My understanding (I didn't even know who Milo was before this) is that he was saying things that some (many?) people found offensive. I read some of his articles after a quite Google search, and I can certainly see why. The man is a conservative attack dog, but is also an unabashed gay man - that's got to be frustrating to the political left, because he's both an 'enemy' as well as one of the 'protected' classes. But who was he harassing on Twitter? His followers?
I'm all for banning users who actively harass other people. I'm not sure this guy really fit the profile.
Perhaps read some of Bruce Schneier's books. Applied Cryptography was an early one, but there are more recent books out now. I'd start listening to the Security Now podcast as well, as it provides some great examples of "how to do things wrong", and teaches a lot of fundamentals. Steve Gibson has written some real life crypto products, and does his homework on topics of the day.
Essentially, I've learned just enough to know that, even as a 20-year veteran programmer, I'm not sure I'd be able to write a secure system, as it's just not my expertise. It's horrifically difficult to do it right without a huge amount of experience specifically in that field. If anyone tells you its simple to do, they're a liar or a fool. Never, ever try to invent your own security protocols, and especially never invent your own cryptography behind closed doors. It's pretty much guaranteed that you'll get things disastrously wrong unless it stands up to a *lot* of open review by cryptography experts. Search WEP security for a history lesson.
Unfortunately, IoT companies are filled with lots of smart young engineers who have no idea security is so impossibly hard to get perfect on the first try, and they're building unbelievably stupid security flaws into all these internet-facing devices. Buy an IoT baby monitor today, and you've got reasonably good odds that anyone in the world could view your baby cam with only a modest amount of effort. It's actually that bad right now.
Good on you for being willing to acknowledge that you need to know more about the fundamentals.
I well know my ignorance in physics and astronomy, so I don't put too much stock in my own opinions, and neither should others. Still... The current speculation on dark matter remind me greatly of the incredibly complex equations and calculations some ancient scientists and mathematicians invented to explain orbital mechanics of a geocentric universe, with the earth as the center of the celestial heavens... and they almost got everything worked out that way. It wasn't until the heliocentric model was established that the underlying laws fell into place, showing that orbital mechanics follow much simpler and more elegant laws.
It always felt to me that dark matter and energy were essentially a placeholder that admitted "our calculations are this far off, and we don't have a clue why." So many things in our universe seem to have such elegant laws to explain them once we understand enough. I hope this discrepancy is found and explained in my lifetime, as it would be fascinating to hear what the actual explanation for these "holes" are in the current best-of-breed theoretical models lie.
Oh, more on topic... in terms of *not* finding a particle when you look for one. The absence of data is also interesting to scientists, just not quite as sexy. It fills in our knowledge of the universe in the same way that a failed invention does - by showing what doesn't work, we take one more step towards discovering an invention that does.
The comment dataset came from Yahoo! Finance and News, which you wouldn’t think of as exactly the dank basement of the internet—but it turns out a whopping 7% of comments on Finance and 16.4% on News were deemed abusive by human screeners.
I look forward to perusing this database and finding out exactly how abusive these comments actually are. I don't doubt there are a lot of assholes on the internet. Slashdot has one of the most effective self-policing filtering mechanisms I've seen. Browse at -1 on occasion to see some of the crap, even though I think most obvious trolls have left, as they can't get much traction here. Sure, it goes awry sometimes during heated debates (toss the word SJW in there and you're going to spark some positive and negative mods just with that), but overall does a good job of filtering out most of the garbage. But what's the criteria? Are we talking genuine abuse, or "microagressions", where someone perhaps just expresses an opinion that's not quite PC enough for someone else's delicate ears?
Moreover, a 90% success rate doesn't strike me as all that fantastic. That means 1 in 10 abuse flags is a complete false positive. That would be a completely unacceptable rate with a spam filter. I have a feeling that with all the training that's been done, all you have to do is say one of the "banned" words, like "cunt", and you'll get flagged, even if speaking about it in an appropriate context, like I'm doing. Or am I being abusive just by mentioning the word, since I'm a man? Oops, probably another flag there for mentioning my male gender. Given the tone of my post just now, I'll bet even a human might flag me for a microagression.
Unlike some here, I think the effort to civilize online speech is not unwarranted. Talk to prominent men and (especially) women online and find out how much verbal abuse gets heaped on them. It's fairly disgusting. But this is an area which, I think, needs to be tread upon very carefully. Simply blacklisting hateful speech doesn't cure the problem. It addresses a symptom, and will just push the abuse "underground" to a level where an AI can't detect it. Humans are clever that way.
I'm not sure what can be done short of preventing anonymous interaction, because that seems to bring out the worst in people. Many notorious trolls tend to be cowards, and are mortified when their actions are associated with their real names. This algorithm is obviously one way to address the problem, but I have to admit I remain skeptical about this sort of approach.
Windows 10.1 is now out, with Windows 10.2 and Windows 10.3 expected next year...
What's in a name?
I still think they should have called it Windows X, and started designated the major releases using names of various rodents. Windows X Hamster, Windows X Squirrel, Windows X Guinea Pig, etc
I've been through two major OS upgrades and even more minor ones since purchasing my Mac mini, none of which I paid for. Either you're misinformed or Apple just really likes me for some reason.
No kidding. On my microwave, there's a button that's labeled "bacon". Seriously? What the hell does a "bacon" button do? I've never dared to press it. I'm going to be really upset if I find out that pressing that button magically makes bacon appear in my microwave, and I never read the instruction manual to find that out.
You know what else was awesome? How Microsoft took this opportunity to re-install the Get Office app (how I missed those nag screens informing me that my copy of Office 2010 just isn't shiny enough), and to put the Edge browser and MS Store icons back on my task bar. Because, my goodness, I had completely lost those apps. Thank goodness Microsoft is looking out for me by making sure I can find these valuable services again.
Besides that, where would this even stop? People use computers for all sorts of things. Should your OS snoop on you to make sure you're not cheating on your taxes? Should it check to make sure you're not browsing just a bit too much at pro-Jihadist websites, or looking up how to make a pipebomb? How about if you're trying to figure out how to hire a hitman?
To be honest, though... this smells a lot like some trumped-up nonsense. We hear about shit like this all the time, and it never happens. Exactly how many stories about nefarious DRM-in-our-OS schemes does one have to hear about before getting completely jaded? A report from *TorrentFreak*? Um... yeah. Thanks, Slashdot, for once again giving completely unsubstantiated rumor-mongering some credibility. This was just a combination of a speculative piece based on a few words in a EULA, and a wishful-thinking report from a content-production organization telling about how they wish tech companies would solve all their problems, and also that they'd like a magical unicorn please.
"In short, Comcast is arguing that protecting your own privacy should be a paid luxury option, and stopping them from doing so would raise broadband rates. But as we've noted for years it's the lack of competition that keeps broadband prices high. It's also the lack of competition that prevents users upset with broadband privacy practices from switching to another ISP. That's why the FCC thinks some basic privacy rules of the road might be a good idea.
So, unfortunately, instead of actually solving the real problem - the lack of competition, the FCC thinks "basic privacy rules might be a good idea." I mean, while I agree with that, it's just papering over the real issue. I understand that the FCC itself can't do anything about that, but I just can't see anything changing for the better in any significant way until we manage to break Comcast's near stranglehold on many areas of the market.
Also, Comcast's arguments about trading services for user information neglects to mention one tiny little fact: Most of the services that provide users a service in exchange for harvesting user information are providing a completely free service, like G-mail or Facebook, and many users seem to be fine with that. Comcast is "double dipping" - charging a significant amount for a paid service AND also trying to earn more by snooping on their customers. That's a completely different thing, and Comcast will have a hard time convincing anyone that they need to do this to remain profitable or that this is forcing them to keep rates high. The notion that allowing them to snoop on users would actually end up lowering rates is laughable. Users don't have any choices in many cases, so there's no pressure on them to keep rates competitive.
I suppose this isn't entirely unexpected. Windows has never played well with others in a multi-boot environment. I recall that it doesn't preserve alternate bootloaders like Grub when installing a new OS, and I'd imagine that's how these major upgrades are treated. There were probably changes to the bootloader of some sort, and so it blithely "updated" it, wiping out the existing bootloader, apparently without bothering to confirm whether it *should* or not.
This is why my Windows dev machine is Windows-only, and I've got a separate Linux box with multiple distros on it for Linux-specific development.
But seriously, Microsoft? That's just lame. It's hard to imagine that this isn't a known scenario that they wouldn't think to test for. It's not like multi-boot scenarios are unheard of.
I thought I'd adopt Captain Haddock-like insults, just for today. "Twittering paddy-cake" just seemed an appropriately British insult, given the article. Feel free to use as you wish.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't mean to imply the bullet trains didn't end up being useful (re-reading, it does sort of sound like I was implying that). The Japanese love them, and they're incredibly well-used there... as are ALL their public transportation infrastructure, in fact. But the international attention garnered by the last Olympics held there was what motivated their construction. That's a pretty well-known fact, not a denigration of the trains themselves.
TV resolutions and audio channel count have now jumped the shark. This is clearly about "bigger numbers are better" at this point. Who in Japan has 90" televisions that could possibly make use of that resolution? Seriously, isn't that what digital movie projectors use?
I'd bet this is more about international prestige than anything else, sort of like how they built the bullet trains (Shinkansen) for their last Olympics. From what I hear, they tend to care a great deal how the rest of the world sees them. You'll probably see some more impressive public works in time for their Olympic games.
Bullshit. The extra 1 min it takes to get the barman to call a EMT is *not* going to make that much difference. In fact I would assert that it makes none at all. The distance of the pub from the closest hospital will be the dominating factor. In the 60s as in the 2016s.
I guess you missed the part where I'm *agreeing with you*.
After all, there's a land line, and in most emergencies, you could also quickly run outside to call.
Try at least reading to the end of the post, you twittering paddy-cake.
That's very nice of you to do this for that young lady. My advice:
People here tend to complain about Microsoft's "privacy invading" features, but keep in mind they do actually come with some tangible benefits. One of the benefits of using a Microsoft account is that the computer can automatically back up all her documents to OneDrive, which offers 5GB of free storage, or (naturally) paid plans if she needs more. If you don't want to do this, will you also take responsibility for setting up the computer with an alternative backup service? One advantage of OneDrive is that it's integrated into Windows Explorer, making it fairly simple to use.
Personally, I don't make use of them myself, but then again, I backup my Windows, Mac, and Linux machines to my Linux-based NAS, which is in turn set up to push backups to an Amazon AWS account. You have to realize that people like me are not... normal. It's very likely that this girl won't even think about backups until her drive crashes, or if she somehow loses or destroys her laptop, and she loses a semester of work.
Some are also suggesting installing Linux Mint. It's a great OS, but have you looked at her college requirements to see if what software they use? If they only have Windows and Mac versions, you might not be doing her a favor by installing Linux. Do they support Linux (with detailed instructions) when she needs to connect to the college network? Also, again, what about automatic backups, which are critically important? Unfortunately, I'm not sure what's available for Linux Mint, as again, my own systems use a custom backup system.
It's important that you consider what would really serve this young lady best, rather than letting ideology drive your technical decisions when setting everything up for her.
You know how we functioned without a mobile phone? We couldn't do a thing in many cases, and people died because of it. No, not terrorist attacks, but more mundane things like medical emergencies and car accidents.
A decade and a half ago (or thereabouts), I was driving with my father on a winter-slick rural road, and we came upon an accident. A kid had just lost control of his car and flipped it over on the side of the road. My dad had his cell phone with him (that's what they were called then) and called 911. Fortunately, the kid wasn't badly hurt, but if he had been, that call may have saved his life.
It was then that I determined I really should get a cell phone of my own. What I saw someone else in an accident and couldn't make a simple phone call to help them? Or, perhaps more likely, what if I got stranded myself and needed some assistance?
I'm not saying blocking mobile calls should be illegal in a private establishment - so long as patrons are notified. After all, there's a land line, and in most emergencies, you could also quickly run outside to call. I'm just saying that you shouldn't pooh-pooh how many lives mobile phones have likely saved. That's a critical function of them, one you may not appreciate until you have to use it yourself.
Xbox Live is perhaps finally worth the $60 per year for Xbox one owners, as you get three free games each month (two Xbox one, plus one compatible Xbox 360 game). Some are crap, as you'd expect, but there have been some real gems in there as well.
but once they see people are buying the new hardware by the millions, the following E3 will result in big reveals for games that can only run on the newer consoles.
PC makers have been making games that scale to different levels of hardware for decades. There's no reason console makers can't do the same thing. And it's a hell of a lot easier when you've got only TWO targets with precisely known specs, rather than the complete spectrum of devices PC makers always deal with.
Yeah, good point. You'd want just a validation hash of someone's identity so it couldn't be reversed.
When I say "invalidates the entire results", I don't mean it destroys the blockchain. Rather, I meant that any illicitly modified blockchain can be easily detected as invalid. A better way of putting it is that the electronic ledger is essentially "tamper-proof". It's impossible for anyone to modify any piece of the ledger without invalidating the entire thing - and because the ledger is widely disseminated (that's the "distributed" part), no one can replace the *entire* ledger without someone noticing such a drastic modification. It's sort of like how changing a single bit in any file, no matter how large that file is, will result in a completely different hash value. A blockchain is just a way of using cryptographic-quality hashes to incrementally validate data as it's entered.
So, to answer your question, no, you don't have to run the election again.:)
Then whoever controls 51% of the mining, controls the election. I dont see how this is a good idea.
Bitcoin != blockchains. There is no "mining" in a generic blockchain, nor any notion of "51% = control". Those are Bitcoin-specific implementation details.
A blockchain is just a digital ledger that's been encrypted in such a way that you can't alter previous entries without invalidating the entire results. Essentially, it's a way of preventing someone from going back in time and "cooking the books". Think of it as a set of data entries sorted by time, each digitally signed, with the results depending on the results both on the current block AND the signed results of all previous blocks. If you try to alter an earlier figure, the digital signature doesn't match.
Although blockchains are decentralized by nature (sort of like Git), you can certainly designate one source as "authoritative" (like a repository on GitHub). So, in the case of elections or banking, there would obviously be an authoritative source that only permitted valid changes to be made, even if the ledgers themselves are decentralized. In the case of Bitcoin, the authoritative source is actually an algorithm, but in the case of an election, it would probably just be encrypted personal information and who you voted for.
"Although approximately 450,000 people now drive for Uber, there are 210 million licensed drivers in the United States -- and an estimated 4.2 million adults who drive impaired, the study says."
And I love the numbers with no context. Are these 4.2 million people driving drunk daily? Weekly? Monthly? Ever?
You can't simply compare total numbers of drivers or even drunk-drivers versus that of Uber drivers. A single Uber driver can service *many* customers. This is basic logic, which seems to escape some.
I actually believe it will work the other way, where popular actors and actresses will preserve and license their likeness, so they can be digitally recreated at any age and for any performance based on past works. You may see instances where actors are created digitally from scratch, but I believe that people will be more interested in seeing human performances in most creative endeavors, except in rare cases as a novelty.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding (I didn't even know who Milo was before this) is that he was saying things that some (many?) people found offensive. I read some of his articles after a quite Google search, and I can certainly see why. The man is a conservative attack dog, but is also an unabashed gay man - that's got to be frustrating to the political left, because he's both an 'enemy' as well as one of the 'protected' classes. But who was he harassing on Twitter? His followers?
I'm all for banning users who actively harass other people. I'm not sure this guy really fit the profile.
Perhaps read some of Bruce Schneier's books. Applied Cryptography was an early one, but there are more recent books out now. I'd start listening to the Security Now podcast as well, as it provides some great examples of "how to do things wrong", and teaches a lot of fundamentals. Steve Gibson has written some real life crypto products, and does his homework on topics of the day.
Essentially, I've learned just enough to know that, even as a 20-year veteran programmer, I'm not sure I'd be able to write a secure system, as it's just not my expertise. It's horrifically difficult to do it right without a huge amount of experience specifically in that field. If anyone tells you its simple to do, they're a liar or a fool. Never, ever try to invent your own security protocols, and especially never invent your own cryptography behind closed doors. It's pretty much guaranteed that you'll get things disastrously wrong unless it stands up to a *lot* of open review by cryptography experts. Search WEP security for a history lesson.
Unfortunately, IoT companies are filled with lots of smart young engineers who have no idea security is so impossibly hard to get perfect on the first try, and they're building unbelievably stupid security flaws into all these internet-facing devices. Buy an IoT baby monitor today, and you've got reasonably good odds that anyone in the world could view your baby cam with only a modest amount of effort. It's actually that bad right now.
Good on you for being willing to acknowledge that you need to know more about the fundamentals.
I well know my ignorance in physics and astronomy, so I don't put too much stock in my own opinions, and neither should others. Still... The current speculation on dark matter remind me greatly of the incredibly complex equations and calculations some ancient scientists and mathematicians invented to explain orbital mechanics of a geocentric universe, with the earth as the center of the celestial heavens... and they almost got everything worked out that way. It wasn't until the heliocentric model was established that the underlying laws fell into place, showing that orbital mechanics follow much simpler and more elegant laws.
It always felt to me that dark matter and energy were essentially a placeholder that admitted "our calculations are this far off, and we don't have a clue why." So many things in our universe seem to have such elegant laws to explain them once we understand enough. I hope this discrepancy is found and explained in my lifetime, as it would be fascinating to hear what the actual explanation for these "holes" are in the current best-of-breed theoretical models lie.
Oh, more on topic... in terms of *not* finding a particle when you look for one. The absence of data is also interesting to scientists, just not quite as sexy. It fills in our knowledge of the universe in the same way that a failed invention does - by showing what doesn't work, we take one more step towards discovering an invention that does.
From the article:
The comment dataset came from Yahoo! Finance and News, which you wouldn’t think of as exactly the dank basement of the internet—but it turns out a whopping 7% of comments on Finance and 16.4% on News were deemed abusive by human screeners.
I look forward to perusing this database and finding out exactly how abusive these comments actually are. I don't doubt there are a lot of assholes on the internet. Slashdot has one of the most effective self-policing filtering mechanisms I've seen. Browse at -1 on occasion to see some of the crap, even though I think most obvious trolls have left, as they can't get much traction here. Sure, it goes awry sometimes during heated debates (toss the word SJW in there and you're going to spark some positive and negative mods just with that), but overall does a good job of filtering out most of the garbage. But what's the criteria? Are we talking genuine abuse, or "microagressions", where someone perhaps just expresses an opinion that's not quite PC enough for someone else's delicate ears?
Moreover, a 90% success rate doesn't strike me as all that fantastic. That means 1 in 10 abuse flags is a complete false positive. That would be a completely unacceptable rate with a spam filter. I have a feeling that with all the training that's been done, all you have to do is say one of the "banned" words, like "cunt", and you'll get flagged, even if speaking about it in an appropriate context, like I'm doing. Or am I being abusive just by mentioning the word, since I'm a man? Oops, probably another flag there for mentioning my male gender. Given the tone of my post just now, I'll bet even a human might flag me for a microagression.
Unlike some here, I think the effort to civilize online speech is not unwarranted. Talk to prominent men and (especially) women online and find out how much verbal abuse gets heaped on them. It's fairly disgusting. But this is an area which, I think, needs to be tread upon very carefully. Simply blacklisting hateful speech doesn't cure the problem. It addresses a symptom, and will just push the abuse "underground" to a level where an AI can't detect it. Humans are clever that way.
I'm not sure what can be done short of preventing anonymous interaction, because that seems to bring out the worst in people. Many notorious trolls tend to be cowards, and are mortified when their actions are associated with their real names. This algorithm is obviously one way to address the problem, but I have to admit I remain skeptical about this sort of approach.
Windows 10.1 is now out, with Windows 10.2 and Windows 10.3 expected next year...
What's in a name?
I still think they should have called it Windows X, and started designated the major releases using names of various rodents. Windows X Hamster, Windows X Squirrel, Windows X Guinea Pig, etc
Emoji guns don't kill people. Emoji bullets do.
I've been through two major OS upgrades and even more minor ones since purchasing my Mac mini, none of which I paid for. Either you're misinformed or Apple just really likes me for some reason.
No kidding. On my microwave, there's a button that's labeled "bacon". Seriously? What the hell does a "bacon" button do? I've never dared to press it. I'm going to be really upset if I find out that pressing that button magically makes bacon appear in my microwave, and I never read the instruction manual to find that out.
You know what else was awesome? How Microsoft took this opportunity to re-install the Get Office app (how I missed those nag screens informing me that my copy of Office 2010 just isn't shiny enough), and to put the Edge browser and MS Store icons back on my task bar. Because, my goodness, I had completely lost those apps. Thank goodness Microsoft is looking out for me by making sure I can find these valuable services again.
*tosses them into recycle bin once again*
Besides that, where would this even stop? People use computers for all sorts of things. Should your OS snoop on you to make sure you're not cheating on your taxes? Should it check to make sure you're not browsing just a bit too much at pro-Jihadist websites, or looking up how to make a pipebomb? How about if you're trying to figure out how to hire a hitman?
To be honest, though... this smells a lot like some trumped-up nonsense. We hear about shit like this all the time, and it never happens. Exactly how many stories about nefarious DRM-in-our-OS schemes does one have to hear about before getting completely jaded? A report from *TorrentFreak*? Um... yeah. Thanks, Slashdot, for once again giving completely unsubstantiated rumor-mongering some credibility. This was just a combination of a speculative piece based on a few words in a EULA, and a wishful-thinking report from a content-production organization telling about how they wish tech companies would solve all their problems, and also that they'd like a magical unicorn please.
From the article:
"In short, Comcast is arguing that protecting your own privacy should be a paid luxury option, and stopping them from doing so would raise broadband rates. But as we've noted for years it's the lack of competition that keeps broadband prices high. It's also the lack of competition that prevents users upset with broadband privacy practices from switching to another ISP. That's why the FCC thinks some basic privacy rules of the road might be a good idea.
So, unfortunately, instead of actually solving the real problem - the lack of competition, the FCC thinks "basic privacy rules might be a good idea." I mean, while I agree with that, it's just papering over the real issue. I understand that the FCC itself can't do anything about that, but I just can't see anything changing for the better in any significant way until we manage to break Comcast's near stranglehold on many areas of the market.
Also, Comcast's arguments about trading services for user information neglects to mention one tiny little fact: Most of the services that provide users a service in exchange for harvesting user information are providing a completely free service, like G-mail or Facebook, and many users seem to be fine with that. Comcast is "double dipping" - charging a significant amount for a paid service AND also trying to earn more by snooping on their customers. That's a completely different thing, and Comcast will have a hard time convincing anyone that they need to do this to remain profitable or that this is forcing them to keep rates high. The notion that allowing them to snoop on users would actually end up lowering rates is laughable. Users don't have any choices in many cases, so there's no pressure on them to keep rates competitive.
I suppose this isn't entirely unexpected. Windows has never played well with others in a multi-boot environment. I recall that it doesn't preserve alternate bootloaders like Grub when installing a new OS, and I'd imagine that's how these major upgrades are treated. There were probably changes to the bootloader of some sort, and so it blithely "updated" it, wiping out the existing bootloader, apparently without bothering to confirm whether it *should* or not.
This is why my Windows dev machine is Windows-only, and I've got a separate Linux box with multiple distros on it for Linux-specific development.
But seriously, Microsoft? That's just lame. It's hard to imagine that this isn't a known scenario that they wouldn't think to test for. It's not like multi-boot scenarios are unheard of.
I thought I'd adopt Captain Haddock-like insults, just for today. "Twittering paddy-cake" just seemed an appropriately British insult, given the article. Feel free to use as you wish.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't mean to imply the bullet trains didn't end up being useful (re-reading, it does sort of sound like I was implying that). The Japanese love them, and they're incredibly well-used there... as are ALL their public transportation infrastructure, in fact. But the international attention garnered by the last Olympics held there was what motivated their construction. That's a pretty well-known fact, not a denigration of the trains themselves.
TV resolutions and audio channel count have now jumped the shark. This is clearly about "bigger numbers are better" at this point. Who in Japan has 90" televisions that could possibly make use of that resolution? Seriously, isn't that what digital movie projectors use?
I'd bet this is more about international prestige than anything else, sort of like how they built the bullet trains (Shinkansen) for their last Olympics. From what I hear, they tend to care a great deal how the rest of the world sees them. You'll probably see some more impressive public works in time for their Olympic games.
Bullshit. The extra 1 min it takes to get the barman to call a EMT is *not* going to make that much difference. In fact I would assert that it makes none at all. The distance of the pub from the closest hospital will be the dominating factor. In the 60s as in the 2016s.
I guess you missed the part where I'm *agreeing with you*.
After all, there's a land line, and in most emergencies, you could also quickly run outside to call.
Try at least reading to the end of the post, you twittering paddy-cake.
Yeah, because that's a spot on description of something that happens in bars all of the time.
Which is why I also included "medical emergencies", you bilious blunderbuss.
That's very nice of you to do this for that young lady. My advice:
People here tend to complain about Microsoft's "privacy invading" features, but keep in mind they do actually come with some tangible benefits. One of the benefits of using a Microsoft account is that the computer can automatically back up all her documents to OneDrive, which offers 5GB of free storage, or (naturally) paid plans if she needs more. If you don't want to do this, will you also take responsibility for setting up the computer with an alternative backup service? One advantage of OneDrive is that it's integrated into Windows Explorer, making it fairly simple to use.
Personally, I don't make use of them myself, but then again, I backup my Windows, Mac, and Linux machines to my Linux-based NAS, which is in turn set up to push backups to an Amazon AWS account. You have to realize that people like me are not... normal. It's very likely that this girl won't even think about backups until her drive crashes, or if she somehow loses or destroys her laptop, and she loses a semester of work.
Some are also suggesting installing Linux Mint. It's a great OS, but have you looked at her college requirements to see if what software they use? If they only have Windows and Mac versions, you might not be doing her a favor by installing Linux. Do they support Linux (with detailed instructions) when she needs to connect to the college network? Also, again, what about automatic backups, which are critically important? Unfortunately, I'm not sure what's available for Linux Mint, as again, my own systems use a custom backup system.
It's important that you consider what would really serve this young lady best, rather than letting ideology drive your technical decisions when setting everything up for her.
You know how we functioned without a mobile phone? We couldn't do a thing in many cases, and people died because of it. No, not terrorist attacks, but more mundane things like medical emergencies and car accidents.
A decade and a half ago (or thereabouts), I was driving with my father on a winter-slick rural road, and we came upon an accident. A kid had just lost control of his car and flipped it over on the side of the road. My dad had his cell phone with him (that's what they were called then) and called 911. Fortunately, the kid wasn't badly hurt, but if he had been, that call may have saved his life.
It was then that I determined I really should get a cell phone of my own. What I saw someone else in an accident and couldn't make a simple phone call to help them? Or, perhaps more likely, what if I got stranded myself and needed some assistance?
I'm not saying blocking mobile calls should be illegal in a private establishment - so long as patrons are notified. After all, there's a land line, and in most emergencies, you could also quickly run outside to call. I'm just saying that you shouldn't pooh-pooh how many lives mobile phones have likely saved. That's a critical function of them, one you may not appreciate until you have to use it yourself.
Xbox Live is perhaps finally worth the $60 per year for Xbox one owners, as you get three free games each month (two Xbox one, plus one compatible Xbox 360 game). Some are crap, as you'd expect, but there have been some real gems in there as well.
but once they see people are buying the new hardware by the millions, the following E3 will result in big reveals for games that can only run on the newer consoles.
PC makers have been making games that scale to different levels of hardware for decades. There's no reason console makers can't do the same thing. And it's a hell of a lot easier when you've got only TWO targets with precisely known specs, rather than the complete spectrum of devices PC makers always deal with.
Yeah, good point. You'd want just a validation hash of someone's identity so it couldn't be reversed.
When I say "invalidates the entire results", I don't mean it destroys the blockchain. Rather, I meant that any illicitly modified blockchain can be easily detected as invalid. A better way of putting it is that the electronic ledger is essentially "tamper-proof". It's impossible for anyone to modify any piece of the ledger without invalidating the entire thing - and because the ledger is widely disseminated (that's the "distributed" part), no one can replace the *entire* ledger without someone noticing such a drastic modification. It's sort of like how changing a single bit in any file, no matter how large that file is, will result in a completely different hash value. A blockchain is just a way of using cryptographic-quality hashes to incrementally validate data as it's entered.
So, to answer your question, no, you don't have to run the election again. :)
Then whoever controls 51% of the mining, controls the election. I dont see how this is a good idea.
Bitcoin != blockchains. There is no "mining" in a generic blockchain, nor any notion of "51% = control". Those are Bitcoin-specific implementation details.
A blockchain is just a digital ledger that's been encrypted in such a way that you can't alter previous entries without invalidating the entire results. Essentially, it's a way of preventing someone from going back in time and "cooking the books". Think of it as a set of data entries sorted by time, each digitally signed, with the results depending on the results both on the current block AND the signed results of all previous blocks. If you try to alter an earlier figure, the digital signature doesn't match.
Although blockchains are decentralized by nature (sort of like Git), you can certainly designate one source as "authoritative" (like a repository on GitHub). So, in the case of elections or banking, there would obviously be an authoritative source that only permitted valid changes to be made, even if the ledgers themselves are decentralized. In the case of Bitcoin, the authoritative source is actually an algorithm, but in the case of an election, it would probably just be encrypted personal information and who you voted for.
"Although approximately 450,000 people now drive for Uber, there are 210 million licensed drivers in the United States -- and an estimated 4.2 million adults who drive impaired, the study says."
And I love the numbers with no context. Are these 4.2 million people driving drunk daily? Weekly? Monthly? Ever?
You can't simply compare total numbers of drivers or even drunk-drivers versus that of Uber drivers. A single Uber driver can service *many* customers. This is basic logic, which seems to escape some.
I actually believe it will work the other way, where popular actors and actresses will preserve and license their likeness, so they can be digitally recreated at any age and for any performance based on past works. You may see instances where actors are created digitally from scratch, but I believe that people will be more interested in seeing human performances in most creative endeavors, except in rare cases as a novelty.