Being freed from repetitive, menial labor should allow us to do something more meaningful.
Yes, it would be nice if all those poor unemployed people could do meaningful things like start a business, or write that novel they've always dreamed about. But who's going to pay them for that? And how are they going to feed their families in the meantime?
People have enough trouble finding work when there are all these repetitive menial jobs. They'd be doing something more meaningful if they could, but the option isn't there. When those menial jobs go away, it's not clear what they can move on to.
Up till now, I thought they were the victims of sophisticated Russian ex-KGB agents using quantum cryptanalysis. But it turns out they fell for a common phishing scam written by some script kiddie.
It's not necessarily an "either/or" sort of thing, i.e. either "sophisticated Russian hackers" or "phishing scam". Social engineering is an effective attack vector, and it's not unusual for sophisticated hackers to make use of it, sometimes in tandem with other methods. Phishing scams sometimes use some kind of other access or research to determine who is a good target within an organization, or how the email should be crafted to elicit the desired response. Then, once some kind of access is gained from phishing, the attacker may use that access to attack other targets.
It's possible that it was a sophisticated Russian attacker making use of phishing.
You can report iMessages that look like spam or junk from the Messages app. If you get an iMessage from someone who's not saved in your Contacts, you'll see a Report Junk link under the message. Tap the link to forward the sender's information and the message to Apple.
Not only are their statistics vague (in that they're saying "more than before" without numbers), but they may be misleading. They're citing the fact that their trade-in program is doing well. It may be that people are trading in an old Mac they don't use anymore in order to get a discount on a Surface, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a new Mac isn't still their primary machine.
I mean, it's possible that people are trading in their Macs for Surface en masse, but I wouldn't trust Microsoft's claims on that. For all the people who might be disappointed that Apple has replaced function keys with a touchscreen on the new MacBook Pro, is seems hard to believe that the solution would be to use a tablet.
The reality is that the tech industry has reached a dead end with the death of Moore's Law.
Is the problem really processing power, though? For a system like this, it seems like there are other problems bound to creep up:
* AFAIK, we still don't have good enough AI to figure out a spacial 3D world from visual input. I know it's still being worked on and there's been progress, but being able to place objects in the real world in this kind of augmented reality requires that the computer can figure out the layout of 3D objects within the real world.
* Even if you can render the graphics and place them appropriately in the world, there's still the problem of designing the UI. You need to create both the visual look of the interface, and figure out which gestures to use for different controls. The interface (input and feedback) needs to be easy and intuitive and provide clear feedback to user interaction.
* You also need to make the gestures such that they're read by the computer reliably-- that is, if I'm supposed to do a specific hand motion to activate a feature, the hand motion needs to be something that the computer will recognize almost every time it is performed, it needs to be distinct enough from other control gestures and natural gestures. Basically, people need to be able to control these systems without constantly activating various controls by accident.
These are fairly difficult problems for computers to figure out, and as far as I know, they're not really a problem of insufficient computing power. That is, as far as I know, it's not like we've developed code that can do these things and a UI that works well, but we need a computer 5x as powerful to run it in real-time. The problem is that we just don't have the design/code to do it.
First, the amount of time spent watching stuff is a poor metric by itself. What you really want to know is the amount of enjoyment people get out of the service. Admittedly that is very hard to measure accurately, which is why they want to use "hours spent watching" as a more easily determinable value.
One of the things that I think is important to keep in mind is, a lot of people just turn on the TV when they get home. They just turn on *something*. They might take a nap or leave the room. They might be reading things online. They still just have *something* playing on the TV.
So it's not just a question of whether or not they're enjoying the TV show they're watching, but also a question of whether they're really watching the TV show that they're streaming.
In a monopsony, there are many suppliers, but one customer who will buy it
Do you mean "many suppliers, but one distributor"? Because that would be more accurate. The issue that I'm talking about (and also Apple iTunes) is not that there's a single "customer". there are millions of customers. But one business that has taken over resale and distribution.
Movie and TV studios took note, and vowed they would never be controlled like that so they are ensuring that no one service will become dominant and be forced to acquiesce to whatever terms they provide.
I agree that part of the reason for the things I describe is that video content owners have been trying to avoid the situation the record industry created with Apple iTunes and Spotify. Spotify has done the same thing, to a degree, in that you can stream almost any music you want for a single subscription fee. As a result, the role of music in our society has drastically changed. Recorded music is almost a commodity. People don't associate the same value to the product that they used to. Record companies make a tiny amount of money from each song on Spotify, and they're trying to make it up in bulk. Studios don't want the same thing to happen with movies and TV.
Streaming is reshaping the way we view movies and TV anyway.
The fragmentation is intentional, on the part of the content owners. Believe me, everyone knows that a lot of people want a single streaming service with all content. It's just not what copyright owners and ISPs want.
Let's say Netflix suddenly had the rights to stream all movies, TV shows, and live events, and became the service that pretty much everyone used. Even if they raised prices quite a lot, people would still sign up for it. However, a company like Comcast would then be relegated to being a "dumb pipe". People would still pay them for Internet access, but they'd lose most of their revenue for cable TV or streaming services of their own. It's actually in Comcast's interest to keep streaming services insufficient to replace cable, so that people will continue paying for cable.
A company like HBO wouldn't like it, either. They could continue to make money by licensing their original shows, but that's not the only way that they make money. Even for their streaming services, they make money by bundling a bunch of content and charging more per month than you would probably pay for their original shows. However, a decent chunk of income comes from deals with cable providers, which would dry up quickly once everyone had moved to Netflix.
Even the networks and production companies that produce shows probably wouldn't like it, for the most part. Right now, they can license the same show or movie to Amazon, HBO, iTunes, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and any other services they like. You're forced to pay for a bunch of different services, and they get a small cut of each of those services' incomes. If the number of services were cut, they might also make less money from that one service than the aggregate of all of the other many services you're paying for. After all, you may be subscribing to some of those services for only one or two shows (because a fair amount of the content on each is available on the others), but the extra money still gets split among content owners.
And all of that still hasn't touched on the fear of one company controlling the whole market of video distributions. If Netflix were to get access to all content before the other streaming services, then they could become a de facto monopoly, and control distribution for all the different content owners. Even if all of the streaming services suddenly had access to all content, they would lose most of their marketing leverage. They would only be able to compete on things like the quality of their apps, the quality and bandwidth usage of their streams, or price. You and I might think that sounds great, but it's not really what the industry wants.
What does this have to do with Ubuntu? AMD ended their support.
In fairness, I don't read him as saying that it's Ubuntu's fault. He's saying that the drivers for his graphics card became insufficient. Even if it's AMD's fault, it's still a problem that may impact some users.
If you are on Slashdot and haven't switched to Linux by now, then it seems extremely unlikely that you ever will.
Not necessarily. For some of us, we use Linux in some contexts and would prefer to use it, but there's at least one thing keeping us stuck on another platform. I'll stop using Windows as soon as I'm able, but it just hasn't hit that point yet.
I think the single biggest problem with 3D printing is that most people don't have any idea what they would use it for. It's a neat concept, and it does seem useful that you could create a custom-made little plastic doodad of any specifications you want. The idea of being able to share designs seems to also have potential. Still, if someone gave me a 3D printer for free, I can't think of what I would use it for.
Maybe I just don't have enough imagination, but I think most of the population probably has even less than I do. There are only so many little plastic pieces of junk I need in my life. I think I'd get more use out of an automated loom that could make clothes, or an automated printer/binder that could make books. Or a system that made custom Ikea pieces for assembling custom furniture. I suppose you could make plastic furniture with a big enough 3D printer, but I don't want plastic furniture-- or a big enough 3D printer for that.
I've read through articles online about all the useful things you could make with your 3D printer. It's always stuff like book ends or door stops. Basically stuff that I don't really need, but if I did, the same purpose could be served by a small rock.
"What about all of those people who have been out of work for over a year, and stopped looking?"
A bunch of them are retired, or decided to be homemakers?
Also, there's a limit to how much you can say "the job market is bad" because some people have stopped looking for work. Even just talking about those who stopped looking for work because the economy is bad, the job market could improve, and if they're still not looking for work, they're still not going to find a job.
Call it what you want. It's still filtering out a lot of messages so that you'll never see them.
The only real difference that I see is that the filtering is done by users of the site, rather than by an administrator. And as I said, the administrators still intervene at times. I also think that Twitter might be too unruly a setup for a moderation scheme. It's not really a discussion forum.
I tend to agree. In fairness, though, I think part of the reason it works it that moderation effectively removes a lot of the worst of what people say. It's still basically censorship. The administrators will also step in sometimes when someone who is being abusing of the system.
It's not as though Slashdot is absolutely uncensored. If it were, I'm not sure I would like this site.
And just as much as the freedom of speech protects your ability to say something, it equally protects my right to refuse to provide you with a platform for saying it. The owners of Slashdot have every right to delete this comment that I'm writing right now. They have every right to lock my account and even block my IP address.
The great irony here is that Trump is busy empowering people who oppose net neutrality while his followers complain about a private company controlling the content of their own website. Forget about Twitter, ending net neutrality would allow ISPs to exercise much more strict control over your access to the whole Internet, potentially blocking or slowing traffic that they don't feel is advantageous to their business. If Verizon decides they're anti-Trump, they could just block access to his websites because "Fuck you, it's our network and we'll do what we want." The principle that the Internet is communication infrastructure and should treat traffic without bias-- that's the concept Trump is looking to tear down.
I agree. Facebook is allowed to control their API and terms of service. The real shame is that we've all allowed ourselves to be penned into proprietary/closed "social networking" sites for our communications.
It's not even an issue of cost. A lot of content owners don't want Netflix to have a complete catalog. NBC/Universal/Comcast, for example, controls a lot of content and *also* services for distributing content. If you can get all of the Comcast content without paying for Comcast services, then Comcast loses a bunch of money. Comcast will, therefore, go out of its way to hobble Netflix and prevent it from having access to all of it's content.
People around here hate C# (those that do) because it's from MS. When it comes to MS, there are no technical merits that can redeem the technology. They are not rational people.
The complaints I've heard didn't generally sound so irrational. I thought the consensus was "It seems like a good language, but still most useful in building things for Windows. Maybe that will change as the cross-platform stuff improves, but for now, I'll stick with [whatever language they're using]." Admittedly, I'm not a real programmer and only get a sense for what programmers think from this site.
a Federal judge could order a company that continues operating against a court order to pay a daily fine until they stop
And then the company could say it stopped. Or it could stop temporarily. Or they could put a tiny little drop of real aloe into each bottle, say, "Fine it has aloe now," and call it a day.
Or they could order an import ban on the product should they exist outside the US.
And then the company can restructure a little, sell the same product under a different brand name, and hope no one notices. No matter what, you need something in the government that has the ability to monitor what's happening in the market, looking for fraud and abuse, setting some basic fair rules, and enforcing those rules. The federal judge cannot actively go looking for abuse, cannot proactively set rules (can only decide particular matters brought into court), and has no direct ability to enforce.
You wanted to end the kleptocracy, so you elected the guy who said that it's impossible for him to have a conflict of interest? The guy who, already before getting elected, has started merging his personal business with government business, and leveraging his political position to drive customers to his private business? The guy who has repeatedly cheated on his taxes, refused to pay vendors and contractors the money they're owed, and driven several businesses into the ground?
Good luck with that. It's almost as funny as the people who say that they voted for Trump because they're tired of rich, arrogant, entitled people from big cities running the country, and they wanted someone who understood the plight of the common man.
To clarify my position above, I'm not opposed to calling foul if you find actual evidence of fraud. If someone finds reason to believe fraud has happened without real evidence, then it should be reported to the proper authorities and investigated to see if credible evidence can be found. However, unless and until evidence is found, the results of the election should be accepted.
I'm not a Trump supporter. That's just my consistent opinion of how elections should work.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens once they're in the cells? Are they eventually broken down or excreted?
Being freed from repetitive, menial labor should allow us to do something more meaningful.
Yes, it would be nice if all those poor unemployed people could do meaningful things like start a business, or write that novel they've always dreamed about. But who's going to pay them for that? And how are they going to feed their families in the meantime?
People have enough trouble finding work when there are all these repetitive menial jobs. They'd be doing something more meaningful if they could, but the option isn't there. When those menial jobs go away, it's not clear what they can move on to.
Up till now, I thought they were the victims of sophisticated Russian ex-KGB agents using quantum cryptanalysis. But it turns out they fell for a common phishing scam written by some script kiddie.
It's not necessarily an "either/or" sort of thing, i.e. either "sophisticated Russian hackers" or "phishing scam". Social engineering is an effective attack vector, and it's not unusual for sophisticated hackers to make use of it, sometimes in tandem with other methods. Phishing scams sometimes use some kind of other access or research to determine who is a good target within an organization, or how the email should be crafted to elicit the desired response. Then, once some kind of access is gained from phishing, the attacker may use that access to attack other targets.
It's possible that it was a sophisticated Russian attacker making use of phishing.
From Apple:
You can report iMessages that look like spam or junk from the Messages app. If you get an iMessage from someone who's not saved in your Contacts, you'll see a Report Junk link under the message. Tap the link to forward the sender's information and the message to Apple.
Not only are their statistics vague (in that they're saying "more than before" without numbers), but they may be misleading. They're citing the fact that their trade-in program is doing well. It may be that people are trading in an old Mac they don't use anymore in order to get a discount on a Surface, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a new Mac isn't still their primary machine.
I mean, it's possible that people are trading in their Macs for Surface en masse, but I wouldn't trust Microsoft's claims on that. For all the people who might be disappointed that Apple has replaced function keys with a touchscreen on the new MacBook Pro, is seems hard to believe that the solution would be to use a tablet.
The reality is that the tech industry has reached a dead end with the death of Moore's Law.
Is the problem really processing power, though? For a system like this, it seems like there are other problems bound to creep up:
* AFAIK, we still don't have good enough AI to figure out a spacial 3D world from visual input. I know it's still being worked on and there's been progress, but being able to place objects in the real world in this kind of augmented reality requires that the computer can figure out the layout of 3D objects within the real world.
* Even if you can render the graphics and place them appropriately in the world, there's still the problem of designing the UI. You need to create both the visual look of the interface, and figure out which gestures to use for different controls. The interface (input and feedback) needs to be easy and intuitive and provide clear feedback to user interaction.
* You also need to make the gestures such that they're read by the computer reliably-- that is, if I'm supposed to do a specific hand motion to activate a feature, the hand motion needs to be something that the computer will recognize almost every time it is performed, it needs to be distinct enough from other control gestures and natural gestures. Basically, people need to be able to control these systems without constantly activating various controls by accident.
These are fairly difficult problems for computers to figure out, and as far as I know, they're not really a problem of insufficient computing power. That is, as far as I know, it's not like we've developed code that can do these things and a UI that works well, but we need a computer 5x as powerful to run it in real-time. The problem is that we just don't have the design/code to do it.
How about the regulations that give these few companies control over a large portion of the usable radio bandwidth?
First, the amount of time spent watching stuff is a poor metric by itself. What you really want to know is the amount of enjoyment people get out of the service. Admittedly that is very hard to measure accurately, which is why they want to use "hours spent watching" as a more easily determinable value.
One of the things that I think is important to keep in mind is, a lot of people just turn on the TV when they get home. They just turn on *something*. They might take a nap or leave the room. They might be reading things online. They still just have *something* playing on the TV.
So it's not just a question of whether or not they're enjoying the TV show they're watching, but also a question of whether they're really watching the TV show that they're streaming.
In a monopsony, there are many suppliers, but one customer who will buy it
Do you mean "many suppliers, but one distributor"? Because that would be more accurate. The issue that I'm talking about (and also Apple iTunes) is not that there's a single "customer". there are millions of customers. But one business that has taken over resale and distribution.
Movie and TV studios took note, and vowed they would never be controlled like that so they are ensuring that no one service will become dominant and be forced to acquiesce to whatever terms they provide.
I agree that part of the reason for the things I describe is that video content owners have been trying to avoid the situation the record industry created with Apple iTunes and Spotify. Spotify has done the same thing, to a degree, in that you can stream almost any music you want for a single subscription fee. As a result, the role of music in our society has drastically changed. Recorded music is almost a commodity. People don't associate the same value to the product that they used to. Record companies make a tiny amount of money from each song on Spotify, and they're trying to make it up in bulk. Studios don't want the same thing to happen with movies and TV.
Streaming is reshaping the way we view movies and TV anyway.
The fragmentation is intentional, on the part of the content owners. Believe me, everyone knows that a lot of people want a single streaming service with all content. It's just not what copyright owners and ISPs want.
Let's say Netflix suddenly had the rights to stream all movies, TV shows, and live events, and became the service that pretty much everyone used. Even if they raised prices quite a lot, people would still sign up for it. However, a company like Comcast would then be relegated to being a "dumb pipe". People would still pay them for Internet access, but they'd lose most of their revenue for cable TV or streaming services of their own. It's actually in Comcast's interest to keep streaming services insufficient to replace cable, so that people will continue paying for cable.
A company like HBO wouldn't like it, either. They could continue to make money by licensing their original shows, but that's not the only way that they make money. Even for their streaming services, they make money by bundling a bunch of content and charging more per month than you would probably pay for their original shows. However, a decent chunk of income comes from deals with cable providers, which would dry up quickly once everyone had moved to Netflix.
Even the networks and production companies that produce shows probably wouldn't like it, for the most part. Right now, they can license the same show or movie to Amazon, HBO, iTunes, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and any other services they like. You're forced to pay for a bunch of different services, and they get a small cut of each of those services' incomes. If the number of services were cut, they might also make less money from that one service than the aggregate of all of the other many services you're paying for. After all, you may be subscribing to some of those services for only one or two shows (because a fair amount of the content on each is available on the others), but the extra money still gets split among content owners.
And all of that still hasn't touched on the fear of one company controlling the whole market of video distributions. If Netflix were to get access to all content before the other streaming services, then they could become a de facto monopoly, and control distribution for all the different content owners. Even if all of the streaming services suddenly had access to all content, they would lose most of their marketing leverage. They would only be able to compete on things like the quality of their apps, the quality and bandwidth usage of their streams, or price. You and I might think that sounds great, but it's not really what the industry wants.
What does this have to do with Ubuntu? AMD ended their support.
In fairness, I don't read him as saying that it's Ubuntu's fault. He's saying that the drivers for his graphics card became insufficient. Even if it's AMD's fault, it's still a problem that may impact some users.
If you are on Slashdot and haven't switched to Linux by now, then it seems extremely unlikely that you ever will.
Not necessarily. For some of us, we use Linux in some contexts and would prefer to use it, but there's at least one thing keeping us stuck on another platform. I'll stop using Windows as soon as I'm able, but it just hasn't hit that point yet.
I think the single biggest problem with 3D printing is that most people don't have any idea what they would use it for. It's a neat concept, and it does seem useful that you could create a custom-made little plastic doodad of any specifications you want. The idea of being able to share designs seems to also have potential. Still, if someone gave me a 3D printer for free, I can't think of what I would use it for.
Maybe I just don't have enough imagination, but I think most of the population probably has even less than I do. There are only so many little plastic pieces of junk I need in my life. I think I'd get more use out of an automated loom that could make clothes, or an automated printer/binder that could make books. Or a system that made custom Ikea pieces for assembling custom furniture. I suppose you could make plastic furniture with a big enough 3D printer, but I don't want plastic furniture-- or a big enough 3D printer for that.
I've read through articles online about all the useful things you could make with your 3D printer. It's always stuff like book ends or door stops. Basically stuff that I don't really need, but if I did, the same purpose could be served by a small rock.
So what if I don't have any apps on my Roku/AppleTV that serve ads? How does Facebook determine which shows are being streamed by which IP addresses?
"What about all of those people who have been out of work for over a year, and stopped looking?"
A bunch of them are retired, or decided to be homemakers?
Also, there's a limit to how much you can say "the job market is bad" because some people have stopped looking for work. Even just talking about those who stopped looking for work because the economy is bad, the job market could improve, and if they're still not looking for work, they're still not going to find a job.
Call it what you want. It's still filtering out a lot of messages so that you'll never see them.
The only real difference that I see is that the filtering is done by users of the site, rather than by an administrator. And as I said, the administrators still intervene at times. I also think that Twitter might be too unruly a setup for a moderation scheme. It's not really a discussion forum.
I tend to agree. In fairness, though, I think part of the reason it works it that moderation effectively removes a lot of the worst of what people say. It's still basically censorship. The administrators will also step in sometimes when someone who is being abusing of the system.
It's not as though Slashdot is absolutely uncensored. If it were, I'm not sure I would like this site.
So don't use it, you cry baby.
And just as much as the freedom of speech protects your ability to say something, it equally protects my right to refuse to provide you with a platform for saying it. The owners of Slashdot have every right to delete this comment that I'm writing right now. They have every right to lock my account and even block my IP address.
The great irony here is that Trump is busy empowering people who oppose net neutrality while his followers complain about a private company controlling the content of their own website. Forget about Twitter, ending net neutrality would allow ISPs to exercise much more strict control over your access to the whole Internet, potentially blocking or slowing traffic that they don't feel is advantageous to their business. If Verizon decides they're anti-Trump, they could just block access to his websites because "Fuck you, it's our network and we'll do what we want." The principle that the Internet is communication infrastructure and should treat traffic without bias-- that's the concept Trump is looking to tear down.
I agree. Facebook is allowed to control their API and terms of service. The real shame is that we've all allowed ourselves to be penned into proprietary/closed "social networking" sites for our communications.
It's not even an issue of cost. A lot of content owners don't want Netflix to have a complete catalog. NBC/Universal/Comcast, for example, controls a lot of content and *also* services for distributing content. If you can get all of the Comcast content without paying for Comcast services, then Comcast loses a bunch of money. Comcast will, therefore, go out of its way to hobble Netflix and prevent it from having access to all of it's content.
People around here hate C# (those that do) because it's from MS. When it comes to MS, there are no technical merits that can redeem the technology. They are not rational people.
The complaints I've heard didn't generally sound so irrational. I thought the consensus was "It seems like a good language, but still most useful in building things for Windows. Maybe that will change as the cross-platform stuff improves, but for now, I'll stick with [whatever language they're using]." Admittedly, I'm not a real programmer and only get a sense for what programmers think from this site.
a Federal judge could order a company that continues operating against a court order to pay a daily fine until they stop
And then the company could say it stopped. Or it could stop temporarily. Or they could put a tiny little drop of real aloe into each bottle, say, "Fine it has aloe now," and call it a day.
Or they could order an import ban on the product should they exist outside the US.
And then the company can restructure a little, sell the same product under a different brand name, and hope no one notices. No matter what, you need something in the government that has the ability to monitor what's happening in the market, looking for fraud and abuse, setting some basic fair rules, and enforcing those rules. The federal judge cannot actively go looking for abuse, cannot proactively set rules (can only decide particular matters brought into court), and has no direct ability to enforce.
You want the kleptocracy to continue?
You wanted to end the kleptocracy, so you elected the guy who said that it's impossible for him to have a conflict of interest? The guy who, already before getting elected, has started merging his personal business with government business, and leveraging his political position to drive customers to his private business? The guy who has repeatedly cheated on his taxes, refused to pay vendors and contractors the money they're owed, and driven several businesses into the ground?
Good luck with that. It's almost as funny as the people who say that they voted for Trump because they're tired of rich, arrogant, entitled people from big cities running the country, and they wanted someone who understood the plight of the common man.
To clarify my position above, I'm not opposed to calling foul if you find actual evidence of fraud. If someone finds reason to believe fraud has happened without real evidence, then it should be reported to the proper authorities and investigated to see if credible evidence can be found. However, unless and until evidence is found, the results of the election should be accepted.
I'm not a Trump supporter. That's just my consistent opinion of how elections should work.