You can have a social network or advertising platform without scummy behavior related to data practices. I don't see how attempting to do either is a mark against Apple and neither of those efforts seem to exist. I suspect that Apple failed in part because advertising is more effective when you do collect all manner of data on people and that not having the ability to target ads in that way, makes them much less valuable. Ping was also only related to music, which made it niche and non-viable from day one even if people had any interest in using it.
As far as purchase records go, they have to keep them due to U.S. laws (or those of other jurisdictions) related to records of financial transactions. Any other payment service is going to have the same records and the same option of selling information mined from those records. The question is whether or not Apple sells any of that information or do anything else with it, even if only for their own internal use. I don't use Apple Pay so I've never bothered to look into it.
This is interesting, but I'm not sure how useful it is. You might be able to create an AI that has some desirable characteristics based on human morality, but as soon as you make it compete against other AIs that don't possess those characteristics, it will either adapt to possess them itself in order to remain competitive or it will perish if it's been crippled in a way to prevent it from adjusting. A pacifistic Pac-Man AI might be novel, but if it was made to compete, it wouldn't do as well.
Idiots on 4chan will spam or hack the voting process for their own amusement. The results are anything but predictable and probably more amusing than anything else. See this example of what you get and tell me that's an obvious outcome.
Even then, I don't think this will ever replace a well-crafted story by a single author or a small group of writers. We've had choose your own adventure novels and other interactive forms of entertainment in the past (with many arising due to the internet itself) and they've never supplanted the more traditional forms of media.
I also suspect that the current approach never will either. People really don't want a crowd-driven story, what they want is that they themselves get to drive the narrative, and that when they participate in these group-driven projects it's because they assume that they'll get to steer the group rather than being bit player. I suspect that people drop out and lose interest when things don't go their way, so at the end all you're left with are the people who made the most popular decisions at most of the steps. Eventually the technology may advance far enough for people to have their own simulated experiences created for them on an individual basis and perhaps that's when the traditional approach falls by the wayside.
I think they do care about privacy, but whether it's for philosophical reasons or simply as a matter of good business (i.e., marketing and PR) is up for debate.
If you look at what they do as a company, a lot of their products or services are designed to make it harder to access personal data. You can cynically argue that they only do this because it's a blow to their competition that thrives off being able to sell that data as opposed to Apple who gets by selling expensive gadgets, but from my perspective as a consumer, I don't care if the product does more to protect my privacy. If Apple does it purely out of greed or a desire to destroy their competition, I'm no better or worse off than if they do it because of some deeply held principles on the part of everyone working there.
Maybe they don't care about privacy as much as you would like them to, but I think they do a better job of it than most other companies and I hope they continue to make improvements in those areas.
Once it's been empirically evaluated and found to be effective, it's just medicine. Just because something is a hippy-dippy, tree-hugging belief, doesn't automatically make it incorrect.
If you think that she believes in a lot of other things that are demonstrably wrong through evidence, this provides a good opportunity since you can clearly point to something she already believes in and has personal experience with as having been scientifically validated. Perhaps she'll give more credence to science than she otherwise would and might be more willing to examine her other beliefs through that lens.
Shibboleths are things that are useful for identifying distinct groups of people. A good example is the bar scene in the Tarantino film Inglorious Bastards. One of the characters is an Englishman pretending to be a German Officer and he does an okay job, especially given the tense situation and everyone is fooled. However, the hand gesture he makes when ordering drinks is improper and immediately betrays him as a spy.
The word itself comes from an old Hebrew word that has an unrelated meaning to the present use, which springs from a Biblical story, where the word "Shibboleth" was used as a modern shibboleth because it was pronounced differently between two warring groups and could be used to tell if a person was a foe attempting to pass themselves off as a friend. There are plenty of other examples of this being employed throughout history. For example, if you're traveling in warn torn parts of the Middle East, you may want to memorize a few passages from the Quran as that's a common shibboleth used by militants to determine if someone is actually a Muslim since it's often impossible to know based on appearance alone.
This seems like a useful shibboleth. Anyone who's whining about this online is the kind of prat you probably don't want anywhere near your project. I think the first example is especially illustrative:
So is the SQLite CoC thing a joke or not? If it's not a joke, f*ck this. If it is a joke, that's even worse.
Here's the type of person that is likely to go out of their way to take umbrage over something relatively minor. The kind of person who's happy to shove a CoC down your throat as long its theirs, but will scream about having to follow some other set of rules that they don't like.
I never invested in or mined bitcoin, but I was genuinely intrigued by the whole thing. The concept itself is interesting and it's funny to think back to a time where people were spending them when they were pretty much like coins. No one expected any of it to really pan out or be worth anything, so people would spend a dozen or so on a pizza if they could find some place that would take them just for the novelty of spending some funny digital money that no one really understood. I just wonder how many of those people think back on that pizza and think that they could have had a quarter million dollars instead if they would have held onto them.
Everything to come with it has been fascinating. The rapid technological arms race to mine more bitcoins, where people started being able recoup an investment from their high-end GPU in a few months by having it mine bitcoin instead of gaming on it, and people setting up little bitcoin mining operations until the ASICs pretty much killed that off. People posting on message boards about plowing their tuition into mining rigs or just outright investing bitcoin and the stories about people moving to towns that had cheap power contractually guaranteed to set up massive mining operations there because electricity was the real limiting factor.
All of it's almost just too surreal and I'm not even completely sure that the rodeo is over either. It's like getting to watch a gold rush happen and all of the human exuberance and tragedy that comes along with it.
Now doesn't seem like a particularly bad time. The price has been relatively stable for a while. It's probably still going to slide down, but it's probably better to get in now when there's at least some future chance of it going up sometime in the future instead of getting in right at was starting to crater. If it remains relatively stable over time, it might have some potential as a real currency since one of the biggest knocks against it was that the value was too unstable.
I've heard the opposite and that it actually takes pathetically little effort to get a large amount of benefit, as in 15 minutes of brisk walking each day and it's going to have an impact. This has even been previously covered on Slashdot.
If you want to look like Mr. Universe or something like that, obviously you'll need to do a substantial daily workout, but basic health benefits don't require all that much. Just because you don't look like a gym rat doesn't mean that you're completely unhealthy. The minimum amount of exercise might not let you run a marathon in anything approaching a good time, but it will mean you live longer and will probably be happier as well.
I fail to see the problem with any of this. Small talk is time wasting bullshit to try to keep up pleasantries. Instead of asking pointless questions you already know the answer to, why not just find someone you can have a worthwhile conversation with instead of having both people engage in an activity that neither find particularly enjoyable or stimulating?
Trying to teach Finnish people to partake in this idiocy is like actively teaching a dog to crap on your carpet.
The real issue was that the name was a poor choice. People put far too much confidence in it. Maybe that was going to happen no matter what since people are lazy, stupid fools, but the name probably exacerbated this greatly. Call it “Driver Assist” or something like that. It’s not supposed to drive you around or be flawless, but to react to a dangerous situation before you can when it’s capable of that.
The fact that it's the 4th warmest means we are making progress and the problem is not intensifying - nay, it is healing.
That's a little shortsighted. It's a bit like saying that because an alcoholic hasn't had a drink in the last week that they're well on their way to being cured.
But look at the amount of terrible UX in closed source software. I don't think there are many people who will praise the direction that Microsoft took with the more recent installments of Windows. Some UX designer was responsible for that. Hell, there are people who still hate the ribbon with a passion and that's a decade gone at this point. It almost seems more like tossing darts in terms of successes, and a lot of good UIs are merely refinements on something created ages ago.
UX is almost more like a religion than a science. There are some core tenants that everyone generally agrees on, but you can interpret the scripture almost any way you like to support whatever crazy ideas you have as long as you get get some followers on board.
The UX in open source is largely bad because no one tried or wanted to spend any time on it. The UX in closed-source software is generally good when someone ripped off the one good example discovered years ago or just as terrible as the open source software despite huge amounts of man hours and other cost thrown at the problem. I suspect that the good UX comes from the developers who are users themselves and have a good understanding of the software and the needs of the users. The people who generally do UX for commercial software are so divorced from the users and the product that they end up creating some heinous monstrosity in their pursuit of artistry.
I'll assume the AC meant to say CO2 producing energy, as not using energy at all seems rather silly. However, it's right in the middle of the previous post:
That is not negligible! But once you've kept your car for three years, then no, more carbon dioxide is produced in driving the car than in making the car.
It's likely better to have all of the energy generation for electric cars done in a central location, even if it's all done with coal power, but simply having an electric car doesn't meant that running it is CO2 free. You wouldn't claim that having an electric car is a good green alternative if the person who owned was charging it with a diesel generator every day.
The most surprising part of all of this
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· Score: 5, Funny
I think the most shocking part of this is that we're seeing a Slashdot article about it now instead of two days later.
I kid, but it's probably because the editors couldn't watch their cat videos and had to do something productive for a change.
I don't own one, so I don't know this for sure, but I thought the latest crop of smart watches were supposed to be able to do all of those things. I know that some of the first ones were more tethered to the phone, but I thought Samsung (or maybe it was Apple) had a version that could operate on cell networks independently. Maybe it doesn't piggyback off of the existing subscription so you need a separate line for it unlike this device, but it seems like if they added that, then this phone has even less reason to exist.
A motorcycle actually has a purpose though and there are things you can do with a dirt bike that you wouldn't want to use a car for. There are even some people who use a motorcycle as their main or only means of transportation. That's especially true in a lot of countries outside of the U.S. and Europe where someone who might not be able to afford a car can still get a bike.
Meanwhile, I can't see terribly many people who would actually spend money on this. It might get some favorable mentions in the press, but no one is actually going to buy this thing.
If Microsoft were to receive a patent for their own implementation, it would imply that the patent office believes that it is different from other, existing implementations. Utility patents cover specific implementations, not general ideas. If Apple (or some other company) has a patent using approach ABC, but Microsoft's patent lists using approach XYZ for that aspect, then their implementation would not infringe on that other patent.
Also, most of this stuff never actually sees the light of day because it either doesn't work anywhere near well enough, or because it is prohibitively expensive to manufacture or would require tens or hundreds of millions of dollars invested into production facilities just to be able to make it in the kind of volume that company would need to put a product on the market. Of course if you're going to spend all of that money paying engineers to do the R&D work, you may as well patent it it in case you need it later or someone else is interested in buying or licensing it from you.
All of what you say is true, but if you point out a tech company that most people have never heard of still has a long way to go to deliver hardware at a level and price customers expect, you don't get nearly as many clicks as you do if you say that the company is a con. Hopefully the sensationalist writing will get someone at the company to lash out at you on social media so you can get even more attention by starting a bogus internet feud so you can write even more clickbait articles because internet drama stories are far easier to crap out than anything that may require actual journalism.
And this is exactly the product that a good number of people want and vote for with their attention, so it's difficult to fault anyone for giving the good people what they desire. And this is hardly some recent event lest anyone think the world has gone to hell recently. I don't recall a time when the checkout lines at the grocery stores didn't have the National Enquirer or similar tabloids for sale. There's always been a market for sensationalist crap.
Wouldn't it be even better (or at least more intuitive) to say it went from about 1 in 25 to about 6 in 25? If it hurts your head too much to deal with the percentages, I would imagine that converting the fractions would be just as confusing for a large subset of that group.
The U.S. doesn't need to be dependent on them at all for oil. We've easily got enough of our own to ride out the switch to electric vehicles. If you look at who we import oil from, we get way more of it from Canada than we do Saudi Arabia.
The reality is that they buy a lot from us to support their military and they hate Iran with a passion, which suits our interests fine. They're a shitty ally, but no one wants to rock the boat too much as the Middle East is unstable enough as is without countries collapsing and another ISIS-like entity trying to seize power.
There might be a slight difference between executing (different than murder) someone who was themselves a mass murderer after they've sat in prison for decades and have had several rounds of appeals as opposed to executing someone for homosexuality, being a women's rights activist, or allegedly practicing sorcery. If you're lucky you might even be crucified.
Also, not all U.S. states have a death penalty, and of those that do, many don't use the electric chair. Wikipedia indicates that some states allow convicted criminals to choose it if they so want, but that there aren't a lot of states actually using it. Most of it is by lethal injection, and I'd say that there are probably more humane ways than that to kill a person if you're going to do it. Nitrous oxide asphyxiation seems like a pretty painless way to me, and probably a hell of a lot less expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
You can have a social network or advertising platform without scummy behavior related to data practices. I don't see how attempting to do either is a mark against Apple and neither of those efforts seem to exist. I suspect that Apple failed in part because advertising is more effective when you do collect all manner of data on people and that not having the ability to target ads in that way, makes them much less valuable. Ping was also only related to music, which made it niche and non-viable from day one even if people had any interest in using it.
As far as purchase records go, they have to keep them due to U.S. laws (or those of other jurisdictions) related to records of financial transactions. Any other payment service is going to have the same records and the same option of selling information mined from those records. The question is whether or not Apple sells any of that information or do anything else with it, even if only for their own internal use. I don't use Apple Pay so I've never bothered to look into it.
This is interesting, but I'm not sure how useful it is. You might be able to create an AI that has some desirable characteristics based on human morality, but as soon as you make it compete against other AIs that don't possess those characteristics, it will either adapt to possess them itself in order to remain competitive or it will perish if it's been crippled in a way to prevent it from adjusting. A pacifistic Pac-Man AI might be novel, but if it was made to compete, it wouldn't do as well.
Idiots on 4chan will spam or hack the voting process for their own amusement. The results are anything but predictable and probably more amusing than anything else. See this example of what you get and tell me that's an obvious outcome.
Even then, I don't think this will ever replace a well-crafted story by a single author or a small group of writers. We've had choose your own adventure novels and other interactive forms of entertainment in the past (with many arising due to the internet itself) and they've never supplanted the more traditional forms of media.
I also suspect that the current approach never will either. People really don't want a crowd-driven story, what they want is that they themselves get to drive the narrative, and that when they participate in these group-driven projects it's because they assume that they'll get to steer the group rather than being bit player. I suspect that people drop out and lose interest when things don't go their way, so at the end all you're left with are the people who made the most popular decisions at most of the steps. Eventually the technology may advance far enough for people to have their own simulated experiences created for them on an individual basis and perhaps that's when the traditional approach falls by the wayside.
I think they do care about privacy, but whether it's for philosophical reasons or simply as a matter of good business (i.e., marketing and PR) is up for debate.
If you look at what they do as a company, a lot of their products or services are designed to make it harder to access personal data. You can cynically argue that they only do this because it's a blow to their competition that thrives off being able to sell that data as opposed to Apple who gets by selling expensive gadgets, but from my perspective as a consumer, I don't care if the product does more to protect my privacy. If Apple does it purely out of greed or a desire to destroy their competition, I'm no better or worse off than if they do it because of some deeply held principles on the part of everyone working there.
Maybe they don't care about privacy as much as you would like them to, but I think they do a better job of it than most other companies and I hope they continue to make improvements in those areas.
Once it's been empirically evaluated and found to be effective, it's just medicine. Just because something is a hippy-dippy, tree-hugging belief, doesn't automatically make it incorrect.
If you think that she believes in a lot of other things that are demonstrably wrong through evidence, this provides a good opportunity since you can clearly point to something she already believes in and has personal experience with as having been scientifically validated. Perhaps she'll give more credence to science than she otherwise would and might be more willing to examine her other beliefs through that lens.
Shibboleths are things that are useful for identifying distinct groups of people. A good example is the bar scene in the Tarantino film Inglorious Bastards. One of the characters is an Englishman pretending to be a German Officer and he does an okay job, especially given the tense situation and everyone is fooled. However, the hand gesture he makes when ordering drinks is improper and immediately betrays him as a spy.
The word itself comes from an old Hebrew word that has an unrelated meaning to the present use, which springs from a Biblical story, where the word "Shibboleth" was used as a modern shibboleth because it was pronounced differently between two warring groups and could be used to tell if a person was a foe attempting to pass themselves off as a friend. There are plenty of other examples of this being employed throughout history. For example, if you're traveling in warn torn parts of the Middle East, you may want to memorize a few passages from the Quran as that's a common shibboleth used by militants to determine if someone is actually a Muslim since it's often impossible to know based on appearance alone.
So is the SQLite CoC thing a joke or not? If it's not a joke, f*ck this. If it is a joke, that's even worse.
Here's the type of person that is likely to go out of their way to take umbrage over something relatively minor. The kind of person who's happy to shove a CoC down your throat as long its theirs, but will scream about having to follow some other set of rules that they don't like.
I never invested in or mined bitcoin, but I was genuinely intrigued by the whole thing. The concept itself is interesting and it's funny to think back to a time where people were spending them when they were pretty much like coins. No one expected any of it to really pan out or be worth anything, so people would spend a dozen or so on a pizza if they could find some place that would take them just for the novelty of spending some funny digital money that no one really understood. I just wonder how many of those people think back on that pizza and think that they could have had a quarter million dollars instead if they would have held onto them.
Everything to come with it has been fascinating. The rapid technological arms race to mine more bitcoins, where people started being able recoup an investment from their high-end GPU in a few months by having it mine bitcoin instead of gaming on it, and people setting up little bitcoin mining operations until the ASICs pretty much killed that off. People posting on message boards about plowing their tuition into mining rigs or just outright investing bitcoin and the stories about people moving to towns that had cheap power contractually guaranteed to set up massive mining operations there because electricity was the real limiting factor.
All of it's almost just too surreal and I'm not even completely sure that the rodeo is over either. It's like getting to watch a gold rush happen and all of the human exuberance and tragedy that comes along with it.
Now doesn't seem like a particularly bad time. The price has been relatively stable for a while. It's probably still going to slide down, but it's probably better to get in now when there's at least some future chance of it going up sometime in the future instead of getting in right at was starting to crater. If it remains relatively stable over time, it might have some potential as a real currency since one of the biggest knocks against it was that the value was too unstable.
I've heard the opposite and that it actually takes pathetically little effort to get a large amount of benefit, as in 15 minutes of brisk walking each day and it's going to have an impact. This has even been previously covered on Slashdot.
If you want to look like Mr. Universe or something like that, obviously you'll need to do a substantial daily workout, but basic health benefits don't require all that much. Just because you don't look like a gym rat doesn't mean that you're completely unhealthy. The minimum amount of exercise might not let you run a marathon in anything approaching a good time, but it will mean you live longer and will probably be happier as well.
I fail to see the problem with any of this. Small talk is time wasting bullshit to try to keep up pleasantries. Instead of asking pointless questions you already know the answer to, why not just find someone you can have a worthwhile conversation with instead of having both people engage in an activity that neither find particularly enjoyable or stimulating?
Trying to teach Finnish people to partake in this idiocy is like actively teaching a dog to crap on your carpet.
The real issue was that the name was a poor choice. People put far too much confidence in it. Maybe that was going to happen no matter what since people are lazy, stupid fools, but the name probably exacerbated this greatly. Call it “Driver Assist” or something like that. It’s not supposed to drive you around or be flawless, but to react to a dangerous situation before you can when it’s capable of that.
It's hard to make a fair comparison. How many of those Android users who haven't updated even had the option?
The fact that it's the 4th warmest means we are making progress and the problem is not intensifying - nay, it is healing.
That's a little shortsighted. It's a bit like saying that because an alcoholic hasn't had a drink in the last week that they're well on their way to being cured.
But look at the amount of terrible UX in closed source software. I don't think there are many people who will praise the direction that Microsoft took with the more recent installments of Windows. Some UX designer was responsible for that. Hell, there are people who still hate the ribbon with a passion and that's a decade gone at this point. It almost seems more like tossing darts in terms of successes, and a lot of good UIs are merely refinements on something created ages ago.
UX is almost more like a religion than a science. There are some core tenants that everyone generally agrees on, but you can interpret the scripture almost any way you like to support whatever crazy ideas you have as long as you get get some followers on board.
The UX in open source is largely bad because no one tried or wanted to spend any time on it. The UX in closed-source software is generally good when someone ripped off the one good example discovered years ago or just as terrible as the open source software despite huge amounts of man hours and other cost thrown at the problem. I suspect that the good UX comes from the developers who are users themselves and have a good understanding of the software and the needs of the users. The people who generally do UX for commercial software are so divorced from the users and the product that they end up creating some heinous monstrosity in their pursuit of artistry.
That is not negligible! But once you've kept your car for three years, then no, more carbon dioxide is produced in driving the car than in making the car.
It's likely better to have all of the energy generation for electric cars done in a central location, even if it's all done with coal power, but simply having an electric car doesn't meant that running it is CO2 free. You wouldn't claim that having an electric car is a good green alternative if the person who owned was charging it with a diesel generator every day.
I think the most shocking part of this is that we're seeing a Slashdot article about it now instead of two days later.
I kid, but it's probably because the editors couldn't watch their cat videos and had to do something productive for a change.
I don't own one, so I don't know this for sure, but I thought the latest crop of smart watches were supposed to be able to do all of those things. I know that some of the first ones were more tethered to the phone, but I thought Samsung (or maybe it was Apple) had a version that could operate on cell networks independently. Maybe it doesn't piggyback off of the existing subscription so you need a separate line for it unlike this device, but it seems like if they added that, then this phone has even less reason to exist.
A motorcycle actually has a purpose though and there are things you can do with a dirt bike that you wouldn't want to use a car for. There are even some people who use a motorcycle as their main or only means of transportation. That's especially true in a lot of countries outside of the U.S. and Europe where someone who might not be able to afford a car can still get a bike.
Meanwhile, I can't see terribly many people who would actually spend money on this. It might get some favorable mentions in the press, but no one is actually going to buy this thing.
Close, but I think this is a case of the U.S. minding its own businesses.
If Microsoft were to receive a patent for their own implementation, it would imply that the patent office believes that it is different from other, existing implementations. Utility patents cover specific implementations, not general ideas. If Apple (or some other company) has a patent using approach ABC, but Microsoft's patent lists using approach XYZ for that aspect, then their implementation would not infringe on that other patent.
Also, most of this stuff never actually sees the light of day because it either doesn't work anywhere near well enough, or because it is prohibitively expensive to manufacture or would require tens or hundreds of millions of dollars invested into production facilities just to be able to make it in the kind of volume that company would need to put a product on the market. Of course if you're going to spend all of that money paying engineers to do the R&D work, you may as well patent it it in case you need it later or someone else is interested in buying or licensing it from you.
All of what you say is true, but if you point out a tech company that most people have never heard of still has a long way to go to deliver hardware at a level and price customers expect, you don't get nearly as many clicks as you do if you say that the company is a con. Hopefully the sensationalist writing will get someone at the company to lash out at you on social media so you can get even more attention by starting a bogus internet feud so you can write even more clickbait articles because internet drama stories are far easier to crap out than anything that may require actual journalism.
And this is exactly the product that a good number of people want and vote for with their attention, so it's difficult to fault anyone for giving the good people what they desire. And this is hardly some recent event lest anyone think the world has gone to hell recently. I don't recall a time when the checkout lines at the grocery stores didn't have the National Enquirer or similar tabloids for sale. There's always been a market for sensationalist crap.
Wouldn't it be even better (or at least more intuitive) to say it went from about 1 in 25 to about 6 in 25? If it hurts your head too much to deal with the percentages, I would imagine that converting the fractions would be just as confusing for a large subset of that group.
The U.S. doesn't need to be dependent on them at all for oil. We've easily got enough of our own to ride out the switch to electric vehicles. If you look at who we import oil from, we get way more of it from Canada than we do Saudi Arabia.
The reality is that they buy a lot from us to support their military and they hate Iran with a passion, which suits our interests fine. They're a shitty ally, but no one wants to rock the boat too much as the Middle East is unstable enough as is without countries collapsing and another ISIS-like entity trying to seize power.
There might be a slight difference between executing (different than murder) someone who was themselves a mass murderer after they've sat in prison for decades and have had several rounds of appeals as opposed to executing someone for homosexuality, being a women's rights activist, or allegedly practicing sorcery. If you're lucky you might even be crucified.
Also, not all U.S. states have a death penalty, and of those that do, many don't use the electric chair. Wikipedia indicates that some states allow convicted criminals to choose it if they so want, but that there aren't a lot of states actually using it. Most of it is by lethal injection, and I'd say that there are probably more humane ways than that to kill a person if you're going to do it. Nitrous oxide asphyxiation seems like a pretty painless way to me, and probably a hell of a lot less expensive.