I think a lot of people in rural areas got a raw deal from this digital TV signal upgrade, because it makes it impossible to pick up a lot of stations you used to be able to tune in with the old analog system.
Where we live, for example? We're about a 70 minute drive away from Washington DC (with many people in town commuting to/from the DC area daily for work), yet you can't pick up the DC network stations over the air. (Well, you *might* get 1 or 2 if you aim the right antenna just the right way -- but you won't get the number of them you did before things went digital.)
I never understood why repeaters weren't implemented to boost the digital OTA signals, to ensure good coverage? Couldn't a piece of the funds received by selling off the old frequencies go to this?
It's an interesting idea... I mean, I certainly looked at Chromebooks before but took a pass on buying one due to the low hardware specs. I've worked in I.T. for decades - and it's a fairly regular thing to run across a 5-6 year old notebook computer that someone is happy to get rid of free. Spend $20 on a new battery for it from some vendor on Amazon and maybe upgrade the RAM or swap in a new SSD, and you have a laptop that performs at least as well as any Chromebook for very little money. (And you recycled something existing, instead of buying more gear. Arguably a good thing.)
But I have a feeling the appeal of the Chromebook as it stands today is the low price-point. You get something that looks modern, is relatively thin and lightweight, and for less money than the Windows laptops they're selling everywhere. They're good enough for schools (their biggest customers) too.
If you beefed it up to deserve the "Pro" moniker - how would that affect the price? IMO, the vendors selling the "nicer" Chromebooks with more RAM and so forth are already nearing the price points where you wonder why you'd still buy one instead of a full-featured notebook on sale, running Windows 10.
I can definitely understand the motivation for someone to do these scams. But ultimately, you're in a situation where you can't really get "the law" to crack down on the people doing them (thanks to their location and ability to post their ads using various internet connections that aren't their own).
The way to deter them is to cost the scammers as much time, effort and money as possible. Lead them on into thinking you're going to give them a payout, when you're really just harassing them. (If they're going to "send you a check in the mail", make sure you tell them you never received it and get them to mail another. If you can get them to pay postage for an item they think they're scamming from you, mail some heavy rocks or bricks.)
The ironic thing is, this radioactive "waste" clearly still has lots of potential energy in it, or else it wouldn't be dangerous in the first place. IMO, what's needed is a process to use this stuff after it's no longer suitable for use in the original reactor.
I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure there are other reactor designs that would allow building smaller scale power generators that run on this waste material, instead of trying to bury it, shoot it into space, or what-not.
"But, Rawls says, the point at which we stop that inequality is when the extra money for the rich stops benefitting the society as a whole. At some point rich people just get more and more wealth, but it doesn't actually help the poorest to improve their quality of life (and often begins to make the poorest WORSE off). And again going back to the veil of ignorance, if you didn't know what your talent would be before entering in a society (and you might have ended up on the bottom), you probably would say that's not fair for all. Collectively, we need to design the rules to benefit us all, because rich people don't exist in a vacuum."
What I'd like to know is, at what point does someone get "too rich" to benefit society as a whole anymore? That's the problem with these statements. They may be based in reality, but there's no logical way to draw a line saying "X amount of wealth is still acceptable, but don't earn a penny more than that or you'll become one of the bad guys in society!"
In fact, an extremely wealthy individual might wind up donating practically all of his or her remaining wealth, upon death, to charitable causes -- negating all of the hand-wringing and postulating over how amassing that wealth was detrimental to society.
You know? As a libertarian myself, it always amuses me how people rush to argue over the relatively few things central government accomplished for people that we can all agree are useful and often used by the vast majority of citizens.
When I think of all the boneheaded things government has done with my money (anything from grants for studying cow flatulence to billions of dollars the Pentagon managed to just make vanish into thin air right around the time we were distracted by 9-11) -- concerns over the expenditures for emergency services and a national highway system are at the bottom of my list.
I guess you need to zero in on those, though, if you want to make sure libertarians look like idiots for pointing out how wasteful government spending can be?
I'd definitely like to see mandatory drug testing ended, across the board. (For that matter, the same goes for those sobriety checkpoints.) You shouldn't be presumed guilty until proven innocent, period. When it comes to most private sector jobs that drug test? Regardless of any philosophical reasons against it, the practice is quite likely just a waste of money overall. I've worked at jobs where drug testing was required as a condition of employment PLUS at random intervals afterwards. Those tests aren't all that cheap, and the labs doing the testing aren't infallible either. So a positive result means you have to do a second test to verify the result. By then, a lot of people are crafty enough to know ways to cheat the tests. And who's to say a company didn't get rid of a really good employee over one of them? Just because someone likes to get high once in a while doesn't prove they can't do a great job at whatever you hired them for. How about we fire people for doing those drugs or drinking on company time and stop worrying about digging up evidence about what they may do on their personal time?
Seriously? The only part of the whole thing that made me like Apple slightly less was when they first started SUPPORTING emojis in the OS and made a big deal about it as a "new feature" worth upgrading for.
As far as I'm concerned, emojis are generally just an annoyance. Reminds me of back in the BBS era where people could make flashing colored ANSI text and animated twirling cursors moving around and backspacing things that were on the screen.
If you feel the need to send images to someone, great. Send a photo or even a video. But *why* go to a bunch of trouble to hunt down a little icon representing a replacement for a word or two in a sentence?
I can't say I knew for certain that the human pain threshold was 106-108F, but everything else you said seems like common sense to me. I have to think the WHO was just looking for an excuse to publish another new "finding" more than providing anything really useful for people.
An awful lot of people don't even drink their coffee without diluting it with some creamer or milk first, and/or adding sugar and stirring. All of those processes will serve to drop its temperature too.
But everyone I know takes really small sips of tea or coffee when it hasn't yet had a little time to sit and cool. Your body is self-regulating your drinking so you don't cause injury.
Wow.... I'm an "Apple fanboy" now, because I post an honest opinion about the pros and cons of the WWDC event? Sorry I didn't just bash on the entire thing as pointless so it might please you, Mr. "binary numbers for a Slashdot nick".
As a matter of fact, yes.... I'm often using my iPhone to read email and linked articles people send me when I'm on public transportation, riding to/from work. Once I'm at my computer, I sometimes wish I had the ability to paste quotes from what I read (such as if I want to share it with someone I know on Facebook). Without easy copy/paste functionality, that requires the extra steps of pulling the original content back up on the PC or Mac in a browser and finding the info of interest again, just to do the copy/paste on it. Usually, that's not even worth the effort.
But that conveniently ignores the more important part of my comment on the feature.... the ability to create a drawing or sketch on an iPad Pro using the pencil, and then easily xfer it over to a project on the Mac. That has the potential to save someone the expense of buying a Wacom or similar tablet, which would be inferior to the experience drawing/sketching on the iPad Pro anyway.
I don't think either company is going to have any problems selling their latest graphics card offerings, considering all the notebook computers that have under-powered graphics chipsets and all the Apple products that used older chipsets with mediocre performance.
It may be true that games aren't taxing the latest card's capabilities right now -- but they're not in the same situation as CPUs, where even a budget priced processor has more power than people need for most of what they do. With graphics cards, anything with really good performance has come with a high price tag - pricing it out of the range of the mainstream user. The newer card technology is needed to push prices down, as much as anything else.
I'm sure many people will whine about being underwhelmed by this year's WWDC and the lack of any new hardware announcements, etc. But IMO, there were some really solid improvements shown. The "universal clipboard" is a HUGE improvement, IMO. That's something you can't really do on any other platform today and works especially well for Apple since so many Mac users also own an iPhone and/or iPad. When Apple first released "Continuity" - I found it an interesting concept, but lacking in many ways. (Heck, it wasn't even compatible with the older versions of Bluetooth found in many Macs - so many people couldn't even begin using it when it was released.) The ability to copy content from my iPad or iPhone and simply paste back into any app on my Mac, though? That's quite useful. The iPad Pro, especially, is a better artistic tool than any Mac if you're using the Apple Pencil with it. Now, it can truly feel like an accessory for your Mac instead of operating in an island.
watchOS 3 looks FAR better than what we've got now for the Apple Watch too. (In this case, I'd argue we're finally really getting what it should have had originally, or at LEAST by the second OS update. But glad to see it's becoming reality, regardless. Just like with the original iPhone, the watch is a much better product when Apple allows apps to fully run on it.)
I'm also happy to see the "Home" app coming to iOS to control HomeKit. The HomeKit standard was definitely released too quickly and with too little forethought by Apple. The glaring omission was not having one central management app for it built into the OS, so again -- about time!
I gotta say though? I'm just not at all excited by the changes for Photos. I just don't know why most users would find it that compelling to let the computer try to analyze a bunch of aspects of the photos in a collection and try to organize them for you? I see that as potentially slowing down the software (while lightning fast scrolling through thumbnails and opening/editing photos is usually considered a high priority), and I'd become frustrated when photos I *knew* I took weren't appearing in certain collections, every time the Mac didn't properly figure out they were part of certain groups. IMO, the most "surefire" way to know that a group of photos belongs together is by the date/time-stamp -- and we've had that feature for a long time now.
Especially with the discontinuation of the "pro" quality Aperture software, I was hoping Photos would add more "pro" level features to compensate, instead of all of this "auto sorting" and "automatic memory video making" stuff.
Basically, this guy built a machine that doesn't serve a useful purpose. It inflicts a specific type of pain on people which the marketplace had no existing demand for. There are plenty of power tools and other machines out there which are capable of inflicting injury -- even if they're actually designed with a primary purpose of doing some sort of useful task (mowing lawns, shredding tree branches, etc. etc.).
He's not really starting a new conversation about anything I can see? Movies like Robocop addressed the possibility of building weaponized robots that could cause human injury, decades ago.
Unless we actually reach a point where robots can truly think for themselves and reason (not just the fake A.I. seen with intelligent agents like Siri on your phone), whoever builds them and programs them to work a certain way is ultimately responsible for what was constructed.
The way Bethesda cut so much content out of Fallout 4 before it went on sale, and ruined the ending scenes in the process? I would never recommend anyone spend $110 for a "deluxe edition" of the game!
I had many, many hours of game-play sunk into Fallout 4 and the story got pretty in depth as I went on. That's what made the build-up to the poor excuse for a climax SO frustrating. The DLC Bethesda has been selling for the game since then does zilch to address any of this. Play a bunch of new side missions for Valentine's detective agency on some new maps? Hell no! I'm still angry I was promised I'd become the new director of the Institute, only to discover I still had no power to change anything about its relations with the other factions. (A bunch of their scientists still expected me to take orders from them, running around to do synth recovery missions and what-not. Huh?!)
Too many bugs left in the game too.... Like the mission where I was supposed to select McCreedy as my companion to go get a serum out of a medical center to save his son. Last I was with him, I sent him to the Castle settlement. But every time I went back there to get him, he was nowhere to be found. Sometimes I'd hear his voice, speaking some random comment, but I'd run all over the place looking for him and he wasn't there! I wound up having to "cheat" - using a console command to force his character to appear where I was (only possible because I had the Windows version). And on the weird mission with the U.S. Constitution (ship on top of the Savings and Loan, run by robots) - I completed the whole thing except we didn't successfully defend it against some raiders as it was getting ready to blast off. So I reloaded my previous save game to try again. When I completed the raider defense successfully that time? It said I had to talk to the captain as the last step, but he refused to speak to me. When I left and returned, it just said I completed everything. Never got to see the ship blast off. (I got mad and just started killing all the robots and plundered the ship.)
I have to disagree that "all of my complaints are relatively incorrect". I'm glad you haven't experienced issues typing on the MS keyboard cover, but it's a fact that many of our users have. The Surface Pro is designed so it props upright along the edge of the cover, and the cover is a plastic and fabric combo that's slightly flexible. That means if you're sitting on a train or other form of public transportation and it's vibrating/bouncing around, the Surface Pro 4 can't really be held still by the keyboard portion - unlike a laptop with a traditional hinged lid firmly attached to the bottom half of the shell. That doesn't even begin to discuss such questions as why MS feels the need to sell the keyboard cover as an *option* for over $100 on a computer this expensive? Seems to me it should be included, as I've never met anyone who bought a Surface Pro 4 and decided to skip the keyboard cover.
As for the font scaling? Try any of a number of older apps developed using Java 6.... It's typically not compiled to be "scaling aware" (even if Java 6 technically did offer the option to compile source that way). Our Fonality VoIP "HUD" control panel is one such example. On a Surface Pro 4, if you launch it - you can't even see the phone extensions you're trying to click on because it draws them so tiny. There's no way to get Windows 10 to tell the app to draw it larger in proportion to everything else. All you can do is drag it onto a regular (non 4K) external display where it will display properly.
Well, first off? I don't think there's any point in trying to twist this into some sort of "anti libertarian" rant... implying it's libertarian philosophies which cause sites like Facebook to act the way they do.
IMO, this has nothing to do with politics, unless you're going to go so far as to say you feel social media, cloud drive storage, cloud backup and other such offerings should all be run only by the government or strictly regulated under government control. (I suppose that's ONE way to try to force these entities not to delete your data against your will or suddenly go out of business without adequate provisions for recovering your data first, or ??)
But otherwise, no... the truth is the same as ever. If someone offers you a service at no charge, you really have no say when it comes to not liking the way the service is performed, or any changes made to the rules of how the free service gets offered. Your options include discontinuing use of the service, complying with whatever rules and demands are placed upon it to continue using it, or spending money for alternatives (which could include building your own).
That said? I see no harm in complaining when you're unhappy. If nothing else, Facebook management needs to hear the opinions of the user-base. If it's clear that a change is so strongly disliked, it causes a lot of people to stop using it -- at least they can't pretend not to understand why it happened. And maybe... just maybe, it will cause them to rethink a bad idea once in a while and preserve the service as a little more friendly to use.
Seriously, I work in I.T. for a company with a highly mobile workforce, and we're both Mac and Windows friendly on top of that. So our environment is mixed, with a lot of emphasis on trying out various portable options and cloud offerings, while still supporting some traditional server "back end" for our financial system and shared network drives.
Long ago, we switched all of our users from desktop systems to laptops, and we had a policy of issuing corporate iPads ever since the iPad 2 came along. (For a long time, we had a division of our company doing iOS software development - so it made sense to issue hardware to run the stuff we made.)
Right now, we're starting to issue the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 to new hires who request a Windows PC instead of a Mac. And that brings up the question of whether its time to stop issuing iPads - if the Surface Pro is supposed to double as a tablet.
What we're seeing though is that generally no, the "one solution fits all" model is a big compromise and doesn't really work that well. Out of all of the different computers we've issued over the years, from HP Elitebooks to various Dell machines to different Macbooks -- the only one that's held up over the years as the "gold standard" that users really liked AND worked reliably was the Macbook Air 13". It's light and thin enough so people can throw it in a backpack or whatnot and take it with them without a care. Battery life is great. It's about half the price of the high end Macbook Pro laptops. The basic look stayed the same from the first year of production through current models - meaning there's no stigma about someone pulling out and opening an older 2011 or 2012 model in a meeting with clients. And repairs are pretty reasonably priced. (With Apple doing a "flat rate" repair program on them, you can have one with 5 or 6 things wrong with it and it's still cost effective to have it serviced rather than trash it.)
With the Surface Pro 4, by contrast? Yes, people think things like the pencil are cool, and it's a very capable machine when plugged into a dock and used like a desktop. But as soon as you take it with you to use like an iPad, you run into a lot of downsides. Battery life NOT so great, for starters. And because it runs a full Windows 10 OS, it has the inherent problems that come with a full blown, more complex OS. Issues not always waking from sleep properly, for example -- leading to a long wait to reboot the whole thing, or apps that aren't designed for the hi-res 4K display so fonts display so tiny, they're unreadable. The keyboard cover is too flimsy to allow typing on it like laptop if you actually have to use it in your lap. (It's designed assuming you have a solid surface like a table underneath the whole thing.) Lastly, I think it's a big omission that you can't buy a Surface Pro 4 with a built-in LTE cellular modem like you can an iPad. Having a cellular data plan on the devices goes a LONG way towards feeling "always connected" and ensuring your cloud-based data or apps are always available "on the go".
It doesn't sound to me like the service was in the wrong, denying a refund in this situation? If you're just using the service to troll people, requesting transfers of funds you know up-front you don't *really* want to transfer, it seems like it's YOUR problem if the payment processor grows tired of participating in your game and declares your funds transfer final.
As someone who was forced to deal with PayPal's antics as part of the "package deal" selling on eBay when the two of them formed a cartel, I can think of SO many more legitimate situations to complain about PayPal over than this one.
I think this is an interesting situation from a legal standpoint and worth thinking about. But your response makes more sense than anything else I read here.
IMO, there should be an expectation that any web site providing a service for pay would make reasonable efforts not to allow misuse of the site to continue, especially when it's of a criminal nature and injuring your site's own users. When such things happen, they have to be examined on a case by case basis by the legal system. (EG. How much evidence really exists to show the party running the web site was aware of the illegal activities?)
Sites like Craigslist and Facebook are apparently worried that they'll get drug into this too, with some draconian new legislation putting new burdens on them. That would certainly be a bad outcome, but doesn't seem like one that should happen at all here? A free site allowing open access is more of a "common carrier", like the phone company. (Would you arrest people working for your VoIP provider because a criminal transaction took place via a phone call carried over their network?) There's no profit motive for them to "look the other way" about illegal activities done by people paying to post ads, etc.
Yeah, I'll grant you the author of that essay probably uses "storing information" far more literally than he should. The brain obviously remembers/stores SOME things, or else we'd be completely non-functional. If I place my car keys on the dresser, I'm able to make a "mental note" that I'm putting them there, so I can go back later in the day and retrieve them.
I think the point was, we don't (except maybe the individuals who seem to really have "photographic memory") store complete sets of information about what we observe. When you scan an image into a computer, it stores a copy of the whole thing, pixel for pixel. It might use compression to help save space, but a replica of the original image is saved someplace and that's what the computer works from in image editors or any type of software analyzing the image to match it for criteria.
The interesting thing with the human brain is, everyone seems to have different amounts of data they store when they observe things. (EG. Sure, you can recall scenes from a movie once you've watched it. But I guarantee if 50 people watch the same movie for the first time, you'll get a wide range of results if you ask each of them to recall some of those scenes.) There are probably all sorts of factors in play as to why each individual considers certain details worth remembering and others safe to discard. That, alone, means we've got to figure out the mechanics of how all of that works before we can properly simulate it in A.I. (Simply electing to use a specific "lossy" storage algorithm for data collection isn't going to mimic what really goes on in the human mind.)
For those not paying attention, the only market segment in Windows computers that's selling well right now are gaming laptops and desktops.
The fact is, the video game industry is one that eclipses Hollywood in dollars spent. It's here to stay and increasingly, it's becoming a mainstream pastime for the general public. Obviously, the dedicated consoles are a big piece of the gaming pie (and heck, that's been true since the days of the Atari 2600). But there's so much more you can do with a keyboard and a mouse, coupled to a system with a lot of memory and disk storage space.
In recent years though, a laptop/notebook/ultrabook/whatever meant you had sub-standard 3D graphics capabilities. Even the most expensive discreet graphics added to your laptop put you in the category of, "Yes... you can now actually PLAY the new game titles, but only with reduced detail levels and other compromises, or frame rates will really suffer." That's not exactly compelling.
The new chips from both nVidia and ATI are basically 2 generations ahead of what's been available. You're getting a big performance leap AND better pricing. I'm thinking this is exactly what Apple needs to use to get its product line back up to par (since it uses mobile GPUs even in its iMac desktops), and what will stimulate the PC industry as a whole.
There's no reason to have to settle for console gaming if this hurdle is taken out of the way.
Obviously, you're not working in I.T. support for a company with highly mobile workers who often need assistance in the form of a quick fix, no matter where they're located.
Windows "Safe Mode" can be useful for removing malware because it tells the OS to boot up in a "bare bones" mode, bypassing the startup registry keys or scripts it would usually run at boot time. This may be less true for Windows 10 or 8 than for 7... but it was definitely the case with 7 that malware removal tools couldn't completely delete some malware without first booting into safe mode. (Once the code was running, courtesy of getting launched by the normal boot processes that were skipped in safe mode, they kept themselves locked from deletion.)
It's not always a viable option to tell somebody who is half way around the world "Sorry, but you have to stop using your corporate-issued laptop now. Unhook it from the network immediately and send it back to us to remove the malware for you." They just want someone in I.T. to try to connect up and get it cleaned up so it functions properly again -- so they can do the business presentation they were scheduled to do or what-not.
If there are concerns it wasn't possible to get it 100% clean, it can be earmarked to re-image when it comes back.
I found the above-linked essay pretty interesting, because he points out what should probably be obvious in hindsight, but easily gets lots in all the "noise" about A.I.
Basically, he argues that the human brain doesn't really "process" or "store" information anything like a computer. We used those flawed analogies all the time when describing how someone's brain works -- but they're no more accurate than the popular medical theory in the past that everything was fluid-based. The truth is -- a computer is a great tool for storing a bunch of data for selective retrieval, and you can use that to an extent to fake intelligence (a la Apple's "Siri", Microsoft's "Cortana", or other such agents). But it's nothing more than an illusion crafted by the software developer. Investing more time, effort and money into such projects is likely to result only in creating more believable "pretend intelligence" as the data-pool it pulls responses from increases in size and scope. You're still no further towards a goal of making a computer that's "self aware" or can think for itself.
Corporate I.T. likes these types of remote assistance packages, primarily because they let you set up a whole list of computers to click to connect with, under a single "master" account. It's really convenient to have all of your company's workstations organized by department or group and easily visible as to which are online and which are offline.
We used LogMeIn for this until they started talking about charging us thousands for what used to be free. That's when TeamViewer kind of popped up out of nowhere, promising equivalent functionality at no cost and a great migration path off of LogMeIn.
TeamViewer gives a unified interface for remote controlling everything set up with it, no matter what platform (Linux, Mac or Windows) and gives the ability to reboot a Windows PC in "safe mode" and still connect back up to it (great for malware removal purposes, etc.).
I've always thought Microsoft's remote desktop client needs a LOT of improvement, so these 3rd. party solutions aren't so necessary.
Truthfully, everyone I know who has a "smart TV" only purchased it on some kind of sale where it seemed like it didn't cost any more than TVs without the smart functionality. We have a 42" LCD we bought last Xmas at Best Buy that has some smart functionality in it. (One button press on the remote takes you into Netflix, and it supports a couple of other services too.) But we really only bought it because it seemed to have a good picture, was priced right on a sale, and it's the size we wanted for an upstairs bedroom TV as a gift for grandma (who is currently living with us). She won't ever use the smart features. She just wants to use her DirecTV satellite hook-up.
I'm pretty sure this stuff is easy enough to implement, it will just come standard with new televisions before long. Enough people want to "cut the cord" and stream content that the TV makers will start viewing it as a basic function of a television set.
I also happen to think Ron Paul got a whole LOT of things right. (Arguably, he spent a bit too much time arguing some aspects of foreign policy that America isn't ready for yet -- hurting his credibility. But still, he made MUCH more sense than the mass media wanted to admit.) And honestly? Although he made a lot of references to advocating a return to the days of the "gold standard", I think that's a concept that can be implemented without involving gold at all. The key is simply tying our currency to *something* tangible, rather than backing it with nothing but faith in the monetary system remaining solvent.
Rand is really not that close a follower of Ron's beliefs.... He's much more of a typical Republican, except one who is more in-tune than most with protecting individual freedom from government intrusions of privacy. He never gave me the impression he wanted to do much of anything to put an end to the "war on terror" (beyond reigning in agencies like the TSA or NSA spying on American citizens, perhaps).
In any case, Ron Paul is one of very FEW exceptions as a candidate who was registered on the Republican ticket, yet held very libertarian beliefs.
I think you're selling a lot of people short if you think most Libertarians will just vote Trump out of the belief that "blocking Hillary" is more important than any of their other principles. The problem is, America doesn't have nearly enough libertarian-minded people in the first place. But I predict you'll see at least a doubling of the usual number of votes for the L.P. in this election.
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I think a lot of people in rural areas got a raw deal from this digital TV signal upgrade, because it makes it impossible to pick up a lot of stations you used to be able to tune in with the old analog system.
Where we live, for example? We're about a 70 minute drive away from Washington DC (with many people in town commuting to/from the DC area daily for work), yet you can't pick up the DC network stations over the air. (Well, you *might* get 1 or 2 if you aim the right antenna just the right way -- but you won't get the number of them you did before things went digital.)
I never understood why repeaters weren't implemented to boost the digital OTA signals, to ensure good coverage? Couldn't a piece of the funds received by selling off the old frequencies go to this?
It's an interesting idea... I mean, I certainly looked at Chromebooks before but took a pass on buying one due to the low hardware specs. I've worked in I.T. for decades - and it's a fairly regular thing to run across a 5-6 year old notebook computer that someone is happy to get rid of free. Spend $20 on a new battery for it from some vendor on Amazon and maybe upgrade the RAM or swap in a new SSD, and you have a laptop that performs at least as well as any Chromebook for very little money. (And you recycled something existing, instead of buying more gear. Arguably a good thing.)
But I have a feeling the appeal of the Chromebook as it stands today is the low price-point. You get something that looks modern, is relatively thin and lightweight, and for less money than the Windows laptops they're selling everywhere. They're good enough for schools (their biggest customers) too.
If you beefed it up to deserve the "Pro" moniker - how would that affect the price? IMO, the vendors selling the "nicer" Chromebooks with more RAM and so forth are already nearing the price points where you wonder why you'd still buy one instead of a full-featured notebook on sale, running Windows 10.
I can definitely understand the motivation for someone to do these scams. But ultimately, you're in a situation where you can't really get "the law" to crack down on the people doing them (thanks to their location and ability to post their ads using various internet connections that aren't their own).
The way to deter them is to cost the scammers as much time, effort and money as possible. Lead them on into thinking you're going to give them a payout, when you're really just harassing them. (If they're going to "send you a check in the mail", make sure you tell them you never received it and get them to mail another. If you can get them to pay postage for an item they think they're scamming from you, mail some heavy rocks or bricks.)
The ironic thing is, this radioactive "waste" clearly still has lots of potential energy in it, or else it wouldn't be dangerous in the first place.
IMO, what's needed is a process to use this stuff after it's no longer suitable for use in the original reactor.
I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure there are other reactor designs that would allow building smaller scale power generators that run on this waste material, instead of trying to bury it, shoot it into space, or what-not.
"But, Rawls says, the point at which we stop that inequality is when the extra money for the rich stops benefitting the society as a whole. At some point rich people just get more and more wealth, but it doesn't actually help the poorest to improve their quality of life (and often begins to make the poorest WORSE off). And again going back to the veil of ignorance, if you didn't know what your talent would be before entering in a society (and you might have ended up on the bottom), you probably would say that's not fair for all. Collectively, we need to design the rules to benefit us all, because rich people don't exist in a vacuum."
What I'd like to know is, at what point does someone get "too rich" to benefit society as a whole anymore? That's the problem with these statements. They may be based in reality, but there's no logical way to draw a line saying "X amount of wealth is still acceptable, but don't earn a penny more than that or you'll become one of the bad guys in society!"
In fact, an extremely wealthy individual might wind up donating practically all of his or her remaining wealth, upon death, to charitable causes -- negating all of the hand-wringing and postulating over how amassing that wealth was detrimental to society.
You know? As a libertarian myself, it always amuses me how people rush to argue over the relatively few things central government accomplished for people that we can all agree are useful and often used by the vast majority of citizens.
When I think of all the boneheaded things government has done with my money (anything from grants for studying cow flatulence to billions of dollars the Pentagon managed to just make vanish into thin air right around the time we were distracted by 9-11) -- concerns over the expenditures for emergency services and a national highway system are at the bottom of my list.
I guess you need to zero in on those, though, if you want to make sure libertarians look like idiots for pointing out how wasteful government spending can be?
I'd definitely like to see mandatory drug testing ended, across the board. (For that matter, the same goes for those sobriety checkpoints.) You shouldn't be presumed guilty until proven innocent, period. When it comes to most private sector jobs that drug test? Regardless of any philosophical reasons against it, the practice is quite likely just a waste of money overall. I've worked at jobs where drug testing was required as a condition of employment PLUS at random intervals afterwards. Those tests aren't all that cheap, and the labs doing the testing aren't infallible either. So a positive result means you have to do a second test to verify the result. By then, a lot of people are crafty enough to know ways to cheat the tests. And who's to say a company didn't get rid of a really good employee over one of them? Just because someone likes to get high once in a while doesn't prove they can't do a great job at whatever you hired them for. How about we fire people for doing those drugs or drinking on company time and stop worrying about digging up evidence about what they may do on their personal time?
Seriously? The only part of the whole thing that made me like Apple slightly less was when they first started SUPPORTING emojis in the OS and made a big deal about it as a "new feature" worth upgrading for.
As far as I'm concerned, emojis are generally just an annoyance. Reminds me of back in the BBS era where people could make flashing colored ANSI text and animated twirling cursors moving around and backspacing things that were on the screen.
If you feel the need to send images to someone, great. Send a photo or even a video. But *why* go to a bunch of trouble to hunt down a little icon representing a replacement for a word or two in a sentence?
I can't say I knew for certain that the human pain threshold was 106-108F, but everything else you said seems like common sense to me. I have to think the WHO was just looking for an excuse to publish another new "finding" more than providing anything really useful for people.
An awful lot of people don't even drink their coffee without diluting it with some creamer or milk first, and/or adding sugar and stirring. All of those processes will serve to drop its temperature too.
But everyone I know takes really small sips of tea or coffee when it hasn't yet had a little time to sit and cool. Your body is self-regulating your drinking so you don't cause injury.
Wow.... I'm an "Apple fanboy" now, because I post an honest opinion about the pros and cons of the WWDC event? Sorry I didn't just bash on the entire thing as pointless so it might please you, Mr. "binary numbers for a Slashdot nick".
As a matter of fact, yes.... I'm often using my iPhone to read email and linked articles people send me when I'm on public transportation, riding to/from work. Once I'm at my computer, I sometimes wish I had the ability to paste quotes from what I read (such as if I want to share it with someone I know on Facebook). Without easy copy/paste functionality, that requires the extra steps of pulling the original content back up on the PC or Mac in a browser and finding the info of interest again, just to do the copy/paste on it. Usually, that's not even worth the effort.
But that conveniently ignores the more important part of my comment on the feature.... the ability to create a drawing or sketch on an iPad Pro using the pencil, and then easily xfer it over to a project on the Mac. That has the potential to save someone the expense of buying a Wacom or similar tablet, which would be inferior to the experience drawing/sketching on the iPad Pro anyway.
I don't think either company is going to have any problems selling their latest graphics card offerings, considering all the notebook computers that have under-powered graphics chipsets and all the Apple products that used older chipsets with mediocre performance.
It may be true that games aren't taxing the latest card's capabilities right now -- but they're not in the same situation as CPUs, where even a budget priced processor has more power than people need for most of what they do. With graphics cards, anything with really good performance has come with a high price tag - pricing it out of the range of the mainstream user. The newer card technology is needed to push prices down, as much as anything else.
I'm sure many people will whine about being underwhelmed by this year's WWDC and the lack of any new hardware announcements, etc. But IMO, there were some really solid improvements shown. The "universal clipboard" is a HUGE improvement, IMO. That's something you can't really do on any other platform today and works especially well for Apple since so many Mac users also own an iPhone and/or iPad. When Apple first released "Continuity" - I found it an interesting concept, but lacking in many ways. (Heck, it wasn't even compatible with the older versions of Bluetooth found in many Macs - so many people couldn't even begin using it when it was released.) The ability to copy content from my iPad or iPhone and simply paste back into any app on my Mac, though? That's quite useful. The iPad Pro, especially, is a better artistic tool than any Mac if you're using the Apple Pencil with it. Now, it can truly feel like an accessory for your Mac instead of operating in an island.
watchOS 3 looks FAR better than what we've got now for the Apple Watch too. (In this case, I'd argue we're finally really getting what it should have had originally, or at LEAST by the second OS update. But glad to see it's becoming reality, regardless. Just like with the original iPhone, the watch is a much better product when Apple allows apps to fully run on it.)
I'm also happy to see the "Home" app coming to iOS to control HomeKit. The HomeKit standard was definitely released too quickly and with too little forethought by Apple. The glaring omission was not having one central management app for it built into the OS, so again -- about time!
I gotta say though? I'm just not at all excited by the changes for Photos. I just don't know why most users would find it that compelling to let the computer try to analyze a bunch of aspects of the photos in a collection and try to organize them for you? I see that as potentially slowing down the software (while lightning fast scrolling through thumbnails and opening/editing photos is usually considered a high priority), and I'd become frustrated when photos I *knew* I took weren't appearing in certain collections, every time the Mac didn't properly figure out they were part of certain groups. IMO, the most "surefire" way to know that a group of photos belongs together is by the date/time-stamp -- and we've had that feature for a long time now.
Especially with the discontinuation of the "pro" quality Aperture software, I was hoping Photos would add more "pro" level features to compensate, instead of all of this "auto sorting" and "automatic memory video making" stuff.
Basically, this guy built a machine that doesn't serve a useful purpose. It inflicts a specific type of pain on people which the marketplace had no existing demand for. There are plenty of power tools and other machines out there which are capable of inflicting injury -- even if they're actually designed with a primary purpose of doing some sort of useful task (mowing lawns, shredding tree branches, etc. etc.).
He's not really starting a new conversation about anything I can see? Movies like Robocop addressed the possibility of building weaponized robots that could cause human injury, decades ago.
Unless we actually reach a point where robots can truly think for themselves and reason (not just the fake A.I. seen with intelligent agents like Siri on your phone), whoever builds them and programs them to work a certain way is ultimately responsible for what was constructed.
The way Bethesda cut so much content out of Fallout 4 before it went on sale, and ruined the ending scenes in the process? I would never recommend anyone spend $110 for a "deluxe edition" of the game!
I had many, many hours of game-play sunk into Fallout 4 and the story got pretty in depth as I went on. That's what made the build-up to the poor excuse for a climax SO frustrating. The DLC Bethesda has been selling for the game since then does zilch to address any of this. Play a bunch of new side missions for Valentine's detective agency on some new maps? Hell no! I'm still angry I was promised I'd become the new director of the Institute, only to discover I still had no power to change anything about its relations with the other factions. (A bunch of their scientists still expected me to take orders from them, running around to do synth recovery missions and what-not. Huh?!)
Too many bugs left in the game too.... Like the mission where I was supposed to select McCreedy as my companion to go get a serum out of a medical center to save his son. Last I was with him, I sent him to the Castle settlement. But every time I went back there to get him, he was nowhere to be found. Sometimes I'd hear his voice, speaking some random comment, but I'd run all over the place looking for him and he wasn't there! I wound up having to "cheat" - using a console command to force his character to appear where I was (only possible because I had the Windows version). And on the weird mission with the U.S. Constitution (ship on top of the Savings and Loan, run by robots) - I completed the whole thing except we didn't successfully defend it against some raiders as it was getting ready to blast off. So I reloaded my previous save game to try again. When I completed the raider defense successfully that time? It said I had to talk to the captain as the last step, but he refused to speak to me. When I left and returned, it just said I completed everything. Never got to see the ship blast off. (I got mad and just started killing all the robots and plundered the ship.)
I have to disagree that "all of my complaints are relatively incorrect". I'm glad you haven't experienced issues typing on the MS keyboard cover, but it's a fact that many of our users have. The Surface Pro is designed so it props upright along the edge of the cover, and the cover is a plastic and fabric combo that's slightly flexible. That means if you're sitting on a train or other form of public transportation and it's vibrating/bouncing around, the Surface Pro 4 can't really be held still by the keyboard portion - unlike a laptop with a traditional hinged lid firmly attached to the bottom half of the shell. That doesn't even begin to discuss such questions as why MS feels the need to sell the keyboard cover as an *option* for over $100 on a computer this expensive? Seems to me it should be included, as I've never met anyone who bought a Surface Pro 4 and decided to skip the keyboard cover.
As for the font scaling? Try any of a number of older apps developed using Java 6.... It's typically not compiled to be "scaling aware" (even if Java 6 technically did offer the option to compile source that way). Our Fonality VoIP "HUD" control panel is one such example. On a Surface Pro 4, if you launch it - you can't even see the phone extensions you're trying to click on because it draws them so tiny. There's no way to get Windows 10 to tell the app to draw it larger in proportion to everything else. All you can do is drag it onto a regular (non 4K) external display where it will display properly.
Well, first off? I don't think there's any point in trying to twist this into some sort of "anti libertarian" rant ... implying it's libertarian philosophies which cause sites like Facebook to act the way they do.
IMO, this has nothing to do with politics, unless you're going to go so far as to say you feel social media, cloud drive storage, cloud backup and other such offerings should all be run only by the government or strictly regulated under government control. (I suppose that's ONE way to try to force these entities not to delete your data against your will or suddenly go out of business without adequate provisions for recovering your data first, or ??)
But otherwise, no ... the truth is the same as ever. If someone offers you a service at no charge, you really have no say when it comes to not liking the way the service is performed, or any changes made to the rules of how the free service gets offered. Your options include discontinuing use of the service, complying with whatever rules and demands are placed upon it to continue using it, or spending money for alternatives (which could include building your own).
That said? I see no harm in complaining when you're unhappy. If nothing else, Facebook management needs to hear the opinions of the user-base. If it's clear that a change is so strongly disliked, it causes a lot of people to stop using it -- at least they can't pretend not to understand why it happened. And maybe ... just maybe, it will cause them to rethink a bad idea once in a while and preserve the service as a little more friendly to use.
Seriously, I work in I.T. for a company with a highly mobile workforce, and we're both Mac and Windows friendly on top of that. So our environment is mixed, with a lot of emphasis on trying out various portable options and cloud offerings, while still supporting some traditional server "back end" for our financial system and shared network drives.
Long ago, we switched all of our users from desktop systems to laptops, and we had a policy of issuing corporate iPads ever since the iPad 2 came along. (For a long time, we had a division of our company doing iOS software development - so it made sense to issue hardware to run the stuff we made.)
Right now, we're starting to issue the Microsoft Surface Pro 4 to new hires who request a Windows PC instead of a Mac. And that brings up the question of whether its time to stop issuing iPads - if the Surface Pro is supposed to double as a tablet.
What we're seeing though is that generally no, the "one solution fits all" model is a big compromise and doesn't really work that well. Out of all of the different computers we've issued over the years, from HP Elitebooks to various Dell machines to different Macbooks -- the only one that's held up over the years as the "gold standard" that users really liked AND worked reliably was the Macbook Air 13". It's light and thin enough so people can throw it in a backpack or whatnot and take it with them without a care. Battery life is great. It's about half the price of the high end Macbook Pro laptops. The basic look stayed the same from the first year of production through current models - meaning there's no stigma about someone pulling out and opening an older 2011 or 2012 model in a meeting with clients. And repairs are pretty reasonably priced. (With Apple doing a "flat rate" repair program on them, you can have one with 5 or 6 things wrong with it and it's still cost effective to have it serviced rather than trash it.)
With the Surface Pro 4, by contrast? Yes, people think things like the pencil are cool, and it's a very capable machine when plugged into a dock and used like a desktop. But as soon as you take it with you to use like an iPad, you run into a lot of downsides. Battery life NOT so great, for starters. And because it runs a full Windows 10 OS, it has the inherent problems that come with a full blown, more complex OS. Issues not always waking from sleep properly, for example -- leading to a long wait to reboot the whole thing, or apps that aren't designed for the hi-res 4K display so fonts display so tiny, they're unreadable. The keyboard cover is too flimsy to allow typing on it like laptop if you actually have to use it in your lap. (It's designed assuming you have a solid surface like a table underneath the whole thing.) Lastly, I think it's a big omission that you can't buy a Surface Pro 4 with a built-in LTE cellular modem like you can an iPad. Having a cellular data plan on the devices goes a LONG way towards feeling "always connected" and ensuring your cloud-based data or apps are always available "on the go".
It doesn't sound to me like the service was in the wrong, denying a refund in this situation? If you're just using the service to troll people, requesting transfers of funds you know up-front you don't *really* want to transfer, it seems like it's YOUR problem if the payment processor grows tired of participating in your game and declares your funds transfer final.
As someone who was forced to deal with PayPal's antics as part of the "package deal" selling on eBay when the two of them formed a cartel, I can think of SO many more legitimate situations to complain about PayPal over than this one.
I think this is an interesting situation from a legal standpoint and worth thinking about. But your response makes more sense than anything else I read here.
IMO, there should be an expectation that any web site providing a service for pay would make reasonable efforts not to allow misuse of the site to continue, especially when it's of a criminal nature and injuring your site's own users. When such things happen, they have to be examined on a case by case basis by the legal system. (EG. How much evidence really exists to show the party running the web site was aware of the illegal activities?)
Sites like Craigslist and Facebook are apparently worried that they'll get drug into this too, with some draconian new legislation putting new burdens on them. That would certainly be a bad outcome, but doesn't seem like one that should happen at all here? A free site allowing open access is more of a "common carrier", like the phone company. (Would you arrest people working for your VoIP provider because a criminal transaction took place via a phone call carried over their network?) There's no profit motive for them to "look the other way" about illegal activities done by people paying to post ads, etc.
Yeah, I'll grant you the author of that essay probably uses "storing information" far more literally than he should. The brain obviously remembers/stores SOME things, or else we'd be completely non-functional. If I place my car keys on the dresser, I'm able to make a "mental note" that I'm putting them there, so I can go back later in the day and retrieve them.
I think the point was, we don't (except maybe the individuals who seem to really have "photographic memory") store complete sets of information about what we observe. When you scan an image into a computer, it stores a copy of the whole thing, pixel for pixel. It might use compression to help save space, but a replica of the original image is saved someplace and that's what the computer works from in image editors or any type of software analyzing the image to match it for criteria.
The interesting thing with the human brain is, everyone seems to have different amounts of data they store when they observe things. (EG. Sure, you can recall scenes from a movie once you've watched it. But I guarantee if 50 people watch the same movie for the first time, you'll get a wide range of results if you ask each of them to recall some of those scenes.) There are probably all sorts of factors in play as to why each individual considers certain details worth remembering and others safe to discard. That, alone, means we've got to figure out the mechanics of how all of that works before we can properly simulate it in A.I. (Simply electing to use a specific "lossy" storage algorithm for data collection isn't going to mimic what really goes on in the human mind.)
For those not paying attention, the only market segment in Windows computers that's selling well right now are gaming laptops and desktops.
The fact is, the video game industry is one that eclipses Hollywood in dollars spent. It's here to stay and increasingly, it's becoming a mainstream pastime for the general public. Obviously, the dedicated consoles are a big piece of the gaming pie (and heck, that's been true since the days of the Atari 2600). But there's so much more you can do with a keyboard and a mouse, coupled to a system with a lot of memory and disk storage space.
In recent years though, a laptop/notebook/ultrabook/whatever meant you had sub-standard 3D graphics capabilities. Even the most expensive discreet graphics added to your laptop put you in the category of, "Yes... you can now actually PLAY the new game titles, but only with reduced detail levels and other compromises, or frame rates will really suffer." That's not exactly compelling.
The new chips from both nVidia and ATI are basically 2 generations ahead of what's been available. You're getting a big performance leap AND better pricing. I'm thinking this is exactly what Apple needs to use to get its product line back up to par (since it uses mobile GPUs even in its iMac desktops), and what will stimulate the PC industry as a whole.
There's no reason to have to settle for console gaming if this hurdle is taken out of the way.
Obviously, you're not working in I.T. support for a company with highly mobile workers who often need assistance in the form of a quick fix, no matter where they're located.
Windows "Safe Mode" can be useful for removing malware because it tells the OS to boot up in a "bare bones" mode, bypassing the startup registry keys or scripts it would usually run at boot time. This may be less true for Windows 10 or 8 than for 7 ... but it was definitely the case with 7 that malware removal tools couldn't completely delete some malware without first booting into safe mode. (Once the code was running, courtesy of getting launched by the normal boot processes that were skipped in safe mode, they kept themselves locked from deletion.)
It's not always a viable option to tell somebody who is half way around the world "Sorry, but you have to stop using your corporate-issued laptop now. Unhook it from the network immediately and send it back to us to remove the malware for you." They just want someone in I.T. to try to connect up and get it cleaned up so it functions properly again -- so they can do the business presentation they were scheduled to do or what-not.
If there are concerns it wasn't possible to get it 100% clean, it can be earmarked to re-image when it comes back.
https://aeon.co/essays/your-br...
I found the above-linked essay pretty interesting, because he points out what should probably be obvious in hindsight, but easily gets lots in all the "noise" about A.I.
Basically, he argues that the human brain doesn't really "process" or "store" information anything like a computer. We used those flawed analogies all the time when describing how someone's brain works -- but they're no more accurate than the popular medical theory in the past that everything was fluid-based. The truth is -- a computer is a great tool for storing a bunch of data for selective retrieval, and you can use that to an extent to fake intelligence (a la Apple's "Siri", Microsoft's "Cortana", or other such agents). But it's nothing more than an illusion crafted by the software developer. Investing more time, effort and money into such projects is likely to result only in creating more believable "pretend intelligence" as the data-pool it pulls responses from increases in size and scope. You're still no further towards a goal of making a computer that's "self aware" or can think for itself.
Actually, a lot of corporations migrated over to TeamViewer after a fiasco with LogMeIn eliminating their free version of their software.
http://lifehacker.com/remote-d...
Corporate I.T. likes these types of remote assistance packages, primarily because they let you set up a whole list of computers to click to connect with, under a single "master" account. It's really convenient to have all of your company's workstations organized by department or group and easily visible as to which are online and which are offline.
We used LogMeIn for this until they started talking about charging us thousands for what used to be free. That's when TeamViewer kind of popped up out of nowhere, promising equivalent functionality at no cost and a great migration path off of LogMeIn.
TeamViewer gives a unified interface for remote controlling everything set up with it, no matter what platform (Linux, Mac or Windows) and gives the ability to reboot a Windows PC in "safe mode" and still connect back up to it (great for malware removal purposes, etc.).
I've always thought Microsoft's remote desktop client needs a LOT of improvement, so these 3rd. party solutions aren't so necessary.
Truthfully, everyone I know who has a "smart TV" only purchased it on some kind of sale where it seemed like it didn't cost any more than TVs without the smart functionality. We have a 42" LCD we bought last Xmas at Best Buy that has some smart functionality in it. (One button press on the remote takes you into Netflix, and it supports a couple of other services too.) But we really only bought it because it seemed to have a good picture, was priced right on a sale, and it's the size we wanted for an upstairs bedroom TV as a gift for grandma (who is currently living with us). She won't ever use the smart features. She just wants to use her DirecTV satellite hook-up.
I'm pretty sure this stuff is easy enough to implement, it will just come standard with new televisions before long. Enough people want to "cut the cord" and stream content that the TV makers will start viewing it as a basic function of a television set.
Oh, I'm not new here .... not by a long shot.
I also happen to think Ron Paul got a whole LOT of things right. (Arguably, he spent a bit too much time arguing some aspects of foreign policy that America isn't ready for yet -- hurting his credibility. But still, he made MUCH more sense than the mass media wanted to admit.) And honestly? Although he made a lot of references to advocating a return to the days of the "gold standard", I think that's a concept that can be implemented without involving gold at all. The key is simply tying our currency to *something* tangible, rather than backing it with nothing but faith in the monetary system remaining solvent.
Rand is really not that close a follower of Ron's beliefs.... He's much more of a typical Republican, except one who is more in-tune than most with protecting individual freedom from government intrusions of privacy. He never gave me the impression he wanted to do much of anything to put an end to the "war on terror" (beyond reigning in agencies like the TSA or NSA spying on American citizens, perhaps).
In any case, Ron Paul is one of very FEW exceptions as a candidate who was registered on the Republican ticket, yet held very libertarian beliefs.
I think you're selling a lot of people short if you think most Libertarians will just vote Trump out of the belief that "blocking Hillary" is more important than any of their other principles. The problem is, America doesn't have nearly enough libertarian-minded people in the first place. But I predict you'll see at least a doubling of the usual number of votes for the L.P. in this election.