... No goodbye, or thanks for staying late. No handshake. No eye contact....
I work in Dilbert's world -- that is, a standard cube farm. There is a very small number of non-cube offices in my building; one of them has a printout taped on the window, with the stereotypical business man type meme which is captioned, "One of my annual holiday traditions is to come out of my office and acknowledge cubicle people."
In over a year working here, I've never even seen the occupant of that office in his office... so I honestly can't be certain if the meme is posted entirely in jest or not.
I'll ignore the feasibility discussion for the moment, as I have another commentary in mind:
The idiom I'm referencing in the Subject is actually, "One man's meat is another man's poison," but I would like to suggest that perhaps sometimes it goes the other way around. If the government of Canada were to actually succeed in making their online infrastructure more difficult to attack, then there are people of a certain type of personality who will take that as a personal challenge, and as such, they will put that much more effort into cracking those defenses. (By way of example, I refer you to Apple's similar longstanding claims that Mac OS is less vulnerable to hacks than Windows.)
In fact, what Trudeau has accomplished herein is to invoke the Streisand Effect, by crowing about his plans to harden their infrastructure; though it might seem somewhat incongruent on the surface, he has now cast out what amounts to an open invitation to those who might be inclined to accept that challenge, to perform the very attacks which he claims that he is seeking to discourage.
To wit: I think maybe he just made a strategic oopsie.
One method which privacy protestors sometimes favor is wiping their phone prior to entering the airport terminal, and restoring it to normal after leaving... and with the ubiquity of encryption on smart phones, that makes it extremely likely that a forensic search would be entirely fruitless, regardless of the methods employed. So how long will it take for airport authorities to decide that a wiped phone qualifies as a refusal to comply?
The trade-offs will obviously vary from one task to another, but it seems to me that the trade-offs with the most obvious root justification are also the ones which have the most impact on this discussion. For instance: Prokopov's comment about apps being at least twice as big can very frequently be explained by toggling the IDE's compiler from 32-bit to 64-bit. So no: there are absolutely no user perceivable benefits from that change -- you know, aside for the simple fact that 32-bit apps are being phased out entirely.
Another obvious justification -- though, perhaps a slightly more contentions one -- is the notion of optimizing for developer productivity, instead of for coding efficiency. I used to take great pride in providing a more elegant and clean coded solution than those of my peers, but anymore I find myself leaning more heavily on "frameworks" and "libraries", in spite of the fact that I know full well that each and every one I use is going to add more bloat to my app. So why do I use them? Duh... so that I don't have to rebuild the wheel. Someone else built that wheel -- in many cases, several someone else's -- and I have no desire whatsoever to spend the next 40 to 80 work hours muddling through all of the different use case scenarios, when someone else has already done all of that work for me and several other people have debugged and refined it, on top of that.
So do I care about efficient code? Sure. But I care about my own efficiency, quite a bit more.
I think it might be noteworthy that they did exactly the opposite last year, with the iPhone 8/8+ available on 9/22 and the iPhone X available on 11/3. The most obvious explanation in that particular case was production delays... but what if it was less about practical issues and more about exploring the market? I mean, I know that I for one pre-ordered an iPhone X straightaway, and ignored the iPhone 8 entirely... but I dunno; maybe that mode of thinking only matches the crazy ones. (Or maybe not.) Perhaps most people want either whatever is available immediately (instant gratification) or whatever is cheapest. Last year, you could get both of those things at once... this year, you have to choose... but you can get their best options straightaway.
And both last year's roll-out and this year's roll-out are perfectly valid marketing methodologies.
The core premise of this commentary seems to be that China hasn't basically already created the theorized divide between their "internet" and the rest of the world. I'm not so sure that people operating from behind The Great Firewall would entirely agree with that premise.
It sounds to me like that means that Apple is going to seriously distrust nutcases like me... I use the gMail app exclusively for e-mail on my iPhone, and I rarely make actual phone calls, except for occasionally during my drive home from work. I mean, how could that possibly be "normal"?.... right, Apple?
People often look to the algorithms of things like a GPS navigator or a news aggregator with the notion that it's always going to spit back results which are somehow "better" than whatever a human could have come up with... and to a certain extent, that might even be true. The thing that we don't always bother to ask is, what specifically did the human programmers of that algorithm decide to define as "better"? In some cases, it's a matter of what's least expensive, because that's what the consumer/end-user wants. In other cases, it's a matter of what's most profitable, because that's what the "real" customer wants. And in a few cases, "better" could easily be nothing more than taking that whole damned decision making process out of the end-user's hands, just so that they don't have to think about it.
Take GPS as an obvious potential example of this latter scenario: In many cases, there are a myriad of different possible routes which will all get you to the same destination in roughly the same time-frame -- barring obvious slowdowns, like a major accident on one of those routes. If you happen to know several such routes yourself, try testing your GPS: go "off route," and see what happens. I've conducted this test myself a few times, in one instance even going off route multiple times over the course of a drive... and the GPS happily rerouted and recalculated the estimate time of arrival each and every time... and outside of taking an obviously ridiculous route, the GPS's ETA only rarely extends beyond a few minutes different from the very first ETA that it had offered me, at the beginning of my trip. And yes... now and then, I can even manage to beat the GPS's estimate. (Your mileage may vary, and all that good stuff.)
So it's not always about getting the algorithm to help you find "the best" option... sometimes it's just about making a decision, and running with it. The same paradigm could easily be applied to many other decisions that we make in life. It hasn't been pushed quite this far yet, but consider: "Should I wear my blue shirt with tan slacks today, or the red shirt with black slacks?" "Should I have Moe's for lunch, or Chick-fil-a?" "Should I wear Old Spice or Ax, today?" "Boxers or briefs?" "Straight tie or bow tie?" Ohhhhhhh, the decisions!
Now, these are of course pretty far outside of the norm... most of us can usually come up with our own answers to these common everyday decisions. But that's just a few minor examples of the direction that things could go, once the machine has been supplied with enough of the right (?!?) data. And mark my words: if you can find a decent way to make the machine do it, there will be an audience willing to pass off even these minor decisions to the "wisdom of the machine."
And why not? After all, making decisions is, in-and-of-itself, just one more piece of stress in our lives. And who needs unnecessary stress... right?
I've known several extremely talented photographers over the years, so I don't actually remember which one passed along this tidbit of wisdom... but it stuck with me. No matter how much money you spend on cameras and flashes and props and all that... the very best camera is always incredibly easy to identify: Simply put, it's the one you have with you.
In the long run, it really doesn't matter how much "better" that other camera that you left at home (or didn't buy) is; if that amazing, potentially award winning shot is in front of you right now, just snap the picture with whatever you have. If your kids are being incredibly cute right now, snap the picture. If your wife is looking particularly beautiful right at this moment, just snap the damned picture. And be happy that you were there to enjoy that moment, when it came.
One of the very best thing I've ever done was to start using Chick-fil-a's mobile app, rather than waiting in line... not because I have anything against the in-person ordering experience, nor even because of a time difference between the two experiences. (There is often little or no time advantage, actually.) Rather, the critical factor which makes ordering from my phone worth doing, is the digitally e-mailed receipt. With all of those receipts already in a digital format and handily sent to me automatically, I don't have to really think about things like historic price increases, until the moment that such a thing becomes important to me. Nor do I have to guess at how often I frequent a given restaurant/store; the answer to that question is a simple word search away.
Obviously, you could also go with one of those apps that attempts to read your paper receipts and collates them for you... assuming that you're going to consistently remember to add your latest receipt to the app. But I'm not Sheldon; I'm not nearly obsessive enough to remember every single time. For those of us who are more Leonard and less Sheldon, letting the computer do a bit more of the work for us is, perhaps, a good thing.
As an aside: Chick-fil-a doesn't seem to change their prices very often; that's vaguely interesting to me, especially in light of this particular article. (Not that I ever actually eat at McDonalds, anyway...)
If you've already built a home theater, you almost certainly did so because you don't care about the "IMAX experience" nearly so much as you value your privacy and personal space. I would not-so-humbly cite myself as an obvious example: I have a decent 1080p projector throwing 110" on the wall (no screen -- just a light blue-gray painted room) with a mid-range Bose 5.1, and my primary media driver is a simple AppleTV 3 -- not even the latest model. I think it's actually a decent setup; it certainly meets my own viewing needs, and it more than meets the needs of the primary audience. And who do you think that might be? My kids, of course. Does anyone honestly think that a group of young children is going to know the difference between the "IMAX experience" and my humble setup? Of course not -- frankly, most adults probably wouldn't know the difference between a 1080p projection and a 4K HDR projection, even if you specifically pointed it out to them.
Which makes me wonder, as I noted in the post subject: who could possibly be the target audience for such a setup? My best guess: top one-percenters, who got there by way of an inheritance or a lottery. People who throw money at stupid crap, because they can. People who only want "the best"... specifically because some salesman told them that it's the best.
Honestly... how many such people does Sony think they can sucker, before the well abruptly runs dry?
I have my old internet "handle" based accounts, and I've had several variations on them over the years. I still use one of those for communicating with people who I know well -- and who I no longer have to worry about impressing... because they already know me well enough to not really care about my online handle, anymore.
I also have one "non-handle" account, and I use that anytime that a first impression actually matters, such as (obviously) interviewers and/or recruiters. That account is based upon my real name, which means it matches up nicely with what they'll see on my resume. I think it works pretty decently for that purpose.
The only note-able disadvantage is, my "real name" account has a rather peculiar set of problems, which I've somehow never experienced with any of my other accounts: Some other idiot with a vaguely similar name thinks that it's their account, and keeps using it when they fill in their contact information with various companies. And I don't necessarily think that they're just attempting to "black hole" junk advertisers... I've received confirmation messages for house purchases and rentals, vacation reservations, flight confirmations... you name it. Disturbingly, many of the companies which send me information for this other "non-me" person, never even bother to perform basic verification of the address before sending personal information to it.
And before you ask: yes, I've tried to get non-me to stop; they don't seem to care, or they're just too oblivious to understand the nature of the problem. They've even opened a Roku account using that e-mail, which I've attempted to cancel on several occasions -- but apparently, any device which has been activated on a Roku account can reactivate that account at any time, even without access to the e-mail account and without the Roku account password... from which I learned that if someone else somehow gains access to your Roku account (with or without your permission) they'll basically have access to it for life, on your dime. If I were malicious, I could add any of Roku's additional-fee services to non-me's account and connect any of my own devices to it for free, and they could do absolutely nothing about it -- except of course cancel the credit card that they used to sign up, which would no doubt result in creditors harassing them for non-payment, at some point. (I'll never be signing up for Roku myself, that's for sure!)
But yeah... I guess I just have to chalk that up as another one of those things that boggles my mind, but simply can't be helped. It's still worth it to maintain that e-mail account, for those brief periods every five or ten years when I'm interviewing for my next job.
Ironically, the only e-mail messages that come into my (largely defunct) Yahoo account are from... ummm... advertisers. That is to say, that's the address I give out to websites and/or companies that I never actually want to hear from again. So, did I buy something from those companies? Maybe... but just as likely not. So sure, Verizon; knock yourself out -- though, I have little faith that you're going to get much real value out of scraping my inbox.
(Also... it baffles my mind that there are people who still use legacy AOL accounts.)
Propaganda 101: The first step towards winning any war, regardless of the field of battle... is to convince your opponent that they've already lost. When they stop fighting, then the war really is well and truly over, regardless of who had the high ground -- either physically, intellectually or morally.
... by robocalling seniors to spread misinformation about the bill. "Your Assembly member will be voting on a proposal by San Francisco politicians that could increase your cellphone bill by $30 a month...
It's abundantly obvious that the telecoms themselves are who would be enacting the consequences that they're describing. As such, I wouldn't necessarily classify that as misinformation, so much as a threat -- nay, even blackmail.
... a senior e-threat analyst for Bitdefender... [said that]... Bitdefender is no longer monitoring Chrome 66 and later with their anti-exploit technology.
I entirely understand their chagrin -- but this response might be a mistake. For an anti-virus/anti-malware package to blatantly state that they're not monitoring a browser, just because the makers of that browser are getting a bit paranoid about plugins (rightfully so, mind you)... yeah, that's not going to sit well with a lot of people. Some people will blame Google, and some will blame Bitdefender... and both will lose face to some degree -- as well as lose users. Thing is, Google can afford to lose both of those to some degree, as they'll regain those numbers long before they run out of cash to throw at their reputation reparation PR folks.
I don't know much about the subsidy issue -- but I do know that the coverage maps for the big four have been largely inaccurate at their fringes for quite a few years. Everyone knows it, but nobody has ever really tried to do anything substantive about it.
Personally, I think that one of the reasons that these maps are so inaccurate is that they're rarely updated to account for non-network changes to an area, which adversely affect coverage. My own anecdote is illustrative of this particular problem: Back when I had AT&T, their coverage map showed me a very small triangle of poor coverage, coincidentally centered directly over my townhouse. I mean, you could literally walk two doors down and watch the bars go up two clicks. As such, I could usually make phone calls from the top two floors of the house, but the reception dropped off dramatically on the bottom floor. I lived with it... because at least the coverage map was accurate, so I couldn't exactly claim that I was being lied to, or anything like that.
Time passed, and my reception did not improve -- but you wouldn't have known that from their coverage map! That small triangle? At some point, they decided that they didn't need to represent that small weak area on the map anymore. I never figured out why, but as far as AT&T was concerned, my coverage was now perfectly fine. (It wasn't, really.) I shrugged it off, because while it was vaguely annoying, it was by no means the end of the world, nor was it even the highest priority issue in my life, not by a long shot.
Some more time passed, and construction crews started building an overpass at a major intersection, just under two miles from my house. Not long after they'd started, my reception started getting much, much worse. I did some research on my own, and determined that this was most likely because AT&T's nearest tower was immediately behind that intersection, from the point of view of my house... and a crap load of new cement, asphalt and rebar was being erected directly between me and that tower. It got to the point where the reception problems which used to only affect me in the basement had extended upwards to the top floor -- and the lower two floors got no reception at all. I called up AT&T and explained about the signal degradation I was experiencing, and asked if they were going to be able to do anything to remediate the situation. Then -- and I kid you not -- the lady on the other end deadpan responded with, "Well you know sir, we don't actually guarantee coverage inside of your house."
I was shocked by such an apathetic response. Who actually treats customers that way?? I went straight to the store that very day, switched to another carrier, and never looked back. And AT&T's coverage maps? Nah... they never once changed to indicate that things might be in any way sub-par around that tower. (Not that I actually expected them to, of course.)
So it's not just Verizon, and it's not a problem that's going to go away. My take-away from this article, is that those rural subsidies might well be their financial incentive for that misdirection... and all this time, I had naively assumed it was just to get new customers locked into an inescapable contract.
My dad offered me this advice, years ago: "In life, you don't get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate." You might say that it's a philosophical variation on the old adage, "You have to move out to move up," because the two frequently lead to the same end result. After all, if you stay in a job year after year, than there's a halfway decent chance that you're not negotiating -- or at least, not negotiating hard -- which almost certainly means that you're not getting what you deserve. Thus, in order to get the pay that you think you deserve, you have to interview with other employers and negotiate with them for a better paycheck and/or benefits than whatever you're currently getting. That may mean leaving an otherwise "comfortable" job with a window office, in favor of a cubicle in Dilbert's world and a much bigger paycheck... but that's just part of the negotiation; sometimes it requires both sides to give something up.
And frankly, that roughly sums up why I've left each of my last four jobs. (I figure I'll work my way back to a window seat, eventually.)
Personally, if I were running a social network faced with this kind of crap from an Orwellian corporation with no sense of humor, I'd simply respond to them along these lines: "Alright. You want us to block critical comments about one of your brands? No problem -- but we can't actually afford to manually block every single post that's critical of your products... so this is going to have to be a keyword block. And just so you're aware: because of the way in which a keyword blocking feature operates, that likely means that all posts about your product are potentially subject to being blocked, real or fake."
I would then proceed to simply block the keyword "Kurkure."
I think it's pretty obvious what really happened here: The original patent holders were openly suckered by the tribes. Let's look briefly at the events preceding this point in the story:
Allergan had some patents which they were using in Eastern Texas to assert some potentially highly lucrative claims. The winds turned, patent protections were weakened nationwide, and it became clear that their patents were about to be invalidated. They paid millions to a tribe to "shelter" those patents behind their sovereign immunity privileges. Also note that this wasn't an isolated incident: other patent holders followed a similar pattern, with other tribes.
So, what were the tribes responsibilities, in these business deals? Well... for all practical purposes, their responsibilities were little more than paying a lawyer, which was easily affordable after their new windfall. Other than that, they could simply sit back, buy a few expensive bottles of wine to celebrate, and start dreaming up cool ways to spend the rest of their cash. Sounds like it was an amazing deal from their point of view, even if the patents had been invalidated immediately.
Personally, I think the tribes knew exactly what they were doing; they had no expectations of their windfall remaining in play, long-term. In theory, perhaps they could "lose" a privilege supposedly associated with their sovereign immunity -- which is apparently what we're reading about now -- but they clearly weren't taking advantage of that privilege, anyway. And the risk of entirely losing sovereign immunity was practically nonexistent, since that would involve an act of Congress. So basically, they had everything to gain and nothing to lose.
In short: Allergan (and others) got suckered out of millions... because, in attempting to protect their own snake oil, they ended up falling for someone elses snake oil. (Somehow, I just can't find it in me to feel sorry for them.)
Well, acknowledging that I'm being a bit pedantic, now... but when was the last time you checked? (As for me: it was about half an hour ago, while preparing my response to your previous message.)
I had to check into your assertion, and it seems you're almost right: on the surface, it does indeed appear that Verizon has lowered their new customer base prices -- and increased the base speeds -- since I signed my own Fios contract, three years ago. That said: it's always good policy to probe deeper behind any "promo" price, because "the devil is in the details," as they say.
The "price lock" at $40 appears to be only for the first year -- not two years; it looks like the price goes to $55 thereafter. (I can't find this additional detail, but the price almost certainly goes up again after the conclusion of the contract's second year; it has for me in the past, on multiple occasions.) And as you noted, that doesn't include fees... but you may have overlooked that one of those fees is the not-so-insignificant "equipment fee," which is either $10 per month (rental) or $149 up front -- and Verizon has been known to require new equipment deployment for new customers, in the past. As an aside, to be eligible for these prices you apparently also have to sign up for both paper free billing and auto-pay... but those final requirements will probably just be minor blips to most people.
So some people might be able to get a "good deal" out of this promo, but not necessarily everyone. I still need to do some math, to determine whether or not it would be worth it to me personally, to juggle my account around and try to get that new rate plan.
If you've been paying attention to Apple's trend with the iMac, you can see where this article could be a warning of things to come: Apple has been trying to drive the iMac down to basically a great big tablet on a stand for the past two decades. It's predominantly that thermal envelope which has stopped them from getting there, without significant compromise -- but that hasn't stopped other vendors from likewise attempting to release "desktops" with the same objective in mind. (The Surface Studio springs to mind, as one example... but there are others as well.)
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... No goodbye, or thanks for staying late. No handshake. No eye contact. ...
I work in Dilbert's world -- that is, a standard cube farm. There is a very small number of non-cube offices in my building; one of them has a printout taped on the window, with the stereotypical business man type meme which is captioned, "One of my annual holiday traditions is to come out of my office and acknowledge cubicle people."
In over a year working here, I've never even seen the occupant of that office in his office... so I honestly can't be certain if the meme is posted entirely in jest or not.
Sadly, you're probably right. I say sadly, because what you describe should be the norm. It obviously isn't... but it should be.
I'll ignore the feasibility discussion for the moment, as I have another commentary in mind:
The idiom I'm referencing in the Subject is actually, "One man's meat is another man's poison," but I would like to suggest that perhaps sometimes it goes the other way around. If the government of Canada were to actually succeed in making their online infrastructure more difficult to attack, then there are people of a certain type of personality who will take that as a personal challenge, and as such, they will put that much more effort into cracking those defenses. (By way of example, I refer you to Apple's similar longstanding claims that Mac OS is less vulnerable to hacks than Windows.)
In fact, what Trudeau has accomplished herein is to invoke the Streisand Effect, by crowing about his plans to harden their infrastructure; though it might seem somewhat incongruent on the surface, he has now cast out what amounts to an open invitation to those who might be inclined to accept that challenge, to perform the very attacks which he claims that he is seeking to discourage.
To wit: I think maybe he just made a strategic oopsie.
One method which privacy protestors sometimes favor is wiping their phone prior to entering the airport terminal, and restoring it to normal after leaving... and with the ubiquity of encryption on smart phones, that makes it extremely likely that a forensic search would be entirely fruitless, regardless of the methods employed. So how long will it take for airport authorities to decide that a wiped phone qualifies as a refusal to comply?
The trade-offs will obviously vary from one task to another, but it seems to me that the trade-offs with the most obvious root justification are also the ones which have the most impact on this discussion. For instance: Prokopov's comment about apps being at least twice as big can very frequently be explained by toggling the IDE's compiler from 32-bit to 64-bit. So no: there are absolutely no user perceivable benefits from that change -- you know, aside for the simple fact that 32-bit apps are being phased out entirely.
Another obvious justification -- though, perhaps a slightly more contentions one -- is the notion of optimizing for developer productivity, instead of for coding efficiency. I used to take great pride in providing a more elegant and clean coded solution than those of my peers, but anymore I find myself leaning more heavily on "frameworks" and "libraries", in spite of the fact that I know full well that each and every one I use is going to add more bloat to my app. So why do I use them? Duh... so that I don't have to rebuild the wheel. Someone else built that wheel -- in many cases, several someone else's -- and I have no desire whatsoever to spend the next 40 to 80 work hours muddling through all of the different use case scenarios, when someone else has already done all of that work for me and several other people have debugged and refined it, on top of that.
So do I care about efficient code? Sure. But I care about my own efficiency, quite a bit more.
I think it might be noteworthy that they did exactly the opposite last year, with the iPhone 8/8+ available on 9/22 and the iPhone X available on 11/3. The most obvious explanation in that particular case was production delays... but what if it was less about practical issues and more about exploring the market? I mean, I know that I for one pre-ordered an iPhone X straightaway, and ignored the iPhone 8 entirely... but I dunno; maybe that mode of thinking only matches the crazy ones. (Or maybe not.) Perhaps most people want either whatever is available immediately (instant gratification) or whatever is cheapest. Last year, you could get both of those things at once... this year, you have to choose... but you can get their best options straightaway.
And both last year's roll-out and this year's roll-out are perfectly valid marketing methodologies.
The core premise of this commentary seems to be that China hasn't basically already created the theorized divide between their "internet" and the rest of the world. I'm not so sure that people operating from behind The Great Firewall would entirely agree with that premise.
It sounds to me like that means that Apple is going to seriously distrust nutcases like me... I use the gMail app exclusively for e-mail on my iPhone, and I rarely make actual phone calls, except for occasionally during my drive home from work. I mean, how could that possibly be "normal"? .... right, Apple?
People often look to the algorithms of things like a GPS navigator or a news aggregator with the notion that it's always going to spit back results which are somehow "better" than whatever a human could have come up with... and to a certain extent, that might even be true. The thing that we don't always bother to ask is, what specifically did the human programmers of that algorithm decide to define as "better"? In some cases, it's a matter of what's least expensive, because that's what the consumer/end-user wants. In other cases, it's a matter of what's most profitable, because that's what the "real" customer wants. And in a few cases, "better" could easily be nothing more than taking that whole damned decision making process out of the end-user's hands, just so that they don't have to think about it.
Take GPS as an obvious potential example of this latter scenario: In many cases, there are a myriad of different possible routes which will all get you to the same destination in roughly the same time-frame -- barring obvious slowdowns, like a major accident on one of those routes. If you happen to know several such routes yourself, try testing your GPS: go "off route," and see what happens. I've conducted this test myself a few times, in one instance even going off route multiple times over the course of a drive... and the GPS happily rerouted and recalculated the estimate time of arrival each and every time... and outside of taking an obviously ridiculous route, the GPS's ETA only rarely extends beyond a few minutes different from the very first ETA that it had offered me, at the beginning of my trip. And yes... now and then, I can even manage to beat the GPS's estimate. (Your mileage may vary, and all that good stuff.)
So it's not always about getting the algorithm to help you find "the best" option... sometimes it's just about making a decision, and running with it. The same paradigm could easily be applied to many other decisions that we make in life. It hasn't been pushed quite this far yet, but consider: "Should I wear my blue shirt with tan slacks today, or the red shirt with black slacks?" "Should I have Moe's for lunch, or Chick-fil-a?" "Should I wear Old Spice or Ax, today?" "Boxers or briefs?" "Straight tie or bow tie?" Ohhhhhhh, the decisions!
Now, these are of course pretty far outside of the norm... most of us can usually come up with our own answers to these common everyday decisions. But that's just a few minor examples of the direction that things could go, once the machine has been supplied with enough of the right (?!?) data. And mark my words: if you can find a decent way to make the machine do it, there will be an audience willing to pass off even these minor decisions to the "wisdom of the machine."
And why not? After all, making decisions is, in-and-of-itself, just one more piece of stress in our lives. And who needs unnecessary stress... right?
I've known several extremely talented photographers over the years, so I don't actually remember which one passed along this tidbit of wisdom... but it stuck with me. No matter how much money you spend on cameras and flashes and props and all that... the very best camera is always incredibly easy to identify: Simply put, it's the one you have with you.
In the long run, it really doesn't matter how much "better" that other camera that you left at home (or didn't buy) is; if that amazing, potentially award winning shot is in front of you right now, just snap the picture with whatever you have. If your kids are being incredibly cute right now, snap the picture. If your wife is looking particularly beautiful right at this moment, just snap the damned picture. And be happy that you were there to enjoy that moment, when it came.
One of the very best thing I've ever done was to start using Chick-fil-a's mobile app, rather than waiting in line... not because I have anything against the in-person ordering experience, nor even because of a time difference between the two experiences. (There is often little or no time advantage, actually.) Rather, the critical factor which makes ordering from my phone worth doing, is the digitally e-mailed receipt. With all of those receipts already in a digital format and handily sent to me automatically, I don't have to really think about things like historic price increases, until the moment that such a thing becomes important to me. Nor do I have to guess at how often I frequent a given restaurant/store; the answer to that question is a simple word search away.
Obviously, you could also go with one of those apps that attempts to read your paper receipts and collates them for you... assuming that you're going to consistently remember to add your latest receipt to the app. But I'm not Sheldon; I'm not nearly obsessive enough to remember every single time. For those of us who are more Leonard and less Sheldon, letting the computer do a bit more of the work for us is, perhaps, a good thing.
As an aside: Chick-fil-a doesn't seem to change their prices very often; that's vaguely interesting to me, especially in light of this particular article. (Not that I ever actually eat at McDonalds, anyway...)
If you've already built a home theater, you almost certainly did so because you don't care about the "IMAX experience" nearly so much as you value your privacy and personal space. I would not-so-humbly cite myself as an obvious example: I have a decent 1080p projector throwing 110" on the wall (no screen -- just a light blue-gray painted room) with a mid-range Bose 5.1, and my primary media driver is a simple AppleTV 3 -- not even the latest model. I think it's actually a decent setup; it certainly meets my own viewing needs, and it more than meets the needs of the primary audience. And who do you think that might be? My kids, of course. Does anyone honestly think that a group of young children is going to know the difference between the "IMAX experience" and my humble setup? Of course not -- frankly, most adults probably wouldn't know the difference between a 1080p projection and a 4K HDR projection, even if you specifically pointed it out to them.
Which makes me wonder, as I noted in the post subject: who could possibly be the target audience for such a setup? My best guess: top one-percenters, who got there by way of an inheritance or a lottery. People who throw money at stupid crap, because they can. People who only want "the best"... specifically because some salesman told them that it's the best.
Honestly... how many such people does Sony think they can sucker, before the well abruptly runs dry?
I have my old internet "handle" based accounts, and I've had several variations on them over the years. I still use one of those for communicating with people who I know well -- and who I no longer have to worry about impressing... because they already know me well enough to not really care about my online handle, anymore.
I also have one "non-handle" account, and I use that anytime that a first impression actually matters, such as (obviously) interviewers and/or recruiters. That account is based upon my real name, which means it matches up nicely with what they'll see on my resume. I think it works pretty decently for that purpose.
The only note-able disadvantage is, my "real name" account has a rather peculiar set of problems, which I've somehow never experienced with any of my other accounts: Some other idiot with a vaguely similar name thinks that it's their account, and keeps using it when they fill in their contact information with various companies. And I don't necessarily think that they're just attempting to "black hole" junk advertisers... I've received confirmation messages for house purchases and rentals, vacation reservations, flight confirmations... you name it. Disturbingly, many of the companies which send me information for this other "non-me" person, never even bother to perform basic verification of the address before sending personal information to it.
And before you ask: yes, I've tried to get non-me to stop; they don't seem to care, or they're just too oblivious to understand the nature of the problem. They've even opened a Roku account using that e-mail, which I've attempted to cancel on several occasions -- but apparently, any device which has been activated on a Roku account can reactivate that account at any time, even without access to the e-mail account and without the Roku account password... from which I learned that if someone else somehow gains access to your Roku account (with or without your permission) they'll basically have access to it for life, on your dime. If I were malicious, I could add any of Roku's additional-fee services to non-me's account and connect any of my own devices to it for free, and they could do absolutely nothing about it -- except of course cancel the credit card that they used to sign up, which would no doubt result in creditors harassing them for non-payment, at some point. (I'll never be signing up for Roku myself, that's for sure!)
But yeah... I guess I just have to chalk that up as another one of those things that boggles my mind, but simply can't be helped. It's still worth it to maintain that e-mail account, for those brief periods every five or ten years when I'm interviewing for my next job.
Ironically, the only e-mail messages that come into my (largely defunct) Yahoo account are from... ummm... advertisers. That is to say, that's the address I give out to websites and/or companies that I never actually want to hear from again. So, did I buy something from those companies? Maybe... but just as likely not. So sure, Verizon; knock yourself out -- though, I have little faith that you're going to get much real value out of scraping my inbox.
(Also... it baffles my mind that there are people who still use legacy AOL accounts.)
Propaganda 101: The first step towards winning any war, regardless of the field of battle... is to convince your opponent that they've already lost. When they stop fighting, then the war really is well and truly over, regardless of who had the high ground -- either physically, intellectually or morally.
... by robocalling seniors to spread misinformation about the bill. "Your Assembly member will be voting on a proposal by San Francisco politicians that could increase your cellphone bill by $30 a month ...
It's abundantly obvious that the telecoms themselves are who would be enacting the consequences that they're describing. As such, I wouldn't necessarily classify that as misinformation, so much as a threat -- nay, even blackmail.
... a senior e-threat analyst for Bitdefender ... [said that] ... Bitdefender is no longer monitoring Chrome 66 and later with their anti-exploit technology.
I entirely understand their chagrin -- but this response might be a mistake. For an anti-virus/anti-malware package to blatantly state that they're not monitoring a browser, just because the makers of that browser are getting a bit paranoid about plugins (rightfully so, mind you) ... yeah, that's not going to sit well with a lot of people. Some people will blame Google, and some will blame Bitdefender... and both will lose face to some degree -- as well as lose users. Thing is, Google can afford to lose both of those to some degree, as they'll regain those numbers long before they run out of cash to throw at their reputation reparation PR folks.
Can Bitdefender afford that, though?
I don't know much about the subsidy issue -- but I do know that the coverage maps for the big four have been largely inaccurate at their fringes for quite a few years. Everyone knows it, but nobody has ever really tried to do anything substantive about it.
Personally, I think that one of the reasons that these maps are so inaccurate is that they're rarely updated to account for non-network changes to an area, which adversely affect coverage. My own anecdote is illustrative of this particular problem: Back when I had AT&T, their coverage map showed me a very small triangle of poor coverage, coincidentally centered directly over my townhouse. I mean, you could literally walk two doors down and watch the bars go up two clicks. As such, I could usually make phone calls from the top two floors of the house, but the reception dropped off dramatically on the bottom floor. I lived with it... because at least the coverage map was accurate, so I couldn't exactly claim that I was being lied to, or anything like that.
Time passed, and my reception did not improve -- but you wouldn't have known that from their coverage map! That small triangle? At some point, they decided that they didn't need to represent that small weak area on the map anymore. I never figured out why, but as far as AT&T was concerned, my coverage was now perfectly fine. (It wasn't, really.) I shrugged it off, because while it was vaguely annoying, it was by no means the end of the world, nor was it even the highest priority issue in my life, not by a long shot.
Some more time passed, and construction crews started building an overpass at a major intersection, just under two miles from my house. Not long after they'd started, my reception started getting much, much worse. I did some research on my own, and determined that this was most likely because AT&T's nearest tower was immediately behind that intersection, from the point of view of my house... and a crap load of new cement, asphalt and rebar was being erected directly between me and that tower. It got to the point where the reception problems which used to only affect me in the basement had extended upwards to the top floor -- and the lower two floors got no reception at all. I called up AT&T and explained about the signal degradation I was experiencing, and asked if they were going to be able to do anything to remediate the situation. Then -- and I kid you not -- the lady on the other end deadpan responded with, "Well you know sir, we don't actually guarantee coverage inside of your house."
I was shocked by such an apathetic response. Who actually treats customers that way?? I went straight to the store that very day, switched to another carrier, and never looked back. And AT&T's coverage maps? Nah... they never once changed to indicate that things might be in any way sub-par around that tower. (Not that I actually expected them to, of course.)
So it's not just Verizon, and it's not a problem that's going to go away. My take-away from this article, is that those rural subsidies might well be their financial incentive for that misdirection... and all this time, I had naively assumed it was just to get new customers locked into an inescapable contract.
Silly me.
My dad offered me this advice, years ago: "In life, you don't get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate." You might say that it's a philosophical variation on the old adage, "You have to move out to move up," because the two frequently lead to the same end result. After all, if you stay in a job year after year, than there's a halfway decent chance that you're not negotiating -- or at least, not negotiating hard -- which almost certainly means that you're not getting what you deserve. Thus, in order to get the pay that you think you deserve, you have to interview with other employers and negotiate with them for a better paycheck and/or benefits than whatever you're currently getting. That may mean leaving an otherwise "comfortable" job with a window office, in favor of a cubicle in Dilbert's world and a much bigger paycheck... but that's just part of the negotiation; sometimes it requires both sides to give something up.
And frankly, that roughly sums up why I've left each of my last four jobs. (I figure I'll work my way back to a window seat, eventually.)
Personally, if I were running a social network faced with this kind of crap from an Orwellian corporation with no sense of humor, I'd simply respond to them along these lines: "Alright. You want us to block critical comments about one of your brands? No problem -- but we can't actually afford to manually block every single post that's critical of your products... so this is going to have to be a keyword block. And just so you're aware: because of the way in which a keyword blocking feature operates, that likely means that all posts about your product are potentially subject to being blocked, real or fake."
I would then proceed to simply block the keyword "Kurkure."
I think it's pretty obvious what really happened here: The original patent holders were openly suckered by the tribes. Let's look briefly at the events preceding this point in the story:
Allergan had some patents which they were using in Eastern Texas to assert some potentially highly lucrative claims. The winds turned, patent protections were weakened nationwide, and it became clear that their patents were about to be invalidated. They paid millions to a tribe to "shelter" those patents behind their sovereign immunity privileges. Also note that this wasn't an isolated incident: other patent holders followed a similar pattern, with other tribes.
So, what were the tribes responsibilities, in these business deals? Well... for all practical purposes, their responsibilities were little more than paying a lawyer, which was easily affordable after their new windfall. Other than that, they could simply sit back, buy a few expensive bottles of wine to celebrate, and start dreaming up cool ways to spend the rest of their cash. Sounds like it was an amazing deal from their point of view, even if the patents had been invalidated immediately.
Personally, I think the tribes knew exactly what they were doing; they had no expectations of their windfall remaining in play, long-term. In theory, perhaps they could "lose" a privilege supposedly associated with their sovereign immunity -- which is apparently what we're reading about now -- but they clearly weren't taking advantage of that privilege, anyway. And the risk of entirely losing sovereign immunity was practically nonexistent, since that would involve an act of Congress. So basically, they had everything to gain and nothing to lose.
In short: Allergan (and others) got suckered out of millions... because, in attempting to protect their own snake oil, they ended up falling for someone elses snake oil. (Somehow, I just can't find it in me to feel sorry for them.)
... No auto-pay was required for me this year....
Well, acknowledging that I'm being a bit pedantic, now... but when was the last time you checked? (As for me: it was about half an hour ago, while preparing my response to your previous message.)
Cute... but point taken. ;-)
Understanding of course, that the kind of transition you're illustrating takes time, after all...
I had to check into your assertion, and it seems you're almost right: on the surface, it does indeed appear that Verizon has lowered their new customer base prices -- and increased the base speeds -- since I signed my own Fios contract, three years ago. That said: it's always good policy to probe deeper behind any "promo" price, because "the devil is in the details," as they say.
The "price lock" at $40 appears to be only for the first year -- not two years; it looks like the price goes to $55 thereafter. (I can't find this additional detail, but the price almost certainly goes up again after the conclusion of the contract's second year; it has for me in the past, on multiple occasions.) And as you noted, that doesn't include fees... but you may have overlooked that one of those fees is the not-so-insignificant "equipment fee," which is either $10 per month (rental) or $149 up front -- and Verizon has been known to require new equipment deployment for new customers, in the past. As an aside, to be eligible for these prices you apparently also have to sign up for both paper free billing and auto-pay... but those final requirements will probably just be minor blips to most people.
So some people might be able to get a "good deal" out of this promo, but not necessarily everyone. I still need to do some math, to determine whether or not it would be worth it to me personally, to juggle my account around and try to get that new rate plan.
If you've been paying attention to Apple's trend with the iMac, you can see where this article could be a warning of things to come: Apple has been trying to drive the iMac down to basically a great big tablet on a stand for the past two decades. It's predominantly that thermal envelope which has stopped them from getting there, without significant compromise -- but that hasn't stopped other vendors from likewise attempting to release "desktops" with the same objective in mind. (The Surface Studio springs to mind, as one example... but there are others as well.)