I'm replying to a person who stated "no exceptions." Rules with "no exceptions" are often quite bad. I prefer not to be punished for someone else's lack of imagination.
What if I'm an Uber driver or otherwise self-employed? Am I not free to make decisions about my work schedule for myself? What if I'm a painter, writer, or engaged in some other form of creative activity? Must I stop doing what others might consider a leisure activity if I derive income from it? Also, what stops someone else from deciding at some point in the future that anything more than 30 hours per week is sinful and what if I can't afford to maintain my lifestyle based on those limitations?
What average are they talking about though? The mean, median, or mode? If it's the mean, you could have half of the population working about 80 hours and the other half working about 0, yet your mean still comes out to 38.9 hours even though no one person actually works even close to that.
There's plenty of other "gotchas" that might be built in such as taking the total number of hours divided by 52 weeks in a year, without accounting that the average person has several weeks of vacation so that the real hours worked per week is much higher.
In general I'd agree, but there are people out there who have nothing better to do with their lives and some tickle in their brain or bug up their ass that leads them to devote as much of their time as possible to wasting your time or making you miserable. Here's but one example of countless many.
If you're blocking someone just because they disagree with you or aren't validating your belief structure, I'd say that kind of makes you a bit of a dink. If someone's just endlessly spamming you, why devote your attention to any of it?
When Renée DiResta shares her medical history, pornography habits, and other private information with the rest of the world, I might take her proposal seriously.
What a fucking awful idea though. Data for Democracy, indeed. I didn't realize that Stasi were operating under a new name now.
Trolling is partially intent in my opinion. You can state pure facts, but if the reason (and manner) in which you're delivering them is designed to stir up shit, it's trolling. Any idiot can get involved in a flame war argument on the internet, but a troll (or at least a good one) is where you can get everyone else to have the flame war for you while you watch from the sidelines. It's not even necessary to state a point of view. Even asking a question that you know is going to provoke some strong responses (e.g., "Has anyone had good experiences with System D?") and derail the thread can be construed as trolling.
If you call Elon Musk a scam artist and spend several paragraphs defending that point with examples and further explanation of your reasoning (whether any of it is good or not is immaterial) it's probably not a troll. If you're calling Musk a scam artist because you're just shit talking on the internet, it's much more likely to be a troll. As you point out, you could just be an idiot who doesn't know better, but that's much more difficult to know on the internet.
Give people the opportunity to do the right thing when it costs them very little and they'll often do it. When you create a huge set of regulatory hoops (or any other barrier to entry, really) to jump through, is it any wonder when people don't bother and route around it? The same arguments applied to digital music piracy and as soon as companies like Amazon and Apple started selling DRM-free music, a huge number of pirates became paying customers.
The FCC is just a prime example of how government bureaucracy lumbers on long after it has become unnecessary. This is just a good indicate that it should be thrown out entirely, or that it needs to be re-imagined to do something useful. Imagine if instead of trying to chase people down for pirate radio stations, it was actively helping provide information on how to set stations up and letting people know which frequencies would be good to use in their area?
The problem is that even if you yourself don't use Facebook, if enough of your relatives or friends use it, they can probably build a pretty good profile on you as well. Even better from their perspective if no one is trying to control their privacy settings. I really wonder what the default settings about sharing information are for non-users.
Congress knows that if it went after these people and started handing out hard prison time for corporate malfeasance that they'd soon have no one to shake down for brib^H^H^H^H campaign contributions. Actually solving the problem isn't particularly useful to a representative so long as they can appear to be "acting tough" which is just as effective in terms of getting votes and means that they can continue to "act tough" in the future since the problem remains. Everyone can point fingers and blame everyone else and no one ever needs to actually be held responsible.
It's not always the payment processors that are pushing for this directly. There are often laws put in place designed to crack down on certain behaviors (see Craigslist closing down their personals section recently) and payment services are required to abide by them. If the laws are vaguely defined then the processors are going to be more strict than necessary because running afoul of law even once is nightmare for them.
Think of it this way. If I'm a payment processor I get paid by processing payments. I really don't care if those are for groceries, commissioned artworks, illicit drugs, or prostitutes. I get paid either way and it's in my best interest to process as many payments as possible. However, the government isn't powerful enough to be able to even put a dent in behavior it doesn't like and can't even begin to unilaterally enforce it. So they make laws that make processing payments for certain things illegal. It's much easier for them to go after me than it is hundreds of people buying drugs, so it's in my interest to not let anyone pay for anything that looks like illegal drugs using my system even if that means I inadvertently prevent some hippies from buying some herbal tea that's in no way illegal from time to time. You can still get that without laws (say that 90% of my customers are Mormons and don't want me to process payments for coffee) but it's rare.
And even though I disagree with the new age puritanism that's making the rounds, I don't think it's my right to tell a company that they can't give in to pressure from their customers if they want to. If they think keeping the 90% Mormon customers at the expense of losing the other 10% is better than potentially losing a good chunk of 90% of their customers, that's their own business decision. If it's a bad business move, they'll fail and get replaced by a company that does a better job of serving consumers.
I pretty sure that civil asset forfeiture laws could be applied if they government really cared. Sure it would end up in court, but that will drag on forever. The companies won't like having their scooter and revenue seized, but they'll just bill the customer for it. Eventually, people learn to be responsible. It doesn't matter what you do as the companies will pass the costs on to the customers, so just ticket the scooter and note the date and time. The company doesn't need to tell the government who was responsible for leaving it illegally parked as they'll just pass on the bill.
London just banned carrying knives in public. What makes you think it wouldn't be a crime to wear any clothing designed to defeat a surveillance system?
Other parts of the package are made overseas due to costs, so it's a matter of shipping more components to the U.S. to assemble the final product and then having to ship that back to Asia again anyways as most computers or other devices (phones, tablets, routers, etc.) are assembled there as well. Add in less expensive labor costs in Asia (and no one wanting to make a large capital investment into robotic assembly lines if they don't have to) and it just makes more sense to finish the assembly in Asia.
There are still a lot of chip fabs in the U.S., but even if the wafers and dies are made in the U.S., they're going to be shipped overseas for assembly into the final product.
Is that a consequence of biology or the result of a mathematical oddity arising as a result of so few people living that long and those who do being exceptional cases? The results seem somewhat counter-intuitive, so I'm inclined to think it's the latter case.
I'm more interested in seeing what the interventions that are currently available (and those that will become available over the next several decades) will do in the long run. Maybe they won't extend the total amount of time all that much, but if I can feel like I'm 40 when I'm 90, I won't complain too much if I still check out at 100.
You can hire people with fewer skills to do that job. You might take it for granted that not everyone knows how to drive or necessarily came from somewhere where most of the population owns automobiles. If Europe hopes to integrate their growing immigrant population, they're going to need for those people to have jobs and to be out in society.
Some of those people are very low skill and a lack of language proficiency may remove other job opportunities as well. This type of job almost seems like a perfect match for someone who lacks most vocational skills and doesn't yet have a strong grasp of the local language. It might not seem like much to you or I, but it's something.
It's important to differentiate between the companies that make and sell SSDs and the companies that manufacture the NAND flash memory that is used in SSDs. In the case of the first, there is significantly more competition, but there aren't as many companies that actually make the NAND and it's those that have been accused of price fixing and possibly other anti-competitive behavior.
I also expect that part of the reason SSD prices are falling faster relative to HDD prices is that the bare minimum material cost for an HDD is more expensive. An SSD is just a cheap enclosure around a bunch of NAND flash chips on a board with connectors, an embedded processor, and a few other components that are relatively inexpensive and subject to price decreases as a result of Moore's law. The enclosure for the HDD is more sturdy and made of more expensive materials and other parts that have more of a fixed cost that holds stable.
One advantage that SSDs have is that NAND manufacturers have been willing to move from SLC/MLC NAND as used in the initial SSDs to TLC and now even QLC NAND, which has greatly increased the storage capacity of SSDs and even allows for greater capacity than you can get in an HDD assuming you're willing to pay the obscene costs. This does come at the expense of longevity as you get fewer program-erase cycles when using more bits per cell. For most consumers this doesn't matter as they're unlikely to hit those limits and any SSD is going to be a major speed improvement over an HDD.
I do agree that HDD will likely be relegated to backup and archival purposes. I don't have many computers left that aren't using an SSD for their main drive and I can't see myself using anything but an SSD as a primary in future builds.
I don't think any one company owns enough patents related to NAND to prevent anyone from making it if they wanted to. Typically, companies get together and create a patent pool that offers FRAND licensing terms so anyone can pay, and everyone pays the same price. A company which owns some of those patents might have an edge since they're paying themselves in part. The real cost savings will be on the production side so if you can make a better fabrication process with lower defects and better yields, you'll make it up there.
However patents or not, it doesn't matter if the companies are price fixing, which is what is be charged. I'm not really sure why you're ranting about patents when I don't think they have anything to do with this case specifically, and typically aren't much of an issue in this space as no one company has enough patents by itself to make anything useful without being sued by some other company so they're forced to band together to create some kind of standard.
My guess is that they probably won't anytime soon. Not necessarily because it's impossible, but simply because they're the premium hard drive product and will be priced in such a way. Perhaps once they have sufficient capacity to supplant spinning disks in even the entry level bargain PCs and notebooks, the price difference between the two will erode further, but I don't think there are enough companies manufacturing the NAND flash memory to really drive prices down through competition and the biggest players are facing a price-fixing lawsuit at the current moment so they may have been conspiring to keep prices artificially high.
Amazon could probably buy up spaces in malls or other retail locations that have gone out of business over the last several years and create shipping centers where people can pick up shipments if they can't reliably get it at home. Either that or they just store stuff there and do last mile deliveries themselves during the hours that people are actually home. There're plenty of people who want to be Uber drivers during those hours, so I could see Amazon being able to find people willing to do the work.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm replying to a person who stated "no exceptions." Rules with "no exceptions" are often quite bad. I prefer not to be punished for someone else's lack of imagination.
What if I'm an Uber driver or otherwise self-employed? Am I not free to make decisions about my work schedule for myself? What if I'm a painter, writer, or engaged in some other form of creative activity? Must I stop doing what others might consider a leisure activity if I derive income from it? Also, what stops someone else from deciding at some point in the future that anything more than 30 hours per week is sinful and what if I can't afford to maintain my lifestyle based on those limitations?
What average are they talking about though? The mean, median, or mode? If it's the mean, you could have half of the population working about 80 hours and the other half working about 0, yet your mean still comes out to 38.9 hours even though no one person actually works even close to that.
There's plenty of other "gotchas" that might be built in such as taking the total number of hours divided by 52 weeks in a year, without accounting that the average person has several weeks of vacation so that the real hours worked per week is much higher.
I'll assume it's a shortening of "broadcast" and that they mean that images of the screen are being sent to these third parties.
Good news residents, thieves aren't coming to plunder your document safes. Instead, they're only going to rummage through your jewelry boxes.
May as well have led with a bit on no conclusive evidence that the apps were trying to give you cancer.
In general I'd agree, but there are people out there who have nothing better to do with their lives and some tickle in their brain or bug up their ass that leads them to devote as much of their time as possible to wasting your time or making you miserable. Here's but one example of countless many.
If you're blocking someone just because they disagree with you or aren't validating your belief structure, I'd say that kind of makes you a bit of a dink. If someone's just endlessly spamming you, why devote your attention to any of it?
When Renée DiResta shares her medical history, pornography habits, and other private information with the rest of the world, I might take her proposal seriously.
What a fucking awful idea though. Data for Democracy, indeed. I didn't realize that Stasi were operating under a new name now.
Trolling is partially intent in my opinion. You can state pure facts, but if the reason (and manner) in which you're delivering them is designed to stir up shit, it's trolling. Any idiot can get involved in a flame war argument on the internet, but a troll (or at least a good one) is where you can get everyone else to have the flame war for you while you watch from the sidelines. It's not even necessary to state a point of view. Even asking a question that you know is going to provoke some strong responses (e.g., "Has anyone had good experiences with System D?") and derail the thread can be construed as trolling.
If you call Elon Musk a scam artist and spend several paragraphs defending that point with examples and further explanation of your reasoning (whether any of it is good or not is immaterial) it's probably not a troll. If you're calling Musk a scam artist because you're just shit talking on the internet, it's much more likely to be a troll. As you point out, you could just be an idiot who doesn't know better, but that's much more difficult to know on the internet.
Give people the opportunity to do the right thing when it costs them very little and they'll often do it. When you create a huge set of regulatory hoops (or any other barrier to entry, really) to jump through, is it any wonder when people don't bother and route around it? The same arguments applied to digital music piracy and as soon as companies like Amazon and Apple started selling DRM-free music, a huge number of pirates became paying customers.
The FCC is just a prime example of how government bureaucracy lumbers on long after it has become unnecessary. This is just a good indicate that it should be thrown out entirely, or that it needs to be re-imagined to do something useful. Imagine if instead of trying to chase people down for pirate radio stations, it was actively helping provide information on how to set stations up and letting people know which frequencies would be good to use in their area?
Why not just get these people licensed? It seems less expensive than chasing these people around when there's better things the FCC could be doing.
The problem is that even if you yourself don't use Facebook, if enough of your relatives or friends use it, they can probably build a pretty good profile on you as well. Even better from their perspective if no one is trying to control their privacy settings. I really wonder what the default settings about sharing information are for non-users.
Congress knows that if it went after these people and started handing out hard prison time for corporate malfeasance that they'd soon have no one to shake down for brib^H^H^H^H campaign contributions. Actually solving the problem isn't particularly useful to a representative so long as they can appear to be "acting tough" which is just as effective in terms of getting votes and means that they can continue to "act tough" in the future since the problem remains. Everyone can point fingers and blame everyone else and no one ever needs to actually be held responsible.
It's not always the payment processors that are pushing for this directly. There are often laws put in place designed to crack down on certain behaviors (see Craigslist closing down their personals section recently) and payment services are required to abide by them. If the laws are vaguely defined then the processors are going to be more strict than necessary because running afoul of law even once is nightmare for them.
Think of it this way. If I'm a payment processor I get paid by processing payments. I really don't care if those are for groceries, commissioned artworks, illicit drugs, or prostitutes. I get paid either way and it's in my best interest to process as many payments as possible. However, the government isn't powerful enough to be able to even put a dent in behavior it doesn't like and can't even begin to unilaterally enforce it. So they make laws that make processing payments for certain things illegal. It's much easier for them to go after me than it is hundreds of people buying drugs, so it's in my interest to not let anyone pay for anything that looks like illegal drugs using my system even if that means I inadvertently prevent some hippies from buying some herbal tea that's in no way illegal from time to time. You can still get that without laws (say that 90% of my customers are Mormons and don't want me to process payments for coffee) but it's rare.
And even though I disagree with the new age puritanism that's making the rounds, I don't think it's my right to tell a company that they can't give in to pressure from their customers if they want to. If they think keeping the 90% Mormon customers at the expense of losing the other 10% is better than potentially losing a good chunk of 90% of their customers, that's their own business decision. If it's a bad business move, they'll fail and get replaced by a company that does a better job of serving consumers.
I pretty sure that civil asset forfeiture laws could be applied if they government really cared. Sure it would end up in court, but that will drag on forever. The companies won't like having their scooter and revenue seized, but they'll just bill the customer for it. Eventually, people learn to be responsible. It doesn't matter what you do as the companies will pass the costs on to the customers, so just ticket the scooter and note the date and time. The company doesn't need to tell the government who was responsible for leaving it illegally parked as they'll just pass on the bill.
London just banned carrying knives in public. What makes you think it wouldn't be a crime to wear any clothing designed to defeat a surveillance system?
I've found that the install disc makes a perfectly good coaster. Seems plenty ready for use to me.
Other parts of the package are made overseas due to costs, so it's a matter of shipping more components to the U.S. to assemble the final product and then having to ship that back to Asia again anyways as most computers or other devices (phones, tablets, routers, etc.) are assembled there as well. Add in less expensive labor costs in Asia (and no one wanting to make a large capital investment into robotic assembly lines if they don't have to) and it just makes more sense to finish the assembly in Asia.
There are still a lot of chip fabs in the U.S., but even if the wafers and dies are made in the U.S., they're going to be shipped overseas for assembly into the final product.
Is that a consequence of biology or the result of a mathematical oddity arising as a result of so few people living that long and those who do being exceptional cases? The results seem somewhat counter-intuitive, so I'm inclined to think it's the latter case.
I'm more interested in seeing what the interventions that are currently available (and those that will become available over the next several decades) will do in the long run. Maybe they won't extend the total amount of time all that much, but if I can feel like I'm 40 when I'm 90, I won't complain too much if I still check out at 100.
Some day the machines will rise up and begin to exterminate mankind, but idiots on the internet will argue about whether or not it's real AI.
You can hire people with fewer skills to do that job. You might take it for granted that not everyone knows how to drive or necessarily came from somewhere where most of the population owns automobiles. If Europe hopes to integrate their growing immigrant population, they're going to need for those people to have jobs and to be out in society.
Some of those people are very low skill and a lack of language proficiency may remove other job opportunities as well. This type of job almost seems like a perfect match for someone who lacks most vocational skills and doesn't yet have a strong grasp of the local language. It might not seem like much to you or I, but it's something.
It's important to differentiate between the companies that make and sell SSDs and the companies that manufacture the NAND flash memory that is used in SSDs. In the case of the first, there is significantly more competition, but there aren't as many companies that actually make the NAND and it's those that have been accused of price fixing and possibly other anti-competitive behavior.
I also expect that part of the reason SSD prices are falling faster relative to HDD prices is that the bare minimum material cost for an HDD is more expensive. An SSD is just a cheap enclosure around a bunch of NAND flash chips on a board with connectors, an embedded processor, and a few other components that are relatively inexpensive and subject to price decreases as a result of Moore's law. The enclosure for the HDD is more sturdy and made of more expensive materials and other parts that have more of a fixed cost that holds stable.
One advantage that SSDs have is that NAND manufacturers have been willing to move from SLC/MLC NAND as used in the initial SSDs to TLC and now even QLC NAND, which has greatly increased the storage capacity of SSDs and even allows for greater capacity than you can get in an HDD assuming you're willing to pay the obscene costs. This does come at the expense of longevity as you get fewer program-erase cycles when using more bits per cell. For most consumers this doesn't matter as they're unlikely to hit those limits and any SSD is going to be a major speed improvement over an HDD.
I do agree that HDD will likely be relegated to backup and archival purposes. I don't have many computers left that aren't using an SSD for their main drive and I can't see myself using anything but an SSD as a primary in future builds.
I don't think any one company owns enough patents related to NAND to prevent anyone from making it if they wanted to. Typically, companies get together and create a patent pool that offers FRAND licensing terms so anyone can pay, and everyone pays the same price. A company which owns some of those patents might have an edge since they're paying themselves in part. The real cost savings will be on the production side so if you can make a better fabrication process with lower defects and better yields, you'll make it up there.
However patents or not, it doesn't matter if the companies are price fixing, which is what is be charged. I'm not really sure why you're ranting about patents when I don't think they have anything to do with this case specifically, and typically aren't much of an issue in this space as no one company has enough patents by itself to make anything useful without being sued by some other company so they're forced to band together to create some kind of standard.
My guess is that they probably won't anytime soon. Not necessarily because it's impossible, but simply because they're the premium hard drive product and will be priced in such a way. Perhaps once they have sufficient capacity to supplant spinning disks in even the entry level bargain PCs and notebooks, the price difference between the two will erode further, but I don't think there are enough companies manufacturing the NAND flash memory to really drive prices down through competition and the biggest players are facing a price-fixing lawsuit at the current moment so they may have been conspiring to keep prices artificially high.
Amazon could probably buy up spaces in malls or other retail locations that have gone out of business over the last several years and create shipping centers where people can pick up shipments if they can't reliably get it at home. Either that or they just store stuff there and do last mile deliveries themselves during the hours that people are actually home. There're plenty of people who want to be Uber drivers during those hours, so I could see Amazon being able to find people willing to do the work.