Yep, the "calories per serving" has been abused all to hell and back. I recall reading the calories on a cup of instant noodles and thinking "that's a bit high for such a small meal", and then realized they were claiming it was "2 servings" - after which my reaction was "holy shit!"
If threats don't work, you move onto punishments. Or is that crazy talk?
Oh, and when I went to school a few decades ago, videogames were all we wanted to talk about too. Kids tend to dive very deeply into new fads, and it tends to scare the shit out parents and school administrators.
If you live in a swamp and an alligator attacks you, do you blame yourself for being a slow swimmer? Or do you blame the swamp for forcing you to hang out with alligators?
Yes, I often ponder this as I'm being attacked by alligators in the swamp I live in./sarcasm
General writing protip: the whole point of an analogy is to relate a situation that's difficult to understand to a more COMMON scenario. I'm more confused by this bizarre analogy, while I understand the actual issue of digital privacy just fine.
Well, at least Musk didn't call his cars "total crap."
Honestly, it doesn't really affect my opinion of Musk that much. With his bizarre rants about living in a simulated universe and the AI boogeyman, I've always thought he was brilliant, but possibly a bit unhinged. This is just one more example.
I wish we stayed with the WIndows 7 model, where a purchase meant a purchase not a subscription.
I haven't yet seen a monthly bill for my copy of Windows. People keep mistaking the new Windows model as some radical departure, which it really is not. All it means is that Microsoft is doing away with UPGRADE purchases. You're still required to purchase a new copy of Windows if you buy a new computer.
You get a license for the lifetime of the computer, not your lifetime. So, it's really not as different in reality as "the last version of Window" sounds. I think Microsoft just realized that most consumers didn't purchase upgrades anyhow (only "upgrading" when a new computer was purchased), and maintaining several OS lines at the same time was a pain, so in reality, it's more of a cost-saving measure for them by simply keeping everyone on the same branch of Windows.
I think it's one of those products like fruitcake, which everyone claims to hate, but obviously some people actually like it because it's still around. So, I think plenty of people eat it, but perhaps don't talk about it. Or more to the point, probably not so much in circles techies run in, which are perhaps more of an "avocado toast" crowd.
Statistics from the 1990s say that 3.8 cans of Spam are consumed every second in the United States, totaling nearly 122 million cans annually. It became part of the diet of almost 30% of American households, perceived differently in various regions of the country. It is also sometimes associated with economic hardship because of its relatively low cost.
Generally speaking, I think Spam would have done fine, even without the e-mail-related moniker.
I'd kill for a parody of that brand guide, but rewritten for C++. Remove all the feel-good platitudes about "our values" (or perhaps replace with a discussion of l-values and r-values) and be completely blunt about how convoluted, complicated, and plain screwed up the language is, while yet it still somehow remains both popular and useful in actual production environments.
Yes, such a brand guide seems wholly appropriate for billion dollar companies and their top products, when you have a dedicated and expensive marketing team to coordinate in their job of actively promoting a brand with an actual marketing budget, all designed to sell more products or affect public perception.
For a free and open source programming language, though, it feels ridiculously overblown. The amount of design hipster-ism that's oozes from this document is completely absurd. In short, this is really nothing more than marketing masturbation.
I'm also guessing I just violated Go's Code of Conduct as well. Whoops.
So do you not believe that this is the cause of colony collapse or do you not think that a huge decline in pollinators is a problem?
It seems like we'll soon be getting a reasonably definitive answer on that first question. If colonies rebound after the ban, then that's a pretty good indicator of causality. Likewise, if no rebound occurs over a period of time, such that persistent contamination is ruled out, then that also is an indicator that there may be something else at play.
You forget that this so called "free market" is exactly what happened here. Without any regulation (thus "free market"), the biggest providers push the smaller ones aside and gain an monopoly. After that it's raising prices and raising prices, because there is no competition left.
Yep - Isn't "free market" great?
This seems to be a common misconception. The "free market" doesn't preclude regulation. It relies on it. Without regulation, you simply have anarchy, and a free market can't function correctly - or at least, as efficiently. From ancient times, the most prosperous free markets have co-habited with a strong government to provide oversight and regulation, which offers a safe haven that in turn provides for a greater focus on economic development.
Also, a lot of the monopolistic tendencies of cable companies are due to regulation of the WRONG kind, preventing competitors from even entering the market in certain areas, or preventing local co-ops from forming to offer an alternative option. Like almost anything else, regulation can be a double-edged sword depending how it's used, either helping or harming consumers.
No, cable TV pricing and service is pretty much the poster-child for what happens when we don't have enough competition in the market. The new internet streaming services you get at $10-15 per month are more indicative of the free market. Netflix and Hulu can't arbitrarily raise prices at will because they're competing with each other for market share.
I guess you can takeaway a positive life lesson for both your kids: gambling is a fool's bet, because it always favors the house in the long run.
I have to say, the exploitative nature of loot boxes in some games make me embarrassed to be a professional game developer. At least with creeps like Zynga, I could sort of pretend they weren't "real" developers making AAA games. I'm all for sale of cosmetic goods and fun consumables to enhance the game, and to allow people to voluntarily support an otherwise free game. Anything else is just slimy.
That being said, my feelings are a bit conflicted when it comes to government intervention here, because that opens the door to more regulation, and I tend to fear what direction that could take in the future. Yes, they're addressing something I dislike now, but what if next it's something I feel they have no business regulating? Probably justified in this case, as I think many game companies have crossed a line, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.
This sort of security measure isn't any more absolute than a lock on your front door. I think it mostly just protects against clueless users who accidentally forwards sensitive documents to the entire company instead of the intended recipients. And a real benefit is to provide evidence that anyone who breaches confidentiality has obviously done so deliberately. You can't really "accidentally" take a screenshot and then forward it to others.
We now have light gray on white visual elements, because high contrast, easy to spot UI elements are so gauche.
We have mystery meat navigation elements (text doesn't show up until you mouse over), because even though designers 15 years ago figured out that was bad, a new generation apparently has to relearn the same lessons.
Sigh... Generally speaking, the new UI looks prettier and more professional / polished (the old UI was admittedly ugly), but it actually looks slightly less usable to me. It's a shame we can't get both.
Monitors and TVs have very different use cases. I don't think you should infer that if someone claims that 8K TVs are pointless for most people that they also believe 8K monitors are also pointless.
Clearly not everyone needs an 8K monitor, but there are certainly many people for whom it would be very useful. Like you said, you can increase the size and replace multiple monitors, which seems pretty handy.
Unless you're purchasing an extremely large TV and viewing it from a pretty close distance, 8K TVs will never be worth it, because you won't even see the difference.
It might eventually become mainstream simply due to manufacturing ease of only supporting a single resolution, similar to how almost all new TVs are 4K, even small ones. But I'm still not certain 8K will really ever take hold. I think 4K may end up becoming that ubiquitous "good enough" point beyond which remains only niche products.
Any legitimate web-stressing service should require that you prove ownership of the domain to be stressed by adding specific markers to root-access resources. Not performing this basic safety check is criminally negligent at best, and a criminal enterprise at worst. And anyone who subscribes to and thus promotes a malicious service like that should be prosecuted. Anything else is just excuses.
Yep, that's why I said "a bit of a pain" rather than "a nightmare to fix." I'm not trying to overblow the issue, certainly, and I definitely think electronic keys are more secure than physical keys for the most part.
It does need to be fixed, but I wouldn't really call this a significant threat to security, given the fairly high technical hurdle to creating a forged master key.
Their discovery also prompted Assa Abloy to release a security patch to fix the flaws. According to their disclosure timeline, Assa Abloy was first told of the vulnerabilities a month later in April 2017, and met again over several months to fix the flaws. The software is patched at the central server, but the firmware on each lock needs to be updated.
So, it can be patched, but sounds like a bit of a pain. It also sounds like this was responsibly disclosed by the researchers to the manufacturer, so good for them on that point.
Honestly, I question whether any significant numbers satellites are actually running Windows 95, despite the claim of "hundreds." That seems like a terrible choice for a satellite OS, and there are plenty of alternatives. Why in the world would developers skimp like that on projects that may cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars?
I saw absolutely no sources or validation of this claim by the author, who, by the way, even got the OS name wrong, calling it Windows-95. So, forgive me, but I'll remain skeptical of this claim until I see a bit more evidence.
Slashdot editors, didn't this claim look the tiniest bit suspicious to you either? Damn.
Or is some lawyer just getting over reaching and assuming someone isn't going to read the fine print?
Yeah, probably just an over-reaching lawyer, with the attitude "hey, let's just grab ALL the rights while we're at it - just in case we need them" My guess is that they originally wanted to be able to use the media for advertisement or self-promotion, but got ridiculously greedy and over-reaching with the language.
You'll probably see an explanation from the company president for this language, and a shortly after a severe narrowing of the language to make it more reasonable, or clear what the intent is.
My heavens, who'd have thought anyone would actually READ all that legalese, huh?
This is certainly a form of wealth redistribution, but it's not enforcing collective ownership. So, I think that falls more in line with socialism, not communism. Moreover, the idea is to replace most forms of welfare with this. Yes, people like me (and probably most of us here) will be putting in far more than we take out, but that's already true. And I'd posit that current forms of welfare are much more prone to abuse and have more overhead to manage, because of the more complicated rules other than "you must be a citizen, and then you get x amount per week."
Even as a fiscally conservative Republican, I think UBI has some merit, at least in theory. My initial response was similar to yours, and I didn't think much of the idea. But as I considered the pros and cons, I realized that it may actually be an improvement over what we have right now.
There are certainly some sticking points about whether it's truly going to be something we can afford, and whether it's going to actually replace most of our welfare programs as they currently exist. And are people going to insist that illegal aliens receive benefits? That might very well make it economically untenable, not to mention being somewhat unfair to citizens. But the biggest question mark to me is whether this will have a significantly negative impact on people's incentive to work and be productive. It's hard to predict whether or not this would be the case.
I also disagree with the wildly optimistic notion that "you'll be able to live very well on UBI." I think you'll be able to keep off the streets and avoid starvation, but I don't see how, economically speaking, you could "live very well" without a MASSIVE increase in tax burdens. That's all well and good for multi-millionaires like Kurzweil (net worth $30 million), but a lot harder for the middle class, which will have to finance the bulk of this, like always. In fact, I think it's probably critical that UBI is NOT seen as a free ride, but as more of a supplemental income for those at the bottom of the economic ladder who aspire to more than a subsistence lifestyle. It's in the name, after all: "basic".
I think one way to dip our toes into the water would be to try putting a random % of US citizens into a trial system. Make any contributions a straight deduction on federal income taxes, and any benefits are likewise deducted from any welfare benefits. Then, track the stats of participants over a few years, see if we can keep the budgetary impact neutral, and see if it has a harmful effect on productivity of the participants.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who's worked in retail would probably tell you they'd prefer the bot.
Yep, the "calories per serving" has been abused all to hell and back. I recall reading the calories on a cup of instant noodles and thinking "that's a bit high for such a small meal", and then realized they were claiming it was "2 servings" - after which my reaction was "holy shit!"
If threats don't work, you move onto punishments. Or is that crazy talk?
Oh, and when I went to school a few decades ago, videogames were all we wanted to talk about too. Kids tend to dive very deeply into new fads, and it tends to scare the shit out parents and school administrators.
Absolute legality would swiftly follow absolute lethality.
If you live in a swamp and an alligator attacks you, do you blame yourself for being a slow swimmer? Or do you blame the swamp for forcing you to hang out with alligators?
Yes, I often ponder this as I'm being attacked by alligators in the swamp I live in. /sarcasm
General writing protip: the whole point of an analogy is to relate a situation that's difficult to understand to a more COMMON scenario. I'm more confused by this bizarre analogy, while I understand the actual issue of digital privacy just fine.
Well, at least Musk didn't call his cars "total crap."
Honestly, it doesn't really affect my opinion of Musk that much. With his bizarre rants about living in a simulated universe and the AI boogeyman, I've always thought he was brilliant, but possibly a bit unhinged. This is just one more example.
I wish we stayed with the WIndows 7 model, where a purchase meant a purchase not a subscription.
I haven't yet seen a monthly bill for my copy of Windows. People keep mistaking the new Windows model as some radical departure, which it really is not. All it means is that Microsoft is doing away with UPGRADE purchases. You're still required to purchase a new copy of Windows if you buy a new computer.
You get a license for the lifetime of the computer, not your lifetime. So, it's really not as different in reality as "the last version of Window" sounds. I think Microsoft just realized that most consumers didn't purchase upgrades anyhow (only "upgrading" when a new computer was purchased), and maintaining several OS lines at the same time was a pain, so in reality, it's more of a cost-saving measure for them by simply keeping everyone on the same branch of Windows.
Apparently, Spam is really popular in Hawaii.
I think it's one of those products like fruitcake, which everyone claims to hate, but obviously some people actually like it because it's still around. So, I think plenty of people eat it, but perhaps don't talk about it. Or more to the point, probably not so much in circles techies run in, which are perhaps more of an "avocado toast" crowd.
Statistics from the 1990s say that 3.8 cans of Spam are consumed every second in the United States, totaling nearly 122 million cans annually. It became part of the diet of almost 30% of American households, perceived differently in various regions of the country. It is also sometimes associated with economic hardship because of its relatively low cost.
Generally speaking, I think Spam would have done fine, even without the e-mail-related moniker.
I'd kill for a parody of that brand guide, but rewritten for C++. Remove all the feel-good platitudes about "our values" (or perhaps replace with a discussion of l-values and r-values) and be completely blunt about how convoluted, complicated, and plain screwed up the language is, while yet it still somehow remains both popular and useful in actual production environments.
Yes, such a brand guide seems wholly appropriate for billion dollar companies and their top products, when you have a dedicated and expensive marketing team to coordinate in their job of actively promoting a brand with an actual marketing budget, all designed to sell more products or affect public perception.
For a free and open source programming language, though, it feels ridiculously overblown. The amount of design hipster-ism that's oozes from this document is completely absurd. In short, this is really nothing more than marketing masturbation.
I'm also guessing I just violated Go's Code of Conduct as well. Whoops.
So do you not believe that this is the cause of colony collapse or do you not think that a huge decline in pollinators is a problem?
It seems like we'll soon be getting a reasonably definitive answer on that first question. If colonies rebound after the ban, then that's a pretty good indicator of causality. Likewise, if no rebound occurs over a period of time, such that persistent contamination is ruled out, then that also is an indicator that there may be something else at play.
You forget that this so called "free market" is exactly what happened here. Without any regulation (thus "free market"), the biggest providers push the smaller ones aside and gain an monopoly. After that it's raising prices and raising prices, because there is no competition left.
Yep - Isn't "free market" great?
This seems to be a common misconception. The "free market" doesn't preclude regulation. It relies on it. Without regulation, you simply have anarchy, and a free market can't function correctly - or at least, as efficiently. From ancient times, the most prosperous free markets have co-habited with a strong government to provide oversight and regulation, which offers a safe haven that in turn provides for a greater focus on economic development.
Also, a lot of the monopolistic tendencies of cable companies are due to regulation of the WRONG kind, preventing competitors from even entering the market in certain areas, or preventing local co-ops from forming to offer an alternative option. Like almost anything else, regulation can be a double-edged sword depending how it's used, either helping or harming consumers.
And that, kids, is how the free market works
No, cable TV pricing and service is pretty much the poster-child for what happens when we don't have enough competition in the market. The new internet streaming services you get at $10-15 per month are more indicative of the free market. Netflix and Hulu can't arbitrarily raise prices at will because they're competing with each other for market share.
I guess you can takeaway a positive life lesson for both your kids: gambling is a fool's bet, because it always favors the house in the long run.
I have to say, the exploitative nature of loot boxes in some games make me embarrassed to be a professional game developer. At least with creeps like Zynga, I could sort of pretend they weren't "real" developers making AAA games. I'm all for sale of cosmetic goods and fun consumables to enhance the game, and to allow people to voluntarily support an otherwise free game. Anything else is just slimy.
That being said, my feelings are a bit conflicted when it comes to government intervention here, because that opens the door to more regulation, and I tend to fear what direction that could take in the future. Yes, they're addressing something I dislike now, but what if next it's something I feel they have no business regulating? Probably justified in this case, as I think many game companies have crossed a line, but it doesn't mean I have to like it.
This sort of security measure isn't any more absolute than a lock on your front door. I think it mostly just protects against clueless users who accidentally forwards sensitive documents to the entire company instead of the intended recipients. And a real benefit is to provide evidence that anyone who breaches confidentiality has obviously done so deliberately. You can't really "accidentally" take a screenshot and then forward it to others.
You forgot:
We now have light gray on white visual elements, because high contrast, easy to spot UI elements are so gauche.
We have mystery meat navigation elements (text doesn't show up until you mouse over), because even though designers 15 years ago figured out that was bad, a new generation apparently has to relearn the same lessons.
Sigh... Generally speaking, the new UI looks prettier and more professional / polished (the old UI was admittedly ugly), but it actually looks slightly less usable to me. It's a shame we can't get both.
Monitors and TVs have very different use cases. I don't think you should infer that if someone claims that 8K TVs are pointless for most people that they also believe 8K monitors are also pointless.
Clearly not everyone needs an 8K monitor, but there are certainly many people for whom it would be very useful. Like you said, you can increase the size and replace multiple monitors, which seems pretty handy.
Unless you're purchasing an extremely large TV and viewing it from a pretty close distance, 8K TVs will never be worth it, because you won't even see the difference.
It might eventually become mainstream simply due to manufacturing ease of only supporting a single resolution, similar to how almost all new TVs are 4K, even small ones. But I'm still not certain 8K will really ever take hold. I think 4K may end up becoming that ubiquitous "good enough" point beyond which remains only niche products.
Any legitimate web-stressing service should require that you prove ownership of the domain to be stressed by adding specific markers to root-access resources. Not performing this basic safety check is criminally negligent at best, and a criminal enterprise at worst. And anyone who subscribes to and thus promotes a malicious service like that should be prosecuted. Anything else is just excuses.
Yep, that's why I said "a bit of a pain" rather than "a nightmare to fix." I'm not trying to overblow the issue, certainly, and I definitely think electronic keys are more secure than physical keys for the most part.
It does need to be fixed, but I wouldn't really call this a significant threat to security, given the fairly high technical hurdle to creating a forged master key.
The linked article answers that question:
Their discovery also prompted Assa Abloy to release a security patch to fix the flaws. According to their disclosure timeline, Assa Abloy was first told of the vulnerabilities a month later in April 2017, and met again over several months to fix the flaws. The software is patched at the central server, but the firmware on each lock needs to be updated.
So, it can be patched, but sounds like a bit of a pain. It also sounds like this was responsibly disclosed by the researchers to the manufacturer, so good for them on that point.
Honestly, I question whether any significant numbers satellites are actually running Windows 95, despite the claim of "hundreds." That seems like a terrible choice for a satellite OS, and there are plenty of alternatives. Why in the world would developers skimp like that on projects that may cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars?
I saw absolutely no sources or validation of this claim by the author, who, by the way, even got the OS name wrong, calling it Windows-95. So, forgive me, but I'll remain skeptical of this claim until I see a bit more evidence.
Slashdot editors, didn't this claim look the tiniest bit suspicious to you either? Damn.
It's technically illegal to deface or destroy money.
Or is some lawyer just getting over reaching and assuming someone isn't going to read the fine print?
Yeah, probably just an over-reaching lawyer, with the attitude "hey, let's just grab ALL the rights while we're at it - just in case we need them" My guess is that they originally wanted to be able to use the media for advertisement or self-promotion, but got ridiculously greedy and over-reaching with the language.
You'll probably see an explanation from the company president for this language, and a shortly after a severe narrowing of the language to make it more reasonable, or clear what the intent is.
My heavens, who'd have thought anyone would actually READ all that legalese, huh?
This is certainly a form of wealth redistribution, but it's not enforcing collective ownership. So, I think that falls more in line with socialism, not communism. Moreover, the idea is to replace most forms of welfare with this. Yes, people like me (and probably most of us here) will be putting in far more than we take out, but that's already true. And I'd posit that current forms of welfare are much more prone to abuse and have more overhead to manage, because of the more complicated rules other than "you must be a citizen, and then you get x amount per week."
Even as a fiscally conservative Republican, I think UBI has some merit, at least in theory. My initial response was similar to yours, and I didn't think much of the idea. But as I considered the pros and cons, I realized that it may actually be an improvement over what we have right now.
There are certainly some sticking points about whether it's truly going to be something we can afford, and whether it's going to actually replace most of our welfare programs as they currently exist. And are people going to insist that illegal aliens receive benefits? That might very well make it economically untenable, not to mention being somewhat unfair to citizens. But the biggest question mark to me is whether this will have a significantly negative impact on people's incentive to work and be productive. It's hard to predict whether or not this would be the case.
I also disagree with the wildly optimistic notion that "you'll be able to live very well on UBI." I think you'll be able to keep off the streets and avoid starvation, but I don't see how, economically speaking, you could "live very well" without a MASSIVE increase in tax burdens. That's all well and good for multi-millionaires like Kurzweil (net worth $30 million), but a lot harder for the middle class, which will have to finance the bulk of this, like always. In fact, I think it's probably critical that UBI is NOT seen as a free ride, but as more of a supplemental income for those at the bottom of the economic ladder who aspire to more than a subsistence lifestyle. It's in the name, after all: "basic".
I think one way to dip our toes into the water would be to try putting a random % of US citizens into a trial system. Make any contributions a straight deduction on federal income taxes, and any benefits are likewise deducted from any welfare benefits. Then, track the stats of participants over a few years, see if we can keep the budgetary impact neutral, and see if it has a harmful effect on productivity of the participants.