Thanks... That makes sense, but also sounds like some of it has changed since way back when I was in college. (I knew Comp Sci majors were doing coding, but there was kind of a separate track if you wanted to become a programmer. I remember more of them explaining it to me as learning the math and theory that you'd need if you were, say, to get hired by AMD or Intel to help design the next new GPU or CPU?) Of course, our programming classes used to involve signing in to green screen dumb terminals connected to shell sessions on a minicomputer so you could code in C or what-not.:)
It seems to me there really is a strong demand for certain computer-related fields, but "Computer Science" gets thrown out there as a college major far more often, as kind of a "catch all".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but back when I was in college in the early 1990's, Computer Science was essentially a math degree, where you learned a lot of theory of how computer CPU's work along with the other circuit level internals that make up a computer. As soon as I told my guidance counselor that I had an interest in computers, she immediately tried to steer me that direction. That's when I pushed back, because I'm not even very good at math and that's not at all what interests me about them. I was more fascinated by the growing ability to network computers together and use them as a next generation communications tool. (Once I said THAT, they put me in some telecom courses that were really about nothing more than analog telephony over copper wires. So that was a waste too.)
In hindsight, I think I was really searching for a good MIS career path, but it barely existed back then. I wound up focusing on creative writing instead, and learned the computer ins and outs on my own.
I see data analytics as "the next big thing" right now, if you're math inclined. There's BIG money in finding experts who can crunch big data collections and interpret their meaning for everything from politics to marketing. It's also a pretty good bet to get specialized in distributed, cloud-hosted databases, if that piques your interest. I suppose there's some demand for a computer scientist who can grok the upcoming quantum computing revolution too. But all in all? I can't see it being that worthwhile to invest in a Comp Sci degree right now, vs. some other options?
Unfortunately, very true... although as someone who once worked as a Mac technician (not for Apple)? Their repair-ability really comes and goes in waves. You can tell that over the years, Apple went back and forth on how easy they wanted their systems to be for users to service or at least upgrade.
There was actually a time-frame (somewhere around 2010?) where Apple took considerable interest in letting users open up their own Macs and do a number of warranty repairs on their own. They used to have a self-service section of their web site with instructions for some of the work required, if you opted to just receive the repair part and do the work yourself.
Right now, in this Tim Cook era? Apple is on a full-on crusade to make everything difficult to impossible to open up and service. All of the Macbook Pros and Macbooks are nearly disposable designs. If you spill liquid into one, you're looking at a repair that amounts to them just selling you all new innards, put back in the original shell - at a cost that's only $300 or so less than buying a new machine.
My whole life, I've run into people who take comic books way too seriously. I mean, I get it to an extent. For many people, this was the stuff that formulated their ideas of right and wrong, in childhood. And many people went on to embrace such things as the quality artwork that went into the more advanced graphic novels. There's even a whole social group that evolved around attending the comic conventions.
But you've gotta be able to step back from all of it and realize it's just make-believe. There's absolutely no sane reason to threaten a movie critic with their life because they wrote a negative review of a movie about a comic book character.
I don't believe this has a thing to do with a "mens' rights" crowd who feels Aquaman counters the evil that was Wonder Woman becoming a successful movie! A whole lot of guys I know got a big laugh about of the photoshopped pic passed around the Internet with Aquaman's star stuck at the bottom of the sea, dying, because he got one of those plastic rings stuck around his neck from the 6 packs of soda cans.
I mean, as one example? I work for a company that uses a lot of freelance workers on a project basis, as needed. They're required to have company email addresses so their correspondence looks like it comes from our company. But otherwise, they're more or less on their own to work with their team of people that brought them on-board for whatever they're doing.
When the business was smaller, the people in I.T. pretty much met/interacted with all of these freelancers, so they were familiar with the sound of their voices, etc. That meant, if something came up like one of them contacting I.T. to request a password reset for their email? It was just taken care of without a second thought.
Well -- fast-forwarding to now, we suddenly had the realization that none of us in I.T. really know half the freelance workers we've been asked to create mailboxes for, anymore, and to complicate it further? Many of them are heavily using DropBox shared folders with people in their team. If someone wanted to, they could pretend to be somebody else, to request a password change and hijack the person's mailbox and/or DropBox. We never really had a system in place to help thwart that, because it just wasn't a "thing" until we grew enough for it to matter.
I'm sure this sort of stuff happens everywhere -- and when you're too busy managing everything else swirlnig around in keeping the infrastructure running properly, it's easy to overlook that it creeped in as a security weakness.
Yes, companies are VERY worried about cybersecurity matters right now. But it's not so much because they're afraid of the bad press if they get hacked. (Like people here keep posting -- security breaches of people's credit cards and personal info have become so commonplace, it's assumed that every valid credit card number in use in America is leaked out in one collection or another of data from the hacks. You card isn't getting misused because hackers don't have it. Rather, it's just the fact that nobody has pulled it from lists of millions and millions of them and tried to use it yet.)
The big problem is a fear of lawsuits and losing major client contracts over it. There are so many government regulations in effect now (such as HIPAA, FURPA, etc.), many businesses are supposed to be in compliance now and yet they're only partially there. In other cases, businesses are cranking out increasingly detailed demands of vendors they work with, saying they must do A through Z as security measures, or else they're liable for any security leaks. A lot of this stuff is still just signed off on as "boilerplate", because companies don't fully understand what they're being asked to do and/or decide they'll just accept the liability if something goes wrong, as they try to become more compliant on their OWN timetables. But it's certainly a big fear.
This has been a concept (or even a dream) for many people for decades. Cyberpunk novels treat this idea as almost a staple item in their fictional societies, and that goes back as far as at least the 1980's.
I think all of this augmented reality tech you see on smartphones and past projects like "Google Glass" also point to a desire to head in that general direction.
The fact is though? We really have no idea how to tie our electronics in to the human brain so they'd seamlessly inter-operate. Modern medicine is still trying to figure out the chemical reactions in the brain and what leads to various malfunctions (like Alzheimer's disease). There's a disease (although extremely rare) that causes one to have continual seizures (hundreds per day), and the only cure we know for it right now is cutting out one half of the brain completely. ("When in doubt, rip it out." is not usually an indicator that you have a strong understanding of how a thing is supposed to really work.)
You could easily imagine putting data on a microchip that holds, say, a complete set of language information for a foreign language. But how would you get the brain to *access* what's on the chip and to automatically query that chip when appropriate?
When you start looking at the details like that, you realize nobody on this planet is going to see such a thing working in Elon Musk's lifetime.
Before I read the article, I thought this might be about someone who fit all the brains of a PC into a regular wireless mouse. That could have been pretty cool, if you just paired a wireless Bluetooth keyboard to it and the only cord coming from it was a combo video connection to a display and power for the mouse/computer itself.
It would limit you to your external display choices, but you could probably make the only mouse cord a Thunderbolt or USB-C cable that could provide video signal to the display and also draw the power needed from it to run the computer-mouse itself?
I regret every dollar I wasted buying previous Battlefield titles, and I had the good sense to skip this one.
I do like first-person shooters and I had a lot of fun playing some of the Call of Duty games, so all the hype over the latest Battlefield installment usually got the best of me and caused me to go ahead and purchase/try it. But among other things, I really dislike that UI they insist on sticking with where everything is managed from a web-based front end/menu. I don't know why exactly? I guess it just feels like it hogs needless resources running a browser session just to draw screens that any other game I ever played just hard-coded in as the menus?
Beyond that, though? I just never got that into the game-play. Each new iteration promises "more" -- but it's got the same basic formula that just doesn't do it for me. As formulaic as EA titles are anyway? They *really* need to get everything right with them, or else gamers seem doomed to suffer through the same flaws, no matter how many new editions they release.
Time for some of these tired re-hashes to see poor enough sales so maybe they make the effort to do something totally new.
That's just ONE news investigation about the prevalence of govt. workers watching porn while on the clock. And clearly, they weren't ALL arrested or lost their jobs over it. So yes, I'm aware of actual cases related to this....
I have no idea what you're going on about with your other points? Sure, a government worker can own a high-end SUV. But it's also clear that if they're able to afford to do so, they're making pretty good money in their government position. Someone like that should really be able to weather the occasional "storm" of a government shut-down, since it's known that's a risk of doing that type of work. I'd guess that in at least some cases like that, their significant other earns a good paycheck someplace else too. So they probably still have that part of their income coming in (assuming they don't both work together in government jobs).
I can tell you when I was at that car wash, I was simply buying the $20 or so standard wash from them. I can't afford to pay hundreds to get my car detailed and hand waxed like that.
Actually, I think that's pretty doubtful. Government shutdowns are always risky for popularity of the person in charge when one happens. Fact is, there are probably roughly as many Republicans as Democrats not getting paid for work they're doing as govt. contractors or employees whenever things shut down. When the money starts running out, a lot of people aren't so happy to keep supporting whatever agenda is keeping them from getting paid -- even if it was initially their stance.
I'm not a Trump supporter (voted for Gary Johnson, actually). But one thing I have to give the man some credit for is that he's been pretty consistent about focusing on the same issues he campaigned on before his election. I don't think he could have made it much more clear that one of his big issues was getting a border wall built between the USA and Mexico? So unlike many Presidents, he's actually sticking true to his word on it. I think everyone with a clue knew, all along, that "making Mexico pay for it" was just over-the-top (typical Trump) bragging. If we really make Mexico fund it, it'll have to be in some indirect/creative way, such as grabbing a big percentage of every wire transfer an immigrant does in America that has a destination in Mexico. And I doubt THAT would be enforceable or go over well?
Realistically, I think the border wall is probably a waste of money. BUT, like most things? The truth is probably in the middle, between what the supporters claim it will accomplish, and how terrible the detractors claim it will be. Even if the wall really does zilch to prevent illegal border crossings -- it does have the side effect of creating a lot of jobs for engineers, construction people, and suppliers of materials needed to build it. (A lot of Democrats thought such big public works projects were AMAZING when FDR did them....)
I live near DC and never hear the end of all the moaning and whining when government does a shut-down. I mean, it really does reach the absurd at times. I remember last time there was a shutdown, I was at a full service car wash in Gaithersburg, MD. This lady in front of me rolls in with a high-end luxury full size SUV, and asks to have it fully detailed and waxed. While we're standing in line, she proceeds to tell me how the government shutdown has made everything so stressful for her.... and she just decided to get the car all cleaned up since she had all this time to kill now.
It only took about 2 days of this shut-down before people were on all the news stations, talking about their struggle. (None of them were even close to missing 1 paycheck yet!)
I really do get that the younger people, who just got a first "real job" doing something for Federal govt., would be far more impacted... But hey, I *never* accepted a government job for this reason. Always felt like the private sector made more sense. I don't like knowing my paycheck is covered by tax revenue they forcibly take from everybody else who works, and everything is subject to voters voting people in or out of office, legislation changing what government plans to do next, etc. Federal govt. jobs have different sets of perks, too, though. It's very difficult to get fired from most government jobs, for example. Even the idiots trying to watch porn while on the job often just got a slap on the wrist and kept their employment.... If you're a real screw up, you sometimes even get a promotion, because it's the only easy way for your superior to get rid of having to deal with you.
This is yet another instance where I think they try to extend things too far. The "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series was aimed at kids, for starters. I used to be a big fan of those books as a kid, and tried to check them out at my local library whenever they had another one I hadn't read yet. But they certainly weren't "adult content" material. It seems odd to try to associate what they were doing with a Black Mirror episode that's clearly a lot more mature in nature. And all of that's before even asking if the idea of having multiple endings to follow in a book means you own the concept of doing an interactive TV show or movie with multiple outcomes?
The biggest problem, as someone else commented, by simply be Netflix using the "Choose your own adventure" wording to describe it.
Yeah... if you manage to KILL a patient while trying to treat them in a hospital, I think its obvious they can't just ask for a do over. How many times does the patient die right after a hospital procedure, vs. the times they're able to go home? (You're the one with all these percentages -- so I'm sure you can enlighten me? I'm thinking the ones who die are like 1/100th. of the customer base though?) I'm certain there are MANY situations where a surgery is botched, and the patient complains to a "brick wall", because the hospital and doctors are conditioned to never admit mistakes, and to prepare to defend themselves in litigation. The better and cheaper solution is to offer to make it right. How can this NOT be a good policy to improve healthcare?
Addressing your general life expectancy comparisons? That's an overly simplistic way to pretend to gauge "quality of healthcare". If a nation is full of people with a healthier lifestyle (less air pollution, better eating habits, less tendency to smoke, more inclined to get regular exercise, etc.) - they're going to have a better life expectancy, even if healthcare is relatively poor. I think by most standards, Americans do a lot of things that hurt their life expectancy -- and so far? The field of medicine still has a pretty terrible track record of actually curing illnesses, vs. treating symptoms.
I don't believe, either, that it's impossible for healthcare to be an efficient market. That may have traditionally been true, but that's also thanks to its development as a science that was generally considered too difficult for the average person to understand. Doctors really wanted to be treated like gods, and patients were constantly advised not to try to self-diagnose their own problems. In fact, they're advised to keep visiting doctors for "regular check-ups", because presumably, even if you're well and feel healthy, you're not REALLY able to be sure without a doctor looking you over and confirming it. With advancements like prevalent Internet access, people can research their own health matters and discover such things as drug side effects and dangerous interactions with other drugs on their own. When it's time to see a doctor for a problem, they can go in, armed with some education about their situation too. Hospitals are just starting to be forced to make their rate cards available to the public, too. That's been a huge issue until now, because the insurance companies know what hospitals want to charge for procedures -- but the individuals didn't. You should soon be able to call around and get quotes for medical procedures, just like you would for any other expensive service.
Just a typical intimidation tactic used by police and detectives, really. They figure if people really were hiding an abducted kid there, they could rattle them a bit by acting 100% confident.
"In fact, I would argue that the goal of a nation should be to have the happiest people with the lowest GDP. Too much constant stress to produce takes people away from the meaningful things in life. Why have a population that works more than it has to?"
To the above statement? I'd say that's fine in a utopian ideal world. But people are simply NOT going to stay happy while nobody is really interested in doing any work to produce things of value. When you see these societies depicted in TV shows or movies, you'll notice they're almost always science-fiction universes with fantastic technologies (like the "replicator" in Star Trek) that magically break through this reality barrier. At the most basic level, we don't even maintain order without putting in continual work. The natural state of things tends towards chaos. And humans aren't happy and enjoying "meaningful things in life" while everything around them is unorganized chaos.
I see all the socialists here have modded my original post down as a "troll" status. (Why am I not that surprised? Typical...)
Single-payer is ONE way to handle the idea of "healthcare for all", but it runs completely counter to the principles the USA was founded on. I don't believe that it makes any sense to copy-cat it, just because it's the de-facto way to handle costly services in nations that aren't Democratic Republics.
Apparently, you don't grasp the difference between people who VOLUNTARILY opt to do some work for free, for the benefit of others, and those who are forced to work under a system where government mandates they be paid a fixed pay rate, no matter how good a level of care they do (or don't) provide? I'm a big proponent of people doing voluntary works of charity, but NOT of a political system that forces those earning an income to give a piece of that income to the government, to fund these services at no cost to everyone else.
And no, it's VERY clear that most nations in the world offering forms of single-payer or "universal" healthcare are NOT pulling off "providing the best care possible to everyone"! They're providing a mixed bag of generally mediocre levels of care, often with long wait times to see a specialist. Some folks are even dying while waiting for their turn to get help under those systems. That's the result you usually get, EVERY time you advocate socialist solutions -- because a large percentage of people doing the work aren't that motivated to do as good a job as possible. Luckily, the type of personality of someone who wants to become a doctor or a nurse tends to lean towards the more compassionate ones, who will sacrifice a lot to help others out. But still? They're not properly rewarded for going above and beyond, putting in a lot of extra hours of time to research problem cases or to learn and master new techniques. That means many will just burn out and stop making the extra effort. They'll collect their mandated salaries and do the minimum that's required -- so the care people receive only meets that basic standard.
The ACA did eliminate "lifetime caps" on insurance policies, BTW. But that's never been the situation until Obama enacted that change - and it's far from a certainty it won't revert back again. Insurance companies are businesses who need to turn profits like any other businesses. It may or may not be sustainable for them to pay unlimited dollar amounts out for care. Almost every other form of insurance I can think of has limits on payouts for things. When your car is wrecked and it costs too much to repair, they declare it totaled out and pay that value instead. They don't just pay "whatever it takes" to repair it again, no matter what....
There are all KINDS of reforms that we could do in America to improve the healthcare situation. I don't think a blanket idea of going to government-paid healthcare for all is the "best answer". A lot of money is lost to fraudulent claims that aren't investigated as well as they should be. A lot of money is lost thanks to the FDA protecting big pharma with patent protections I don't think are called for, given the nature of what they produce and sell. A lot of money is lost with malpractice suits and the threat of them costing doctors big $'s to cover themselves from them. Funny how for hundreds of pages of ACA "reform", they never even touched the aspect of legal reform.... I'd like to see more hospitals simply enact policies of a free do-over if a doctor misdiagnoses a person or a surgery fails to fix a problem. Make it a more customer-friendly system, and they'd save a bundle on needless lawsuits that raise costs of care.
And highly trained medical staff shouldn't be forced into slavery, to take care of every health issue for people who can't or won't pay anything for it. So what do you do?
Honestly, I'm tired of people going on, constantly, about equality in America, as though it's something we're obligated to try to achieve, or even a worthy goal? Other than making the statement that, "All men are created equal." -- it's really all about giving people a framework of opportunities to better THEMSELVES, if they wish to make the effort.
If you're living in poverty, yeah -- you probably won't have access to the best medical care available. What you do have is a pretty decent chance to get a lot of basic treatment done at little to no cost to you. Between doctors and dentists who willingly volunteer some of their time to provide these services, and government agencies taxing others to fund it, it certainly exists. Cancer treatment is HUGELY expensive, though - to the point where many insurance policies even put a "cap" on the amount they'll spend for it over your lifetime. So yeah, it's going to be the wealthier people who get the best treatment when they're in that particular bind.. They're the only ones with enough disposable income to not only have a good insurance policy, but to have paid extra for supplemental policies for things like cancer treatment -- or the funds to pay out of pocket for what insurance won't cover.
Ultimately though? You can't just demand America provide the "best care possible" to everybody, in all cases, regardless of their ability to pay, and magically have a better society. You'd quickly wind up spending most of your waking hours working to pay government back for providing those costly services to all the other people who used them.
Obviously, there's plenty of Windows 10 hate to go around, especially here on Slashdot.
But given the constantly decreasing price of storage per megabyte (and faster read/write times for it!), it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all for the OS to simply reserve the amount it would take to do any OS upgrade, and keep it safe from being used up by other programs or user data.
Honestly, I bet millions of Window laptops are out there right now, with at LEAST this much storage space already partitioned off for some kind of OEM "recovery" partition that most people will never find worthwhile to use? HP, Dell and others love to configure their systems like that. But for people not knowledgeable enough to blow away the whole partition structure before doing a clean installation of Windows? A lot of them now have a machine running Windows 8 or 10, but with as much as 40GB or so wasted on some recovery partition that would bring them back to Windows 7 if they actually used it. In other cases, it would just restore the PC to its original state, full of useless crapware that was bundled with it, plus an OS that needs 50+ update patches to be re-downloaded to get it current again.
I've gone camping or hiking at a number of these national parks and the reality is -- they're not always that free of trash and kept well maintained, even when they have a full government staff.
I'm not saying it's a great situation having trash cans that aren't getting emptied for visitors right now... But volunteers have already taken it upon themselves to do some of that in a few parks. It's not like you need special training that comes with the job of "park ranger" to be able to do it!
This thing is over 180 miles long, and most people I know who ride horses or bicycle through it will tell you they've almost never seen a government employee doing any cleanup or maintenance work on it. People in my town are regularly organizing small groups on weekends to walk along a section of it and pick up any cans, bottles or other trash they find -- because we really don't EXPECT to wait for some Federal employee to keep it nice for us. It's a net benefit to our community to have it nearby, so we can attract business from people traveling along it who stop for a meal or even to stay overnight.
The mass media is trying to sound the alarm of how horrible a couple weeks of government shutdown has been to our parks, but I'm going to call B.S. on this one. It's all part of a concerted effort to apply as much pressure as possible to re-open government, mainly so people working for them can get paid again. I get it... Nobody likes to lose their regular paycheck. But it rings a bit hollow as being the "whole truth".
Except I'm one more piece of the demographic who isn't riding a bike to or from work....
And why would I know "absolutely nothing" about the subject, just because I don't ride a bike? Do you also feel people know absolutely nothing about the trucking industry because they don't work in the profession, and never drove a big rig? I guess nobody ever knows the first thing about automobiles without getting a driver's license and driving one either, right?
Yep... I was trying to give GM the benefit of the doubt, as much as possible, on that one. In the 1980's, everyone seemed to figure out their vehicles were shoddy junk. I mean, literally every friend of mine had parents who bought at least one or two GM vehicles and proceeded to have horror stories about how often they broke down.
I believe they improved significantly since then. But the interiors are still a weak spot for them.
Seriously... I may be one of the only adults out there who can say this, but I never learned how to ride a bicycle. As a kid, growing up, I had all kinds of pedal cars, a tricycle or two, a "Big Wheel", etc. Any of them were good enough to ride up and down our street. And considering my dad had an accident as a teenager, when he was struck by a car delivering newspapers, that affected him the rest of his life? He wasn't all that willing to encourage me to get or ride a bicycle.
Then, I got my driver's license - and bicycles quickly went out the window as things I had any interest in.
These days? Sometimes I wish I could ride one... but I have to do a 60 mile commute each way for work, plus occasionally visit other job sites. So it wouldn't be for that. And when I see the prices for decent bicycles these days.... Yeah, I'm not motivated to buy one and figure out how to ride it either, at this point in my life.
Do I think all union auto workers are just "parasites"? No.... That's utter crap. A company's most valuable asset is its labor, and there wouldn't BE any profitable companies using union labor if they weren't able to benefit from it.
With GM, I think they have a multitude of problems. For starters, they tried to offer too big a variety of vehicles. Every new vehicle you add to the product line is a huge up-front R&D expense and a risk it might not even sell well. After that, it has the negative impact of requiring you keep a parts inventory for it (typically for many years after you stop building it). And if you don't keep refreshing all of those models, the older ones you keep selling become non-competitive.
Second? I think they're making a big mistake, right now, by not changing focus to electric vehicles. Now is NOT the time to stop making cars like the Volt. GM was one of the pioneers of the modern EV, when they first built the EV-1 vehicles that eventually all got dumped in landfills and forgotten about. I think that was just a product built to appease politicians at the time, and didn't make economic sense. But that was back in the 1990's. A lot has changed since then.
But absolutely, GM has a long history of selling cars with "fit and finish" problems. Some of that is poor engineering or cost-cutting in the wrong places. But some of that is also thanks to union auto-workers who didn't take enough pride in doing quality work. They just wanted to "punch a card" and get paid for showing up and doing the minimum. (I knew some of these guys personally. They'd tell me stories of how guys would get mad at a boss over whatever, and retaliate by dropping a ball bearing down in the door assembly of a new car or truck before it was finished -- to ensure it always had a rattle.... stuff like that.)
I'm not saying you'd end all of that with non-union labor. You wouldn't.... But there's generally less fear of losing your job if you're part of a collective who bargains on your behalf.
GM is bleeding thanks to a thousand paper cuts, more than just ONE person or issue you could try to point a finger at.
To the people complaining that they were even allowed to settle? I think it really *is* an issue that the people hired to do customer support regularly go "off script" and say things that aren't true. And that's not something Comcast can really control 100%. Nobody pays much for labor for the telephone work, and people are gonna say whatever they can sneak past their supervisors if they think it'll get more sales and boost their metrics for a possible raise.
Comcast absolutely does suck. I'm a customer.... I know. But not everything is because corporate trains their people to lie to you.
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Thanks... That makes sense, but also sounds like some of it has changed since way back when I was in college. (I knew Comp Sci majors were doing coding, but there was kind of a separate track if you wanted to become a programmer. I remember more of them explaining it to me as learning the math and theory that you'd need if you were, say, to get hired by AMD or Intel to help design the next new GPU or CPU?) Of course, our programming classes used to involve signing in to green screen dumb terminals connected to shell sessions on a minicomputer so you could code in C or what-not. :)
It seems to me there really is a strong demand for certain computer-related fields, but "Computer Science" gets thrown out there as a college major far more often, as kind of a "catch all".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but back when I was in college in the early 1990's, Computer Science was essentially a math degree, where you learned a lot of theory of how computer CPU's work along with the other circuit level internals that make up a computer. As soon as I told my guidance counselor that I had an interest in computers, she immediately tried to steer me that direction. That's when I pushed back, because I'm not even very good at math and that's not at all what interests me about them. I was more fascinated by the growing ability to network computers together and use them as a next generation communications tool. (Once I said THAT, they put me in some telecom courses that were really about nothing more than analog telephony over copper wires. So that was a waste too.)
In hindsight, I think I was really searching for a good MIS career path, but it barely existed back then. I wound up focusing on creative writing instead, and learned the computer ins and outs on my own.
I see data analytics as "the next big thing" right now, if you're math inclined. There's BIG money in finding experts who can crunch big data collections and interpret their meaning for everything from politics to marketing. It's also a pretty good bet to get specialized in distributed, cloud-hosted databases, if that piques your interest. I suppose there's some demand for a computer scientist who can grok the upcoming quantum computing revolution too. But all in all? I can't see it being that worthwhile to invest in a Comp Sci degree right now, vs. some other options?
Unfortunately, very true ... although as someone who once worked as a Mac technician (not for Apple)? Their repair-ability really comes and goes in waves. You can tell that over the years, Apple went back and forth on how easy they wanted their systems to be for users to service or at least upgrade.
There was actually a time-frame (somewhere around 2010?) where Apple took considerable interest in letting users open up their own Macs and do a number of warranty repairs on their own. They used to have a self-service section of their web site with instructions for some of the work required, if you opted to just receive the repair part and do the work yourself.
Right now, in this Tim Cook era? Apple is on a full-on crusade to make everything difficult to impossible to open up and service. All of the Macbook Pros and Macbooks are nearly disposable designs. If you spill liquid into one, you're looking at a repair that amounts to them just selling you all new innards, put back in the original shell - at a cost that's only $300 or so less than buying a new machine.
My whole life, I've run into people who take comic books way too seriously. I mean, I get it to an extent. For many people, this was the stuff that formulated their ideas of right and wrong, in childhood. And many people went on to embrace such things as the quality artwork that went into the more advanced graphic novels. There's even a whole social group that evolved around attending the comic conventions.
But you've gotta be able to step back from all of it and realize it's just make-believe. There's absolutely no sane reason to threaten a movie critic with their life because they wrote a negative review of a movie about a comic book character.
I don't believe this has a thing to do with a "mens' rights" crowd who feels Aquaman counters the evil that was Wonder Woman becoming a successful movie! A whole lot of guys I know got a big laugh about of the photoshopped pic passed around the Internet with Aquaman's star stuck at the bottom of the sea, dying, because he got one of those plastic rings stuck around his neck from the 6 packs of soda cans.
I mean, as one example? I work for a company that uses a lot of freelance workers on a project basis, as needed. They're required to have company email addresses so their correspondence looks like it comes from our company. But otherwise, they're more or less on their own to work with their team of people that brought them on-board for whatever they're doing.
When the business was smaller, the people in I.T. pretty much met/interacted with all of these freelancers, so they were familiar with the sound of their voices, etc. That meant, if something came up like one of them contacting I.T. to request a password reset for their email? It was just taken care of without a second thought.
Well -- fast-forwarding to now, we suddenly had the realization that none of us in I.T. really know half the freelance workers we've been asked to create mailboxes for, anymore, and to complicate it further? Many of them are heavily using DropBox shared folders with people in their team. If someone wanted to, they could pretend to be somebody else, to request a password change and hijack the person's mailbox and/or DropBox. We never really had a system in place to help thwart that, because it just wasn't a "thing" until we grew enough for it to matter.
I'm sure this sort of stuff happens everywhere -- and when you're too busy managing everything else swirlnig around in keeping the infrastructure running properly, it's easy to overlook that it creeped in as a security weakness.
Yes, companies are VERY worried about cybersecurity matters right now. But it's not so much because they're afraid of the bad press if they get hacked. (Like people here keep posting -- security breaches of people's credit cards and personal info have become so commonplace, it's assumed that every valid credit card number in use in America is leaked out in one collection or another of data from the hacks. You card isn't getting misused because hackers don't have it. Rather, it's just the fact that nobody has pulled it from lists of millions and millions of them and tried to use it yet.)
The big problem is a fear of lawsuits and losing major client contracts over it. There are so many government regulations in effect now (such as HIPAA, FURPA, etc.), many businesses are supposed to be in compliance now and yet they're only partially there. In other cases, businesses are cranking out increasingly detailed demands of vendors they work with, saying they must do A through Z as security measures, or else they're liable for any security leaks. A lot of this stuff is still just signed off on as "boilerplate", because companies don't fully understand what they're being asked to do and/or decide they'll just accept the liability if something goes wrong, as they try to become more compliant on their OWN timetables. But it's certainly a big fear.
This has been a concept (or even a dream) for many people for decades. Cyberpunk novels treat this idea as almost a staple item in their fictional societies, and that goes back as far as at least the 1980's.
I think all of this augmented reality tech you see on smartphones and past projects like "Google Glass" also point to a desire to head in that general direction.
The fact is though? We really have no idea how to tie our electronics in to the human brain so they'd seamlessly inter-operate. Modern medicine is still trying to figure out the chemical reactions in the brain and what leads to various malfunctions (like Alzheimer's disease). There's a disease (although extremely rare) that causes one to have continual seizures (hundreds per day), and the only cure we know for it right now is cutting out one half of the brain completely. ("When in doubt, rip it out." is not usually an indicator that you have a strong understanding of how a thing is supposed to really work.)
You could easily imagine putting data on a microchip that holds, say, a complete set of language information for a foreign language. But how would you get the brain to *access* what's on the chip and to automatically query that chip when appropriate?
When you start looking at the details like that, you realize nobody on this planet is going to see such a thing working in Elon Musk's lifetime.
Before I read the article, I thought this might be about someone who fit all the brains of a PC into a regular wireless mouse. That could have been pretty cool, if you just paired a wireless Bluetooth keyboard to it and the only cord coming from it was a combo video connection to a display and power for the mouse/computer itself.
It would limit you to your external display choices, but you could probably make the only mouse cord a Thunderbolt or USB-C cable that could provide video signal to the display and also draw the power needed from it to run the computer-mouse itself?
I regret every dollar I wasted buying previous Battlefield titles, and I had the good sense to skip this one.
I do like first-person shooters and I had a lot of fun playing some of the Call of Duty games, so all the hype over the latest Battlefield installment usually got the best of me and caused me to go ahead and purchase/try it. But among other things, I really dislike that UI they insist on sticking with where everything is managed from a web-based front end/menu. I don't know why exactly? I guess it just feels like it hogs needless resources running a browser session just to draw screens that any other game I ever played just hard-coded in as the menus?
Beyond that, though? I just never got that into the game-play. Each new iteration promises "more" -- but it's got the same basic formula that just doesn't do it for me. As formulaic as EA titles are anyway? They *really* need to get everything right with them, or else gamers seem doomed to suffer through the same flaws, no matter how many new editions they release.
Time for some of these tired re-hashes to see poor enough sales so maybe they make the effort to do something totally new.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/...
That's just ONE news investigation about the prevalence of govt. workers watching porn while on the clock. And clearly, they weren't ALL arrested or lost their jobs over it. So yes, I'm aware of actual cases related to this ....
I have no idea what you're going on about with your other points? Sure, a government worker can own a high-end SUV. But it's also clear that if they're able to afford to do so, they're making pretty good money in their government position. Someone like that should really be able to weather the occasional "storm" of a government shut-down, since it's known that's a risk of doing that type of work. I'd guess that in at least some cases like that, their significant other earns a good paycheck someplace else too. So they probably still have that part of their income coming in (assuming they don't both work together in government jobs).
I can tell you when I was at that car wash, I was simply buying the $20 or so standard wash from them. I can't afford to pay hundreds to get my car detailed and hand waxed like that.
Actually, I think that's pretty doubtful. Government shutdowns are always risky for popularity of the person in charge when one happens. Fact is, there are probably roughly as many Republicans as Democrats not getting paid for work they're doing as govt. contractors or employees whenever things shut down. When the money starts running out, a lot of people aren't so happy to keep supporting whatever agenda is keeping them from getting paid -- even if it was initially their stance.
I'm not a Trump supporter (voted for Gary Johnson, actually). But one thing I have to give the man some credit for is that he's been pretty consistent about focusing on the same issues he campaigned on before his election. I don't think he could have made it much more clear that one of his big issues was getting a border wall built between the USA and Mexico? So unlike many Presidents, he's actually sticking true to his word on it. I think everyone with a clue knew, all along, that "making Mexico pay for it" was just over-the-top (typical Trump) bragging. If we really make Mexico fund it, it'll have to be in some indirect/creative way, such as grabbing a big percentage of every wire transfer an immigrant does in America that has a destination in Mexico. And I doubt THAT would be enforceable or go over well?
Realistically, I think the border wall is probably a waste of money. BUT, like most things? The truth is probably in the middle, between what the supporters claim it will accomplish, and how terrible the detractors claim it will be. Even if the wall really does zilch to prevent illegal border crossings -- it does have the side effect of creating a lot of jobs for engineers, construction people, and suppliers of materials needed to build it. (A lot of Democrats thought such big public works projects were AMAZING when FDR did them....)
I live near DC and never hear the end of all the moaning and whining when government does a shut-down. I mean, it really does reach the absurd at times. I remember last time there was a shutdown, I was at a full service car wash in Gaithersburg, MD. This lady in front of me rolls in with a high-end luxury full size SUV, and asks to have it fully detailed and waxed. While we're standing in line, she proceeds to tell me how the government shutdown has made everything so stressful for her.... and she just decided to get the car all cleaned up since she had all this time to kill now.
It only took about 2 days of this shut-down before people were on all the news stations, talking about their struggle. (None of them were even close to missing 1 paycheck yet!)
I really do get that the younger people, who just got a first "real job" doing something for Federal govt., would be far more impacted ... But hey, I *never* accepted a government job for this reason. Always felt like the private sector made more sense. I don't like knowing my paycheck is covered by tax revenue they forcibly take from everybody else who works, and everything is subject to voters voting people in or out of office, legislation changing what government plans to do next, etc. Federal govt. jobs have different sets of perks, too, though. It's very difficult to get fired from most government jobs, for example. Even the idiots trying to watch porn while on the job often just got a slap on the wrist and kept their employment.... If you're a real screw up, you sometimes even get a promotion, because it's the only easy way for your superior to get rid of having to deal with you.
This is yet another instance where I think they try to extend things too far. The "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series was aimed at kids, for starters. I used to be a big fan of those books as a kid, and tried to check them out at my local library whenever they had another one I hadn't read yet. But they certainly weren't "adult content" material. It seems odd to try to associate what they were doing with a Black Mirror episode that's clearly a lot more mature in nature. And all of that's before even asking if the idea of having multiple endings to follow in a book means you own the concept of doing an interactive TV show or movie with multiple outcomes?
The biggest problem, as someone else commented, by simply be Netflix using the "Choose your own adventure" wording to describe it.
Tackling my last point first ....
Yeah... if you manage to KILL a patient while trying to treat them in a hospital, I think its obvious they can't just ask for a do over. How many times does the patient die right after a hospital procedure, vs. the times they're able to go home? (You're the one with all these percentages -- so I'm sure you can enlighten me? I'm thinking the ones who die are like 1/100th. of the customer base though?) I'm certain there are MANY situations where a surgery is botched, and the patient complains to a "brick wall", because the hospital and doctors are conditioned to never admit mistakes, and to prepare to defend themselves in litigation. The better and cheaper solution is to offer to make it right. How can this NOT be a good policy to improve healthcare?
Addressing your general life expectancy comparisons? That's an overly simplistic way to pretend to gauge "quality of healthcare". If a nation is full of people with a healthier lifestyle (less air pollution, better eating habits, less tendency to smoke, more inclined to get regular exercise, etc.) - they're going to have a better life expectancy, even if healthcare is relatively poor. I think by most standards, Americans do a lot of things that hurt their life expectancy -- and so far? The field of medicine still has a pretty terrible track record of actually curing illnesses, vs. treating symptoms.
I don't believe, either, that it's impossible for healthcare to be an efficient market. That may have traditionally been true, but that's also thanks to its development as a science that was generally considered too difficult for the average person to understand. Doctors really wanted to be treated like gods, and patients were constantly advised not to try to self-diagnose their own problems. In fact, they're advised to keep visiting doctors for "regular check-ups", because presumably, even if you're well and feel healthy, you're not REALLY able to be sure without a doctor looking you over and confirming it. With advancements like prevalent Internet access, people can research their own health matters and discover such things as drug side effects and dangerous interactions with other drugs on their own. When it's time to see a doctor for a problem, they can go in, armed with some education about their situation too. Hospitals are just starting to be forced to make their rate cards available to the public, too. That's been a huge issue until now, because the insurance companies know what hospitals want to charge for procedures -- but the individuals didn't. You should soon be able to call around and get quotes for medical procedures, just like you would for any other expensive service.
Just a typical intimidation tactic used by police and detectives, really. They figure if people really were hiding an abducted kid there, they could rattle them a bit by acting 100% confident.
"In fact, I would argue that the goal of a nation should be to have the happiest people with the lowest GDP. Too much constant stress to produce takes people away from the meaningful things in life. Why have a population that works more than it has to?"
To the above statement? I'd say that's fine in a utopian ideal world. But people are simply NOT going to stay happy while nobody is really interested in doing any work to produce things of value. When you see these societies depicted in TV shows or movies, you'll notice they're almost always science-fiction universes with fantastic technologies (like the "replicator" in Star Trek) that magically break through this reality barrier. At the most basic level, we don't even maintain order without putting in continual work. The natural state of things tends towards chaos. And humans aren't happy and enjoying "meaningful things in life" while everything around them is unorganized chaos.
I see all the socialists here have modded my original post down as a "troll" status. (Why am I not that surprised? Typical ...)
Single-payer is ONE way to handle the idea of "healthcare for all", but it runs completely counter to the principles the USA was founded on. I don't believe that it makes any sense to copy-cat it, just because it's the de-facto way to handle costly services in nations that aren't Democratic Republics.
Apparently, you don't grasp the difference between people who VOLUNTARILY opt to do some work for free, for the benefit of others, and those who are forced to work under a system where government mandates they be paid a fixed pay rate, no matter how good a level of care they do (or don't) provide? I'm a big proponent of people doing voluntary works of charity, but NOT of a political system that forces those earning an income to give a piece of that income to the government, to fund these services at no cost to everyone else.
And no, it's VERY clear that most nations in the world offering forms of single-payer or "universal" healthcare are NOT pulling off "providing the best care possible to everyone"! They're providing a mixed bag of generally mediocre levels of care, often with long wait times to see a specialist. Some folks are even dying while waiting for their turn to get help under those systems. That's the result you usually get, EVERY time you advocate socialist solutions -- because a large percentage of people doing the work aren't that motivated to do as good a job as possible. Luckily, the type of personality of someone who wants to become a doctor or a nurse tends to lean towards the more compassionate ones, who will sacrifice a lot to help others out. But still? They're not properly rewarded for going above and beyond, putting in a lot of extra hours of time to research problem cases or to learn and master new techniques. That means many will just burn out and stop making the extra effort. They'll collect their mandated salaries and do the minimum that's required -- so the care people receive only meets that basic standard.
The ACA did eliminate "lifetime caps" on insurance policies, BTW. But that's never been the situation until Obama enacted that change - and it's far from a certainty it won't revert back again. Insurance companies are businesses who need to turn profits like any other businesses. It may or may not be sustainable for them to pay unlimited dollar amounts out for care. Almost every other form of insurance I can think of has limits on payouts for things. When your car is wrecked and it costs too much to repair, they declare it totaled out and pay that value instead. They don't just pay "whatever it takes" to repair it again, no matter what....
There are all KINDS of reforms that we could do in America to improve the healthcare situation. I don't think a blanket idea of going to government-paid healthcare for all is the "best answer". A lot of money is lost to fraudulent claims that aren't investigated as well as they should be. A lot of money is lost thanks to the FDA protecting big pharma with patent protections I don't think are called for, given the nature of what they produce and sell. A lot of money is lost with malpractice suits and the threat of them costing doctors big $'s to cover themselves from them. Funny how for hundreds of pages of ACA "reform", they never even touched the aspect of legal reform.... I'd like to see more hospitals simply enact policies of a free do-over if a doctor misdiagnoses a person or a surgery fails to fix a problem. Make it a more customer-friendly system, and they'd save a bundle on needless lawsuits that raise costs of care.
And highly trained medical staff shouldn't be forced into slavery, to take care of every health issue for people who can't or won't pay anything for it. So what do you do?
Honestly, I'm tired of people going on, constantly, about equality in America, as though it's something we're obligated to try to achieve, or even a worthy goal? Other than making the statement that, "All men are created equal." -- it's really all about giving people a framework of opportunities to better THEMSELVES, if they wish to make the effort.
If you're living in poverty, yeah -- you probably won't have access to the best medical care available. What you do have is a pretty decent chance to get a lot of basic treatment done at little to no cost to you. Between doctors and dentists who willingly volunteer some of their time to provide these services, and government agencies taxing others to fund it, it certainly exists. Cancer treatment is HUGELY expensive, though - to the point where many insurance policies even put a "cap" on the amount they'll spend for it over your lifetime. So yeah, it's going to be the wealthier people who get the best treatment when they're in that particular bind.. They're the only ones with enough disposable income to not only have a good insurance policy, but to have paid extra for supplemental policies for things like cancer treatment -- or the funds to pay out of pocket for what insurance won't cover.
Ultimately though? You can't just demand America provide the "best care possible" to everybody, in all cases, regardless of their ability to pay, and magically have a better society. You'd quickly wind up spending most of your waking hours working to pay government back for providing those costly services to all the other people who used them.
Obviously, there's plenty of Windows 10 hate to go around, especially here on Slashdot.
But given the constantly decreasing price of storage per megabyte (and faster read/write times for it!), it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all for the OS to simply reserve the amount it would take to do any OS upgrade, and keep it safe from being used up by other programs or user data.
Honestly, I bet millions of Window laptops are out there right now, with at LEAST this much storage space already partitioned off for some kind of OEM "recovery" partition that most people will never find worthwhile to use? HP, Dell and others love to configure their systems like that. But for people not knowledgeable enough to blow away the whole partition structure before doing a clean installation of Windows? A lot of them now have a machine running Windows 8 or 10, but with as much as 40GB or so wasted on some recovery partition that would bring them back to Windows 7 if they actually used it. In other cases, it would just restore the PC to its original state, full of useless crapware that was bundled with it, plus an OS that needs 50+ update patches to be re-downloaded to get it current again.
I've gone camping or hiking at a number of these national parks and the reality is -- they're not always that free of trash and kept well maintained, even when they have a full government staff.
I'm not saying it's a great situation having trash cans that aren't getting emptied for visitors right now ... But volunteers have already taken it upon themselves to do some of that in a few parks. It's not like you need special training that comes with the job of "park ranger" to be able to do it!
I live right by part of the C&O Canal:
https://www.nps.gov/choh/index...
This thing is over 180 miles long, and most people I know who ride horses or bicycle through it will tell you they've almost never seen a government employee doing any cleanup or maintenance work on it. People in my town are regularly organizing small groups on weekends to walk along a section of it and pick up any cans, bottles or other trash they find -- because we really don't EXPECT to wait for some Federal employee to keep it nice for us. It's a net benefit to our community to have it nearby, so we can attract business from people traveling along it who stop for a meal or even to stay overnight.
The mass media is trying to sound the alarm of how horrible a couple weeks of government shutdown has been to our parks, but I'm going to call B.S. on this one. It's all part of a concerted effort to apply as much pressure as possible to re-open government, mainly so people working for them can get paid again. I get it... Nobody likes to lose their regular paycheck. But it rings a bit hollow as being the "whole truth".
Except I'm one more piece of the demographic who isn't riding a bike to or from work....
And why would I know "absolutely nothing" about the subject, just because I don't ride a bike? Do you also feel people know absolutely nothing about the trucking industry because they don't work in the profession, and never drove a big rig? I guess nobody ever knows the first thing about automobiles without getting a driver's license and driving one either, right?
Yep... I was trying to give GM the benefit of the doubt, as much as possible, on that one. In the 1980's, everyone seemed to figure out their vehicles were shoddy junk. I mean, literally every friend of mine had parents who bought at least one or two GM vehicles and proceeded to have horror stories about how often they broke down.
I believe they improved significantly since then. But the interiors are still a weak spot for them.
Seriously ... I may be one of the only adults out there who can say this, but I never learned how to ride a bicycle. As a kid, growing up, I had all kinds of pedal cars, a tricycle or two, a "Big Wheel", etc. Any of them were good enough to ride up and down our street. And considering my dad had an accident as a teenager, when he was struck by a car delivering newspapers, that affected him the rest of his life? He wasn't all that willing to encourage me to get or ride a bicycle.
Then, I got my driver's license - and bicycles quickly went out the window as things I had any interest in.
These days? Sometimes I wish I could ride one ... but I have to do a 60 mile commute each way for work, plus occasionally visit other job sites. So it wouldn't be for that. And when I see the prices for decent bicycles these days .... Yeah, I'm not motivated to buy one and figure out how to ride it either, at this point in my life.
Do I think all union auto workers are just "parasites"? No.... That's utter crap. A company's most valuable asset is its labor, and there wouldn't BE any profitable companies using union labor if they weren't able to benefit from it.
With GM, I think they have a multitude of problems. For starters, they tried to offer too big a variety of vehicles. Every new vehicle you add to the product line is a huge up-front R&D expense and a risk it might not even sell well. After that, it has the negative impact of requiring you keep a parts inventory for it (typically for many years after you stop building it). And if you don't keep refreshing all of those models, the older ones you keep selling become non-competitive.
Second? I think they're making a big mistake, right now, by not changing focus to electric vehicles. Now is NOT the time to stop making cars like the Volt. GM was one of the pioneers of the modern EV, when they first built the EV-1 vehicles that eventually all got dumped in landfills and forgotten about. I think that was just a product built to appease politicians at the time, and didn't make economic sense. But that was back in the 1990's. A lot has changed since then.
But absolutely, GM has a long history of selling cars with "fit and finish" problems. Some of that is poor engineering or cost-cutting in the wrong places. But some of that is also thanks to union auto-workers who didn't take enough pride in doing quality work. They just wanted to "punch a card" and get paid for showing up and doing the minimum. (I knew some of these guys personally. They'd tell me stories of how guys would get mad at a boss over whatever, and retaliate by dropping a ball bearing down in the door assembly of a new car or truck before it was finished -- to ensure it always had a rattle.... stuff like that.)
I'm not saying you'd end all of that with non-union labor. You wouldn't.... But there's generally less fear of losing your job if you're part of a collective who bargains on your behalf.
GM is bleeding thanks to a thousand paper cuts, more than just ONE person or issue you could try to point a finger at.
To the people complaining that they were even allowed to settle? I think it really *is* an issue that the people hired to do customer support regularly go "off script" and say things that aren't true. And that's not something Comcast can really control 100%. Nobody pays much for labor for the telephone work, and people are gonna say whatever they can sneak past their supervisors if they think it'll get more sales and boost their metrics for a possible raise.
Comcast absolutely does suck. I'm a customer.... I know. But not everything is because corporate trains their people to lie to you.