Really? Wow.... That's an utterly stupid interpretation of the law. I was always told that in order to be issued a DWI or DUI, they had to find your keys in the ignition. (That seems a little arbitrary in and of itself. I don't see how it can be construed that you were operating the motor vehicle if the engine isn't even running AND you weren't even necessarily in the driver's seat.) But at least that's an easy enough thing to remedy. Just make a mental note that if you're going to "sleep it off" in your car or truck, you always take the keys out of the ignition and put them elsewhere first.
I've been playing a lot of SC2 lately, and it's a really strange thing with that particular game.
I find that it's really enjoyable, trying different variations of strategies and a certain thrill in pulling off such things as heading off a whole army of units as they're on the way to destroy your base, using only a couple of Ghosts with nukes. Or strategically building a bunch of Void Rays in a far corner of the map that the enemy hasn't even explored yet, so you can suddenly bring a fleet of them out unexpectedly to change the course of the battle, just when the enemy thinks he/she is winning.
But at the same time? I just have no interest in ranking up to play at a high level like "Diamond", because all of those "pros" are just playing the game like machines. It's all about how quickly you can click a mouse in exact sequences to maximize build rates of the "optimal" units at so many seconds into the game, etc. etc. While that makes them technically superior players, it also strips all the fun out of it for me. If I get pitted against anyone who plays like that, I find everything I'm constructing gets completely annihilated in a matter of only a few minutes, with hordes of high level units I didn't even think could be built that quickly.... But I have to think people playing the game that way aren't even enjoying it anymore. They're just enjoying going through the motions as precisely as possible to achieve the reward of as high as rank as they can get. It's sort of like the gambler who keeps pulling the lever on that slot machine because the potential payout motivates them to continue, instead of actually finding the slot machine fun to play in and of itself.
I wish more people would at least stop and think first.
In more and more cities, I'm seeing situations where a person is given a citation for "texting while driving" even though their vehicle is stopped at a red traffic light. These are often the folks who were trying to COMPLY with the law by not touching their phone until they knew they reached a red light, where it was finally safe to take a quick look at what was sent to them.
For example, in the DC metro area, we recently had a cop dressed up like a homeless person on the side of the road begging (except the sign he was holding explained that he was a law enforcement officer). He was handing out "texting while driving" tickets to people at the intersection, at the red light!
When I pointed this out to a girl I know who was ranting about the "need to lock people up and throw away the key" for texting while driving, she just shot back, "Good! The people using their phone while sitting in the car ANYPLACE should be punished! Anything to make us safer!" That's the mentality in America that always scares me.
My wife bought it for me the first night it was available for pre-order, as an anniversary gift. It's the 42mm sport version in space gray with a black band.
Especially because it was a gift and has that extra meaning associated with it, it's something I'm happy to wear every day. But I share the opinion of many others that it's too expensive for the benefits it gives you. I'm a big Apple fan/user going back to around 1999-2000 and own or have owned most of their products at one time or another. Even so, I'd have to tell people that the Apple Watch is just a "nice to have extra" if you have the money to blow on another toy.
One of the biggest "turn-offs" for me with the watch is Apple's positioning it as a fashion accessory instead of a piece of technology. That might have been a smart move from purely a short-term profit generating angle. (Nobody would pay for the ridiculously high priced "Edition" model in gold otherwise.) But IMO, it damages the appeal of the product for the rest of us who are actually the computer and tech enthusiasts making up Apple's "bread and butter" customers. For example? I'd love to have a nicer band for my watch with a magnetic clasp, instead of fiddling with the buckle on the sport band. But at $149 and up, no thanks! I can justify giving Apple my $100 for the new "Apple Pencil" for an iPad Pro because that actually adds new functionality and it's a legitimate hardware peripheral. But paying 1 1/2 times that amount for a band that just keeps my watch on my wrist? That's excessive.
I'm also disappointed in the lack of repairability. I got a nasty scratch in the glass face of my watch the first week or two I owned it. But to this day, nobody sells a reasonably priced replacement front glass. (By contrast, if only the glass was scratched or even cracked on a Macbook Air 13", I could buy a replacement piece of glass for the screen for $19 off eBay -- even with the black "Macbook" logo and stripe across the bottom of it.) Apple's "solution" is paying 2/3rds. the price of the watch to exchange for a refurbished replacement. That's even MORE insulting when you consider Apple bragged quite a bit about the scratch resistance of these watch faces. Unfortunately, it seems the "Sport" watch didn't get the better material and actually scratches up relatively easily.
That said? The biggest useful feature of the watch is the remote notifications it gives. It's great when I'm driving and someone sends me a text message. I can read it real quick with a flick of the wrist, without even taking my hand off the wheel or touching my phone. And because it lets you reply with one touch common phrases, I can usually shoot a response back too. I also like the haptic feedback tapping me on the wrist to remind me of calendar appointments a few minutes before they happen. It's easier than pulling my phone out of my pocket to look at it (and if the phone's not on "vibrate" mode, I might not even hear it chirp anyway). I have my watch configured so the current temperature is shown in the bottom left corner too, which is also nice - as that's info I want to know at a glance, throughout the day.
The other 50% usefulness is probably the FitBit type activity tracking functionality -- but that's not something I care a lot about. It's great if you do, however.
Exactly! Best reply I've read on Slashdot this week, s.petry.
The problem most people have with the climate change issue is that people with expensive agendas are found swirling all around it. There's lots of money on the table, waiting to be swept up by anyone proposing "environmentally Green energy alternatives" their business can supposedly provide. If you want to make sure that gravy train doesn't end, you've got to keep everyone fearful about the future and believing your solutions will save them.
The "carbon tax" thing isn't actually an inherently terrible idea. It falls apart in practice, though, because we simply don't have an equitable way to collect an appropriate amount of tax from everyone polluting and then spending it again on things that actually work to remove that much pollution again. All it does is help a few rich people get richer the more they can encourage people to continue contributing to the problem and then paying them to compensate for it.
The elephant in the room that many people choose to ignore is the fact that we've all collectively gotten so much benefit from the energy produced by the fossil fuels that are so despised. I don't know that it's remotely fair to make the oil, coal or gas company the "bad guy" who must pay for all the environmental damage the use of their fuels caused, when it was all of us willingly buying them or the energy produced by them, the whole time. There needs to be more recognition that fossil fuels helped advance society for everyone on this planet who could take advantage of them. And yes, it looks like that caused downsides we need to examine more closely and start addressing. But doing so may just involve accepting we're in for a slightly warmer climate, and relocating some people and buildings would be a good idea over the next 100 years.
Absolutely.... Just the other day, I read a comment made by someone in the tech. field that "Every important new technology I can think of started out being viewed as a toy." So that's probably a common mistake made by both men AND women when it comes to new things they don't understand and haven't spent time working with yet. But the pattern that I think emerges pretty consistently is it's a man who decides to "keep playing with the new toy" until he makes it do something really useful.
Maybe that's just a part of human nature... that men are more likely to take an interest in playing around with something new until they can solve the problem of "How can this thing be used to accomplish something useful?" By contrast, women are more likely to concern themselves with keeping order and cleanliness in their environment and so forth? (I don't know about you, but my experiences over the years tell me that almost every time you walk into a work environment that's trashed up, nasty looking and stinks -- you don't have any women working in it.)
I realize the electronics classes I took in high school weren't available everywhere. I was impressed that my public high school offered those AND a "power tech" class where you had a real auto garage space where you could work on cars. It was a pretty typical high school for the area in every other respect.
My point was more that you shouldn't be paying ITT Tech course prices to have some instructor teaching you the most basic concepts of electricity and what basic components are called/look like. If you really have any interest in electronics, that's all stuff you can learn at no charge by taking out a few books at the local library or looking it up online and doing a little bit of reading.
My ex-wife wasted a huge amount of money getting a student loan for ITT Tech, after they convinced her she could graduate with an electrical engineering degree there and get a great job.
None of the credits earned there transferred to other colleges or universities, for starters. The courses she took were mostly a joke. I learned the same basic electronics skills in my high school electronics classes. (Here's how you read the color bands on a resistor. Here's the basic definition of voltage vs. amperage. That sort of thing....)
At one point, because she was pregnant, she took a semester off. When she tried to return, they announced one of the courses she needed as a requirement to graduate was no longer available and they wanted her to take a different track, taking several more classes to get to the same place.
At that point, she bailed out on the whole thing, and then they put her in collections almost immediately, despite her making repeated contact with them trying to work out some sort of payment arrangement for what she still owed.
The bigger question I have, as a PV solar owner, is: Will the cost of electricity keep going up significantly? The cost/benefit worksheet my solar installer printed out to help sell me on the economics of buying this system factors in the assumption that the utility will keep increasing my rates by a certain percentage, annually.
That's a guess based on past history, and I don't think it's unreasonable. But there's also the possibility that the combo of newer nuclear power technologies going online AND lower costs on solar panels will make power prices hold steady in the future. (If it gets cheaper for you or I to put solar in our home, it also gets cheaper for the utility companies to build big, centralized solar farms for themselves. And they get better pricing because of quantity purchasing.)
Power plants are already doing a lot of conversion from coal burning to natural gas burning generators. That's because the natural gas turbines can easily be powered on or off as load requires it - vs. having to keep it running all day at enough capacity to handle any possible peak loads. As more people generate their own supplemental power and put some back onto the grid for credit, this becomes even more important for the power companies. So the price of coal "going up" will become pretty irrelevant to electric power generation....
Really, I think this is the problem with all of our major metro transportation systems. Almost all of them are still running 30-40 year old technology, day in and day out. Meanwhile, many millions of dollars have poured in to the system to keep it functional -- but that money was too often spent on questionably necessary staff associated with the programs, or on overpriced parts for obsolete equipment, vs. saved up for incremental upgrades and replacement of equipment.
Speaking for the DC area metro system (since living in the area, I know it best)? We may not have the non-standard track gauge that BART has, but certainly, the majority of our metro cars are older models that really need to be taken out of service permanently. Several times a week, I ride on a metrorail car that has a blown speaker, making the announcements difficult to understand. There's regularly a train pulled out of service, causing delays for the trains behind it -- typically due to a door not closing or opening properly. The older cars have vastly inferior sign-boards inside to tell riders what stop is next. And the interiors look awful.... torn seats, disgusting carpet on the floors, and windows with different size rubber gaskets around them so you can spot which ones needed replacing (but they couldn't find perfectly matching replacement parts). Even the frames that advertising goes in need some improvement. I'm always seeing signs where the paper ad is starting to fall out. (I'd sure hate to be the company that paid good money for that....) And it's so rare I see a metrorail car with the hanging straps on it for standing riders to hold onto, I'd assume they decided to eliminate those on purpose.... except I saw a car or two that still had them. So I guess the old ones just all disintegrated and were never replaced?
I get the idea that "regular maintenance" just involves replacing bad brakes or worn out wheels.... "show stopper" problems that keep a car from rolling down the track, essentially. But you can't keep doing that indefinitely.
I don't know that I agree with equating prison with slavery?
First off, if you're paid *anything* as compensation for doing a job, it's not slavery anymore, by definition. Second, I'm not sure that prison has a requirement of doing these jobs? It sounds to me like they're voluntary.... with inmates waiting in line for opportunities to do them because they'd rather have a little bit of money than nothing at all.
None of this means I support the high cost of making phone calls from a prison. Personally, I suspect that's just legal extortion on the part of the companies who came up with the whole system -- and eventually, it will get overturned by the court system. (There's no free marketplace here where prisoners can choose their favorite phone carrier to get the best rates. It's clearly a monopoly, and as such, needs to be regulated to ensure it's not charging above a fair market price for the service rendered.)
But just saying.... it's disingenuous to label prison labor as "slavery". Every one of those inmates was original a citizen with all of the rights and freedoms that came with it. They did things to violate the rights of others around them in order to wind up where they are, with many of those rights stripped away.
I was one of those people hanging on to the older Mac Pro design too, but I bought the new "trash can" model by April or May of 2014 and haven't regretted it a bit. The new design is much more centered around the assumption that your storage is going to be external, not internal -- but so what? I bought a thunderbolt RAID 5 drive cabinet and it holds more storage than the older Mac Pros let you put in them (only 4 drive trays in those). Hardware RAID doesn't require some multi-hundred dollar PCIe card in the machine to do it, either. And a failed drive gives me a red light on the front of the cabinet I can see right away, and a hot-swap can be done without taking the side cover off the computer to get to the drive.
The video card in the "trash can" way outperforms anything you can buy that works properly in the older style tower (except a few niche cases where someone absolutely needs nVidia hardware).
It uses a lot less power, and it's nice and quiet. (None of the stuff I had with my older Mac Pro where the GPU fans would spin up to a fairly loud whine under load, even if the computer itself kept quiet.)
They even make a nice rack mount kit for the new Mac Pro where the cylinder slides into an opening in a rectangular rack case. I've seen that done in a couple of recording studios already.
As I look around at several Windows PCs we've got in the house here -- I think I tend to agree with Apple's comments.
For example, the "gaming PC" my kid was using is based on an AMD processor using an AM3 compatible motherboard. It's not even 5 years old yet, but AMD has moved on to the AM3+ series boards and CPUs already, so there's really no upgrade path for this thing and it feels really sluggish with Windows 8.1 or 10, despite having 8GB of RAM and an SSD. The 3 year old 3D video card is too dated, too -- but putting one of the better performers in requires a bigger power supply, making that a prohibitively expensive upgrade -- at least to put in a system that has no upgrade path for the rest of it.
The 5-6 year old Dell laptop I've got here is literally a beater. Sure, you can still use it to flash upgrade various pieces of hardware (like portable GPS's or my police scanner), but it's a miserable machine to do much else with for more than 10 minutes at a time. Old, slow, and physically falling apart (loose display hinge, letters wearing off of keyboard keys, etc.).
I know a *lot* of people with 5+ year old machines (usually laptops) in a pretty sad state. They *try* to surf the web with them and use business apps like Office, but the experience sucks. If it wasn't for a lack of money, or simple apathy (don't care enough about all this "computer stuff" to buy anything better) - they'd definitely have trashed or donated the things. These really are often people who could use something like an iPad Pro and actually get a big boost in productivity/efficiency over what they've been plodding along with.
I think the Slashdot crowd is naturally going to be biased against these thoughts, because truthfully, that's one of the big benefits of Linux or BSD as your OS. They make older/dated hardware usable again because you don't have an OS bloated with all of the user-friendly extras and eye-candy (unless you configure it that way or choose a distro that leans that way). But Apple's comments really aren't directed towards the computer-savvy geeks who know how to wring every last bit of usefulness out of aging machines or budget hardware.
Like others said, this is just click-bait, trying to twist the story into something about Apple Pay itself and how it compares to any issues people had with Siri not understanding them or working well with poor connections or no cell signal.
The *real* complaint, IMO, seems to simply be merchants who can't be bothered to upgrade their registers and payment terminals to support modern standards.
On Saturday, I shopped at several places (can't even remember all of them I went into), but I know Harbor Freight wouldn't let me use my chip on my card. The terminal had a note taped to it saying "No chip! Swipe only!" - despite having the physical slot in the bottom of it for the chip reader. Had the same experience when I got lunch at Subway in DC near the Faragut North metro station. Another reader that for whatever reason was working as "swipe only".
This might temporarily make me more likely to give up and just swipe a card when I check out someplace.... but that's only because I'm tired of things not working like they're supposed to with the option I prefer to use. As I see signs of it working properly in more places I shop, I'll go back to it again.
I haven't used Apple Pay a whole lot, to be honest. But it worked perfectly for me the last time I paid at McDonalds. I think with them, a lot of confusion on the part of employees (especially at drive thru windows) is the fact McD has their own iOS app in many U.S. markets/cities. With that, you have to hold the phone up to a reader (similar to what Starbucks does) to use an e-coupon (or to record the purchase of a drink that earns you a free one after 5 "card punches"). A lot of these people *just* got trained in how to use that thing, and don't get that "Apple Pay" is a totally separate process.
Honestly, the trick is to funnel your passion for your work into something that pays you back in the long-haul. If you're giving 110% all the time but all your effort is just going back into a salaried job where your hard work is more taken for granted than respected? Then yeah, you're going to wind up in your 40's, burnt-out and with nothing to show for it but prematurely grey hair and a lacking social life.
The Anonymous guy who posted would have had a much different story if he had the guts to take a chance on going it alone, working for himself. If you're such a good software coder, you need to write your own killer app (or even game!) and start marketing it yourself. That, or at least work as a freelancer, getting paid per project on terms you negotiate each time.
When you look at who actually owns the companies that employ you, you'll usually find those folks had a real passion for something having to do with the business. That's how they built the whole thing up into something successful enough, they could afford to hire you. Not everyone is in a position where they can be or want to be that person.... But if you're young and full of motivation/drive and passion for a subject, you shortchange yourself not to try to be one of those people.
Arguably... but groups like FTF clearly believed it was a real issue. I wasn't going to get into that whole debate with them. If you're hung up on semantics, I suppose it is an issue because a zero tolerance for "zero rating" schemes means it doesn't fit the net neutrality wording of what's allowed.
I think "Binge On" is a pragmatic solution to bandwidth problems and providing customers what they want at the lowest possible cost. Some people are taking a hard line approach to all of this - but I think that's something that's just not going to realistically happen because of the relative scarcity of cellular data bandwidth.
When T-Mobile offered something similar with unlimited music streaming when you used one of a list of supported services, you didn't see anyone complaining. Eventually, they added so many services, you could stream music from practically anyplace you'd ever want to.
If you step back a bit from the focus on the iPhone and encryption technology, and look at the bigger picture for a minute? There are plenty of reasons to ask why the FBI should waste time and energy pressing this issue.
For starters, I understand when the San Bernadino shooter's place was searched, several "burner" flip phones were found. That should indicate, right away, that you're dealing with someone who was aware that govt. would try to get info from a smartphone, so work-arounds were purchased. The existence of the burners means there's a good chance nothing of use would be found on the iPhone in question.
Not only that, but we ALSO know the FBI could have easily gotten what they wanted off of the phone in question if they didn't screw up initially by changing the existing iCloud account password. Mistakes like that are similar to damaging any other evidence collected at crime scenes. (You know... such stupid things as somebody handling suspected murder weapons without using gloves and messing up the ability to pull useful fingerprints from it.)
It seems pretty blatantly obvious that this is not really about true concerns of there being critically important info trapped on this phone. (You've got one heck of a flimsy case if you really need THAT to successfully prosecute a mass murderer/shooter!) This is just another power grab attempt by the Feds, and I don't see ANY reason people should cooperate. Investigation of crimes was never supposed to be easy. It's difficult on purpose, because all sorts of steps should be taken to do it without trampling on individual rights. (As I always point out -- you *could* just make it law that the FBI can kick in random people's doors at any time of day or night. I guarantee giving them this ability would greatly increase the amount of crimes they prevented by catching people in the act of planning them, etc. etc. But you know what? We've decided we don't want to live in that kind of society.)
Many people say the DOJ did just this to Microsoft, years ago, when Bill Gates was feuding with them over the monopolistic business practice accusations. It's actually pretty amazing how much the guy changed his tone from before the lawsuit to after rounds of questioning by the government authorities.
Apple still largely has that "pre Microsoft monopoly lawsuit era" mentality, even if it's been slightly tempered by the death of Steve Jobs. I wouldn't doubt it at all if the govt. wants to cut Apple down to size the same way they did with Microsoft, so they're more in line with the things they'd prefer they say and do.
Technically, yes. But to me, it's more a matter of protesting the idea that net neutrality laws should apply equally for a high speed service over fiber or coaxial, vs. cellular data over airwaves and a limited number of costly towers.
If a cellular carrier just said "Unlimited streaming as fast as our network can go for everyone!" -- you'd get a log-jam where nobody had usable data service in no time. Then you'd *really* have something to complain about, as far as what you got for your money.
So glad you explained it this well. Even the folks over at the FTF (Fight the Future) campaign who usually back Internet rights issues I support were recently blasting T-Mobile for having this policy.
At the time, I emailed them back, saying I thought they were barking up the wrong tree, given how many other more serious issues we face as Internet consumers.
As a T-Mobile customer myself, I just can't see how this "Binge On" policy is anything but an improvement over the alternatives I get with any other cellular carrier out there? They can scream that it's an evil "zero rating" scheme all they want, but ultimately -- cellular bandwidth is at FAR more of a premium than land service based bandwidth. So carriers are going to gouge you for every kilobyte of it you use, unless you're working with various random exceptions to the rule that they feel they can live with, based on their network capacity.
I mean, if you're a "well known" hacker, people in the industry doing hiring should be aware of you already. Getting arrested doesn't seem like a big benefit to me? (If you were good enough not to get caught, that should say enough about your talent. With the criminal record, you just limited your employment options, even if it enhanced your credibility in a few other, select areas.)
I can't speak for the situation over in Romania, mind you. But here in the U.S., there's apparently a real problem where law enforcement wants to hire "white hat hackers" but usually finds it can't do so because they don't pass their basic background checks and requirements. (I know one guy who said the FBI really wanted to hire him, simply because he never smoked pot. They said that's the deal-breaker for a whole lot of computer info-sec applicants they get.)
Out here in Maryland, I'm not convinced that going solar makes a whole lot of financial sense. We're one of the states where it's pushed heavily, but we have quite a few days that are cloudy, rainy, snowy or just partially overcast, where panels just don't generate much power.
I purchased a 7.84 KWh PV system with a combination of South and East facing panels (all SunPower branded equipment which does cost a premium, but also means I've got panels with a little greater efficiency per square foot and hopefully backed by a warranty I can have more faith in than some).
The total cost with installation for this system, back at the end of 2014, was around $32,000. And yes, tax credits promised me 33% of that cost back -- but the way my taxes have worked out, I only got about $3,000 of it back the first year. (Not a tax expert or anything, but I'm assuming it's because I had enough other deductions so there wasn't enough earned income left to allow deducting more than that, for that tax year.) Anyway, on this year's return, I believe it was the same way.... I got a few more thousand of it back, but not the whole thing. This was rather unfortunate since the installer convinced me to take out a 1 year long 0% interest "bridge loan" for $10K to help finance the initial purchase, with the promise that "your first tax refund will let you pay it off before you owe any interest on it". Nope.... not so. I had to scramble to come up with money to pay the thing down.
The reason we kept getting flagged for open firewall ports is because the only connection in or out of the Internet was via that firewall and router. So any outside "penetration testing" had to test against the firewall and whatever it saw behind it.
The rules we had configured were to allow certain ports to forward to specific servers though.... nothing related to the workstation in the office running the card processor's software. But their automated testing didn't care. It wasn't intelligent enough to know that those ports led to things like our in-house Exchange server, or ability to connect to a terminal emulation session to a Unix box running an ancient software package for sales and CRM. They just said, "point us to your IP address so we can test it" and that's the only IP we had to give them.
At a previous job (small "family owned" business), they really didn't even handle credit cards very often. But every once in a while, they'd get the walk-in or phone in customer who wanted to pay with one. As the only I.T. guy on staff, I was tossed the mandate to "do the PCI compliance thing, since our bank says we need to start doing it".
I had to do kind of a crash course in it (while they signed us up with a company who would certify us "compliant" after I jumped through all of their hoops).
It's been a while now, but as I recall -- I was able to skip a huge test full of compliance questions simply by telling them we used an outside card processor over the Internet and didn't store any card data locally. I still had to make sure their monthly "penetration testing" passed/didn't find issues, and had a much shorter (25 questions or so?) compliance test to fill out annually.
They complained about several issues that seemed fairly pointless in our situation, although I understood the logic behind about 80% of it. (I remember them always flagging a "warning" because our firewall allowed connections through ports necessary for regular business operations. And I believe one of their demands was that "any computer connecting to the card processing site had to be isolated from the rest of the local network". That was, IMO, overkill and created as many security issues as it solved, since we had Microsoft's WSUS running to push security patches to the workstations automatically, once approved by me -- and I wanted some kind of way to do remote administration or maintenance on these boxes, via the normal procedures used to access any other systems on the LAN.)
So basically, I tried to comply with anything listed that was reasonable -- and "fudged" things on a couple line items. I imagine that's how most companies treat this stuff?
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Really? Wow.... That's an utterly stupid interpretation of the law. I was always told that in order to be issued a DWI or DUI, they had to find your keys in the ignition. (That seems a little arbitrary in and of itself. I don't see how it can be construed that you were operating the motor vehicle if the engine isn't even running AND you weren't even necessarily in the driver's seat.) But at least that's an easy enough thing to remedy. Just make a mental note that if you're going to "sleep it off" in your car or truck, you always take the keys out of the ignition and put them elsewhere first.
Yes, 100% truth!
I've been playing a lot of SC2 lately, and it's a really strange thing with that particular game.
I find that it's really enjoyable, trying different variations of strategies and a certain thrill in pulling off such things as heading off a whole army of units as they're on the way to destroy your base, using only a couple of Ghosts with nukes. Or strategically building a bunch of Void Rays in a far corner of the map that the enemy hasn't even explored yet, so you can suddenly bring a fleet of them out unexpectedly to change the course of the battle, just when the enemy thinks he/she is winning.
But at the same time? I just have no interest in ranking up to play at a high level like "Diamond", because all of those "pros" are just playing the game like machines. It's all about how quickly you can click a mouse in exact sequences to maximize build rates of the "optimal" units at so many seconds into the game, etc. etc. While that makes them technically superior players, it also strips all the fun out of it for me. If I get pitted against anyone who plays like that, I find everything I'm constructing gets completely annihilated in a matter of only a few minutes, with hordes of high level units I didn't even think could be built that quickly.... But I have to think people playing the game that way aren't even enjoying it anymore. They're just enjoying going through the motions as precisely as possible to achieve the reward of as high as rank as they can get. It's sort of like the gambler who keeps pulling the lever on that slot machine because the potential payout motivates them to continue, instead of actually finding the slot machine fun to play in and of itself.
I wish more people would at least stop and think first.
In more and more cities, I'm seeing situations where a person is given a citation for "texting while driving" even though their vehicle is stopped at a red traffic light. These are often the folks who were trying to COMPLY with the law by not touching their phone until they knew they reached a red light, where it was finally safe to take a quick look at what was sent to them.
For example, in the DC metro area, we recently had a cop dressed up like a homeless person on the side of the road begging (except the sign he was holding explained that he was a law enforcement officer). He was handing out "texting while driving" tickets to people at the intersection, at the red light!
When I pointed this out to a girl I know who was ranting about the "need to lock people up and throw away the key" for texting while driving, she just shot back, "Good! The people using their phone while sitting in the car ANYPLACE should be punished! Anything to make us safer!" That's the mentality in America that always scares me.
My wife bought it for me the first night it was available for pre-order, as an anniversary gift. It's the 42mm sport version in space gray with a black band.
Especially because it was a gift and has that extra meaning associated with it, it's something I'm happy to wear every day. But I share the opinion of many others that it's too expensive for the benefits it gives you. I'm a big Apple fan/user going back to around 1999-2000 and own or have owned most of their products at one time or another. Even so, I'd have to tell people that the Apple Watch is just a "nice to have extra" if you have the money to blow on another toy.
One of the biggest "turn-offs" for me with the watch is Apple's positioning it as a fashion accessory instead of a piece of technology. That might have been a smart move from purely a short-term profit generating angle. (Nobody would pay for the ridiculously high priced "Edition" model in gold otherwise.) But IMO, it damages the appeal of the product for the rest of us who are actually the computer and tech enthusiasts making up Apple's "bread and butter" customers. For example? I'd love to have a nicer band for my watch with a magnetic clasp, instead of fiddling with the buckle on the sport band. But at $149 and up, no thanks! I can justify giving Apple my $100 for the new "Apple Pencil" for an iPad Pro because that actually adds new functionality and it's a legitimate hardware peripheral. But paying 1 1/2 times that amount for a band that just keeps my watch on my wrist? That's excessive.
I'm also disappointed in the lack of repairability. I got a nasty scratch in the glass face of my watch the first week or two I owned it. But to this day, nobody sells a reasonably priced replacement front glass. (By contrast, if only the glass was scratched or even cracked on a Macbook Air 13", I could buy a replacement piece of glass for the screen for $19 off eBay -- even with the black "Macbook" logo and stripe across the bottom of it.) Apple's "solution" is paying 2/3rds. the price of the watch to exchange for a refurbished replacement. That's even MORE insulting when you consider Apple bragged quite a bit about the scratch resistance of these watch faces. Unfortunately, it seems the "Sport" watch didn't get the better material and actually scratches up relatively easily.
That said? The biggest useful feature of the watch is the remote notifications it gives. It's great when I'm driving and someone sends me a text message. I can read it real quick with a flick of the wrist, without even taking my hand off the wheel or touching my phone. And because it lets you reply with one touch common phrases, I can usually shoot a response back too. I also like the haptic feedback tapping me on the wrist to remind me of calendar appointments a few minutes before they happen. It's easier than pulling my phone out of my pocket to look at it (and if the phone's not on "vibrate" mode, I might not even hear it chirp anyway). I have my watch configured so the current temperature is shown in the bottom left corner too, which is also nice - as that's info I want to know at a glance, throughout the day.
The other 50% usefulness is probably the FitBit type activity tracking functionality -- but that's not something I care a lot about. It's great if you do, however.
Exactly! Best reply I've read on Slashdot this week, s.petry.
The problem most people have with the climate change issue is that people with expensive agendas are found swirling all around it. There's lots of money on the table, waiting to be swept up by anyone proposing "environmentally Green energy alternatives" their business can supposedly provide. If you want to make sure that gravy train doesn't end, you've got to keep everyone fearful about the future and believing your solutions will save them.
The "carbon tax" thing isn't actually an inherently terrible idea. It falls apart in practice, though, because we simply don't have an equitable way to collect an appropriate amount of tax from everyone polluting and then spending it again on things that actually work to remove that much pollution again. All it does is help a few rich people get richer the more they can encourage people to continue contributing to the problem and then paying them to compensate for it.
The elephant in the room that many people choose to ignore is the fact that we've all collectively gotten so much benefit from the energy produced by the fossil fuels that are so despised. I don't know that it's remotely fair to make the oil, coal or gas company the "bad guy" who must pay for all the environmental damage the use of their fuels caused, when it was all of us willingly buying them or the energy produced by them, the whole time. There needs to be more recognition that fossil fuels helped advance society for everyone on this planet who could take advantage of them. And yes, it looks like that caused downsides we need to examine more closely and start addressing. But doing so may just involve accepting we're in for a slightly warmer climate, and relocating some people and buildings would be a good idea over the next 100 years.
Absolutely .... Just the other day, I read a comment made by someone in the tech. field that "Every important new technology I can think of started out being viewed as a toy." So that's probably a common mistake made by both men AND women when it comes to new things they don't understand and haven't spent time working with yet. But the pattern that I think emerges pretty consistently is it's a man who decides to "keep playing with the new toy" until he makes it do something really useful.
Maybe that's just a part of human nature ... that men are more likely to take an interest in playing around with something new until they can solve the problem of "How can this thing be used to accomplish something useful?" By contrast, women are more likely to concern themselves with keeping order and cleanliness in their environment and so forth? (I don't know about you, but my experiences over the years tell me that almost every time you walk into a work environment that's trashed up, nasty looking and stinks -- you don't have any women working in it.)
I realize the electronics classes I took in high school weren't available everywhere. I was impressed that my public high school offered those AND a "power tech" class where you had a real auto garage space where you could work on cars. It was a pretty typical high school for the area in every other respect.
My point was more that you shouldn't be paying ITT Tech course prices to have some instructor teaching you the most basic concepts of electricity and what basic components are called/look like. If you really have any interest in electronics, that's all stuff you can learn at no charge by taking out a few books at the local library or looking it up online and doing a little bit of reading.
My ex-wife wasted a huge amount of money getting a student loan for ITT Tech, after they convinced her she could graduate with an electrical engineering degree there and get a great job.
None of the credits earned there transferred to other colleges or universities, for starters. The courses she took were mostly a joke. I learned the same basic electronics skills in my high school electronics classes. (Here's how you read the color bands on a resistor. Here's the basic definition of voltage vs. amperage. That sort of thing....)
At one point, because she was pregnant, she took a semester off. When she tried to return, they announced one of the courses she needed as a requirement to graduate was no longer available and they wanted her to take a different track, taking several more classes to get to the same place.
At that point, she bailed out on the whole thing, and then they put her in collections almost immediately, despite her making repeated contact with them trying to work out some sort of payment arrangement for what she still owed.
The bigger question I have, as a PV solar owner, is: Will the cost of electricity keep going up significantly? The cost/benefit worksheet my solar installer printed out to help sell me on the economics of buying this system factors in the assumption that the utility will keep increasing my rates by a certain percentage, annually.
That's a guess based on past history, and I don't think it's unreasonable. But there's also the possibility that the combo of newer nuclear power technologies going online AND lower costs on solar panels will make power prices hold steady in the future. (If it gets cheaper for you or I to put solar in our home, it also gets cheaper for the utility companies to build big, centralized solar farms for themselves. And they get better pricing because of quantity purchasing.)
Power plants are already doing a lot of conversion from coal burning to natural gas burning generators. That's because the natural gas turbines can easily be powered on or off as load requires it - vs. having to keep it running all day at enough capacity to handle any possible peak loads. As more people generate their own supplemental power and put some back onto the grid for credit, this becomes even more important for the power companies. So the price of coal "going up" will become pretty irrelevant to electric power generation ....
Really, I think this is the problem with all of our major metro transportation systems. Almost all of them are still running 30-40 year old technology, day in and day out. Meanwhile, many millions of dollars have poured in to the system to keep it functional -- but that money was too often spent on questionably necessary staff associated with the programs, or on overpriced parts for obsolete equipment, vs. saved up for incremental upgrades and replacement of equipment.
Speaking for the DC area metro system (since living in the area, I know it best)? We may not have the non-standard track gauge that BART has, but certainly, the majority of our metro cars are older models that really need to be taken out of service permanently. Several times a week, I ride on a metrorail car that has a blown speaker, making the announcements difficult to understand. There's regularly a train pulled out of service, causing delays for the trains behind it -- typically due to a door not closing or opening properly. The older cars have vastly inferior sign-boards inside to tell riders what stop is next. And the interiors look awful .... torn seats, disgusting carpet on the floors, and windows with different size rubber gaskets around them so you can spot which ones needed replacing (but they couldn't find perfectly matching replacement parts). Even the frames that advertising goes in need some improvement. I'm always seeing signs where the paper ad is starting to fall out. (I'd sure hate to be the company that paid good money for that ....) And it's so rare I see a metrorail car with the hanging straps on it for standing riders to hold onto, I'd assume they decided to eliminate those on purpose .... except I saw a car or two that still had them. So I guess the old ones just all disintegrated and were never replaced?
I get the idea that "regular maintenance" just involves replacing bad brakes or worn out wheels .... "show stopper" problems that keep a car from rolling down the track, essentially. But you can't keep doing that indefinitely.
I don't know that I agree with equating prison with slavery?
First off, if you're paid *anything* as compensation for doing a job, it's not slavery anymore, by definition. Second, I'm not sure that prison has a requirement of doing these jobs? It sounds to me like they're voluntary .... with inmates waiting in line for opportunities to do them because they'd rather have a little bit of money than nothing at all.
None of this means I support the high cost of making phone calls from a prison. Personally, I suspect that's just legal extortion on the part of the companies who came up with the whole system -- and eventually, it will get overturned by the court system. (There's no free marketplace here where prisoners can choose their favorite phone carrier to get the best rates. It's clearly a monopoly, and as such, needs to be regulated to ensure it's not charging above a fair market price for the service rendered.)
But just saying .... it's disingenuous to label prison labor as "slavery". Every one of those inmates was original a citizen with all of the rights and freedoms that came with it. They did things to violate the rights of others around them in order to wind up where they are, with many of those rights stripped away.
I was one of those people hanging on to the older Mac Pro design too, but I bought the new "trash can" model by April or May of 2014 and haven't regretted it a bit. The new design is much more centered around the assumption that your storage is going to be external, not internal -- but so what? I bought a thunderbolt RAID 5 drive cabinet and it holds more storage than the older Mac Pros let you put in them (only 4 drive trays in those). Hardware RAID doesn't require some multi-hundred dollar PCIe card in the machine to do it, either. And a failed drive gives me a red light on the front of the cabinet I can see right away, and a hot-swap can be done without taking the side cover off the computer to get to the drive.
The video card in the "trash can" way outperforms anything you can buy that works properly in the older style tower (except a few niche cases where someone absolutely needs nVidia hardware).
It uses a lot less power, and it's nice and quiet. (None of the stuff I had with my older Mac Pro where the GPU fans would spin up to a fairly loud whine under load, even if the computer itself kept quiet.)
They even make a nice rack mount kit for the new Mac Pro where the cylinder slides into an opening in a rectangular rack case. I've seen that done in a couple of recording studios already.
How, then, is it "complete shit"?
As I look around at several Windows PCs we've got in the house here -- I think I tend to agree with Apple's comments.
For example, the "gaming PC" my kid was using is based on an AMD processor using an AM3 compatible motherboard. It's not even 5 years old yet, but AMD has moved on to the AM3+ series boards and CPUs already, so there's really no upgrade path for this thing and it feels really sluggish with Windows 8.1 or 10, despite having 8GB of RAM and an SSD. The 3 year old 3D video card is too dated, too -- but putting one of the better performers in requires a bigger power supply, making that a prohibitively expensive upgrade -- at least to put in a system that has no upgrade path for the rest of it.
The 5-6 year old Dell laptop I've got here is literally a beater. Sure, you can still use it to flash upgrade various pieces of hardware (like portable GPS's or my police scanner), but it's a miserable machine to do much else with for more than 10 minutes at a time. Old, slow, and physically falling apart (loose display hinge, letters wearing off of keyboard keys, etc.).
I know a *lot* of people with 5+ year old machines (usually laptops) in a pretty sad state. They *try* to surf the web with them and use business apps like Office, but the experience sucks. If it wasn't for a lack of money, or simple apathy (don't care enough about all this "computer stuff" to buy anything better) - they'd definitely have trashed or donated the things. These really are often people who could use something like an iPad Pro and actually get a big boost in productivity/efficiency over what they've been plodding along with.
I think the Slashdot crowd is naturally going to be biased against these thoughts, because truthfully, that's one of the big benefits of Linux or BSD as your OS. They make older/dated hardware usable again because you don't have an OS bloated with all of the user-friendly extras and eye-candy (unless you configure it that way or choose a distro that leans that way). But Apple's comments really aren't directed towards the computer-savvy geeks who know how to wring every last bit of usefulness out of aging machines or budget hardware.
Like others said, this is just click-bait, trying to twist the story into something about Apple Pay itself and how it compares to any issues people had with Siri not understanding them or working well with poor connections or no cell signal.
The *real* complaint, IMO, seems to simply be merchants who can't be bothered to upgrade their registers and payment terminals to support modern standards.
On Saturday, I shopped at several places (can't even remember all of them I went into), but I know Harbor Freight wouldn't let me use my chip on my card. The terminal had a note taped to it saying "No chip! Swipe only!" - despite having the physical slot in the bottom of it for the chip reader. Had the same experience when I got lunch at Subway in DC near the Faragut North metro station. Another reader that for whatever reason was working as "swipe only".
This might temporarily make me more likely to give up and just swipe a card when I check out someplace .... but that's only because I'm tired of things not working like they're supposed to with the option I prefer to use. As I see signs of it working properly in more places I shop, I'll go back to it again.
I haven't used Apple Pay a whole lot, to be honest. But it worked perfectly for me the last time I paid at McDonalds. I think with them, a lot of confusion on the part of employees (especially at drive thru windows) is the fact McD has their own iOS app in many U.S. markets/cities. With that, you have to hold the phone up to a reader (similar to what Starbucks does) to use an e-coupon (or to record the purchase of a drink that earns you a free one after 5 "card punches"). A lot of these people *just* got trained in how to use that thing, and don't get that "Apple Pay" is a totally separate process.
Honestly, the trick is to funnel your passion for your work into something that pays you back in the long-haul. If you're giving 110% all the time but all your effort is just going back into a salaried job where your hard work is more taken for granted than respected? Then yeah, you're going to wind up in your 40's, burnt-out and with nothing to show for it but prematurely grey hair and a lacking social life.
The Anonymous guy who posted would have had a much different story if he had the guts to take a chance on going it alone, working for himself. If you're such a good software coder, you need to write your own killer app (or even game!) and start marketing it yourself. That, or at least work as a freelancer, getting paid per project on terms you negotiate each time.
When you look at who actually owns the companies that employ you, you'll usually find those folks had a real passion for something having to do with the business. That's how they built the whole thing up into something successful enough, they could afford to hire you. Not everyone is in a position where they can be or want to be that person .... But if you're young and full of motivation/drive and passion for a subject, you shortchange yourself not to try to be one of those people.
Arguably ... but groups like FTF clearly believed it was a real issue. I wasn't going to get into that whole debate with them. If you're hung up on semantics, I suppose it is an issue because a zero tolerance for "zero rating" schemes means it doesn't fit the net neutrality wording of what's allowed.
I think "Binge On" is a pragmatic solution to bandwidth problems and providing customers what they want at the lowest possible cost. Some people are taking a hard line approach to all of this - but I think that's something that's just not going to realistically happen because of the relative scarcity of cellular data bandwidth.
When T-Mobile offered something similar with unlimited music streaming when you used one of a list of supported services, you didn't see anyone complaining. Eventually, they added so many services, you could stream music from practically anyplace you'd ever want to.
If you step back a bit from the focus on the iPhone and encryption technology, and look at the bigger picture for a minute? There are plenty of reasons to ask why the FBI should waste time and energy pressing this issue.
For starters, I understand when the San Bernadino shooter's place was searched, several "burner" flip phones were found. That should indicate, right away, that you're dealing with someone who was aware that govt. would try to get info from a smartphone, so work-arounds were purchased. The existence of the burners means there's a good chance nothing of use would be found on the iPhone in question.
Not only that, but we ALSO know the FBI could have easily gotten what they wanted off of the phone in question if they didn't screw up initially by changing the existing iCloud account password. Mistakes like that are similar to damaging any other evidence collected at crime scenes. (You know... such stupid things as somebody handling suspected murder weapons without using gloves and messing up the ability to pull useful fingerprints from it.)
It seems pretty blatantly obvious that this is not really about true concerns of there being critically important info trapped on this phone. (You've got one heck of a flimsy case if you really need THAT to successfully prosecute a mass murderer/shooter!) This is just another power grab attempt by the Feds, and I don't see ANY reason people should cooperate. Investigation of crimes was never supposed to be easy. It's difficult on purpose, because all sorts of steps should be taken to do it without trampling on individual rights. (As I always point out -- you *could* just make it law that the FBI can kick in random people's doors at any time of day or night. I guarantee giving them this ability would greatly increase the amount of crimes they prevented by catching people in the act of planning them, etc. etc. But you know what? We've decided we don't want to live in that kind of society.)
Many people say the DOJ did just this to Microsoft, years ago, when Bill Gates was feuding with them over the monopolistic business practice accusations. It's actually pretty amazing how much the guy changed his tone from before the lawsuit to after rounds of questioning by the government authorities.
Apple still largely has that "pre Microsoft monopoly lawsuit era" mentality, even if it's been slightly tempered by the death of Steve Jobs. I wouldn't doubt it at all if the govt. wants to cut Apple down to size the same way they did with Microsoft, so they're more in line with the things they'd prefer they say and do.
Technically, yes. But to me, it's more a matter of protesting the idea that net neutrality laws should apply equally for a high speed service over fiber or coaxial, vs. cellular data over airwaves and a limited number of costly towers.
If a cellular carrier just said "Unlimited streaming as fast as our network can go for everyone!" -- you'd get a log-jam where nobody had usable data service in no time. Then you'd *really* have something to complain about, as far as what you got for your money.
So glad you explained it this well. Even the folks over at the FTF (Fight the Future) campaign who usually back Internet rights issues I support were recently blasting T-Mobile for having this policy.
At the time, I emailed them back, saying I thought they were barking up the wrong tree, given how many other more serious issues we face as Internet consumers.
As a T-Mobile customer myself, I just can't see how this "Binge On" policy is anything but an improvement over the alternatives I get with any other cellular carrier out there? They can scream that it's an evil "zero rating" scheme all they want, but ultimately -- cellular bandwidth is at FAR more of a premium than land service based bandwidth. So carriers are going to gouge you for every kilobyte of it you use, unless you're working with various random exceptions to the rule that they feel they can live with, based on their network capacity.
I mean, if you're a "well known" hacker, people in the industry doing hiring should be aware of you already. Getting arrested doesn't seem like a big benefit to me? (If you were good enough not to get caught, that should say enough about your talent. With the criminal record, you just limited your employment options, even if it enhanced your credibility in a few other, select areas.)
I can't speak for the situation over in Romania, mind you. But here in the U.S., there's apparently a real problem where law enforcement wants to hire "white hat hackers" but usually finds it can't do so because they don't pass their basic background checks and requirements. (I know one guy who said the FBI really wanted to hire him, simply because he never smoked pot. They said that's the deal-breaker for a whole lot of computer info-sec applicants they get.)
Not saying the achievement isn't notable ... but pulling a vehicle isn't quite as difficult as they want you to believe.
Here's a video of a girl in Morocco pulling a car by her pony-tail!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Out here in Maryland, I'm not convinced that going solar makes a whole lot of financial sense. We're one of the states where it's pushed heavily, but we have quite a few days that are cloudy, rainy, snowy or just partially overcast, where panels just don't generate much power.
I purchased a 7.84 KWh PV system with a combination of South and East facing panels (all SunPower branded equipment which does cost a premium, but also means I've got panels with a little greater efficiency per square foot and hopefully backed by a warranty I can have more faith in than some).
The total cost with installation for this system, back at the end of 2014, was around $32,000. And yes, tax credits promised me 33% of that cost back -- but the way my taxes have worked out, I only got about $3,000 of it back the first year. (Not a tax expert or anything, but I'm assuming it's because I had enough other deductions so there wasn't enough earned income left to allow deducting more than that, for that tax year.) Anyway, on this year's return, I believe it was the same way.... I got a few more thousand of it back, but not the whole thing. This was rather unfortunate since the installer convinced me to take out a 1 year long 0% interest "bridge loan" for $10K to help finance the initial purchase, with the promise that "your first tax refund will let you pay it off before you owe any interest on it". Nope.... not so. I had to scramble to come up with money to pay the thing down.
The reason we kept getting flagged for open firewall ports is because the only connection in or out of the Internet was via that firewall and router. So any outside "penetration testing" had to test against the firewall and whatever it saw behind it.
The rules we had configured were to allow certain ports to forward to specific servers though .... nothing related to the workstation in the office running the card processor's software. But their automated testing didn't care. It wasn't intelligent enough to know that those ports led to things like our in-house Exchange server, or ability to connect to a terminal emulation session to a Unix box running an ancient software package for sales and CRM. They just said, "point us to your IP address so we can test it" and that's the only IP we had to give them.
At a previous job (small "family owned" business), they really didn't even handle credit cards very often. But every once in a while, they'd get the walk-in or phone in customer who wanted to pay with one. As the only I.T. guy on staff, I was tossed the mandate to "do the PCI compliance thing, since our bank says we need to start doing it".
I had to do kind of a crash course in it (while they signed us up with a company who would certify us "compliant" after I jumped through all of their hoops).
It's been a while now, but as I recall -- I was able to skip a huge test full of compliance questions simply by telling them we used an outside card processor over the Internet and didn't store any card data locally. I still had to make sure their monthly "penetration testing" passed/didn't find issues, and had a much shorter (25 questions or so?) compliance test to fill out annually.
They complained about several issues that seemed fairly pointless in our situation, although I understood the logic behind about 80% of it. (I remember them always flagging a "warning" because our firewall allowed connections through ports necessary for regular business operations. And I believe one of their demands was that "any computer connecting to the card processing site had to be isolated from the rest of the local network". That was, IMO, overkill and created as many security issues as it solved, since we had Microsoft's WSUS running to push security patches to the workstations automatically, once approved by me -- and I wanted some kind of way to do remote administration or maintenance on these boxes, via the normal procedures used to access any other systems on the LAN.)
So basically, I tried to comply with anything listed that was reasonable -- and "fudged" things on a couple line items. I imagine that's how most companies treat this stuff?