CNN has no privacy agreement or obligation to keep this person's ID private. Inasmuch as this person has caused a media event thanks to their creative editing, they have made themselves into a newsworthy subject and thus CNN Is well within norms of journalism to reveal who it is.
For that matter, so is any other part of the media. If any of them also have the identity, then there is ground to attempt to interview them as part of a news story.
TL;DR version: this person has no expectation of privacy thanks to a news event they helped create. If you want privacy, don't do shit like this or at least be better at hiding who the fuck you are.
I'd be interested to know if MVNOs / GoogleFi will get access to this new 600MHz spectrum, once the phone support rolls out.
They will, if they support the handsets that support 600MHz.
For Fi, this means whatever Nexus or Pixel or flavor of the moment phone Google is pushing at the time. Google tends to have the latest band support in their Fi devices. The Nexus line was among the first to support T-Mobile's Band 12 700MHz signals and it works with Fi too.
-Former Fi user with a Nexus 6 now on a T-Mo MVNO because it's much less expensive than Fi.
Yes. There are no phones on the market that support it right now. Wait. Wait a year or two. Sooner than that and you might have a new phone but it's going to be a while before 600MHz has much deployment.
It's more accurate to say it is in their trust. The frequencies belong to the United States government. They are effectively being leased and licensed to carriers like T-Mobile. Their use of the frequencies depends on keeping the licenses.
It is the same for TV and radio: the stations have a license to use their assigned frequency but they don't actually own it, and can have their license revoked if there is reason to do so.
If anything, this is proof nothing significant happened at Roswell, NM in 1947. If it HAD, we would have had things like this popping out of government-funded reverse engineering groups and stuff like transistors would have come along in the mid 50's and.... oh wait, transistors DID come along in the 50s, didn't they? And early integrated circuits, lasers and all sorts of other high tech innovations.
Never mind, clearly we DID come up with a lot of advancement in a very short period of time. But nobody thought about using it for mobile phones.
In all seriousness, the invention of the cellular phone WAS still ahead of actual demand. The first such systems were a gamble because there was no previous demand and people had to be convinced to fork over a fortune to have one... and only for making phone calls, nothing else. There is no way this would have worked decades before it did work. The tech and the demand were not there.
My last IT employer had a vast set of milestones they wanted to hit by 2012. Goals! ha
One of them was to make the company be just like Zynga. Mind, Zynga was already in failure mode long before this visionary goal was born, and the work we did had absolutely nothing to do with anything Zynga did..Very different products and markets.
Apparently the people who did the goals only looked at revenue or some sort of number where Zynga looked great on paper. But some of us knew the truth and openly laughed at that goal. This didn't please management. Oh well. Don't make "be like a company going down the shitter" as a goal and maybe your employees won't laugh.
And my TV is an even lower brand called Changhong. It's was the cheapest set I could get with three HDMI and 40" of screen, and it's been fine. Knock on wood. $200 at Walmart -an experience that forever killed me on using WalmartDOTcom for anything again, but that has nothing to do with the TV.
It seems Changhong is mostly sold by Newegg now, also a Chinese-owned company.
Interestingly, the TV I got shares the same IR remote control codes as my older Toshiba TV, which was made before Toshiba sold the rights. Just curious.
Americans cannot understand and do not trust a president who is, or seems to be, smarter than they are.
Americans want somebody like them. Somebody they can understand. Somebody they can relate to.
Even if that person is really like con man uncle Joe who always spins BS stories at family gatherings and doesn't appear to have a real job, yet always has a new car and women 1/3rd his age with giant boobs hanging around. Nobody knows what Joe does but he sure seems to be good at it, so why not elect him?
Is Apple also going to upgrade their CSRs to resist social engineering to have 2FA turned off?
With PayPal, all you had to do to get around 2FA was call them up and social engineer your way into a password reset, which would also turn off 2FA. In other words, 2FA was so easy to bypass, it was of almost no actual security value.
A gate with a super advanced padlock is not secure if you can simply go around the gate. And that's WAY too easy to do with nearly every 2FA implementation. There is always a way around it or a way in. Always. And anyone determined enough to get in, because they WANT to do something malicious, would, of course KNOW the ways around it.
How is carrying a laptop in luggage any "safer" than carrying it in the passenger cabin?
The same laptop is still on the plane, either way. It has the same potential to explode thanks to shady battery manufacturing or because of malicious intent. Putting it in the cargo hold doesn't change any of that.
What it DOES do is prevent anyone from attempting to fight a fire if the laptop battery ignited. At least in the passenger cabin, there is a chance someone will notice the thing burning and take action to put it out or smother it as best they can. Meanwhile the same thing locked in cargo below will just burn until it sets off the fire detector, at which point nothing else happens because nobody can get to it. We know from history fires like that tend to take out the controls or emit enough toxic fumes to kill all on board. In flight fire is BAD.
It's just a fucking trap. You do all the work to find the vulnerabilities and weaknesses, document them, submit them, get ignored, get ignored, get ignored, and then suddenly a bunch of FBI goons show up and arrest you for hacking and act like YOU are the criminal for trying to find and warn them about their own problems.
I do not buy the concept of spoilers ruining anything. Dammit, if the fucking film is good enough, you won't give a fuck that you found out some spoiler by accident.
And PLENTY of people rank among their favorite movies and shows things they have already seen before, MULTIPLE TIMES and yet they still manage to find enjoyment in seeing them again just the same.
We all know how Star Wars ANH ends. Until Lucas changes it again, it's going to be the same goddamn movie you saw before. But if you count that as a favorite and KNOW EVERY SCENE by heart, you still like it! And it's utterly spoiled for you, isn't it?
So do not whine to me about spoilers. If knowing what happens matters that much, then the filmmakers have failed at their job. We all know the viewing public doesn't hold these assholes accountable for making shit pictures because you all line up to see them anyway. But if you ever found your spines and refused to see crap. better films from better directors would get made and eventually there would be movies so good, it didn't matter if you knew the ending.
Well, at least I can still use my compression tool and RG/6 cable for installing new satellite dishes.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
True story: When Comcast came to wire my house for cable a few years ago, the installer opened a brand-new 1000ft roll of RG6QS with carrier wire, used what he needed to do the drop install, and left the remaining spool behind when he was done. His service truck had about 20 rolls of cable in it. Any chance he got to ditch a spool, he would. It was taking up too much room.
So I now have 700ft of Comcast-grade RG6QS on a spool. It's quite good stuff.
The installer did a fine job. I let his boss know and said nothing about the freebie spool. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, you know.
Why in 2015 was Comcast just now wiring my house? It had been wired for cable years before, but a passing box truck ripped out the cable drop about 15 years ago. We had satellite for TV and DSL for internet and didn't care. So Comcast had to redo the drop when I dropped AT&T slow DSL. Once told about the truck ripping out the old wire, the new installer did a MUCH better job of stringing up a new drop from a higher place. So he also listened to me, did exactly what he needed to do to prevent another issue, and left me a spool of cable. Nice.
I may be the only happy Comcast customer. Or I may be drunk. Pick.
Lately Comcast Xfinity has been touting features they think set them apart from the competition. Voice Remote. Being able to watch on-demand on any device, and a few other things.
But the thing is, never in my entire life have I ever had a desire to TALK to my remote control, and I can't think of a reason, short of losing my mind entirely, that I would ever do that. The idea of uttering "Show me sitcoms" makes me want to die inside.
I don't know anyone else who has ever wanted this feature, either. But Xfinity thinks it's fucking amazing.
Video on any device is a joke. I don't have time to watch video on the go, driving, or at work.
What I want from Xfinity is a stable internet connection with decent speed, and I get that. They don't need to offer me more. I don't want more. I would like a cheaper bill but I'd also like a giant robot, and we cannot always have what we want.
50% in 10 years seems awfully optimistic. But suppose it's 50% in 20 years. It really does not matter, but this does:
What are all these soon to be unemployed people supposed to DO, exactly?
The people aren't going to vanish the moment they are made redundant. They'll still be here, needing to pay the same bills and eat and so on. And the birthrate isn't slowing down. We are making more and more people every day and they'll all need jobs too.
History has repeatedly shown that high unemployment with no hope of finding work leads to massive crime as people have nothing else to do and no options. It can be argued society does not owe anyone a job or welfare payments just for existing. Fine. But society won't like or want what happens when AI takes away so many jobs. The civil unrest WILL be society's problem to solve.
I don't see a way out unless we have massive population curbs, which simply will not happen. It will probably get much worse as people with nothing else to do will spend a lot of time making babies. I am just glad I have no kids who will have to live in the world that should be going to hell in a hurry around the time I die.
Times have changed. People want to do tasks now. They don't give a shit what platform it happens to be using.
Web browsing, email, composing school or work documents, even editing pictures are all platform-agnostic.
Apple and Microsoft inevitably bring their own product ideas to these tasks when it's just not needed. Maybe 20 years ago, yes. But not any more. And Chromebooks get it. The thing only does a few tasks, but they happen to be what 99% of people need. And they do it cheaply and with relative security and safety.
Windows is too busy trying to be all things to all uses and charges a cost in terms of buying a license and also in the increased hardware you need to run to make it a non-miserable experience, because Windows is not a lean OS. It's full of bloat so some version of some product from 10 years ago will still work.
Apple is scarcely better. The iPad is good but still carries with it all the baggage of being an iOS device. And iPads demand a premium price.
So if a cheap Chromebook will do what you need, or you can give it to grandma and not have to worry about ever supporting it or trying to remove viruses from it, you would almost be an idiot to buy a full computer solution. This means the whole foundation of Windows and even the product name are basically obsolete.
I get why they would fight this trend but NOBODY Is going back to the old days. More and more tasks will migrate to phone apps and in turn become simple enough to do on a Chromebook-type device.
Tell that to the idiots using the forgotten social messaging app Whisper, which has nothing to do with the Whisper protocol or Whatsapp.
Nope, it's just a sort of Twitter clone that pretends to be anonymous, and tons of idiots fall for it and post for sale or want to buy messages for "contraband substances" as if nobody can trace them.
The app records the user's IP address, the IMEI of their phone, their GPS (which it uses to set a "nearby messages" group feature), their phone number, and none of this is encrypted in any way AND the developers proudly declare in the TOS that they will happily respond to any requests from law enforcement. The app also inserts ads from the Facebook network so anything you look at on FB may in turn spawn "related" ads in the app. So not only does the app know who you are, we can presume FB in turn knows a lot about which ads are seen when and perhaps even which content the user was looking at.
So it is completely NOT anonymous. And yet idiot users post their messages every day. I had NO idea there were even so many different words for pot.
The app has other major issues, such as a general lack of users -potheads and gays seeking gays seem to be the main users, but they don't add up to very many. So the developer hires workers to make fake posts, uses bots to repost and repost the same messages day after day after day, all in a bid to fake the place into looking like people use it. A lot of the Indian contractors don't even bother to hide that they are posting from Indian call centers.
The app also has a "Popular Posts" feature which presents those items when users first open the app. But what determines what is "popular" is not popularity but the whimsy of one of those Indian workers who decides to promote a particular post to the Popular page, which then gets a lot of views and so forth. So they are manufacturing popularity, not seeking what is naturally popular. It's fraud. The anonymity is fraud.
But very few users bother with this thing and nobody would really notice if it blew away.
The last IT place I worked had a policy, which you had to sign and accept on hire, which stated the company owned ANY idea you came up with during your time as an employee, and they meant away from the office too. They meant they owned the idea if you came up with a better software product OR came up with a way to have your dog mow your lawn for you.
OWNED!
The company was not kidding. We asked them if this meant they owned my invention for cleaning carpet, making a TV antenna out of Cat 5, etc. And they said yes, well, the company will own it but they didn't want these ideas so *cough* they would opt to not take ownership. And we should be grateful!
Now I know you would ask, why would anyone accept this bullshit? Because roughly 200 people, including myself and a bunch of other engineers and analysts and technical employees were all part of an acquired company, and we had to choose to sign off on this crap and keep our jobs, or walk.
Some did walk. The new company fired a lot of other people before the ink was even dry. NOT a happy place to work. In the end, the only ones left were people too deeply important to fire, or people who had spent years on proprietary programs that would not transfer to any other employers. I got laid off after automating my job. That was the only way to get rid of me. I miss the money but not the place.
Who is worth more? A few hundred thousand jobs directly in coal and the places coal employees spend money and their towns and so forth, OR the few billion other lives that will be affected by climate change?
Ah well you see, those few billion people are mostly brown, mostly don't vote in the US, and don't live in coal towns. So proceed with the coal!
I've spent a lot of time in coal country West Virginia, and it is absolutely true, these people don't have many options. There are usually two industries: coal and farming,and farming is not exactly hiring a lot of people. As a result, the people in the towns I visited were thrilled to have jobs working at McDonalds or Subway or Family Dollar, because there was nothing else. The next nearest towns were often an hour away by car, so fuel cost for driving is very high, on some of the most dangerous roads in the US. Anyone who could get A local job was immediately better off.
And a lot of the remaining people lived as best they could, farming for food and so forth. The situation is bleak and a lot of people do turn to meth because there is both an incentive to sell it and make money, and a lot of reason to want to be drugged out of your mind and forget how bad life is.
The problem with supporting coal now is that there is no future in it. Either we let the industry die now. Or we prop it up now and it has to die later. But it is going to die. Supporting it now and allowing more people to begin careers in it is criminal since we KNOW we can't sustain this and these people will be the next ones with no options in 10 or 20 years, or less depending on how the electoral winds blow.
My neighborhood is home to a major AT&T CO which occupies a multistory building the size of a large square block. It was once full of so many employees, they had a whole other second block of parking lots for workers. But it's all automated now. It's kind of a Mother of All COs, serving as a hub for a large number of regular COs.
This CO has ALL the latest services including fiber, video, DSL, whatever. Nobody here can get any of these services except DSL. We're a poorer neighborhood, you see. And they don't feel like offering it here would be viable.
BUT not far away, some land was cleared and a cluster of about 10 new homes went in. Those homes got fiber. To get TO those homes, to service them, they had to go past hundreds of older, established homes and neighborhoods.
AT&T wanted nothing to do with these old customers, many of whom had AT&T DSL for over a decade, closing in on two decades in a couple cases. I know, because I was one of the first DSL customers from that CO. They sent an Bellsouth installer and two trainees to watch him do it, that's how new it was. And shockingly, he could not get it done. They had to roll a second installer to make sense of the PPPOE bridge connection. That's how new DSL was at the time. Forget self install. Even the professionals could barely hack it.
So despite that long track record and despite there being a very high number of landlines still in use here, AT&T didn't want to even offer more options.
The real question with wireless is who provides the best coverage where you need to use it.
Forget the TV ads and coverage maps. You don't care if they claim to cover 99% of the country. Real-world, in the places YOU use it, is what matters. Once you know who works where you need it, find the best deal.
In determining coverage, it is important to use a device that can take full advantage of the signals in use. For example, if you are looking at T-Mobile coverage, you should do so with a LTE band 12-capable device, not an old T-Mo phone granny had in a drawer.
For a relative of mine, we determined that Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint signals would not work for him. So I got him a T-Mobile phone and found a dirt-cheap MVNO to provide service. Works fine, costs very little. Done.
It seems like a lot of people never bother to take that approach and instead get hung up supporting a company because that's who they have been with forever, or they don't mind paying whatever they pay.
Worked support for a major tax software company in recent weeks and my particular specialty focused on people who had login issues.
We generally authenticated by email address or phone number. If someone was locked out and still has access to the email address OR their phone, no problem. I could easily push a reset, after validating other info to ensure it was actually their account.
But if they had changed emails and no longer had access to the email address, or changed phone numbers, the process was MUCH more complicated. These people had to submit photo ID and other fun things to our team. Which is not what you want to tell them when they have ~1 hour to submit their taxes.
One person who called had a family of people who swapped around emails all the time to dodge spam AND they had all changed phone numbers for some reason or other. There was no workable way for me to authenticate them.
Long ago I bought a domain name and use that for my email. My phone authentication goes to an online account and the SMS gets forwarded to whatever my real phone number happens to be.
Given that the ISS program is nearing the end of its funding in 2020 and there is no money or particular interest in funding it to stay longer, there is little point to bring in China now. We're going to have a big problem just to stay beyond 2020 ourselves because the current administration has no interest in spending money on things like this and they have also tasked NASA with doing other very expensive things. So there is no money, although the ISS should last another 10 years if we did fund it.
So, bringing in China now will do one things that seem likely to me:
Either they are going to get stuck with a platform everybody else is going to abandon within the next decade. ISS for sale, AS IS WHERE IS NO WARRANTY.
Or they are going to take full advantage of the 150 billion spent so far and leap ahead, and nobody wants to hand them a stepladder to the stars and damn well not for free.
Slashdot Mirror
CNN has no privacy agreement or obligation to keep this person's ID private. Inasmuch as this person has caused a media event thanks to their creative editing, they have made themselves into a newsworthy subject and thus CNN Is well within norms of journalism to reveal who it is.
For that matter, so is any other part of the media. If any of them also have the identity, then there is ground to attempt to interview them as part of a news story.
TL;DR version: this person has no expectation of privacy thanks to a news event they helped create. If you want privacy, don't do shit like this or at least be better at hiding who the fuck you are.
I'd be interested to know if MVNOs / GoogleFi will get access to this new 600MHz spectrum, once the phone support rolls out.
They will, if they support the handsets that support 600MHz.
For Fi, this means whatever Nexus or Pixel or flavor of the moment phone Google is pushing at the time. Google tends to have the latest band support in their Fi devices. The Nexus line was among the first to support T-Mobile's Band 12 700MHz signals and it works with Fi too.
-Former Fi user with a Nexus 6 now on a T-Mo MVNO because it's much less expensive than Fi.
to get the benefit of this?
Yes. There are no phones on the market that support it right now. Wait. Wait a year or two. Sooner than that and you might have a new phone but it's going to be a while before 600MHz has much deployment.
It's more accurate to say it is in their trust. The frequencies belong to the United States government. They are effectively being leased and licensed to carriers like T-Mobile. Their use of the frequencies depends on keeping the licenses.
It is the same for TV and radio: the stations have a license to use their assigned frequency but they don't actually own it, and can have their license revoked if there is reason to do so.
If anything, this is proof nothing significant happened at Roswell, NM in 1947. If it HAD, we would have had things like this popping out of government-funded reverse engineering groups and stuff like transistors would have come along in the mid 50's and.... oh wait, transistors DID come along in the 50s, didn't they? And early integrated circuits, lasers and all sorts of other high tech innovations.
Never mind, clearly we DID come up with a lot of advancement in a very short period of time. But nobody thought about using it for mobile phones.
In all seriousness, the invention of the cellular phone WAS still ahead of actual demand. The first such systems were a gamble because there was no previous demand and people had to be convinced to fork over a fortune to have one... and only for making phone calls, nothing else. There is no way this would have worked decades before it did work. The tech and the demand were not there.
My last IT employer had a vast set of milestones they wanted to hit by 2012. Goals! ha
One of them was to make the company be just like Zynga. Mind, Zynga was already in failure mode long before this visionary goal was born, and the work we did had absolutely nothing to do with anything Zynga did. .Very different products and markets.
Apparently the people who did the goals only looked at revenue or some sort of number where Zynga looked great on paper. But some of us knew the truth and openly laughed at that goal. This didn't please management. Oh well. Don't make "be like a company going down the shitter" as a goal and maybe your employees won't laugh.
And my TV is an even lower brand called Changhong. It's was the cheapest set I could get with three HDMI and 40" of screen, and it's been fine. Knock on wood.
$200 at Walmart -an experience that forever killed me on using WalmartDOTcom for anything again, but that has nothing to do with the TV.
It seems Changhong is mostly sold by Newegg now, also a Chinese-owned company.
Interestingly, the TV I got shares the same IR remote control codes as my older Toshiba TV, which was made before Toshiba sold the rights. Just curious.
Americans cannot understand and do not trust a president who is, or seems to be, smarter than they are.
Americans want somebody like them. Somebody they can understand. Somebody they can relate to.
Even if that person is really like con man uncle Joe who always spins BS stories at family gatherings and doesn't appear to have a real job, yet always has a new car and women 1/3rd his age with giant boobs hanging around. Nobody knows what Joe does but he sure seems to be good at it, so why not elect him?
Is Apple also going to upgrade their CSRs to resist social engineering to have 2FA turned off?
With PayPal, all you had to do to get around 2FA was call them up and social engineer your way into a password reset, which would also turn off 2FA. In other words, 2FA was so easy to bypass, it was of almost no actual security value.
A gate with a super advanced padlock is not secure if you can simply go around the gate. And that's WAY too easy to do with nearly every 2FA implementation. There is always a way around it or a way in. Always. And anyone determined enough to get in, because they WANT to do something malicious, would, of course KNOW the ways around it.
How is carrying a laptop in luggage any "safer" than carrying it in the passenger cabin?
The same laptop is still on the plane, either way. It has the same potential to explode thanks to shady battery manufacturing or because of malicious intent. Putting it in the cargo hold doesn't change any of that.
What it DOES do is prevent anyone from attempting to fight a fire if the laptop battery ignited. At least in the passenger cabin, there is a chance someone will notice the thing burning and take action to put it out or smother it as best they can. Meanwhile the same thing locked in cargo below will just burn until it sets off the fire detector, at which point nothing else happens because nobody can get to it. We know from history fires like that tend to take out the controls or emit enough toxic fumes to kill all on board. In flight fire is BAD.
It's just a fucking trap. You do all the work to find the vulnerabilities and weaknesses, document them, submit them, get ignored, get ignored, get ignored, and then suddenly a bunch of FBI goons show up and arrest you for hacking and act like YOU are the criminal for trying to find and warn them about their own problems.
Oh sign me up! /s
I do not buy the concept of spoilers ruining anything. Dammit, if the fucking film is good enough, you won't give a fuck that you found out some spoiler by accident.
And PLENTY of people rank among their favorite movies and shows things they have already seen before, MULTIPLE TIMES and yet they still manage to find enjoyment in seeing them again just the same.
We all know how Star Wars ANH ends. Until Lucas changes it again, it's going to be the same goddamn movie you saw before. But if you count that as a favorite and KNOW EVERY SCENE by heart, you still like it! And it's utterly spoiled for you, isn't it?
So do not whine to me about spoilers. If knowing what happens matters that much, then the filmmakers have failed at their job. We all know the viewing public doesn't hold these assholes accountable for making shit pictures because you all line up to see them anyway. But if you ever found your spines and refused to see crap. better films from better directors would get made and eventually there would be movies so good, it didn't matter if you knew the ending.
Wonder if intel is still touchy when people call Itanium by the name Itanic instead.
Oh well. It's been Itanic for so long, I have to put in effort to remember the actual name.
Well, at least I can still use my compression tool and RG/6 cable for installing new satellite dishes.
Oh, wait. Nevermind.
True story: When Comcast came to wire my house for cable a few years ago, the installer opened a brand-new 1000ft roll of RG6QS with carrier wire, used what he needed to do the drop install, and left the remaining spool behind when he was done. His service truck had about 20 rolls of cable in it. Any chance he got to ditch a spool, he would. It was taking up too much room.
So I now have 700ft of Comcast-grade RG6QS on a spool. It's quite good stuff.
The installer did a fine job. I let his boss know and said nothing about the freebie spool. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, you know.
Why in 2015 was Comcast just now wiring my house? It had been wired for cable years before, but a passing box truck ripped out the cable drop about 15 years ago. We had satellite for TV and DSL for internet and didn't care. So Comcast had to redo the drop when I dropped AT&T slow DSL. Once told about the truck ripping out the old wire, the new installer did a MUCH better job of stringing up a new drop from a higher place. So he also listened to me, did exactly what he needed to do to prevent another issue, and left me a spool of cable. Nice.
I may be the only happy Comcast customer. Or I may be drunk. Pick.
Lately Comcast Xfinity has been touting features they think set them apart from the competition. Voice Remote. Being able to watch on-demand on any device, and a few other things.
But the thing is, never in my entire life have I ever had a desire to TALK to my remote control, and I can't think of a reason, short of losing my mind entirely, that I would ever do that. The idea of uttering "Show me sitcoms" makes me want to die inside.
I don't know anyone else who has ever wanted this feature, either. But Xfinity thinks it's fucking amazing.
Video on any device is a joke. I don't have time to watch video on the go, driving, or at work.
What I want from Xfinity is a stable internet connection with decent speed, and I get that. They don't need to offer me more. I don't want more. I would like a cheaper bill but I'd also like a giant robot, and we cannot always have what we want.
It's Smurfs 2. What else could you possibly want?
What could I WANT?
Gargamel to finally eradicate all of those damn Smurfs! Is that a bit much to ask? Perhaps so.
50% in 10 years seems awfully optimistic. But suppose it's 50% in 20 years. It really does not matter, but this does:
What are all these soon to be unemployed people supposed to DO, exactly?
The people aren't going to vanish the moment they are made redundant. They'll still be here, needing to pay the same bills and eat and so on. And the birthrate isn't slowing down. We are making more and more people every day and they'll all need jobs too.
History has repeatedly shown that high unemployment with no hope of finding work leads to massive crime as people have nothing else to do and no options. It can be argued society does not owe anyone a job or welfare payments just for existing. Fine. But society won't like or want what happens when AI takes away so many jobs. The civil unrest WILL be society's problem to solve.
I don't see a way out unless we have massive population curbs, which simply will not happen. It will probably get much worse as people with nothing else to do will spend a lot of time making babies. I am just glad I have no kids who will have to live in the world that should be going to hell in a hurry around the time I die.
Times have changed. People want to do tasks now. They don't give a shit what platform it happens to be using.
Web browsing, email, composing school or work documents, even editing pictures are all platform-agnostic.
Apple and Microsoft inevitably bring their own product ideas to these tasks when it's just not needed. Maybe 20 years ago, yes. But not any more. And Chromebooks get it. The thing only does a few tasks, but they happen to be what 99% of people need. And they do it cheaply and with relative security and safety.
Windows is too busy trying to be all things to all uses and charges a cost in terms of buying a license and also in the increased hardware you need to run to make it a non-miserable experience, because Windows is not a lean OS. It's full of bloat so some version of some product from 10 years ago will still work.
Apple is scarcely better. The iPad is good but still carries with it all the baggage of being an iOS device. And iPads demand a premium price.
So if a cheap Chromebook will do what you need, or you can give it to grandma and not have to worry about ever supporting it or trying to remove viruses from it, you would almost be an idiot to buy a full computer solution. This means the whole foundation of Windows and even the product name are basically obsolete.
I get why they would fight this trend but NOBODY Is going back to the old days. More and more tasks will migrate to phone apps and in turn become simple enough to do on a Chromebook-type device.
Tell that to the idiots using the forgotten social messaging app Whisper, which has nothing to do with the Whisper protocol or Whatsapp.
Nope, it's just a sort of Twitter clone that pretends to be anonymous, and tons of idiots fall for it and post for sale or want to buy messages for "contraband substances" as if nobody can trace them.
The app records the user's IP address, the IMEI of their phone, their GPS (which it uses to set a "nearby messages" group feature), their phone number, and none of this is encrypted in any way AND the developers proudly declare in the TOS that they will happily respond to any requests from law enforcement. The app also inserts ads from the Facebook network so anything you look at on FB may in turn spawn "related" ads in the app. So not only does the app know who you are, we can presume FB in turn knows a lot about which ads are seen when and perhaps even which content the user was looking at.
So it is completely NOT anonymous. And yet idiot users post their messages every day. I had NO idea there were even so many different words for pot.
The app has other major issues, such as a general lack of users -potheads and gays seeking gays seem to be the main users, but they don't add up to very many. So the developer hires workers to make fake posts, uses bots to repost and repost the same messages day after day after day, all in a bid to fake the place into looking like people use it. A lot of the Indian contractors don't even bother to hide that they are posting from Indian call centers.
The app also has a "Popular Posts" feature which presents those items when users first open the app. But what determines what is "popular" is not popularity but the whimsy of one of those Indian workers who decides to promote a particular post to the Popular page, which then gets a lot of views and so forth. So they are manufacturing popularity, not seeking what is naturally popular. It's fraud. The anonymity is fraud.
But very few users bother with this thing and nobody would really notice if it blew away.
The last IT place I worked had a policy, which you had to sign and accept on hire, which stated the company owned ANY idea you came up with during your time as an employee, and they meant away from the office too. They meant they owned the idea if you came up with a better software product OR came up with a way to have your dog mow your lawn for you.
OWNED!
The company was not kidding. We asked them if this meant they owned my invention for cleaning carpet, making a TV antenna out of Cat 5, etc. And they said yes, well, the company will own it but they didn't want these ideas so *cough* they would opt to not take ownership. And we should be grateful!
Now I know you would ask, why would anyone accept this bullshit? Because roughly 200 people, including myself and a bunch of other engineers and analysts and technical employees were all part of an acquired company, and we had to choose to sign off on this crap and keep our jobs, or walk.
Some did walk. The new company fired a lot of other people before the ink was even dry. NOT a happy place to work. In the end, the only ones left were people too deeply important to fire, or people who had spent years on proprietary programs that would not transfer to any other employers. I got laid off after automating my job. That was the only way to get rid of me. I miss the money but not the place.
And all my ideas are now belong to me!
Who is worth more? A few hundred thousand jobs directly in coal and the places coal employees spend money and their towns and so forth, OR the few billion other lives that will be affected by climate change?
Ah well you see, those few billion people are mostly brown, mostly don't vote in the US, and don't live in coal towns. So proceed with the coal!
I've spent a lot of time in coal country West Virginia, and it is absolutely true, these people don't have many options. There are usually two industries: coal and farming,and farming is not exactly hiring a lot of people. As a result, the people in the towns I visited were thrilled to have jobs working at McDonalds or Subway or Family Dollar, because there was nothing else. The next nearest towns were often an hour away by car, so fuel cost for driving is very high, on some of the most dangerous roads in the US. Anyone who could get A local job was immediately better off.
And a lot of the remaining people lived as best they could, farming for food and so forth. The situation is bleak and a lot of people do turn to meth because there is both an incentive to sell it and make money, and a lot of reason to want to be drugged out of your mind and forget how bad life is.
The problem with supporting coal now is that there is no future in it. Either we let the industry die now. Or we prop it up now and it has to die later. But it is going to die. Supporting it now and allowing more people to begin careers in it is criminal since we KNOW we can't sustain this and these people will be the next ones with no options in 10 or 20 years, or less depending on how the electoral winds blow.
My neighborhood is home to a major AT&T CO which occupies a multistory building the size of a large square block. It was once full of so many employees, they had a whole other second block of parking lots for workers. But it's all automated now. It's kind of a Mother of All COs, serving as a hub for a large number of regular COs.
This CO has ALL the latest services including fiber, video, DSL, whatever. Nobody here can get any of these services except DSL. We're a poorer neighborhood, you see. And they don't feel like offering it here would be viable.
BUT not far away, some land was cleared and a cluster of about 10 new homes went in. Those homes got fiber. To get TO those homes, to service them, they had to go past hundreds of older, established homes and neighborhoods.
AT&T wanted nothing to do with these old customers, many of whom had AT&T DSL for over a decade, closing in on two decades in a couple cases. I know, because I was one of the first DSL customers from that CO. They sent an Bellsouth installer and two trainees to watch him do it, that's how new it was. And shockingly, he could not get it done. They had to roll a second installer to make sense of the PPPOE bridge connection. That's how new DSL was at the time. Forget self install. Even the professionals could barely hack it.
So despite that long track record and despite there being a very high number of landlines still in use here, AT&T didn't want to even offer more options.
Comcast has had no such issues offering service.
The real question with wireless is who provides the best coverage where you need to use it.
Forget the TV ads and coverage maps. You don't care if they claim to cover 99% of the country. Real-world, in the places YOU use it, is what matters. Once you know who works where you need it, find the best deal.
In determining coverage, it is important to use a device that can take full advantage of the signals in use. For example, if you are looking at T-Mobile coverage, you should do so with a LTE band 12-capable device, not an old T-Mo phone granny had in a drawer.
For a relative of mine, we determined that Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint signals would not work for him. So I got him a T-Mobile phone and found a dirt-cheap MVNO to provide service. Works fine, costs very little. Done.
It seems like a lot of people never bother to take that approach and instead get hung up supporting a company because that's who they have been with forever, or they don't mind paying whatever they pay.
Worked support for a major tax software company in recent weeks and my particular specialty focused on people who had login issues.
We generally authenticated by email address or phone number. If someone was locked out and still has access to the email address OR their phone, no problem. I could easily push a reset, after validating other info to ensure it was actually their account.
But if they had changed emails and no longer had access to the email address, or changed phone numbers, the process was MUCH more complicated. These people had to submit photo ID and other fun things to our team. Which is not what you want to tell them when they have ~1 hour to submit their taxes.
One person who called had a family of people who swapped around emails all the time to dodge spam AND they had all changed phone numbers for some reason or other. There was no workable way for me to authenticate them.
Long ago I bought a domain name and use that for my email. My phone authentication goes to an online account and the SMS gets forwarded to whatever my real phone number happens to be.
Given that the ISS program is nearing the end of its funding in 2020 and there is no money or particular interest in funding it to stay longer, there is little point to bring in China now. We're going to have a big problem just to stay beyond 2020 ourselves because the current administration has no interest in spending money on things like this and they have also tasked NASA with doing other very expensive things. So there is no money, although the ISS should last another 10 years if we did fund it.
So, bringing in China now will do one things that seem likely to me:
Either they are going to get stuck with a platform everybody else is going to abandon within the next decade. ISS for sale, AS IS WHERE IS NO WARRANTY.
Or they are going to take full advantage of the 150 billion spent so far and leap ahead, and nobody wants to hand them a stepladder to the stars and damn well not for free.