I got called out for this on the Vim forums, saying: You're such a wimp using GVIM! Just use a terminal like a real man! They challenged me to name a single case where a real geek would need to use a GUI for VIM instead of doing on the terminal.
So I told them my use case.
Then they shut up.
The use case is: sometimes I switch from the Latin alphabet to Chinese. I need to change the font and the font size. At the usual font size for Latin characters, the Chinese characters are not clearly legible. If I increase the font size so that they are legible (in fact, my own preference is to increase it to where they look calligraphically beautiful), the Latin letters are far bigger than they need to be, and you can't squeeze enough information into a screenful -- which is not a problem with Chinese text since each character contains so much more information.
So I have a quick keystroke mapping to switch to a given font with ":let &guifont = g:guifont_chin" etc., and we're happy. Not sure there's a way to change the terminal font from within Vim, and even if there were, that's not the role of Vim to control the terminal font, anyway.
"From where I sit, it feels like there are new competitors coming up every day, and we buy them up before they can become a serious threat"
You do understand that getting acquired is one of the most popular exit strategies for venture funded start ups, right?
So, if I understand you correctly, you are agreeing with GP's premise that Facebook is eliminating competition?
To be sure, you are saying that the competition is happy to be eliminated, but that's not the point. Otherwise, whenever some evil villain did something dastardly, like build a fracking CFC-manufacturing plant that spewed acid rain, you could argue, "But it's okay, they paid the city tons of money so they were happy to rezone the area to allow this plant."
No, I would disagree with your statement, although it is technically correct.
When we look for the cause of something, we are looking for an event or action that is the least reasonably expected, and/or one that was by least coerced choice.
For example, if some sniper shoots a car driver and the car swerves into a deep ravine, we don't say that the crash was caused by the driver slumping over the wheel as s/he died, or by the presence of the ravine, because slumping is what a dead body naturally does, and the presence of a ravine is reasonable. We say that the shot from the sniper caused the crash, because that is not a reasonable expectation of driving along a ravine, and also because the sniper took deliberate action.
If you asked, "Well, if there wasn't a ravine there, the car would not have crashed down a ravine, right?" the answer would have to be yes, but to consider that as anything even near to the principal cause of the crash is to mislead one from the true and overwhelmingly unexpected cause of the crash. By that yardstick you could do reductio ad absurdum and say that the cause of the crash was the car manufacturer or the mother who gave birth to the driver.
When we refer to crime and punishment, an event can be considered "reasonable" if it follows morally, even though the chance of that event might not be very high.
When Google does something nasty for which it probably won't be caught, but actually ends up being caught, the cause of the reputation loss is not due to the reasonable prosecution of the nasty action, which follows and is more or less obligatory, but by Google's choice to do the nasty thing in the first place, something it could have chosen not to do.
It's the crime, not the punishment; to say otherwise would be as ridiculous as Anonymous Coward's delightfully sarcastic answer (currently modded 0): "And falls from great heights don't kill you, it's the sudden stop at the end."
Not quite what you're thinking of, but I love the Bug-A-Salt, which fires a near-invisible puff of table salt at flying insects. Better than a flyswatter, doesn't splatter the bug, but brings them down. Also good for spiders that sends my lady screaming. Nowadays, when she sees a spider, she screams, and then grabs the Bug-A-Salt and downs the spider. Take that!
It's so great that I actually hope to see some houseflies around the home. Disappointingly, they have generally steered clear.
Question about NextCloud: What do you think of it?
I use OwnCloud. This was just before NextCloud became practical. I considered going to NextCloud when an OwnCloud client for my aging iPad2 "upgraded" and stopped working. Ultimately I stayed with OwnCloud just to minimize complexity.
How is NextCloud in terms of maturity? Is it a drop-in replacement for OwnCloud, or does it have issues? Do you find yourself using features not available in OwnCloud? (Not that I know what those are, but the marketing text sounded promising at the time.)
[the headphone jack] takes up more space that could be dedicated to battery or another function.
Yes, that space is sooooo valuable that when Apple removed the headphone jack, they filled the space with a piece of molded plastic.
That's incredibly misleading. Sure, it's a piece of molded plastic. What you fail to mention is that it is a functional piece of molded plastic - part of the speaker.
But that's not what the quoted article says. They said: "teardown [of the new iPhone] reveals what's in place of the headphone jack that Apple removed. In short: nothing complicated. Just some plastic. No speaker, and no electronics."
Thank you for pointing this out, but the most grievous disregard for the difference between countable and uncountable nouns is "email", as in "I received 3 emails this morning." But no one says "I received 3 mails this morning," since it's quite apparent that "mail" (and hence "electronic mail", or "e-mail") doesn't take any plural form.
This is a ignorance that really bugs me.:P (And if anyone wants to say that I should have said "AN ignorance", warn me first so I can barf.)
Well, it depends on your point of view if the price in 2007 was 50% of what it is now then it has doubled
I would beg to differ on your attempted "it depends on what you mean"-type excuse for misinterpreting what is generally a socially accepted translation of those words into a mathematically expressible meaning.
While your statement that "if the price in 2007 was 50% of what it is now then it has doubled" is, by itself, correct, this is not at all what GGP said. Saying that the price has gone up by +50% definitely does NOT mean "the price in 2007 was 50% of what it is now". To me, and I would wager most Slashdotters would agree with me, when one says "the amount has gone up by p percent", that is a percentage before the change; that is:
p = (NewAmount - OldAmount) / OldAmount
where p can be (but doesn't have to be) expressed as a percentage I've never seen anyone use NewAmount as the denominator when only the change is mentioned.
Of course, if you say "that's p percent of the new amount," then it explicitly gives the denominator to be NewAmount. But just to say "a change of p percent" is to use the old amount.
In other words, if a certain price increases by 300%, and then drops by 75%, and then the cycle repeats itself several times, you might think that the price is rising rapidly (since 300 sounds so much more than 75) but you still end up with the same price:
Price2 = Price1 + Price1 * 300%
Price3 = Price2 - Price2 * 75% [which is the same as Price1]
Price4 = Price3 + Price3 * 300% [which is the same as Price2]
Price5 = Price4 - Price4 * 75% [which is the same as Price3, and so forth]
Reminds me of this silly comedy superhero cartoon for 10-year-olds that I happened to get a glimpse of at some restaurant (so I don't know the name of the show or its characters).
The evil granny-like old lady stole all the merchandise in the store by walking up to the security guard at the door and saying, "Oh, and I have this coupon for : I get everything in the store for free." (shows coupon) Guard: "Oh, okay."
I've had a Blu Vivo 6 for a fraction over a year now (bought on Black Friday 2016 - its actual release day here in the UK) and there's not been a *single* update for it (not even a minor one).
I'm still waiting for BLU to patch the KRACK vulnerability on my phone.
I got a BLU Advance phone for $75 on Amazon. Nice phone, dual SIM, 5.5", 64GB SD card expansion, Android Marshmallow. This just this past summer (just before Amazon took them off the market for leaking data to China).
For the longest time, it bugged me to update the OS, but I thought: "It works. Why update and risk installing crapware?"
Then KRACK happened. And my BLU phone was still asking to be updated.
I saw that the date of the update predated the discovery of KRACK, so I knew that if I updated, it would not protect from KRACK. However, no other update was available, and eventually I figured that perhaps my failing to install a previous update was preventing a newer update from happening.
So, reluctantly, I updated. Immediate regret. First, after updating, there was no other update available. I didn't get to shield my phone from KRACK, and I'm still waiting for an available update.
Second, it installed this new BLU app that kept telling me to register, and also showed me some "great deals!" on services and things I can pay for. Umm, no thanks.
Third, it messed up my keyboard. The BLU phone originally came with this decent swipe keyboard, not just the standard one that came with Google. That disappeared, and it took a whole week for me to figure out that I wanted to install the TouchPal keyboard app, and another week of hesitation while I read reviews about the keyboard app showing intrusive advertisements, and finally I figured out that I could install the "TouchPal For HTC" app that would work equally well but not have the ads. Apparently it still wasn't the same version as previously, as there were a few glitches (e.g. holding down the N key defaults to the letter with a foreign diacritical, not the question mark which is far more commonly used).
So, for my troubles of agreeing to upgrade, I got: no KRACK protection, ads, and a decline in keyboard function.
No thanks, BLU. Can anyone tell me if CyanogenMod or whatever jailbreak is compatible with the BLU phones?
I've tried talking to the post office and mail carrier. They insist that they are being paid to deliver junk mail and that no action on my part can make them stop delivering it.
That's not true: there's a way to stop them, if you want to take the trouble to implement it. You might have to google around for it, but I'll provide a link to get you started.
So, basically, your post office has a form that you can fill for blocking "erotically arousing or sexually provocative" junk mail: PS Form 1500.
You must be thinking, "Well, that's all well and good, but I'm talking about ads from the local grocery store, not sexually provocative stuff." This is where Rowan vs USPS comes in. You see, the only person who can decide what you find sexually provocative is YOU. So, you can say, "I find the logo of my local grocery store, and these pictures of low-priced vegetables, to be EROTICALLY AROUSING OR SEXUALLY PROVOCATIVE," and no one can say otherwise. The US Postal Service must stop delivering it. This was upheld by the Supreme Court.
We got a Kinect so that our kids could move around a bit without having to exit the home in the dark winter evenings. Other than the bundled "Kinect Sports Rivals" and "Dance Central Spotlight", we also found Kung-Fu for Kinect and Fru enjoyable. In particular, Fru is a rather cool game where your body silhouette becomes part of the gamescape and you have to manipulate it to ascend levels.
Because it is so convenient to have Alexa-type or "Ok, Google"-type technology, more and more people will adopt it. So, we Slashdotters who are aware of the technological and techno-political implications of the loss of privacy are fighting a losing battle, if we merely ignore this or decide that we won't buy an Amazon Echo or turn off the microphone permissions on our smartphone. Not only do we miss out on rather amazing technology (which, granted, is not that great a sacrifice), but we can't avoid being at least indirectly affected by our society as a whole which is embracing the whole Please-Spy-On-Me trend. It's not practical to refuse to go to your sister-in-law's family dinner just because they have Amazon Echo turned on inside the home.
So, we the technologically literate/elite need to take an active role in shaping the way technology interacts with society. It's going to be hard doing the "society" part, so we should work on the "technology" part.
We are okay with technology that's under our control. When we realized that signing up for email meant some central email server was going to handle a huge chunk of our private communication, we didn't shy away from email; we overlaid PGP on top of it. Wen we saw that syncing our personal devices via iCloud meant giving our data to a big corporation, we ran our own private OwnCloud server instead.
So what we need to do is to replicate, not just the Amazon Echo little microphone thingy, but the server that's behind it doing all these things. We need a FOSS replacement for a speech recognition server. That way, we can still retain the capability of voice command, without giving up our privacy to do so.
I'm not sure that speech recognition ("SpRec" --my own monosyllabic abbreviation) in the FOSS world is all that advanced; after all, sprec makes a lot of money, and I don't think corporations are ready to part with their proprietary research. Fortunately, a quick Google search shows that there is hope: some FOSS sprec programs are out there, though still in their infancy (Simon, Kaldi, CMU Sphinx, HTK sprec).
I would call on all the technorati out there to recognize sprec as one of the areas where we need to develop. Where there is a lot of corporate ingress into a big developing market, FOSS needs to be there as well to counterbalance corporate interests. Witness what happened with the popularization of GNU/Linux, Firefox, etc.
Thanks for your attention. Please spread the word.
<sarcasm effect="gagging"> Don't you know? If you actually take into account parts of speech in your grammar, you are not cool and techy! I can receive an "invite" to a "consult", but if I fail to show up I can have another "go".
Clearly your "know" is bad and your "learn" is insufficient. Next time, first find out more about "speak"! </sarcasm>
For those people who need to click on the link, for whatever reason (e.g. it's on an email from a potential employer), there's still a way to know where it leads, right? You can tell Firefox (or whatever browsers) not to follow "redirect" instructions until it asks you. Or am I missing something here?
That link, is a complaint from Proper Media to the courts, saying that:
- at first, Snopes.com was owned by David and Barbara Mikkelson - the two divorced, and Barbara held on to her 50% of the company - then she effectively sold her 50% to Proper Media, a company - but technically she couldn't do that, because Snopes.com had to be owned only by people, not by companies - so, she sold it to 5 people who owned/ran/were Proper Media company. These 5 people pinky-promised that it would be just like Proper Media itself held the shares. - so then, it was 50% David Mikkelson, 50% Proper Media - but then one of the Proper Media people by the name of Green conspired with / got seduced by David Mikkelson, and went over to the dark side! (cue dramatic music) - now, with David's 50% plus a little bit more from Green who quit Proper Media and is now in David's employ, David controls more than 50%! - that's not fair!! Green *promised* that he was holding the shares for Proper Media!
Personally, I'm not sure that Proper Media has a case. If there was a legal requirement that shares couldn't be sold to a company, only people, then there was a reason for this, exactly so that individuals could make decisions and not have to act like a coordinated legal entity. If Proper Media says that Green "should have" done such and such... well, that's going to be hard to argue. So, legally, I think David Mikkelson has better standing.
APEO (now called PEO) has not required, until recently, any exmaination on technical ability. They figured that, if you got the engineering degree, then you are technically competent. The professional licensing exams are all about Law and Ethics in engineering.
When I called to ask in detail, they even said specifically: once you are a Professional Engineer, you are always qualified to be a professional engineer even if you haven't taken any exams since first doing the licensing exam (even if it was decades ago).
So, is it forever? Once you get a Professional Engineer's license from Ontario, isn't there anything that you need to do to maintain the license? The answer is: yes.
You have to pay your fees; otherwise you lose the license.
Shows you where their values lie. More recently, they are implementing a "competency upkeep" type system, which makes much more sense and should have been done in the first place.
So, no, not quite the same as a US engineering license.
I'd like to draw on the collective wisdom of my fellow Slashdotters:
If I am one of those people who turned off Win7 updates to avoid being forcibly upgraded to Win10, can anyone recommend a good website that will guide me through updating Win7 to patch the WannaCry flaw, without adding the telemetry or other unwanted pieces of the upgrade?
I am more familiar with Linux but am forced to use Windows at work, but I insist on avoiding Windows n where n>7.
Yes, that's entirely possible. And yet, the technology has plenty of legitimate uses and should not have been sabotaged.
Knowledge of the capabilities of a large-scale deployment technology that affects such a large proportion of the populace can hardly be construed as sabotage, especially when there is such potential for abuse.
As an analogy, it would be one thing to leak the specific movements of a police investigative team. ("Psst! There's a bunch of cop cars headed toward your warehouse where you keep the stolen cars.") But it would be perfectly legitimate to give the capabilities of the police. ("Psst! There are over 100 police officers in this city who are going to keep an eye out for stolen cars.")
The "Plain Old Text" setting for Slashdot simply inserts <br> tags where your lines end, so that you can use line breaks for formatting. I've always used plain text, and happily take advantage of the ability to insert <blockquote> and other tags manually. Yes, I actually have to type the four characters "<" instead of a less-than sign.
And I always preview. That will save you a lot of grief.
Thanks. That explains it, since I fell asleep halfway through Episode 3. Both times that I watched it. (I remember waking up to some cyborg dude with four arms wielding for lightsabers, and promptly fell asleep again.)
Anyone try one of those cheap "Smart Watches" you see on Amazon? Here's one I looked at: CNPGD Bluetooth Smart Wrist Wrap Watch Phone for IOS and Android, Black (search on Amazon). It has been selling for $9 ("price has dropped by 53%!"), but I'm not sure about the quality of these watches. This particular one gets crummy reviews, but are there any that are worth getting? To be more specific: are there inexpensive watches that will do most of what the Apple Watch does (whatever that happens to be --I don't know) without the expensive price tag? I'm including Android watches; the watch doesn't have to sync to an Apple iPhone, since Android phones are much cheaper and more accessible to the thin wallet.
TV News Broadcast Accidentally Activates Alexa, Initiates Orders
That headline reminds me of a problem the Jedi had in the Minora system - pretty often Jedi were going there and just not coming back. Well it turned out they had this really popular ice cream chain in the system called "Scoop 2 Order" that had 66 flavors and had just launched a big holovid campaign and... well the results were not pretty (for the Jedi anyway).
Ok, I'll bite. Explain it to those of us who have only seen 7 Star Wars movies, please.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there's a role for GVIM.
I got called out for this on the Vim forums, saying: You're such a wimp using GVIM! Just use a terminal like a real man! They challenged me to name a single case where a real geek would need to use a GUI for VIM instead of doing on the terminal.
So I told them my use case.
Then they shut up.
The use case is: sometimes I switch from the Latin alphabet to Chinese. I need to change the font and the font size. At the usual font size for Latin characters, the Chinese characters are not clearly legible. If I increase the font size so that they are legible (in fact, my own preference is to increase it to where they look calligraphically beautiful), the Latin letters are far bigger than they need to be, and you can't squeeze enough information into a screenful -- which is not a problem with Chinese text since each character contains so much more information.
So I have a quick keystroke mapping to switch to a given font with ":let &guifont = g:guifont_chin" etc., and we're happy. Not sure there's a way to change the terminal font from within Vim, and even if there were, that's not the role of Vim to control the terminal font, anyway.
And I don't use a mouse.
So, if I understand you correctly, you are agreeing with GP's premise that Facebook is eliminating competition?
To be sure, you are saying that the competition is happy to be eliminated, but that's not the point. Otherwise, whenever some evil villain did something dastardly, like build a fracking CFC-manufacturing plant that spewed acid rain, you could argue, "But it's okay, they paid the city tons of money so they were happy to rezone the area to allow this plant."
No, I would disagree with your statement, although it is technically correct.
When we look for the cause of something, we are looking for an event or action that is the least reasonably expected, and/or one that was by least coerced choice.
For example, if some sniper shoots a car driver and the car swerves into a deep ravine, we don't say that the crash was caused by the driver slumping over the wheel as s/he died, or by the presence of the ravine, because slumping is what a dead body naturally does, and the presence of a ravine is reasonable. We say that the shot from the sniper caused the crash, because that is not a reasonable expectation of driving along a ravine, and also because the sniper took deliberate action.
If you asked, "Well, if there wasn't a ravine there, the car would not have crashed down a ravine, right?" the answer would have to be yes, but to consider that as anything even near to the principal cause of the crash is to mislead one from the true and overwhelmingly unexpected cause of the crash. By that yardstick you could do reductio ad absurdum and say that the cause of the crash was the car manufacturer or the mother who gave birth to the driver.
When we refer to crime and punishment, an event can be considered "reasonable" if it follows morally, even though the chance of that event might not be very high.
When Google does something nasty for which it probably won't be caught, but actually ends up being caught, the cause of the reputation loss is not due to the reasonable prosecution of the nasty action, which follows and is more or less obligatory, but by Google's choice to do the nasty thing in the first place, something it could have chosen not to do.
It's the crime, not the punishment; to say otherwise would be as ridiculous as Anonymous Coward's delightfully sarcastic answer (currently modded 0): "And falls from great heights don't kill you, it's the sudden stop at the end."
Not quite what you're thinking of, but I love the Bug-A-Salt, which fires a near-invisible puff of table salt at flying insects. Better than a flyswatter, doesn't splatter the bug, but brings them down. Also good for spiders that sends my lady screaming. Nowadays, when she sees a spider, she screams, and then grabs the Bug-A-Salt and downs the spider. Take that!
It's so great that I actually hope to see some houseflies around the home. Disappointingly, they have generally steered clear.
Question about NextCloud: What do you think of it?
I use OwnCloud. This was just before NextCloud became practical. I considered going to NextCloud when an OwnCloud client for my aging iPad2 "upgraded" and stopped working. Ultimately I stayed with OwnCloud just to minimize complexity.
How is NextCloud in terms of maturity? Is it a drop-in replacement for OwnCloud, or does it have issues? Do you find yourself using features not available in OwnCloud? (Not that I know what those are, but the marketing text sounded promising at the time.)
But that's not what the quoted article says. They said: "teardown [of the new iPhone] reveals what's in place of the headphone jack that Apple removed. In short: nothing complicated. Just some plastic. No speaker, and no electronics."
Thank you for pointing this out, but the most grievous disregard for the difference between countable and uncountable nouns is "email", as in "I received 3 emails this morning." But no one says "I received 3 mails this morning," since it's quite apparent that "mail" (and hence "electronic mail", or "e-mail") doesn't take any plural form.
This is a ignorance that really bugs me. :P (And if anyone wants to say that I should have said "AN ignorance", warn me first so I can barf.)
I would beg to differ on your attempted "it depends on what you mean"-type excuse for misinterpreting what is generally a socially accepted translation of those words into a mathematically expressible meaning.
While your statement that "if the price in 2007 was 50% of what it is now then it has doubled" is, by itself, correct, this is not at all what GGP said. Saying that the price has gone up by +50% definitely does NOT mean "the price in 2007 was 50% of what it is now". To me, and I would wager most Slashdotters would agree with me, when one says "the amount has gone up by p percent", that is a percentage before the change; that is:
p = (NewAmount - OldAmount) / OldAmount
where p can be (but doesn't have to be) expressed as a percentage
I've never seen anyone use NewAmount as the denominator when only the change is mentioned.
Of course, if you say "that's p percent of the new amount," then it explicitly gives the denominator to be NewAmount. But just to say "a change of p percent" is to use the old amount.
In other words, if a certain price increases by 300%, and then drops by 75%, and then the cycle repeats itself several times, you might think that the price is rising rapidly (since 300 sounds so much more than 75) but you still end up with the same price:
Price2 = Price1 + Price1 * 300%
Price3 = Price2 - Price2 * 75% [which is the same as Price1]
Price4 = Price3 + Price3 * 300% [which is the same as Price2]
Price5 = Price4 - Price4 * 75% [which is the same as Price3, and so forth]
Reminds me of this silly comedy superhero cartoon for 10-year-olds that I happened to get a glimpse of at some restaurant (so I don't know the name of the show or its characters).
The evil granny-like old lady stole all the merchandise in the store by walking up to the security guard at the door and saying, "Oh, and I have this coupon for : I get everything in the store for free." (shows coupon)
Guard: "Oh, okay."
I'm still waiting for BLU to patch the KRACK vulnerability on my phone.
I got a BLU Advance phone for $75 on Amazon. Nice phone, dual SIM, 5.5", 64GB SD card expansion, Android Marshmallow. This just this past summer (just before Amazon took them off the market for leaking data to China).
For the longest time, it bugged me to update the OS, but I thought: "It works. Why update and risk installing crapware?"
Then KRACK happened. And my BLU phone was still asking to be updated.
I saw that the date of the update predated the discovery of KRACK, so I knew that if I updated, it would not protect from KRACK. However, no other update was available, and eventually I figured that perhaps my failing to install a previous update was preventing a newer update from happening.
So, reluctantly, I updated. Immediate regret. First, after updating, there was no other update available. I didn't get to shield my phone from KRACK, and I'm still waiting for an available update.
Second, it installed this new BLU app that kept telling me to register, and also showed me some "great deals!" on services and things I can pay for. Umm, no thanks.
Third, it messed up my keyboard. The BLU phone originally came with this decent swipe keyboard, not just the standard one that came with Google. That disappeared, and it took a whole week for me to figure out that I wanted to install the TouchPal keyboard app, and another week of hesitation while I read reviews about the keyboard app showing intrusive advertisements, and finally I figured out that I could install the "TouchPal For HTC" app that would work equally well but not have the ads. Apparently it still wasn't the same version as previously, as there were a few glitches (e.g. holding down the N key defaults to the letter with a foreign diacritical, not the question mark which is far more commonly used).
So, for my troubles of agreeing to upgrade, I got: no KRACK protection, ads, and a decline in keyboard function.
No thanks, BLU. Can anyone tell me if CyanogenMod or whatever jailbreak is compatible with the BLU phones?
That's not true: there's a way to stop them, if you want to take the trouble to implement it. You might have to google around for it, but I'll provide a link to get you started.
So, basically, your post office has a form that you can fill for blocking "erotically arousing or sexually provocative" junk mail: PS Form 1500.
You must be thinking, "Well, that's all well and good, but I'm talking about ads from the local grocery store, not sexually provocative stuff." This is where Rowan vs USPS comes in. You see, the only person who can decide what you find sexually provocative is YOU. So, you can say, "I find the logo of my local grocery store, and these pictures of low-priced vegetables, to be EROTICALLY AROUSING OR SEXUALLY PROVOCATIVE," and no one can say otherwise. The US Postal Service must stop delivering it. This was upheld by the Supreme Court.
So, go for it. Stop the junk mail.
We got a Kinect so that our kids could move around a bit without having to exit the home in the dark winter evenings. Other than the bundled "Kinect Sports Rivals" and "Dance Central Spotlight", we also found Kung-Fu for Kinect and Fru enjoyable. In particular, Fru is a rather cool game where your body silhouette becomes part of the gamescape and you have to manipulate it to ascend levels.
Because it is so convenient to have Alexa-type or "Ok, Google"-type technology, more and more people will adopt it. So, we Slashdotters who are aware of the technological and techno-political implications of the loss of privacy are fighting a losing battle, if we merely ignore this or decide that we won't buy an Amazon Echo or turn off the microphone permissions on our smartphone. Not only do we miss out on rather amazing technology (which, granted, is not that great a sacrifice), but we can't avoid being at least indirectly affected by our society as a whole which is embracing the whole Please-Spy-On-Me trend. It's not practical to refuse to go to your sister-in-law's family dinner just because they have Amazon Echo turned on inside the home.
So, we the technologically literate/elite need to take an active role in shaping the way technology interacts with society. It's going to be hard doing the "society" part, so we should work on the "technology" part.
We are okay with technology that's under our control. When we realized that signing up for email meant some central email server was going to handle a huge chunk of our private communication, we didn't shy away from email; we overlaid PGP on top of it. Wen we saw that syncing our personal devices via iCloud meant giving our data to a big corporation, we ran our own private OwnCloud server instead.
So what we need to do is to replicate, not just the Amazon Echo little microphone thingy, but the server that's behind it doing all these things. We need a FOSS replacement for a speech recognition server. That way, we can still retain the capability of voice command, without giving up our privacy to do so.
I'm not sure that speech recognition ("SpRec" --my own monosyllabic abbreviation) in the FOSS world is all that advanced; after all, sprec makes a lot of money, and I don't think corporations are ready to part with their proprietary research. Fortunately, a quick Google search shows that there is hope: some FOSS sprec programs are out there, though still in their infancy (Simon, Kaldi, CMU Sphinx, HTK sprec).
I would call on all the technorati out there to recognize sprec as one of the areas where we need to develop. Where there is a lot of corporate ingress into a big developing market, FOSS needs to be there as well to counterbalance corporate interests. Witness what happened with the popularization of GNU/Linux, Firefox, etc.
Thanks for your attention. Please spread the word.
<sarcasm effect="gagging">
Don't you know? If you actually take into account parts of speech in your grammar, you are not cool and techy! I can receive an "invite" to a "consult", but if I fail to show up I can have another "go".
Clearly your "know" is bad and your "learn" is insufficient. Next time, first find out more about "speak"!
</sarcasm>
For those people who need to click on the link, for whatever reason (e.g. it's on an email from a potential employer), there's still a way to know where it leads, right? You can tell Firefox (or whatever browsers) not to follow "redirect" instructions until it asks you. Or am I missing something here?
I know, eh?
Oh, btw, sometimes my phone rings. It's so annoying! I demand that they stop making these things that make sounds and annoy me!
duhh....
That link, is a complaint from Proper Media to the courts, saying that:
- at first, Snopes.com was owned by David and Barbara Mikkelson
- the two divorced, and Barbara held on to her 50% of the company
- then she effectively sold her 50% to Proper Media, a company
- but technically she couldn't do that, because Snopes.com had to be owned only by people, not by companies
- so, she sold it to 5 people who owned/ran/were Proper Media company. These 5 people pinky-promised that it would be just like Proper Media itself held the shares.
- so then, it was 50% David Mikkelson, 50% Proper Media
- but then one of the Proper Media people by the name of Green conspired with / got seduced by David Mikkelson, and went over to the dark side! (cue dramatic music)
- now, with David's 50% plus a little bit more from Green who quit Proper Media and is now in David's employ, David controls more than 50%!
- that's not fair!! Green *promised* that he was holding the shares for Proper Media!
Personally, I'm not sure that Proper Media has a case. If there was a legal requirement that shares couldn't be sold to a company, only people, then there was a reason for this, exactly so that individuals could make decisions and not have to act like a coordinated legal entity. If Proper Media says that Green "should have" done such and such ... well, that's going to be hard to argue. So, legally, I think David Mikkelson has better standing.
I think it's because they had to take a recording of her voice from the old movie, and in the old movie she never said "a new hope".
But we all know when she did say the word "hope".
APEO (now called PEO) has not required, until recently, any exmaination on technical ability. They figured that, if you got the engineering degree, then you are technically competent. The professional licensing exams are all about Law and Ethics in engineering.
When I called to ask in detail, they even said specifically: once you are a Professional Engineer, you are always qualified to be a professional engineer even if you haven't taken any exams since first doing the licensing exam (even if it was decades ago).
So, is it forever? Once you get a Professional Engineer's license from Ontario, isn't there anything that you need to do to maintain the license? The answer is: yes.
You have to pay your fees; otherwise you lose the license.
Shows you where their values lie. More recently, they are implementing a "competency upkeep" type system, which makes much more sense and should have been done in the first place.
So, no, not quite the same as a US engineering license.
I'd like to draw on the collective wisdom of my fellow Slashdotters:
If I am one of those people who turned off Win7 updates to avoid being forcibly upgraded to Win10, can anyone recommend a good website that will guide me through updating Win7 to patch the WannaCry flaw, without adding the telemetry or other unwanted pieces of the upgrade?
I am more familiar with Linux but am forced to use Windows at work, but I insist on avoiding Windows n where n>7.
Knowledge of the capabilities of a large-scale deployment technology that affects such a large proportion of the populace can hardly be construed as sabotage, especially when there is such potential for abuse.
As an analogy, it would be one thing to leak the specific movements of a police investigative team. ("Psst! There's a bunch of cop cars headed toward your warehouse where you keep the stolen cars.") But it would be perfectly legitimate to give the capabilities of the police. ("Psst! There are over 100 police officers in this city who are going to keep an eye out for stolen cars.")
The "Plain Old Text" setting for Slashdot simply inserts <br> tags where your lines end, so that you can use line breaks for formatting. I've always used plain text, and happily take advantage of the ability to insert <blockquote> and other tags manually. Yes, I actually have to type the four characters "<" instead of a less-than sign.
And I always preview. That will save you a lot of grief.
Hope that helps!
Thanks. That explains it, since I fell asleep halfway through Episode 3. Both times that I watched it. (I remember waking up to some cyborg dude with four arms wielding for lightsabers, and promptly fell asleep again.)
Anyone try one of those cheap "Smart Watches" you see on Amazon? Here's one I looked at:
CNPGD Bluetooth Smart Wrist Wrap Watch Phone for IOS and Android, Black
(search on Amazon).
It has been selling for $9 ("price has dropped by 53%!"), but I'm not sure about the quality of these watches. This particular one gets crummy reviews, but are there any that are worth getting?
To be more specific: are there inexpensive watches that will do most of what the Apple Watch does (whatever that happens to be --I don't know) without the expensive price tag? I'm including Android watches; the watch doesn't have to sync to an Apple iPhone, since Android phones are much cheaper and more accessible to the thin wallet.
Ok, I'll bite. Explain it to those of us who have only seen 7 Star Wars movies, please.