yeah, some of the recent claims of voter fraud actually did come from analyzing voter records: They looked at all the records, and assumed that any two people with the same name and the same birthday (anywhere in the country) were probably the same person. Supposedly, that's where Trump got his claims that there were millions of fraudulent votes.
However, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the problem. First, think about the "[birthday paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem)". If you take 23 people at random, there's a >50% chance that two of them will have the same birthday. Now, think about the fact that there are a lot of common names. How many people are there named "John Smith" in the US? More than 23. Put those two facts together, and there's already a >50% chance that there are two people named "John Smith" that share a birthday in the US.
Now, it's more complicated than that. On the one hand, they looked at people who shared the same birthday in the same year, so you'd need more than 23 people to have a >50% chance of two people sharing a birthday. On the other hand, there are a lot more than 23 people named "John Smith". (I googled it quickly and came up with the number 47,193 men named "John Smith" in the US).
And there are other factors, too, like the fact that certain names are in style in certain years. The year that Frozen came out, lots of people named their daughters "Elsa", for example. So people with the same name are often more likely to be born in certain years, increasing the likelihood they'll have the same exact birthday. Also, for example, if you're a woman named "Holly" or "Christine", there's an increased likelihood that you were born on Christmas, or at least in December.
This has all been worked out in a study, and they eventually found there wasn't any sign of fraud.
I don't mind my PC being always connected. It pretty much already is. Where I'm going to get really upset is when my PC stops working properly when my internet is down for whatever reason.
Yeah, my first thought was "Microsoft probably wants your machine to be connected all the time so that they can push more ads and collect more telemetry." My second thought was, "Will they introduce some new 'feature' that makes it so these machines won't work when the Internet is unavailable?""
Given Microsoft's track record, neither would surprise me in the least.
They're like the last company selling operating systems. Everyone else just sells hardware and gives the OS away with the machine, either it be Apple's offerings, or your average Android smartphone.
I've had a general theory that Microsoft is planning to make a basic version of Windows free, and maybe even open source. Maybe not a "plan" exactly, but maybe they're entertaining the idea, and even preparing for the possibility in case they want to do it. They've been the embracing open source model more and more, and meanwhile seem to be pulling features from Windows Pro and making them Enterprise-only. I'd suspect Windows desktop licensing is a shrinking part of their revenue, and they've killed off any money coming in from Windows upgrades. The OS you use is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I could see them making Windows Pro essentially free as a way to promote their other platforms. Meanwhile, they can collect subscription fees for Windows Enterprise, and still sell Windows Server.
That's how gerrymandering works. You don't create districts for your own party to win, you create single safe districts for the other party to win to "contain" the opposition votes in one district so they don't affect the others.
Actually it's both, and they kind of work together. To make it simple, let's say you have a 100 voters that you need to break into 5 equal-sized "districts" of 20 people. Your party has 40 voters on your side, and your opposing party has 60. Let's assume for the sake of simplicity that everyone always votes for their own party. So how do you want to divide things up?
If you pick people at random, you'll tend toward getting districts that are representative of your entire population, i.e. a 60/40 split. If each district is divided approximately 60/40 (12 people vs 8 people), then your opponents will control all of the districts. Another option is to pack all of your opponents into districts together, and then they'll have 100% control over 3 districts and you'll have 100% control over 2 districts. You still lose.
Another option is to divide it so that you divide things so that, as much as possible, you have a very slim lead. Put 11 of your people in the first district, and 9 of your opponents. You control the district-- just barely, but you control it. That leaves you with 39 people, and your opponents with 51. Do that 2 more times, and you control 3 districts. You're left with 7 people, and your opponent has 33. It doesn't matter much what you do with the last two districts. You're going to lose them both, overwhelmingly. But... you'll notice that the result of this strategy is that you control 60% of the districts even though you only control 40% of the population.
It gets more complicated in real life, but that's the general strategy being employed. You try to divide things so that your opponents have a large minority in as many districts as possible, but in cases where your opponent has more people, it's only possible by packing your opponents votes into overwhelming majorities in a small number of districts.
I'm guessing it's a particularly useful strategy for Republicans, since Democrats tend to be city-folk who are already packing themselves into dense areas with overwhelmingly liberal populations.
does someone have to assist prosecutes in prosecuting them?
No. The 5th amendment generally says they do not. It's complicated, however, by the fact that people still need to comply with search warrants and subpoenas, and they're not permitted to destroy evidence.
So if you can be compelled to provide access to your apartment, can you be compelled to provide access to an encrypted drive? If you can be required to produce documents in your possession, can you be required to unencrypt those documents? If you're not allowed to burn documents, can you erase the unencryption key for those encrypted documents?
That is like saying that me not being allowed to take money from other people is an issue.
Not exactly. It'd be like saying... maybe something like, "Facebook presents some mental health issues." Yeah, there are issues. They're worth talking about. If you're going to jump straight to the conclusion that the government should make Facebook illegal, then you don't understand the issues, and your solution is impractical. But that doesn't mean you're wrong to identify it as an issue.
Similarly, law enforcement being unable to crack encryption is an issue. That doesn't mean that we should compromise encryption or build backdoors. If you think we should do that, then you don't understand the issue and your solution is impractical. But we should still be able to talk about the issue.
To be honest, I don't think he's exactly wrong to say that unbreakable encryption is a public safety issue. It's an issue. It's an issue we can debate and think about and talk about. If encryption is unbreakable, then it makes it harder for law enforcement to do certain things that they might validly want to do.
On the other hand, if people can't encrypt their data (or that encryption is breakable), then it creates an entirely different set of problems. People can't safeguard their data or protect their systems. It increases the vulnerability of our infrastructure. It increases the chances that criminals and terrorists can gain access to important and private information.
There are going to be real valid problems either way. There should be open discussions about what all of those problems are, and how we can mitigate them. But ultimately, I don't think breakable encryption (or backdoored encryption) is a viable long-term option, even if we were willing to live in a police state. The ability to break or circumvent encryption will inevitably fall into the hands of criminals.
Given the fact that he's a giant elderly toddler, I don't doubt it. However, this might be the one instance where I'd be ok with letting it slide. If the government wants to do any kind of economic stimulus, building and repairing infrastructure is probably the best thing it can do (assuming the infrastructure is needed and not just a boondoggle).
Building decent internet infrastructure might be one of the best options, as far as building infrastructure goes. The modern economy runs on computers and internet. Even if you're not doing anything specifically technological, the increased access to information, communication, and collaboration provides increased opportunity and efficiency. (That's an oversimplification, but true enough) Having access to the Internet is also vital for education, in order to get students prepared to work in this economy.
There are other good options. Overhauling the electric grid. Building out solar or wind farms. Repairing existing roads and bridges. Building a decent rail system. I'm sure others. Do it for cities, do it for more rural communities. It'll create opportunities for economic growth wherever you do it.
Well if you want to look at the big picture, areas that have dense population tend to tilt blue. Areas that have dense populations also need more local taxes in order to deal with the increased need to regulation and infrastructure-- i.e. the 300 square miles of NYC needs more spending and upkeep than 300 square miles in the middle of nowhere.
But also, that 300 square miles around NYC produces a disproportionate amount of economic activity and tax revenue. The 300 square miles in the middle of nowhere contributes almost nothing to American economy, at least not in any direct way. That 300 square miles is probably getting subsidized with more tax money than it's generating.
but they will use their excuse that it was to save battery life and money for the customer.
That's not quite what they said. They said as the battery got older and didn't work as well, a surge of activity could cause the phone to draw more power than the battery could deliver, which caused the phone to turn itself off. They already had functionality to throttle the CPU in order to save battery life, so they adjusted the way that functionality worked to prevent the phones from crashing.
I think LordKronos was pointing out that the login page seemed to disallow you from trying to log into that account via a dynamic update to the web page (You went to log in and the text box updated with an X). Hopefully they actually did something more substantive to block the login, rather than simply inserting a script that blocks using that login-- the reason being that an attacker could block the script from running.
That's a bunch of speculation, and hopefully WD isn't that stupid.
"Well, it depends on what you like," the salesman said, somewhat coyly.
Honestly, I don't see why this is anything about the correct answer. Which phone you should buy *does* depend on what you like. You want a small iPhone? The iPhone SE is for you. You want a cheap iPhone? Again, the iPhone SE. You want one of those giant iPhones? The iPhone 8 Plus is a good choice. You want a solid Android phone? Maybe the Google Pixel 2 is a good option?
The iPhone X is a good option if you're looking for Apple's bleeding-edge phone, and have no qualms paying a premium for it. Apple said at launch that they were calling it the iPhone X (X being the roman numeral for 10) because it was what they thought the future iPhone would look like. They marketed buying the iPhone X like if you were buying a concept car. It's cool and future-looking, but expensive and maybe not thoroughly tested and thought-out. Whether that's bullshit or not, my point is that they didn't even market it as "This is the phone for everyone." They marketed it as, "This is the phone for the people who want the latest coolest thing. Otherwise, get one of our normal phones."
Cases are a necessity because these devices are designed to be fragile
I don't know if that's fair. Shortly after the first iPhone was released, it became evident that people kept cracking the screen, and people started buying cases. People buy cases for pretty much every smart phone, not just Apple's. But people still like their phones to be as thin and light as possible, so that's what Apple provides.
unfortunately every handset OEM is convinced they must follow Apple's lead.
It kind of works both ways. I think one of the worst design decisions that Apple's made with the iPhone is to go big. In my personal view, the iPhone SE is still the "right size" for a phone to be, but Apple saw that big Android phones were selling, so they had to mimic it.
Well again, I think I still wouldn't call it a failure just because the deadline is missed. I think you can label it a failure if the outcome is bad. If you're talking specifically about software development, if the release is a buggy piece of crap, that's a failure.
So if your manager sets the goal to implement a bunch of new features by a certain arbitrary, but they instead implement those feature later than that deadline, and then it's all good and everything works great, that doesn't seem like a failure to me. If, instead, they drop some of the proposed features for that release, but still release a substantial high-quality update by the deadline, that also doesn't seem like a failure to me. Sometimes you might include some aspirational goals that you don't expect to reach anyway, but as long as you get done the things that actually need to get done, by the time they need to get done, that's a success.
However, if management insists on reaching arbitrary goals by arbitrary deadlines, and the result is a bunch of overworked developers pushing out buggy updates with crappy half-finished features, then that's a failure. That's bad management.
In disciplines like Operations Research the rule is to never fill the work queue greater than 75% [1]. Otherwise if anything goes wrong you're hosed.
I guess my point here would be, if you fill it to 100%, or even 120%, but everything is properly prioritized and you're ok with only that 75% getting completed, then what's the difference?
I might give someone 20 tasks to do before a set deadline with the understanding that they'll only complete around 7 of them. Why? Because I could be wrong. Maybe he can do 10. Or 15. There's no reason for anyone to run out of things to do. I could be wrong in the other direction, and he only completes 5. The important thing is to prioritize, and to know which tasks actually have to be completed. It might be that we really only need those 5 tasks completed before the deadline and we're fine. Or it could be that we needed him to complete 6 tasks, in which case, we'll have to push the deadline back. And that might be fine as long as that deadline is arbitrary. It's still not a failure, and doesn't necessarily need an analysis of what went wrong, because nothing really went wrong.
If I'm giving 20 tasks and a deadline that only allows 7 tasks to be completed, and I still expect all 20 to be complete, that's when there's a problem. If only 7 tasks got completed when you really needed 20 by the deadline, and the deadline wasn't arbitrary, then that's a failure that requires analysis.
Yes, I agree that your plan should have wiggle room. I think that's what you mean. I've always padded my estimates for timelines and budgets, and I try to underplay what I expect to be able to deliver. Not to be dishonest or get away with anything, but more like operating on the Scotty Principle.(definition, source, source)
But basically, I'll take the amount of time that I think something will take. Then I double it. Then I pad it some more. And then, even then, I expect that I'm not actually going to meet my deadline. I run the whole project on the expectation that things will go far worse then expected, even when I'm planning for everything to go wrong, and then I plan ahead for what sacrifices I can live with.
One of the glib ways I've described my whole process is, "I don't make plans. I make contingency plans." That is, I don't spend too much time trying to figure out how things will work if everything goes according to plan. I put my effort into figuring out all the various ways things could go wrong, what I should prioritize in case of a disaster, and various ways I can delivery my highest priorities in the worst-case scenario. Over the years, I've found that it's a much more effective way to think about projects.
I understand that, but I would say that, in that sense, almost every project will "fail". Even if everyone does everything right, it's rare that a project will deliver everything it set out to, on time and within budget. It's not even really the fault of the person who developed the plan or managed the project, but just the fact that things rarely go according to plan. The only way to make sure you don't "fail" is to set meager goals to achieve within extremely unambitious deadlines and over-inflated budget.
In that context, I don't think that it's necessarily good to think of it as "failure". If you have a long list of deliverables and you cut a bunch to meet a deadline, but the deadline matters and you get the features you actually need, that's at least a partial success. Maybe it's a total success, if the requirements you started out with had a bunch of unnecessary and unrealistic fluff. Or if you miss an arbitrary deadline that didn't really matter and produce all your deliverables shortly after, that could be a total success too.
Not all deadlines, deliverables, and budgets are created equal. The way I see it is, part of being a good project manager is assessing which things really matter, and then prioritizing those things. If the deadline is extremely important and you get all the deliverables you really needed by that deadline, then yes, you "made the deadline" even if you didn't produce every aspirational deliverable you set out to produce. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yeah, I have a sort of theory of project management that dictates that deadlines can't be taken in isolation. They're actually a part of a triumvirate of priorities: the deadline, the budget, and the required deliverables.
When you're starting a project, you should have a deadline, a budget, and a list of what is to be delivered. However, you should expect by default that not all of them will be met. So then you have to know, which ones can you sacrifice, and how much can you sacrifice them?
For example, let's say you discover that you're not going to be able to meet your deadline. Really, that's not the right way to think about it, in terms of "not meeting your deadline". You might possibly be able to meet your deadline if you throw more resources at it (expand your budget). You can certainly meet your deadline if you cut back on your deliverables (i.e. just deliver whatever you have). So given those options, would you prefer to go over budget to make the deadline, make the deadline by shipping whatever you have, or not deliver on the deadline?
And there's not a real "correct answer". It depends on the project. Sometimes you can't sacrifice one to meet the others. Often, a project will require that you break all three: You'll go over budget, past the deadline, and you won't meet your design specs. However, you have to decide how much you can break which ones. For any project, there's some dollar amount budget that you just can't afford to go over, and some deadline that you can't go past.
The whole thing is way more complicated than what I'm portraying here, but my basic concept here is in line with the quote, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy." You should have a plan with a deadline, budget, and deliverables, but understand that things aren't going to go according to plan. The real question is, when things go sideways, what are you willing to settle for? What parts of the plan are you willing to give up? In some ways, the answer to that question is more important than the actual plan you came up with in the first place.
Why is it bad that the people always favor things that they would like?
I think the point that "Registered Coward" was trying to make is that you have a bunch of "anti-federalists" who claim to object to actions by the Federal government on principle, but who will then happily endorse Federal action when it's in favor of their own pet politics. Basically, he's accusing people of hypocrisy.
Like you have people who are pro-gun, who don't like the idea of the Federal government doing any gun control because it's "Federal overreach". They want gun regulations, if there are any, to be set by the state. They argue that it makes more sense because the culture around guns and the need for a gun in Wyoming may be very different than in Washington D.C., so the people in Washington shouldn't make rules for Wyoming. Ok. Fair enough. I wouldn't necessarily say that's the end of the discussion, but it's a valid point.
But then those same people will propose a Federal law mandating that a gun permit from any state should be honored in all states. Basically, if Wyoming allows any random idiot without training to carry a concealed weapon, they want the Federal government to intervene and tell every other state to allow those same idiots to carry a concealed weapon. It's still the Federal government trying to override the state's decisions on gun control, but when the Federal government is overriding the states in a way they like, they're fine with it. Ergo, the objection to "Federal overreach" is not based on any principle. It's really just that they don't like what the federal government is doing, so they're making up fake "principles" for rhetorical purposes.
Not that there aren't genuine libertarians and anti-federalists, but a lot of the "libertarians" aren't libertarians, and the "anti-federalists" aren't opposed to federal action. A lot of them are a bunch of crybabies who are making up nonsense because they aren't getting their way.
Good! If the citizens of California and New York feel these rules are necessary and important they should be able to dictate such rules as they see fit.
That's nice in theory, and it may be what needs to happen if the Federal government abdicates its responsibilities. BUT there's also a problem with this setup: Instead of having one Federal law to abide by, any company whose operations cross state lines will need to juggle different regulations for each state. They need to parse the laws in each state, change their rules and processes in each state, and possibly contend with different lawsuits/penalties in each state.
That sort of thing costs a bunch of money and creates a bunch of inefficiencies. It makes it harder to run a business.
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Ok, let me rephrase then: In retrospect, it might have been a good investment. But it was never a wise investment, any more than betting on horse races is a "wise investment".
Yeah, I think that's the right way to go about it. Get everyone using Firefox and LibreOffice, and whatever other open source applications. Once that's all done and working, swapping out the underlying OS is relatively trivial.
Bitcoin doesn't have "real value" if it's abandoned. That's what I mean when say it's "a string of essentially random bits". If it's not excepted as something that can be exchanged for money, then a bitcoin becomes no different from a random chunk of data that anyone can generate whenever they want. It becomes a defunct currency, except that a physical note from a defunct currency might still have value as a collector's item. It becomes like owning 1 share of stock in a company that went out of business.
If you want to make money, it is incumbent upon you to figure out what is a good investment and what is not, ignoring sayers.
Yes, and what I'm saying is that bitcoin is not, and never has been, a good investment. It has always been a gamble. It's been a gamble that paid off for a lot of people, but still a gamble. Calling it a "good investment" is like calling the roulette table a good investment because you happened to pay and win. It's a terrible place to invest your money, but it just happens to be paying out. For now.
Some cryptocurrency will always have value, just as tulips still sell for as much as $10.
I'm not so sure about that. When the mania fades, there's nothing to keep it from becoming totally worthless. I think it's entirely possible that, in 20 years, we'll be looking at it as a weird fad, like tulips or beanie babies. However, at least tulips are pretty flowers and beanie babies are stuffed animals, and some use can be made of them. The same can't really be said of a string of essentially random bits.
Now I think it's entirely possible that there will be some form of cryptocurrency in everyday use in 20 or 100 years. Even if so, I don't think we have any reason to think that cryptocurrency will be one that exists today, or even that it works the same way as current cryptocurrencies. I just also think it's entirely possible that some of the principles of cryptocurrencies (blockchains being used to verify transactions) could be used in various industries without an actual cryptocurrency.
Here's the thing though: The naysayers were right.
I know that'll be hard for a lot of people to understand, because they're operating in hindsight. In hindsight, yes, you can say, "I should have bought into bitcoin with everything I had as soon as possible, and then sold out when bitcoin was at its peak." However, that doesn't mean they were wrong at the time to say, "You shouldn't bother with bitcoin. It's nonsense."
It's sort of like... Imagine you're playing blackjack, and you have 20. Some idiot tells you to hit. You don't. The next card that comes up is an ace, and then the dealer gets 21. Ok, in hindsight, the idiot was correct, in a way. If you knew everything, exactly what was going to happen, you would know that if you'd taken the ace you would have won. But at the time, knowing what it was possible to know, the correct choice is to stand. When you have a blackjack hand of 20, you stand.
Admittedly, it's not exactly like that. There's not really a statistical model that makes the outcome of bitcoin so easy to predict. You can calculate the likelihood of a blackjack hand coming up, but no one can really tell you the likelihood that bitcoin will still have significant value in 2 years. With bitcoin, the idiot who's telling you to hit on 20 is also part of the system. That idiot is buying into bitcoin himself, and as long as there are enough idiots buying in, it'll keep the bubble going.
Still, it's speculation. It's gambling. At any given moment in the past several years, bitcoin was a bad bet. Putting your money into something so stupid and volatile isn't safe. However, it's also true that, in gambling, sometimes unsafe bets pay off big. If you make a big bet on a long-shot and it pays off, you end up looking like a genius. But betting on long-shots generally doesn't pay off, and if you keep going double-or-nothing on long-shots, you might run up some big winnings, but you'll eventually end up with nothing.
Yeah, some of the recent claims of voter fraud actually did come from analyzing voter records: They looked at all the records, and assumed that any two people with the same name and the same birthday (anywhere in the country) were probably the same person. Supposedly, that's where Trump got his claims that there were millions of fraudulent votes.
However, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the problem. First, think about the "[birthday paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem)". If you take 23 people at random, there's a >50% chance that two of them will have the same birthday. Now, think about the fact that there are a lot of common names. How many people are there named "John Smith" in the US? More than 23. Put those two facts together, and there's already a >50% chance that there are two people named "John Smith" that share a birthday in the US.
Now, it's more complicated than that. On the one hand, they looked at people who shared the same birthday in the same year, so you'd need more than 23 people to have a >50% chance of two people sharing a birthday. On the other hand, there are a lot more than 23 people named "John Smith". (I googled it quickly and came up with the number 47,193 men named "John Smith" in the US).
And there are other factors, too, like the fact that certain names are in style in certain years. The year that Frozen came out, lots of people named their daughters "Elsa", for example. So people with the same name are often more likely to be born in certain years, increasing the likelihood they'll have the same exact birthday. Also, for example, if you're a woman named "Holly" or "Christine", there's an increased likelihood that you were born on Christmas, or at least in December.
This has all been worked out in a study, and they eventually found there wasn't any sign of fraud.
I don't mind my PC being always connected. It pretty much already is. Where I'm going to get really upset is when my PC stops working properly when my internet is down for whatever reason.
Yeah, my first thought was "Microsoft probably wants your machine to be connected all the time so that they can push more ads and collect more telemetry." My second thought was, "Will they introduce some new 'feature' that makes it so these machines won't work when the Internet is unavailable?""
Given Microsoft's track record, neither would surprise me in the least.
They're like the last company selling operating systems. Everyone else just sells hardware and gives the OS away with the machine, either it be Apple's offerings, or your average Android smartphone.
I've had a general theory that Microsoft is planning to make a basic version of Windows free, and maybe even open source. Maybe not a "plan" exactly, but maybe they're entertaining the idea, and even preparing for the possibility in case they want to do it. They've been the embracing open source model more and more, and meanwhile seem to be pulling features from Windows Pro and making them Enterprise-only. I'd suspect Windows desktop licensing is a shrinking part of their revenue, and they've killed off any money coming in from Windows upgrades. The OS you use is becoming increasingly irrelevant.
I could see them making Windows Pro essentially free as a way to promote their other platforms. Meanwhile, they can collect subscription fees for Windows Enterprise, and still sell Windows Server.
That's how gerrymandering works. You don't create districts for your own party to win, you create single safe districts for the other party to win to "contain" the opposition votes in one district so they don't affect the others.
Actually it's both, and they kind of work together. To make it simple, let's say you have a 100 voters that you need to break into 5 equal-sized "districts" of 20 people. Your party has 40 voters on your side, and your opposing party has 60. Let's assume for the sake of simplicity that everyone always votes for their own party. So how do you want to divide things up?
If you pick people at random, you'll tend toward getting districts that are representative of your entire population, i.e. a 60/40 split. If each district is divided approximately 60/40 (12 people vs 8 people), then your opponents will control all of the districts. Another option is to pack all of your opponents into districts together, and then they'll have 100% control over 3 districts and you'll have 100% control over 2 districts. You still lose.
Another option is to divide it so that you divide things so that, as much as possible, you have a very slim lead. Put 11 of your people in the first district, and 9 of your opponents. You control the district-- just barely, but you control it. That leaves you with 39 people, and your opponents with 51. Do that 2 more times, and you control 3 districts. You're left with 7 people, and your opponent has 33. It doesn't matter much what you do with the last two districts. You're going to lose them both, overwhelmingly. But... you'll notice that the result of this strategy is that you control 60% of the districts even though you only control 40% of the population.
It gets more complicated in real life, but that's the general strategy being employed. You try to divide things so that your opponents have a large minority in as many districts as possible, but in cases where your opponent has more people, it's only possible by packing your opponents votes into overwhelming majorities in a small number of districts.
I'm guessing it's a particularly useful strategy for Republicans, since Democrats tend to be city-folk who are already packing themselves into dense areas with overwhelmingly liberal populations.
does someone have to assist prosecutes in prosecuting them?
No. The 5th amendment generally says they do not. It's complicated, however, by the fact that people still need to comply with search warrants and subpoenas, and they're not permitted to destroy evidence.
So if you can be compelled to provide access to your apartment, can you be compelled to provide access to an encrypted drive? If you can be required to produce documents in your possession, can you be required to unencrypt those documents? If you're not allowed to burn documents, can you erase the unencryption key for those encrypted documents?
That is like saying that me not being allowed to take money from other people is an issue.
Not exactly. It'd be like saying... maybe something like, "Facebook presents some mental health issues." Yeah, there are issues. They're worth talking about. If you're going to jump straight to the conclusion that the government should make Facebook illegal, then you don't understand the issues, and your solution is impractical. But that doesn't mean you're wrong to identify it as an issue.
Similarly, law enforcement being unable to crack encryption is an issue. That doesn't mean that we should compromise encryption or build backdoors. If you think we should do that, then you don't understand the issue and your solution is impractical. But we should still be able to talk about the issue.
Instead, they applied the throttle to everything.
Not according the the analysis I saw. They basically slowed things down when the CPU was drawing a lot of power.
To be honest, I don't think he's exactly wrong to say that unbreakable encryption is a public safety issue. It's an issue. It's an issue we can debate and think about and talk about. If encryption is unbreakable, then it makes it harder for law enforcement to do certain things that they might validly want to do.
On the other hand, if people can't encrypt their data (or that encryption is breakable), then it creates an entirely different set of problems. People can't safeguard their data or protect their systems. It increases the vulnerability of our infrastructure. It increases the chances that criminals and terrorists can gain access to important and private information.
There are going to be real valid problems either way. There should be open discussions about what all of those problems are, and how we can mitigate them. But ultimately, I don't think breakable encryption (or backdoored encryption) is a viable long-term option, even if we were willing to live in a police state. The ability to break or circumvent encryption will inevitably fall into the hands of criminals.
Given the fact that he's a giant elderly toddler, I don't doubt it. However, this might be the one instance where I'd be ok with letting it slide. If the government wants to do any kind of economic stimulus, building and repairing infrastructure is probably the best thing it can do (assuming the infrastructure is needed and not just a boondoggle).
Building decent internet infrastructure might be one of the best options, as far as building infrastructure goes. The modern economy runs on computers and internet. Even if you're not doing anything specifically technological, the increased access to information, communication, and collaboration provides increased opportunity and efficiency. (That's an oversimplification, but true enough) Having access to the Internet is also vital for education, in order to get students prepared to work in this economy.
There are other good options. Overhauling the electric grid. Building out solar or wind farms. Repairing existing roads and bridges. Building a decent rail system. I'm sure others. Do it for cities, do it for more rural communities. It'll create opportunities for economic growth wherever you do it.
Well if you want to look at the big picture, areas that have dense population tend to tilt blue. Areas that have dense populations also need more local taxes in order to deal with the increased need to regulation and infrastructure-- i.e. the 300 square miles of NYC needs more spending and upkeep than 300 square miles in the middle of nowhere.
But also, that 300 square miles around NYC produces a disproportionate amount of economic activity and tax revenue. The 300 square miles in the middle of nowhere contributes almost nothing to American economy, at least not in any direct way. That 300 square miles is probably getting subsidized with more tax money than it's generating.
but they will use their excuse that it was to save battery life and money for the customer.
That's not quite what they said. They said as the battery got older and didn't work as well, a surge of activity could cause the phone to draw more power than the battery could deliver, which caused the phone to turn itself off. They already had functionality to throttle the CPU in order to save battery life, so they adjusted the way that functionality worked to prevent the phones from crashing.
I think LordKronos was pointing out that the login page seemed to disallow you from trying to log into that account via a dynamic update to the web page (You went to log in and the text box updated with an X). Hopefully they actually did something more substantive to block the login, rather than simply inserting a script that blocks using that login-- the reason being that an attacker could block the script from running.
That's a bunch of speculation, and hopefully WD isn't that stupid.
"Well, it depends on what you like," the salesman said, somewhat coyly.
Honestly, I don't see why this is anything about the correct answer. Which phone you should buy *does* depend on what you like. You want a small iPhone? The iPhone SE is for you. You want a cheap iPhone? Again, the iPhone SE. You want one of those giant iPhones? The iPhone 8 Plus is a good choice. You want a solid Android phone? Maybe the Google Pixel 2 is a good option?
The iPhone X is a good option if you're looking for Apple's bleeding-edge phone, and have no qualms paying a premium for it. Apple said at launch that they were calling it the iPhone X (X being the roman numeral for 10) because it was what they thought the future iPhone would look like. They marketed buying the iPhone X like if you were buying a concept car. It's cool and future-looking, but expensive and maybe not thoroughly tested and thought-out. Whether that's bullshit or not, my point is that they didn't even market it as "This is the phone for everyone." They marketed it as, "This is the phone for the people who want the latest coolest thing. Otherwise, get one of our normal phones."
Cases are a necessity because these devices are designed to be fragile
I don't know if that's fair. Shortly after the first iPhone was released, it became evident that people kept cracking the screen, and people started buying cases. People buy cases for pretty much every smart phone, not just Apple's. But people still like their phones to be as thin and light as possible, so that's what Apple provides.
unfortunately every handset OEM is convinced they must follow Apple's lead.
It kind of works both ways. I think one of the worst design decisions that Apple's made with the iPhone is to go big. In my personal view, the iPhone SE is still the "right size" for a phone to be, but Apple saw that big Android phones were selling, so they had to mimic it.
Well again, I think I still wouldn't call it a failure just because the deadline is missed. I think you can label it a failure if the outcome is bad. If you're talking specifically about software development, if the release is a buggy piece of crap, that's a failure.
So if your manager sets the goal to implement a bunch of new features by a certain arbitrary, but they instead implement those feature later than that deadline, and then it's all good and everything works great, that doesn't seem like a failure to me. If, instead, they drop some of the proposed features for that release, but still release a substantial high-quality update by the deadline, that also doesn't seem like a failure to me. Sometimes you might include some aspirational goals that you don't expect to reach anyway, but as long as you get done the things that actually need to get done, by the time they need to get done, that's a success.
However, if management insists on reaching arbitrary goals by arbitrary deadlines, and the result is a bunch of overworked developers pushing out buggy updates with crappy half-finished features, then that's a failure. That's bad management.
In disciplines like Operations Research the rule is to never fill the work queue greater than 75% [1]. Otherwise if anything goes wrong you're hosed.
I guess my point here would be, if you fill it to 100%, or even 120%, but everything is properly prioritized and you're ok with only that 75% getting completed, then what's the difference?
I might give someone 20 tasks to do before a set deadline with the understanding that they'll only complete around 7 of them. Why? Because I could be wrong. Maybe he can do 10. Or 15. There's no reason for anyone to run out of things to do. I could be wrong in the other direction, and he only completes 5. The important thing is to prioritize, and to know which tasks actually have to be completed. It might be that we really only need those 5 tasks completed before the deadline and we're fine. Or it could be that we needed him to complete 6 tasks, in which case, we'll have to push the deadline back. And that might be fine as long as that deadline is arbitrary. It's still not a failure, and doesn't necessarily need an analysis of what went wrong, because nothing really went wrong.
If I'm giving 20 tasks and a deadline that only allows 7 tasks to be completed, and I still expect all 20 to be complete, that's when there's a problem. If only 7 tasks got completed when you really needed 20 by the deadline, and the deadline wasn't arbitrary, then that's a failure that requires analysis.
Yes, I agree that your plan should have wiggle room. I think that's what you mean. I've always padded my estimates for timelines and budgets, and I try to underplay what I expect to be able to deliver. Not to be dishonest or get away with anything, but more like operating on the Scotty Principle.(definition, source, source)
But basically, I'll take the amount of time that I think something will take. Then I double it. Then I pad it some more. And then, even then, I expect that I'm not actually going to meet my deadline. I run the whole project on the expectation that things will go far worse then expected, even when I'm planning for everything to go wrong, and then I plan ahead for what sacrifices I can live with.
One of the glib ways I've described my whole process is, "I don't make plans. I make contingency plans." That is, I don't spend too much time trying to figure out how things will work if everything goes according to plan. I put my effort into figuring out all the various ways things could go wrong, what I should prioritize in case of a disaster, and various ways I can delivery my highest priorities in the worst-case scenario. Over the years, I've found that it's a much more effective way to think about projects.
I understand that, but I would say that, in that sense, almost every project will "fail". Even if everyone does everything right, it's rare that a project will deliver everything it set out to, on time and within budget. It's not even really the fault of the person who developed the plan or managed the project, but just the fact that things rarely go according to plan. The only way to make sure you don't "fail" is to set meager goals to achieve within extremely unambitious deadlines and over-inflated budget.
In that context, I don't think that it's necessarily good to think of it as "failure". If you have a long list of deliverables and you cut a bunch to meet a deadline, but the deadline matters and you get the features you actually need, that's at least a partial success. Maybe it's a total success, if the requirements you started out with had a bunch of unnecessary and unrealistic fluff. Or if you miss an arbitrary deadline that didn't really matter and produce all your deliverables shortly after, that could be a total success too.
Not all deadlines, deliverables, and budgets are created equal. The way I see it is, part of being a good project manager is assessing which things really matter, and then prioritizing those things. If the deadline is extremely important and you get all the deliverables you really needed by that deadline, then yes, you "made the deadline" even if you didn't produce every aspirational deliverable you set out to produce. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yeah, I have a sort of theory of project management that dictates that deadlines can't be taken in isolation. They're actually a part of a triumvirate of priorities: the deadline, the budget, and the required deliverables.
When you're starting a project, you should have a deadline, a budget, and a list of what is to be delivered. However, you should expect by default that not all of them will be met. So then you have to know, which ones can you sacrifice, and how much can you sacrifice them?
For example, let's say you discover that you're not going to be able to meet your deadline. Really, that's not the right way to think about it, in terms of "not meeting your deadline". You might possibly be able to meet your deadline if you throw more resources at it (expand your budget). You can certainly meet your deadline if you cut back on your deliverables (i.e. just deliver whatever you have). So given those options, would you prefer to go over budget to make the deadline, make the deadline by shipping whatever you have, or not deliver on the deadline?
And there's not a real "correct answer". It depends on the project. Sometimes you can't sacrifice one to meet the others. Often, a project will require that you break all three: You'll go over budget, past the deadline, and you won't meet your design specs. However, you have to decide how much you can break which ones. For any project, there's some dollar amount budget that you just can't afford to go over, and some deadline that you can't go past.
The whole thing is way more complicated than what I'm portraying here, but my basic concept here is in line with the quote, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy." You should have a plan with a deadline, budget, and deliverables, but understand that things aren't going to go according to plan. The real question is, when things go sideways, what are you willing to settle for? What parts of the plan are you willing to give up? In some ways, the answer to that question is more important than the actual plan you came up with in the first place.
Why is it bad that the people always favor things that they would like?
I think the point that "Registered Coward" was trying to make is that you have a bunch of "anti-federalists" who claim to object to actions by the Federal government on principle, but who will then happily endorse Federal action when it's in favor of their own pet politics. Basically, he's accusing people of hypocrisy.
Like you have people who are pro-gun, who don't like the idea of the Federal government doing any gun control because it's "Federal overreach". They want gun regulations, if there are any, to be set by the state. They argue that it makes more sense because the culture around guns and the need for a gun in Wyoming may be very different than in Washington D.C., so the people in Washington shouldn't make rules for Wyoming. Ok. Fair enough. I wouldn't necessarily say that's the end of the discussion, but it's a valid point.
But then those same people will propose a Federal law mandating that a gun permit from any state should be honored in all states. Basically, if Wyoming allows any random idiot without training to carry a concealed weapon, they want the Federal government to intervene and tell every other state to allow those same idiots to carry a concealed weapon. It's still the Federal government trying to override the state's decisions on gun control, but when the Federal government is overriding the states in a way they like, they're fine with it. Ergo, the objection to "Federal overreach" is not based on any principle. It's really just that they don't like what the federal government is doing, so they're making up fake "principles" for rhetorical purposes.
Not that there aren't genuine libertarians and anti-federalists, but a lot of the "libertarians" aren't libertarians, and the "anti-federalists" aren't opposed to federal action. A lot of them are a bunch of crybabies who are making up nonsense because they aren't getting their way.
Good! If the citizens of California and New York feel these rules are necessary and important they should be able to dictate such rules as they see fit.
That's nice in theory, and it may be what needs to happen if the Federal government abdicates its responsibilities. BUT there's also a problem with this setup: Instead of having one Federal law to abide by, any company whose operations cross state lines will need to juggle different regulations for each state. They need to parse the laws in each state, change their rules and processes in each state, and possibly contend with different lawsuits/penalties in each state.
That sort of thing costs a bunch of money and creates a bunch of inefficiencies. It makes it harder to run a business.