Ugh. I hate security questions. It's a terrible security practice.
People don't seem to recognize that security is often only as good as the weakest point. It doesn't matter how strong your password is, if someone can reset the password by guessing an easily-guessed security question, then your account is easy to compromise. Some security questions can be guessed (e.g. "Who's your favorite movie director?"), some others may be available to be looked up (e.g. "What's your mother's maiden name?"), and some others may be used across multiple sites (e.g. if you answer "What's your mother's maiden name?" on two different sites and one is compromised, then they're both compromised).
When forced to answer security questions, I generate a random multi-word answer and store that in answer in my password manager. Unfortunately that just makes it a weird backup password that I have no idea if or when it might become relevant.
... and this is the problem with "zero rating". When T-Mobile makes makes a whole bunch of music and video services free without a clear and obvious bias for a particular company, people asked, "What's wrong with that?" and it was harder to point to a clear problem. For many consumers, those services being free seemed like a benefit with no real downside.
But I think it becomes much more clear when a wireless carrier starts zero-rating their own pay services. It's a private company leveraging its own control over public infrastructure to push people into using the services *they want you to use*. Make FIOS video streaming "free" so you will pay for that service, and then why would you pay for Netflix, Hulu, or whoever else? With those services, the data usage costs money when you use them on your mobile.
Though it may not be technically/legally an anti-trust violation, this move is ant-competitive at it's core. It violates the "free market forces" that would allow consumers to pay for the best service based on its merits. This is why people in favor of free markets should also favor net neutrality.
Hangouts has been a single unified app that gives consumer-grade IM, voice calls, and video conferencing. They're now splitting the functionality into two products: an audio/video conferencing app, and a text-based chat app. Further, each of those applications are have features added in the hopes of competing with existing business-grade solutions. The audio/video conferencing is getting some features to put it more in line with WebEx, while the text-based chat is being changed to be more like Slack.
That seems to be the basic idea, at least, as far as I can gather.
I've been using Hangouts to add people via phone numbers for years. So now the hangout has the ability to dial into it? So they just added the opposite connection direction?
Yeah, that seems to be the idea. I think they're saying that they've just streamlined the process for inviting people and allowing them to join Hangout meetings, with the aim to make it look more business-y so that businesses that use WebEx and GoToMeeting might use Hangouts instead. I don't use Hangouts enough to know all of what changes they'd need to do to make that happen, but they've been signaling for a while that they want to turn Hangouts into a business-oriented component of the G-Suite, in order to compete better with Office 365.
Yes, apparently they're repositioning Hangouts as a product. Instead of being Google's competitor to Apple's consumer-grade Facetime and Messages, they're positioning it as a business-grade competitor to WebEx and Slack.
I'm vaguely familiar with ITIL as a standard. If the story had been saying that ITIL is very important, I would have known what it was talking about. I'm just personally not familiar with the acronym ITSM, and I'm not sure what it means to say that ITSM is "key to digital transformation". When I looked it up, there seemed to be some association between ITSM and ITIL, but the relationship wasn't clear. In the wikipedia page, it says this about the relationship:
IT service management is often equated with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), even though there are a variety of standards and frameworks contributing to the overall ITSM discipline.
Obviously the wikipedia page isn't exactly an authority, but it seems to be saying that ITIL is a standard for ITSM, but that ITSM is a more general "discipline".
So I think I understand what you're saying, but I'm going to stick to my guns here and say that the article is meaningless drivel, and the term "ITSM" is a surprisingly accurate buzzword that refers vaguely to the management of IT services.
Ok, reading through this, "IT service management" and then the abbreviation "ITSM" clued me in that this is a new buzzword. I looked it up in the Wikipedia to see what this was all about, since I haven't heard this thrown around before:
IT service management (ITSM) refers to the entirety of activities – directed by policies, organized and structured in processes and supporting procedures – that are performed by an organization to plan, design, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers. It is thus concerned with the implementation of IT services that meet customers' needs, and it is performed by the IT service provider through an appropriate mix of people, process and information technology.
So that's nice. IT service management appears to be what it sounds like, i.e. the management of IT services. It sounds really official when you say that it's "directed by policies, organized and structured in processes and supporting procedures", but really, how else are you going to manage something? Oh, and those things are "performed by an organization to plan, design, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services". So... essentially, "IT service management" is when you manage your IT services by using management techniques to deliver IT services? Well aint that somethin.
The article seems similarly meaningless. Surveying people who manage IT finds that they believe, in order to make your IT services run well, you need manage IT services. This is supported with a quote from someone who is selling IT service management software. Is there anything else to this, or is this entirely useless?
While that number may seem high, consider that it costs (more or less) $9.99 a month to stream tens of thousands of songs, as opposed to dropping $10-15 on a single album to own it, either physically or digitally. That means people who subscribe to online streaming services aren't taking out an additional cost to listen to every new Future song or album or the same ones over and over again -- it's essentially free.
This is kind of bullshit. It's not "essentially free", it's essentially $9.99/month. To take me as an example, I had pretty much stopped buying music entirely until Spotify came along. I didn't buy new music anymore, and I didn't buy old music anymore. I was spending $0/month for a few years. Now I subscribe to Spotify, and I pay $9.99/month.
Now guess what happened: I surprising amount of the time, I listen to albums on Spotify that I already own. It's just easier to listen to them in Spotify than to keep them separate. When I'm listening to albums that I haven't purchased, I'm often listening to the same albums or playlists over and over again. To be honest, it's possible that I'm just not even getting my money's worth, that if I'd gathered up all those $9.99/month payments, I could have purchased all the music that I listen to.
On a side note, maybe you think that's foolish, but a big part of why I subscribe is that I don't want to spend time doing that math. I don't want to not-listen to a song that I like because I'm not sure whether it's worth the money. I'd rather just pay my $10/month and not have to think about it. But that's not the point of my post here.
The point is, I pay every month. Sometimes I'm paying to listen to stuff I've already paid to listen to, so it's not "essentially free". It's continually paying for the same content over and over again. Even when I listen to new music, that's no "essentially free", because last month's $10 went toward listening to last month. Everything I listen to this month is being paid for by this month's $10. That's how this works.
So no, I'm not taking out an additional cost for each individual song I listen to. Then again, people who purchase albums are not taking out an additional cost for continuing to listen to the same album they've already purchased. Therefore, calculating ratings based on sales may be a less accurate measure of a song's popularity. In sales, older songs and albums would be under-represented, since people who already own the album but continue to listen to it aren't being counted. Streaming services would be more likely to distinctly show a resurgence in popularity.
ZFS will guard against bit rot. That's not enough. RAID isn't enough.
Yeah, honestly, if you want your data to be really safe, it's not going to be enough to determine a storage medium and filesystem. You need a process.
Conceptually, the process needs to include having multiple copies in multiple locations. Each location needs to have a complete list of files along with a checksum for each file, and each file needs to be checked against that checksum on a regular basis. If a file is found to not match the checksum, you then need to have a mechanism whereby the same file is checked at other locations until a copy of the file is found that matches its checksum, and then *that* copy of the file needs to be redistributed to any locations where the file appeared to be corrupt.
I'm not sure if there's some kind of rsync/bittorrent-like file that will handle that for you automatically. I've thought about it before, that it would be nice if I could buy a series of NAS devices, and scatter them around different locations with some kind of archival redundant file system that does that. I suppose using Amazon/Azure/Google cloud storage might serve as well as anything, though, but I personally don't know exactly what kind of redundancy/integrity safeguards each of those services have in place.
Yes, that was sort of my point. If the police start searching the contents of people's phones randomly, it's a bigger issue. If it's only at borders, you know you're going to be crossing a border, so just wipe the phone in advance.
Honestly, IMO, as a general rule no javascript or web page content should be able to change anything outside of its own content and display. I think browsers should do away with anything that allows a page to change settings, resize windows, create popups, or anything else. If you want a link to open in a new window, you can right-click on it and say, "Open in New Window".
I know some web applications make use of some of these features in valid ways, but they should just find a different design for those features.
you will start seeing scientists predict cooling (and indeed, we already do often when there's a cold snap or a lot of snow, although it's usually blamed on global warming).
You're saying that scientists start predicting global cooling whenever there's a cold snap? Which scientists?
Because you're talking about your local weather, and I sincerely doubt that any reputable climate scientist would change their position on global warming based on your local weather.
I doubt they're doing away with Lightning. There are three main reasons why I think this:
1) As you pointed out, they just did away with the headphone jack last year. If they were going to move to USB-C, it would have made a lot more sense to do it at the same time as killing the headphone jack, so they could push USB-C headphones as the new standard. Instead, they've pushed Lightning headphones.
2) Part of the reason they dropped the headphone jack was to make the iPhone thinner. Lightning is a thinner/smaller port than USB-C, so it seems a better choice for thin/small devices. (I could be wrong, if Lightning requires bigger/more circuitry, but AFAIK, this isn't the case.)
3) Apple has recently released new products with Lightning ports. For example, the new BeatsX headphones use lightning for charging. If they were going to make a major change away from Lightning, it wouldn't make sense to continue to develop products that use it.
That's not to say Apple won't be pushing USB-C in other ways. I wouldn't be surprised to see a USB-C port on iPad pros, which might allow more peripherals or even some kind of fancy docking station. I think it's entirely possible that the new iPhones will come with a USB-C charging cord (USB-C on the side that plugs into your computer or wall charger, Lightning on the side that goes into the iPhone). I also wouldn't be shocked if Apple created a new version of Lightning with backwards compatibility, so that they could incorporate some USB-C/Thunderbolt features into the port.
But no, my baseless prediction is that they are not going to be ditching Lightning this year.
So, 160000 * 0.52 = 83,000 / 12 = ~$7K/month. 3K has just been taken away. That's 40% of his salary *just* for rent. $160k here is not living large,
Are you telling me that a single man can't live off of $4k/month, after rent? I've lived pretty extravagantly for far less. Plus, who said he has to live in a 2-bedroom house? Go down to a 1-bedroom apartment if you can't afford to pay your bills.
Sorry, it just sounds like whining to me. And don't give me any "But San Francisco is so expensive" crap. I live in NYC, which isn't exactly cheap either. If you think $160k isn't a livable wage, go talk to someone who makes minimum wage and find out what they go through.
I had a textbook from the 50s that was quite certain on the idea of the ice age coming. Now, it wasn't talking about an ice age in the next 30 years or being alarmist about it. It was just aware that another ice age that would probably happen.
I mean, yeah, there is such a thing as an "ice age" and there will probably be another one at some point over the entire history of the earth. It's a little beside the point. It's like saying, "Global warming is real, because my textbook says that the sun will eventually turn into a red giant and envelop the Earth, and then the Earth will be very hot." I mean... yeah, it's true, but that's not what we're talking about.
Every one of my science professors back in the early 1970s were talking about the possibility of a coming ice age.
Were they idly talking about the possibility, or were they studying it and coming to a conclusion, after rigorous scientific study?
I'm not trying to get into the whole name-calling thing, but I've heard professors talk about a lot of possibilities. It's a little different when those "possibilities" are considered pretty certain, after years of research and study.
On the other hand, I would admit that scientific conclusions are sometimes wrong. "Science" as a field is generally trending toward being more correct, but there are some bad conclusions along the way. Even in climatologists concluded that we were heading toward an ice age in the 1970s, it seems likely that we would have a better understanding of climate studies now, and most likely our conclusions would be more correct now than they were then.
One Twitter employee cited in the story, who earns a base salary of $160,000 a year, said his earnings are "pretty bad", adding that he pays $3000 rent for a two-bedroom house in San Francisco.
Now maybe my math is bad, but $3k/month is $36k/year. He makes $160k/year. As a rough estimate, let's say he pays 1/3 of his income in taxes, which means he's left with $106k in take-home pay. $106k - $36k is still $70k to spend on living expenses. That's around $5,833/month, or around $194/day.
Now that's just an estimate, admittedly, but the assumptions I'm making aren't completely crazy. If he can't manage to pay his bills or had to borrow money to make it though the month, barring any big unaccounted-for costs (e.g. a sick parent with expensive medical bills), then he's simply living extravagantly.
If you're worried about the border patrol, it seems pretty easy to know when you're approaching a border. You can just wipe the phone in advance using the built in feature to wipe the phone and return it to the factory settings.
The whole thing gets more complicated if we're assuming the police just start confiscating phones of random people without a warrant, but I'd imagine that would face a stronger 4th amendment challenge. And really, at that point, I don't think a kill switch would be good enough. I'd want manufacturers to rethink the whole security design, probably limiting the information stored on the phone in the first place.
For whatever extent you want to talk about the news itself being the cause of stress (which is fair to do), I think we have to look also look at the setup of the platforms, human nature, and the culture around social media, as likely contributing factors.
Because really, however bad the news was, 20 years ago you'd be waiting for the nightly news to find out about it. Several decades before that, you'd be waiting for the following day's newspaper. Now, we're getting constant updates, and those updates may be causing a device in your pocket to vibrate and make noise every time something new comes out. We know that checking all of those notifications is addictive, and not checking causes stress. However, constantly feeling the need to check also causes stress. (human nature)
Also, we have grown to expect that everyone is constantly online, always checking all of their platforms. Speaking for myself, I get messages via various social networks, and if I don't respond immediately, people freak out and take personal offense. Even when I try to remove those apps from my phone or turn off notifications, I get angry messages from people because I'm ignoring them. (culture)
I think it's also worth pointing out that most of these platforms are not really designed for occasional use. I've thought it would be nice if you could set a time-based digest of a social networking site. For example, instead of looking at Twitter, give me a weekly digest of the tweets that (based on some criteria) I'm going to be most likely to want to read and respond to. Only update Twitter at 9am on Sunday mornings with the 25 most important tweets of the week. But Twitter doesn't work that way. It's basically built on the idea that you're always looking, always paying attention, because if you stop paying attention for a day or two, you're just going to miss things and they'll get buried under a flood of other tweets. (the platforms)
Basically, I don't think we can do much about the human-nature aspect. Realistically, I don't foresee the platforms changing because they're providing the instant-feedback that people want. In my thinking, they key would be to change the culture and expectations around social media, which would change what we want from the platform, which would change the platform.
But then, intentionally changing culture is not so easy either.
Ok, so what's the "other way" that it goes? In the one case, you have "aggressive behavior by an employee goes unchecked because of poor management." What's the other way?
Are you interpreting one of the examples to be "aggressive behavior by management goes unchecked because of poor employee behavior"? Because then it would make sense to say, "It goes both ways." But I feel like, in both cases, it's a problem of bad management.
I documented all of this, got supporting statements from my colleagues, and went to HR - who basically said that she's untouchable because she's a minority and a woman.
I don't understand why you say, "Goes both ways". It seems like the same problem. Someone is abusive at work, but getting away with it due to poor management. This isn't "going both ways", it's "going the same way".
Unless you're just trying to make some kind of "I hate 'political correctness' and affirmative action!" argument, in which case, that's kind of off-topic.
Ruby may not be the hot thing anymore, but it's still a usable language, and there are still people using it. It's not as though the language became obsolete when the hype surrounding Rails died down.
I'm not sure we're disagreeing here. My point is that, contrary to the idea that, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," the people who genuinely have something to hide are likely to plan ahead and circumvent this security measure. If you're a terrorist and you know people are going to be asked to unlock your phone and computer, then you're just not going to store your terrorism plans on those devices.
The information the government is likely to gather from this is just a bunch of personal/private information from innocent people.
A large part of your response seems like you think you're arguing with me, but you're basically saying the same thing I am: This only works because it's a small company, and though you might not need a single person as the CEO in a larger company, you'll at least need a formal leadership with a formal decision-making process.
In other words, it's not about it being in Sweden, it's about the fact that it's a 40-person company. If they get much bigger, they'll need to do *something* to put some person or group of people "in charge".
However, I will comment on this:
With the EOE and labor laws in the US, do you think you can discriminate against the people who aren't right?
I don't see why not, as long as your definition of "people who aren't right" isn't about race, gender, or sexual orientation. That is, if your objection is something like, "This won't work once you have black employees!" then you should fuck right off. But labor laws don't really prevent other forms of discrimination, based on things like incompetence, lack of qualifications, or bad behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. I hate security questions. It's a terrible security practice.
People don't seem to recognize that security is often only as good as the weakest point. It doesn't matter how strong your password is, if someone can reset the password by guessing an easily-guessed security question, then your account is easy to compromise. Some security questions can be guessed (e.g. "Who's your favorite movie director?"), some others may be available to be looked up (e.g. "What's your mother's maiden name?"), and some others may be used across multiple sites (e.g. if you answer "What's your mother's maiden name?" on two different sites and one is compromised, then they're both compromised).
When forced to answer security questions, I generate a random multi-word answer and store that in answer in my password manager. Unfortunately that just makes it a weird backup password that I have no idea if or when it might become relevant.
... and this is the problem with "zero rating". When T-Mobile makes makes a whole bunch of music and video services free without a clear and obvious bias for a particular company, people asked, "What's wrong with that?" and it was harder to point to a clear problem. For many consumers, those services being free seemed like a benefit with no real downside.
But I think it becomes much more clear when a wireless carrier starts zero-rating their own pay services. It's a private company leveraging its own control over public infrastructure to push people into using the services *they want you to use*. Make FIOS video streaming "free" so you will pay for that service, and then why would you pay for Netflix, Hulu, or whoever else? With those services, the data usage costs money when you use them on your mobile.
Though it may not be technically/legally an anti-trust violation, this move is ant-competitive at it's core. It violates the "free market forces" that would allow consumers to pay for the best service based on its merits. This is why people in favor of free markets should also favor net neutrality.
Hangouts has been a single unified app that gives consumer-grade IM, voice calls, and video conferencing. They're now splitting the functionality into two products: an audio/video conferencing app, and a text-based chat app. Further, each of those applications are have features added in the hopes of competing with existing business-grade solutions. The audio/video conferencing is getting some features to put it more in line with WebEx, while the text-based chat is being changed to be more like Slack.
That seems to be the basic idea, at least, as far as I can gather.
I've been using Hangouts to add people via phone numbers for years. So now the hangout has the ability to dial into it? So they just added the opposite connection direction?
Yeah, that seems to be the idea. I think they're saying that they've just streamlined the process for inviting people and allowing them to join Hangout meetings, with the aim to make it look more business-y so that businesses that use WebEx and GoToMeeting might use Hangouts instead. I don't use Hangouts enough to know all of what changes they'd need to do to make that happen, but they've been signaling for a while that they want to turn Hangouts into a business-oriented component of the G-Suite, in order to compete better with Office 365.
Yes, apparently they're repositioning Hangouts as a product. Instead of being Google's competitor to Apple's consumer-grade Facetime and Messages, they're positioning it as a business-grade competitor to WebEx and Slack.
I'm vaguely familiar with ITIL as a standard. If the story had been saying that ITIL is very important, I would have known what it was talking about. I'm just personally not familiar with the acronym ITSM, and I'm not sure what it means to say that ITSM is "key to digital transformation". When I looked it up, there seemed to be some association between ITSM and ITIL, but the relationship wasn't clear. In the wikipedia page, it says this about the relationship:
IT service management is often equated with the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), even though there are a variety of standards and frameworks contributing to the overall ITSM discipline.
Obviously the wikipedia page isn't exactly an authority, but it seems to be saying that ITIL is a standard for ITSM, but that ITSM is a more general "discipline".
So I think I understand what you're saying, but I'm going to stick to my guns here and say that the article is meaningless drivel, and the term "ITSM" is a surprisingly accurate buzzword that refers vaguely to the management of IT services.
Ok, reading through this, "IT service management" and then the abbreviation "ITSM" clued me in that this is a new buzzword. I looked it up in the Wikipedia to see what this was all about, since I haven't heard this thrown around before:
IT service management (ITSM) refers to the entirety of activities – directed by policies, organized and structured in processes and supporting procedures – that are performed by an organization to plan, design, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers. It is thus concerned with the implementation of IT services that meet customers' needs, and it is performed by the IT service provider through an appropriate mix of people, process and information technology.
So that's nice. IT service management appears to be what it sounds like, i.e. the management of IT services. It sounds really official when you say that it's "directed by policies, organized and structured in processes and supporting procedures", but really, how else are you going to manage something? Oh, and those things are "performed by an organization to plan, design, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services". So... essentially, "IT service management" is when you manage your IT services by using management techniques to deliver IT services? Well aint that somethin.
The article seems similarly meaningless. Surveying people who manage IT finds that they believe, in order to make your IT services run well, you need manage IT services. This is supported with a quote from someone who is selling IT service management software. Is there anything else to this, or is this entirely useless?
From the summary:
While that number may seem high, consider that it costs (more or less) $9.99 a month to stream tens of thousands of songs, as opposed to dropping $10-15 on a single album to own it, either physically or digitally. That means people who subscribe to online streaming services aren't taking out an additional cost to listen to every new Future song or album or the same ones over and over again -- it's essentially free.
This is kind of bullshit. It's not "essentially free", it's essentially $9.99/month. To take me as an example, I had pretty much stopped buying music entirely until Spotify came along. I didn't buy new music anymore, and I didn't buy old music anymore. I was spending $0/month for a few years. Now I subscribe to Spotify, and I pay $9.99/month.
Now guess what happened: I surprising amount of the time, I listen to albums on Spotify that I already own. It's just easier to listen to them in Spotify than to keep them separate. When I'm listening to albums that I haven't purchased, I'm often listening to the same albums or playlists over and over again. To be honest, it's possible that I'm just not even getting my money's worth, that if I'd gathered up all those $9.99/month payments, I could have purchased all the music that I listen to.
On a side note, maybe you think that's foolish, but a big part of why I subscribe is that I don't want to spend time doing that math. I don't want to not-listen to a song that I like because I'm not sure whether it's worth the money. I'd rather just pay my $10/month and not have to think about it. But that's not the point of my post here.
The point is, I pay every month. Sometimes I'm paying to listen to stuff I've already paid to listen to, so it's not "essentially free". It's continually paying for the same content over and over again. Even when I listen to new music, that's no "essentially free", because last month's $10 went toward listening to last month. Everything I listen to this month is being paid for by this month's $10. That's how this works.
So no, I'm not taking out an additional cost for each individual song I listen to. Then again, people who purchase albums are not taking out an additional cost for continuing to listen to the same album they've already purchased. Therefore, calculating ratings based on sales may be a less accurate measure of a song's popularity. In sales, older songs and albums would be under-represented, since people who already own the album but continue to listen to it aren't being counted. Streaming services would be more likely to distinctly show a resurgence in popularity.
ZFS will guard against bit rot. That's not enough. RAID isn't enough.
Yeah, honestly, if you want your data to be really safe, it's not going to be enough to determine a storage medium and filesystem. You need a process.
Conceptually, the process needs to include having multiple copies in multiple locations. Each location needs to have a complete list of files along with a checksum for each file, and each file needs to be checked against that checksum on a regular basis. If a file is found to not match the checksum, you then need to have a mechanism whereby the same file is checked at other locations until a copy of the file is found that matches its checksum, and then *that* copy of the file needs to be redistributed to any locations where the file appeared to be corrupt.
I'm not sure if there's some kind of rsync/bittorrent-like file that will handle that for you automatically. I've thought about it before, that it would be nice if I could buy a series of NAS devices, and scatter them around different locations with some kind of archival redundant file system that does that. I suppose using Amazon/Azure/Google cloud storage might serve as well as anything, though, but I personally don't know exactly what kind of redundancy/integrity safeguards each of those services have in place.
Yes, that was sort of my point. If the police start searching the contents of people's phones randomly, it's a bigger issue. If it's only at borders, you know you're going to be crossing a border, so just wipe the phone in advance.
Honestly, IMO, as a general rule no javascript or web page content should be able to change anything outside of its own content and display. I think browsers should do away with anything that allows a page to change settings, resize windows, create popups, or anything else. If you want a link to open in a new window, you can right-click on it and say, "Open in New Window".
I know some web applications make use of some of these features in valid ways, but they should just find a different design for those features.
you will start seeing scientists predict cooling (and indeed, we already do often when there's a cold snap or a lot of snow, although it's usually blamed on global warming).
You're saying that scientists start predicting global cooling whenever there's a cold snap? Which scientists?
Because you're talking about your local weather, and I sincerely doubt that any reputable climate scientist would change their position on global warming based on your local weather.
I doubt they're doing away with Lightning. There are three main reasons why I think this:
1) As you pointed out, they just did away with the headphone jack last year. If they were going to move to USB-C, it would have made a lot more sense to do it at the same time as killing the headphone jack, so they could push USB-C headphones as the new standard. Instead, they've pushed Lightning headphones.
2) Part of the reason they dropped the headphone jack was to make the iPhone thinner. Lightning is a thinner/smaller port than USB-C, so it seems a better choice for thin/small devices. (I could be wrong, if Lightning requires bigger/more circuitry, but AFAIK, this isn't the case.)
3) Apple has recently released new products with Lightning ports. For example, the new BeatsX headphones use lightning for charging. If they were going to make a major change away from Lightning, it wouldn't make sense to continue to develop products that use it.
That's not to say Apple won't be pushing USB-C in other ways. I wouldn't be surprised to see a USB-C port on iPad pros, which might allow more peripherals or even some kind of fancy docking station. I think it's entirely possible that the new iPhones will come with a USB-C charging cord (USB-C on the side that plugs into your computer or wall charger, Lightning on the side that goes into the iPhone). I also wouldn't be shocked if Apple created a new version of Lightning with backwards compatibility, so that they could incorporate some USB-C/Thunderbolt features into the port.
But no, my baseless prediction is that they are not going to be ditching Lightning this year.
So, 160000 * 0.52 = 83,000 / 12 = ~$7K/month. 3K has just been taken away. That's 40% of his salary *just* for rent. $160k here is not living large,
Are you telling me that a single man can't live off of $4k/month, after rent? I've lived pretty extravagantly for far less. Plus, who said he has to live in a 2-bedroom house? Go down to a 1-bedroom apartment if you can't afford to pay your bills.
Sorry, it just sounds like whining to me. And don't give me any "But San Francisco is so expensive" crap. I live in NYC, which isn't exactly cheap either. If you think $160k isn't a livable wage, go talk to someone who makes minimum wage and find out what they go through.
I had a textbook from the 50s that was quite certain on the idea of the ice age coming. Now, it wasn't talking about an ice age in the next 30 years or being alarmist about it. It was just aware that another ice age that would probably happen.
I mean, yeah, there is such a thing as an "ice age" and there will probably be another one at some point over the entire history of the earth. It's a little beside the point. It's like saying, "Global warming is real, because my textbook says that the sun will eventually turn into a red giant and envelop the Earth, and then the Earth will be very hot." I mean... yeah, it's true, but that's not what we're talking about.
Even so, that should be enough to pay living expenses and student loans.
Every one of my science professors back in the early 1970s were talking about the possibility of a coming ice age.
Were they idly talking about the possibility, or were they studying it and coming to a conclusion, after rigorous scientific study?
I'm not trying to get into the whole name-calling thing, but I've heard professors talk about a lot of possibilities. It's a little different when those "possibilities" are considered pretty certain, after years of research and study.
On the other hand, I would admit that scientific conclusions are sometimes wrong. "Science" as a field is generally trending toward being more correct, but there are some bad conclusions along the way. Even in climatologists concluded that we were heading toward an ice age in the 1970s, it seems likely that we would have a better understanding of climate studies now, and most likely our conclusions would be more correct now than they were then.
Also:
One Twitter employee cited in the story, who earns a base salary of $160,000 a year, said his earnings are "pretty bad", adding that he pays $3000 rent for a two-bedroom house in San Francisco.
Now maybe my math is bad, but $3k/month is $36k/year. He makes $160k/year. As a rough estimate, let's say he pays 1/3 of his income in taxes, which means he's left with $106k in take-home pay. $106k - $36k is still $70k to spend on living expenses. That's around $5,833/month, or around $194/day.
Now that's just an estimate, admittedly, but the assumptions I'm making aren't completely crazy. If he can't manage to pay his bills or had to borrow money to make it though the month, barring any big unaccounted-for costs (e.g. a sick parent with expensive medical bills), then he's simply living extravagantly.
If you're worried about the border patrol, it seems pretty easy to know when you're approaching a border. You can just wipe the phone in advance using the built in feature to wipe the phone and return it to the factory settings.
The whole thing gets more complicated if we're assuming the police just start confiscating phones of random people without a warrant, but I'd imagine that would face a stronger 4th amendment challenge. And really, at that point, I don't think a kill switch would be good enough. I'd want manufacturers to rethink the whole security design, probably limiting the information stored on the phone in the first place.
For whatever extent you want to talk about the news itself being the cause of stress (which is fair to do), I think we have to look also look at the setup of the platforms, human nature, and the culture around social media, as likely contributing factors.
Because really, however bad the news was, 20 years ago you'd be waiting for the nightly news to find out about it. Several decades before that, you'd be waiting for the following day's newspaper. Now, we're getting constant updates, and those updates may be causing a device in your pocket to vibrate and make noise every time something new comes out. We know that checking all of those notifications is addictive, and not checking causes stress. However, constantly feeling the need to check also causes stress. (human nature)
Also, we have grown to expect that everyone is constantly online, always checking all of their platforms. Speaking for myself, I get messages via various social networks, and if I don't respond immediately, people freak out and take personal offense. Even when I try to remove those apps from my phone or turn off notifications, I get angry messages from people because I'm ignoring them. (culture)
I think it's also worth pointing out that most of these platforms are not really designed for occasional use. I've thought it would be nice if you could set a time-based digest of a social networking site. For example, instead of looking at Twitter, give me a weekly digest of the tweets that (based on some criteria) I'm going to be most likely to want to read and respond to. Only update Twitter at 9am on Sunday mornings with the 25 most important tweets of the week. But Twitter doesn't work that way. It's basically built on the idea that you're always looking, always paying attention, because if you stop paying attention for a day or two, you're just going to miss things and they'll get buried under a flood of other tweets. (the platforms)
Basically, I don't think we can do much about the human-nature aspect. Realistically, I don't foresee the platforms changing because they're providing the instant-feedback that people want. In my thinking, they key would be to change the culture and expectations around social media, which would change what we want from the platform, which would change the platform.
But then, intentionally changing culture is not so easy either.
Ok, so what's the "other way" that it goes? In the one case, you have "aggressive behavior by an employee goes unchecked because of poor management." What's the other way?
Are you interpreting one of the examples to be "aggressive behavior by management goes unchecked because of poor employee behavior"? Because then it would make sense to say, "It goes both ways." But I feel like, in both cases, it's a problem of bad management.
I documented all of this, got supporting statements from my colleagues, and went to HR - who basically said that she's untouchable because she's a minority and a woman.
I don't understand why you say, "Goes both ways". It seems like the same problem. Someone is abusive at work, but getting away with it due to poor management. This isn't "going both ways", it's "going the same way".
Unless you're just trying to make some kind of "I hate 'political correctness' and affirmative action!" argument, in which case, that's kind of off-topic.
Ruby may not be the hot thing anymore, but it's still a usable language, and there are still people using it. It's not as though the language became obsolete when the hype surrounding Rails died down.
I'm not sure we're disagreeing here. My point is that, contrary to the idea that, "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," the people who genuinely have something to hide are likely to plan ahead and circumvent this security measure. If you're a terrorist and you know people are going to be asked to unlock your phone and computer, then you're just not going to store your terrorism plans on those devices.
The information the government is likely to gather from this is just a bunch of personal/private information from innocent people.
Good thing terrorists will never think to do that.
A large part of your response seems like you think you're arguing with me, but you're basically saying the same thing I am: This only works because it's a small company, and though you might not need a single person as the CEO in a larger company, you'll at least need a formal leadership with a formal decision-making process.
In other words, it's not about it being in Sweden, it's about the fact that it's a 40-person company. If they get much bigger, they'll need to do *something* to put some person or group of people "in charge".
However, I will comment on this:
With the EOE and labor laws in the US, do you think you can discriminate against the people who aren't right?
I don't see why not, as long as your definition of "people who aren't right" isn't about race, gender, or sexual orientation. That is, if your objection is something like, "This won't work once you have black employees!" then you should fuck right off. But labor laws don't really prevent other forms of discrimination, based on things like incompetence, lack of qualifications, or bad behavior.