There is no encryption being removed here. What is being removed is the negotiation of encryption. There's a huge difference.
So there would have been encryption, but due to their MITM attack there isn't.
As a reasonable person, that sounds like "removing the encryption" to me.
Just as my wife might say she removed the salt from a meal she prepared, even if she simply elected not to put the salt specified by the recipe into it.
The salt isn't there. Normally it would be. Enough said. We generally all understand the semantics, and I've never felt the need to call her out on it.
I'd say the semantics are the same here. Removing the STARTLS request from the client's traffic is effectively removing the encryption; in the same way ignoring the recipe's instructions to add a salt is removing the salt.
Sure, perhaps a more precise term would be 'omitting the salt'. But "removing the salt" is well understood by all.
This could have been avoided if the authors had used LaTeX for writing their paper.
Hardly. This would have been avoided if the authors had written:
(************ SHOULD WE CITE THE CRAPPY XYZ PAPER HERE *************)
And then it wouldn't have gotten missed even in Notepad. In anything more advanced than notepad I'd also format it bold, and in red too.
Arguing for the commenting features of latex presume they would actually know about the feature, AND choose to use it. For all I know they did use latex, but didn't bother to mark it as a comment. (I mean, they probably used Word, and they didn't mark it as a comment with that either, which they could have done -- so why would switching to latex make them use the feature??)
But using the commenting feature would also potentially be a detriment. They may well WANT their own review, and internal reviewers to see this stuff, so that they can render an opinion. Having it simply omitted from the PDF or printout they are looking at means they don't see it, and can't mark a note... "Hey -- you should cite that paper" or "don't bother with that"... in their review notes.
Corporations don't take family vacations to Disneyland.
No, they hire a consultant to go with them, call it a "Team building exercise", and then the whole thing is a deductible training expense.
If they spend on something that is not income related, then it is not deductible
Of course it is. It still reduces their profits. As taxes are on profits, not revenues it reduces their taxes. The business could buy itself a yacht and that would reduces its taxes, then it could maintain the yacht, and keep it at a marina and that would further reduce its taxes.
Then, if the CEO uses the corporate yacht to go fishing then that might be a taxable benefit on his taxes. (So his taxes go up for using the yacht the corporation owns and maintains.) But if the CEO brings a prospective client or vendor fishing with him then the cost of the whole outing is an advertising/marketing expense.
There are ALL kinds of games one can play with corporate finances.
You want to see what all the hype is about... you don't want to invest a massive amount of time doing so.
I can respect that.
But then current MMORPG solutions is to start you at the beginning and then make you read through it reading one frame every 10 pages. It still takes you a week or two... and it was even less than utterly pointless.
Start new players and new characters one expansion pack behind at the level / skill / gear they should be entering that expansion with and be done with it.
Leave the 'old world' out there for those who like to go back... and if someone or a guild wants to start some alts or whatever at level 1, its because they want to... just let them do it, don't try and boost them through it at light speed. Everybody wins.
Nobody wins with the current solution of forcing people who DON'T want to play the 'old game' to play it at light speed, and ruining for the people who do want to see it with an alt or something.
Even if someone hasn't played WoW, they don't want to do stuff that is 7 years old.
Why not exactly? (Not that i disagree, per se, in an mmorpg, the journey is the point -- why wouldn't I want to start at level 1 and level to X and see the world along the way?
The program I have in games, is that so many people DON'T want to play the early game that they've boosted the XP gain so far that one really can't play the early game.
Quest 1 -- go kill a dozen chickens and come back and I'll give you a level 3 hat.
12 chickens later and your level 7. erm... thanks for a useless hat.
Quest 2 -- go kill 9 giant rats and I'll give you a level 3 boot.
9 rats later... your level 12 now... your using a level 1 starter sword, and you have a useless pair of boots and a hat... useless relative to your own level.
Quest 3 -- oh skip this line what do I need a level 3 pair of pants for... here's something kill 12 ogre shaman for a level 12 sword.
Oh.. shaman are mixed with other stuff... 31 ogres later your level 20 you get your now useless sword. Still not wearing anything in half your armor slots and that level 3 hat and boots are worthless.
I've got 20 new skills and abilities, and so far haven't needed anything beyond the regular auto attack... so I'm not learning squat here.
Hmm... here's a cave,... oh cool a little dungeon... and nothing in it more than level 15... when exactly was I supposed to do this? Its useless, and not even fun now.
And the whole first 4/5ths of the game is this sort of annoying.
I'm old enough to remember when poorly chosen answering machine messages got houses robbed.
Even then the advice was simple -- "don't tell a lot of people your going away, and when you will be back". Advice that holds true today. Advice that you must willfully ignore in order to bring about anecdotes like yours.
Common sense goes a long way.
Common sense would have you look at the growing body of studies that show that facebook on average makes people less happy. And then draw the obvious conclusion.
I hope you're likewise refusing to maintain a checking account, don't have any credit cards, don't own any property, aren't registered to vote, and are posting on/. via a tor proxy or some other such method to preserve the privacy that you profess to value so much.
Do you have a real argument FOR using facebook? Because comparing being on facebook to having a checking account and voting is pretty weaksauce.
Funny, I'm actually arguing your side of the argument in another thread on another article. So I agree with you completely on that front.
I'd like to see anonymous transactions too. But I'm still not sold on stored value cards.
a) I don't like the risk associated with having value tied to the physical card.
b) I'm not convinced the average stored value card is truly anonymous. Can the system really not track you by the use of your stored value card? Does your proposed card really not have any unique identifiers?
c) How is this stored value card protected from fraud and cloning. It sounds like doomed DRM to me to have a card that has a balance available yet prevents someone with physical access from being able to make a copy of the card, or alter the balance.
Bottom line... while I don't like being tracked. Using cash or stored value cards doesn't seem to be an overall improvement. (And even cash can be tracked, I'm surprised in a sense that its not already tracking serial number usage at the average cashiers till, ATM, and bank teller. Mainstream doing that an we'll get all kinds of interesting information from consumer profiling to identifying money laundering by watching the literally cash flow around the country. And all these 20s dispensed from all these ATMs around round the city all showing up in an out of state "laundrymats" bank deposits... or whatever other irregularities...
You seem to be trying to take your personal preferences and apply them to myself and the millions of other people who have found social networking to be useful despite the annoyances that come with it
I'm trying very hard to keep my "personal preferences" out of it. I am just saying one can get along fine without it. That its not 'necessary evil'.
I find it nice to stay abreast of the developments in my friend's lives.
I get that.
Want another anecdote?
I don't doubt that happens.
Do you want another anecdote? If we all submitted right now, to having our blood, DNA, and fingerprints taken a whole whack of crimes could be solved, a whole whack of people with diseases could be diagnosed and treated, a whole bunch of families could be re-uinited, missing children found,... there's all kinds of good things we can do with that.
The chance to see someone I haven't seen in more than a decade is well worth the aggravation of Facebook.
Do you play the lottery too? Because winning a million bucks is a pretty good deal for the winners. Not so much for everyone else though. And I'm not even sure you won a million bucks... more like you won... $150.
But seriously, you haven't seen them in a decade. Pragmatically, if you didn't see them in Helsinki it wouldn't really make an iota of difference to you. Pragmatically you have lots more long lost friends all over the place, and not seeing any of them hasn't lost you any sleep.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy bumping into people I haven't seen in years too... but I really don't see a valid argument to justify signing up to an advertising network just to slightly increase the frequency it happens.
And what if you get back from Helsinki and find your place has been robbed because you posted you were going away on facebook. I know people its happened to. Their kids shared with their friends they were going away on facebook; the perps were never properly caught but their kids heard through the grapevine at school how an older sibling of a friend of a friend or something who saw the facebook post...
The chance to see someone I haven't seen in more than a decade is well worth the aggravation of Facebook.
Is it really? Or have you just not been badly burned yet? With facebook, we're just starting to grasp how nasty it can be to be on the losing end.
Everything else aside, big data, the government spying, insurance company and advertising companies trying to more effectively deny you coverage or sell you crap you don't need. Setting all that aside.
Facebook hasn't resulted in a net benefit to our happiness. Plenty of studies agree. There are some useful features and you can cherry pick positive anecdotes, but for most people facebook hasn't made life better.
For most of them, it's wasted scads of their time, created drama, caused them embarrassment, caused them stress. Exposed them to petty gossip and other peoples drama, other peoples narcissism, etc... and for what? The off chance when they are in Europe someone they know from a different part of Europe will happen to be where they are going...
You sir...you won a small lottery. Congrats.
Its still mostly a losing game. And that's even before factoring in nastiness of what big-data, and government etc are looking to do with you with it.
Don't blame me if your friends have a low signal to noise ratio.
Without meaning to be offensive, why do you think your marathon updates are something all your friends want to read broadcasts about? Its a big event for -you- sure; and far better than your thoughts on breakfast... but there is no real particular need or urgency for me know about it, the day it happens, in a broadcast message. It can wait until we see eachother again; I'll say what's new... and you'll have something genuinely interesting to talk about. I'll be genuinely interested in hearing about it. What did we need facebook for exactly?
If we were friends, and I was on facebook, sure I wouldn't complain about it. 4 posts in 6 months is not excessive noise at all. But I'd hardly miss it if I didn't hear about until we met up somewhere or talked.
I run road races; many of them only provide useful updates via FB,
Yeah, and I concede the point that there are some REALLY stupid organizations out there. And while it hasn't happened yet, it may one day happen that there is some event I want to deal with that I need an FB account for.
But I'd also take the opportunity to point out how stupid it is for an organization to let facebook or any company have total control over their access to their customers/followers/etc.
Whether its facebook, or ebay, or amazon... if your entire presence is at their whim, your fucked if they decide to fuck with you.
Run your own site, and use facebook etc to get people to it. Engage your customers on facebook -- its where they are so you need to be there too... but don't let facebook own your customers.Then if you and facebook part ways you aren't out of business. And if facebook says "jump", you don't have to say "how high".
I think most reputable businesses and organizations get this, only the really bottom end, the local hairdresser or the mom and pop donair shop with their menu online are 'facebook' only.
) I have friends all over the world; literally, on every continent. Is there a better centralized method of communicating with them? Should I send out a broadcast e-mail to all of them every time something noteworthy happens in my life?...
Anything a friend broadcasts me is rarely worth reading. And a broadcast email etc for something like a baby being born etc... is fine.
2) I have friends that only communicate via Facebook. They won't talk on the phone, they don't text, and they rarely check/answer e-mail.
Easy. Those aren't friends.:) Seriously... they WON'T communicate with you except on facebook, so therefore you MUST be on facebook?
3) Ever tried dating in the modern world without Facebook? It's instantly assumed that you're hiding something, which to be fair is frequently the case for people that refuse to share Facebook with would-be mates.
No. But then I'd consider that a handy filter. Anyone who thought I needed a facebook account isn't worth my time.
4) There's an ever growing list of companies and events that decline to maintain a webpage or otherwise keep it updated. If you want to stay abreast of their developments the only way is via FB or Twitter. This ties back into the critical mass comment from earlier.
I've yet to encounter one. Several local businesses have facebook pages instead of websites, but its public and it comes up when i search for them, even though I don't have a facebook account. Of course I can't "follow" them... but that's their loss not mine.
Facebook is a necessary evil.
No, its really not. I'm living without it just fine. No one in my household has an account. The kids think its stupid, and don't even want accounts.
Sure when we visit an aunt at thanksgiving we're a few months behind on the news... so what that we didn't know my niece has a new boyfriend the day it happened or that my brother in law has a new job? Catching up, gives us something to talk about.
I think you are strongly underestimating the amount of tracking and profiling that happens when you make purchases using a credit card. I presume you're familiar with Target's "pregnancy detection" profiling that caused an uproar a few years ago.
Quite familiar. But remember, that's just within Target's own loyalty card. That's not the federal government, and that's not Target tracking you even at other stores. As it happens I do use the loyalty card at the supermarket I use and I'm generally ok with THEM tracking / trending what I'm buying with it there.
I don't generally object to a given store knowing what I've bought AT that store. Indeed i consider it fairly inevitable. After all, I walk up to a cashier show them all my purchases, they look at my face, and then take my payment... if they wanted to keep track of people paying cash, it's all there.
What about Facebook linking the purchases you make in brick & mortar stores to ads they have shown you while you're browsing?
I don't have a facebook account. But the system allegedly isn't personally providing purchase personally identifying information. Supposedly its all hashes. Personally I'd love to see it audited to be sure but you are probably over estimating the value of the data.
I suppose this is also a matter of perspective: I consider the risk of database purchase profile data to have a larger potential for adverse consequences for me than the risk of losing the amount of cash/stored value I carry.
Your kids get what we give them or they do without and get left behind
Because their education will be incomplete if they don't know how to set up their G+ profile and use Hangouts? Your school is chronically underfunded and yet this is what you are teaching them?
No offense, and honestly, I doubt this is even the case. Hopefully they just use GAFE have some cloud storage for some written assignments, and to work on said written assignments in google apps, and everything else is pretty much off; and maybe a school email address that only can send / receive within the schools domain; parents are given the kids passwords when they sign the permission slips. Of course 365 doesn't have the equivalent of G+ etc to deal with, so that's not an issue.
That's roughly how my kids Office 365 is setup.
The point being, that one CAN do it responsibly. Or one can do absurd and ridiculous things like require the kids fill out a G+ profile, and spend class time learning and being encouraged to use hangouts to communicate... I've seen shit like that proposed.
it's as simple as that and we can't afford to apologize.
There's a lot of things kids need, but having the school load them into an advertising network, and train them how to enter their information into it is not one of them.
Being able to get a notification as soon as the freezer fails, or the sump pump fails, or the furnace fails would make a big difference in just how shitty your day is going to end up being.
Murphy's law dictates that whatever you aren't monitoring will be what fails. And if you monitor "everything" then the monitoring system itself will fail.
I generally share your sentiment, but reality is a bitch sometimes.:)
Who said you have to load thousands of dollars at a time on a preloaded cash-equivalent card?
Common sense does. I gave a typical example, my evening yesterday. Just regular run of the mill stuff. $700+ in one evening. Sure not every evening is like that, but how often am I going to load the card? I figure to live on a cash or (cash equivalent card) I'm going to be loading the card with at LEAST $1000 to $1500 at a time. And that'll get me a few to a month tops. The alternative would be what? Loading it daily based on what I expect my daily expenses to be? That's a pain in the ASS and it STILL means I'm wandering around with $1000 in my pocket far more often than I'd like.
And you're welcome to enjoy having the federal government track everything you do while paying the credit card companies for that "privilege" through interest charges and higher prices passed through to you by retailers.
Oh, look: I can misrepresent your position just as easily as you do mine.
I don't think that's THAT much of a misrepresentation. I'm not sure how much personally identifying information they actually take. It sounds like the law doesn't allow them to collect personally identifiable information at all, making it somewhat less egregious than you make out. (Although I also readily concede I don't easily believe that they are within the law. I am optimistic that we could get them there.)
When was the last time you were mugged/robbed, had your house burgled, lost a non-trivial amount of cash, or had cash destroyed in a fire?
I personally have never been mugged or robbed. Although my brother's had his car stolen, and my wife's family home has been burgled several times (consoles, games, jewelry, cash, and CDs). My grandfather has been mugged.
I'm also not particularly likely to get mugged because I'm rarely out and about alone, don't use transit, practically never withdraw cash from ATMs, and never use check cashing companies. Muggers target just those sorts of people -- after all, who better to mug than the guy who you just saw pull a wad out of an ATM, and who is now walking home alone... so MY personal (lack of) mugging experiences aren't necessarily representative of everyone elses circumstances.
I've never lost a non-trivial amount of cash because I don't carry much to lose. I've lost (or have had stolen?) my wallet on at least 2 occasions. And had it found/returned on one of them, minus the cash. And its gone through the wash/dry cycle at least twice as well.
Further cash is pretty durable compared to 'stored value cards'. I've had gift cards that couldn't be read (value lost), Credit cards that wouldn't read, debit cards that wouldn't read, etc.
But you can take and old worn 20 bill, put it through the washing machine, retrieve the pieces, and as long as you have enough of it they'll give you a new 20. I've done it. (See washing machine incidents above.) When my cards stop working, they just stop working -- fortunately most of them are just proxies for the value in an account, and not store of value for the account itself.
In my experience cash is significantly more durable than cards. (Because even if damaged, its usually still recognized and accepted as cash.)
though I wanted to point out that early highrise steel workers rarely used safety lines
Fair enough, safety in general has come a long way. I'm not sure when steel toed boots and hard hats become de rigeur for that matter either.
It's one of the reasons that construction firms went out of their way to hire Mohegans, as for some reason they didn't get the vertigo that's common amongst most of the rest of the human race. Actually, they still fill the ranks of steelworkers to this day.
Seems to be a myth.
There ARE a lot of native american's in steework, but it seems to be more cultural (feats of fearlessnes being revered -- aka its a macho thing) and economic (reservation inhabitants don't have a lot of real opportunities) reasons behind it.
And then once a demographic has a foothold in a market, its common to grow. Friends and family apply to where friends work, because friends and family will refer or help get them hired...), children apply where Dad can help get them in, and it becomes inter-generational.
I take it you find cash fatally flawed for those same reasons: the possibility of theft, loss, or destruction.
Yes. I don't wander around the streets with $100s or $1000s of dollars on me for precisely those reasons.
I do make small purchases with cash all the time, but the amount's I'd ever be faced with losing are not significant enough to matter. Last night alone I bought groceries, plus gas, plus the car battery unexpectedly needed to be replaced, and the delay caused by the latter meant we grabbed take out for dinner. All in $~400 in groceries between the farmers market, butcher, and supermarket, $170 for the battery, $80 for takeout, $60 for gas. over $700. I don't need or want to be carrying that around, because I would miss that if I lost it.
Of course, cash is anonymousâ"which you don't get with a credit card or check.
I don't really get it with cash either if the person taking my money knows who I am.
Are you okay with the federal government tracking every purchase you make with plastic?
No. I am not, "Ok with that".
Because they are.... through a controversial data-mining program that is widely regarded as operating outside its legal authority...
So how about we just rein them in instead of playing cat and mouse with them.
But sure in the meantime, if you are buying something you don't want tracked arrange for an cash envelope drop in a park at night on Halloween or something.
Plus as a publicly funded, attendance is essentially mandatory (private and homeschooling alternatives aside), AND it involves children.
It should be held to the highest privacy standards.
A public school absolutely should NOT be loading advertising companies with profiles of our children. As a parent and as a taxpayer I am against it on both fronts.
I absolutely should have some say in whether my kids are served up to google.
And schools are generally pretty upfront and careful. I get asked for permission for pictures of our kids to appear on the school website (declined). We had to sign permission for our kids to be setup on Office 365 (as that's what their school is trying it out instead of g-apps). After a lot of consideration we elected to allow it, but monitor the kids on it closely, and are using it as a 'teaching opportunity'. But we could have declined it.
I do know of some parents who have hyper stances against their kid using the internet etc; and as far as I know the schools have always made allowances to accomodate these. Just as they allow parents to opt kids out of sex-ed, biology dissections, field trips, and any other topics that a subset of parents may find objectionable.
Your assertion that schools can ram google or anything else down our throats and we can only say, "thank you sir, please, can i have some more?" or pull our kids out of school entirely is just ridiculous.
The differences between applying this to the police and to the general public
Is that the police would be subject to it, while at work, in their work provided vehicle. Same as any of us who drive a vehicle that's part of a corporate fleet that is tracked.
It wouldn't apply to the police's personal vehicle.
It gets a little tiring to hear that all Win8 needs is a bunch of reconfigurion and/or installing classic-shell/charms to make it perfectly usable.
Win8 need that. 8.1 really doesn't, and by the looks of things 10 furthers the trend towards usability.
As for the other settings that "need" tweaking there's always been bad defaults. Your remembering the past with rose colored glasses. Win 98 had "active destkop" to turn your desktop background into a web page. Remember turning that off 1000 times?
XP - at launch people didn't like the 'fisher price' look, and millions of them spent hours making it look just like windows 2000.
Windows 7 -- people didn't like aero -- aero snap, aero peek, the new task switcher, transparency...
And I didn't even mention the rocky start UAC had. But surely you don't think we should return to the XP, run-as-administrator-if-you-want-anything-to-work days.
Win8 insists on imposing the Windows Store experience on everyone, at every turn.
Huh? You set your login up as a local account. And don't launch any "metro" apps (I just unpin them from the start screen, and map images, music, and video to VLC/XBMC/itunes/etc...) the only "metro" app I use is netflix. Microsoft store never makes its presence known.
Apologies if this sounds curt. I just finished 30+ hours of downgrading my mother-in-laws laptop to Win7, at her insistence.
From 8 or 8.1 ? 8.1 is much improved. Beyond that, I could be sarcastic and say "Congrats you found an older person who doesn't want change." because often as not that's all it is.
But even so, I readily concede 8.1 needs more configuration out of the box than 7 did for the average desktop user. Most of the stuff on the default start screen is garbage and should be un-pinned. Programs should open with the desktop version not the full screen tablet version on a desktop, etc.
But I don't think it needs classic shell anymore. And the 8.1 start button (right click) is actually faster to get into a lot of stuff than win 7.
I certainly wouldn't waste 30 hours of my time downgrading it to 7.
That sounds more like a case of "she can have as much of your time she likes for free" so she just expects you do it. When she buys a new car she'll probably find she likes something about the old car more. The instrument cluster, or the seat fabric, or perhaps the trunk release switch was in a more convenient spot, whatever --- and if someone was available to spend 30 hours converting her new car to be 'just so' for free she'd probably insist they do that too. No offense, its just how people are -- hell the example I gave about the trunk release is my own -- I'm STILL not used to the new location of the trunk release in my new car -- and still reach for it in the old location. If I could move just "change it" at no effort or expense to myself... I probably would. Its just human nature to want what we are used to.
FTA: "These gains did not come at the expense of Windows 7, which still managed to grow 0.34 points to 53.05 percent."
Its not surprising really, if you have 7 there's really no compelling reason to upgrade to 8.1. Note that I like 8.1 just fine, its not worth the trouble of upgrading from 7. Especially not at the prices Microsoft is charging for it. I've got 3 Win7 laptop/PCs and even 2 older laptops the kids now use that still have Vista... I'd put 8.1 on all of them... but not at $120 for 8.1 or $200 for 8.1 Pro EACH. I'm simply not going to pay $600 to $1000 to upgrade my home computers to 8.1.
If it were to cost $200 or less to upgrader the entire home, sure. I'd do it, but not at $1000. Not when I know Windows 10 is coming. Not when I know the old laptops are only last another year or so. Not when I know why I buy a new laptop it'll come with the current version on it.
People migrate to the current versions with apple because its free, and in the last few years before that nearly free. Couple that with Apple's extremely aggressive discontinuation of support for anything more than 1 version back and people HAVE to upgrade.
Microsoft is more established in enterprises, and has much longer support cycles... it doesn't matter how good windows 7 is (nevermind your feelings about 8.1 or the upcoming 10 are).. XP is still clinging on and will for years to come.
Reality is that consumers will get the new OS when they buy a new computer. And businesses will get the new OS -- any new OS, kicking and screaming, when they have no choice.
Windows 8.1 sends my every search query to Microsoft if I don't block them by IP at the DNS, router, and hosts file levels.
Gosh...if you search for something, and it looks on the web, it gets sent to the web search engine. Those bastards.
Oh wait... well, suppose you don't WANT it to search the web, just the local computer? And Microsoft forces every search to go the web? Those bastards!
Oh wait... you can turn that 'feature' off? Let me guess -- its a registry hack or some obscure command line thing right? Its actually simpler to block them at the DNS, router, and hosts level... Those bastards.
Oh wait... its a simple gui accessible option in search. The section is called "Use Bing to search online" and the option is called "Get search suggestions and web results from Bing", and its a simple on or off.
Well... other operating systems don't pull this shit... uhoh... OSX Spotlight has this option too? And Ubuntu does too?
Overreact much? Did you even think to look whether you could simply turn it off before you ran to your firewall configuration in your router?
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. Nearly all people from my generation (35-40) I know complain how well-behaved and submissive today's youngsters are.
Yes this is exactly why my generation thinks. That today's youngsters are far less wild than we were.
There is no encryption being removed here. What is being removed is the negotiation of encryption. There's a huge difference.
So there would have been encryption, but due to their MITM attack there isn't.
As a reasonable person, that sounds like "removing the encryption" to me.
Just as my wife might say she removed the salt from a meal she prepared, even if she simply elected not to put the salt specified by the recipe into it.
The salt isn't there. Normally it would be. Enough said. We generally all understand the semantics, and I've never felt the need to call her out on it.
I'd say the semantics are the same here. Removing the STARTLS request from the client's traffic is effectively removing the encryption; in the same way ignoring the recipe's instructions to add a salt is removing the salt.
Sure, perhaps a more precise term would be 'omitting the salt'. But "removing the salt" is well understood by all.
This could have been avoided if the authors had used LaTeX for writing their paper.
Hardly. This would have been avoided if the authors had written:
(************ SHOULD WE CITE THE CRAPPY XYZ PAPER HERE *************)
And then it wouldn't have gotten missed even in Notepad. In anything more advanced than notepad I'd also format it bold, and in red too.
Arguing for the commenting features of latex presume they would actually know about the feature, AND choose to use it. For all I know they did use latex, but didn't bother to mark it as a comment. (I mean, they probably used Word, and they didn't mark it as a comment with that either, which they could have done -- so why would switching to latex make them use the feature??)
But using the commenting feature would also potentially be a detriment. They may well WANT their own review, and internal reviewers to see this stuff, so that they can render an opinion. Having it simply omitted from the PDF or printout they are looking at means they don't see it, and can't mark a note ... "Hey -- you should cite that paper" or "don't bother with that"... in their review notes.
Corporations don't take family vacations to Disneyland.
No, they hire a consultant to go with them, call it a "Team building exercise", and then the whole thing is a deductible training expense.
If they spend on something that is not income related, then it is not deductible
Of course it is. It still reduces their profits. As taxes are on profits, not revenues it reduces their taxes. The business could buy itself a yacht and that would reduces its taxes, then it could maintain the yacht, and keep it at a marina and that would further reduce its taxes.
Then, if the CEO uses the corporate yacht to go fishing then that might be a taxable benefit on his taxes. (So his taxes go up for using the yacht the corporation owns and maintains.) But if the CEO brings a prospective client or vendor fishing with him then the cost of the whole outing is an advertising/marketing expense.
There are ALL kinds of games one can play with corporate finances.
You want to see what all the hype is about... you don't want to invest a massive amount of time doing so.
I can respect that.
But then current MMORPG solutions is to start you at the beginning and then make you read through it reading one frame every 10 pages. It still takes you a week or two... and it was even less than utterly pointless.
Start new players and new characters one expansion pack behind at the level / skill / gear they should be entering that expansion with and be done with it.
Leave the 'old world' out there for those who like to go back... and if someone or a guild wants to start some alts or whatever at level 1, its because they want to... just let them do it, don't try and boost them through it at light speed. Everybody wins.
Nobody wins with the current solution of forcing people who DON'T want to play the 'old game' to play it at light speed, and ruining for the people who do want to see it with an alt or something.
Even if someone hasn't played WoW, they don't want to do stuff that is 7 years old.
Why not exactly? (Not that i disagree, per se, in an mmorpg, the journey is the point -- why wouldn't I want to start at level 1 and level to X and see the world along the way?
The program I have in games, is that so many people DON'T want to play the early game that they've boosted the XP gain so far that one really can't play the early game.
Quest 1 -- go kill a dozen chickens and come back and I'll give you a level 3 hat.
12 chickens later and your level 7. erm... thanks for a useless hat.
Quest 2 -- go kill 9 giant rats and I'll give you a level 3 boot.
9 rats later... your level 12 now... your using a level 1 starter sword, and you have a useless pair of boots and a hat... useless relative to your own level.
Quest 3 -- oh skip this line what do I need a level 3 pair of pants for... here's something kill 12 ogre shaman for a level 12 sword.
Oh.. shaman are mixed with other stuff... 31 ogres later your level 20 you get your now useless sword. Still not wearing anything in half your armor slots and that level 3 hat and boots are worthless.
I've got 20 new skills and abilities, and so far haven't needed anything beyond the regular auto attack... so I'm not learning squat here.
Hmm... here's a cave, ... oh cool a little dungeon... and nothing in it more than level 15... when exactly was I supposed to do this? Its useless, and not even fun now.
And the whole first 4/5ths of the game is this sort of annoying.
I'm old enough to remember when poorly chosen answering machine messages got houses robbed.
Even then the advice was simple -- "don't tell a lot of people your going away, and when you will be back". Advice that holds true today. Advice that you must willfully ignore in order to bring about anecdotes like yours.
Common sense goes a long way.
Common sense would have you look at the growing body of studies that show that facebook on average makes people less happy. And then draw the obvious conclusion.
I hope you're likewise refusing to maintain a checking account, don't have any credit cards, don't own any property, aren't registered to vote, and are posting on /. via a tor proxy or some other such method to preserve the privacy that you profess to value so much.
Do you have a real argument FOR using facebook? Because comparing being on facebook to having a checking account and voting is pretty weaksauce.
My point is that data gets abused
Funny, I'm actually arguing your side of the argument in another thread on another article. So I agree with you completely on that front.
I'd like to see anonymous transactions too. But I'm still not sold on stored value cards.
a) I don't like the risk associated with having value tied to the physical card.
b) I'm not convinced the average stored value card is truly anonymous. Can the system really not track you by the use of your stored value card? Does your proposed card really not have any unique identifiers?
c) How is this stored value card protected from fraud and cloning. It sounds like doomed DRM to me to have a card that has a balance available yet prevents someone with physical access from being able to make a copy of the card, or alter the balance.
Bottom line... while I don't like being tracked. Using cash or stored value cards doesn't seem to be an overall improvement. (And even cash can be tracked, I'm surprised in a sense that its not already tracking serial number usage at the average cashiers till, ATM, and bank teller. Mainstream doing that an we'll get all kinds of interesting information from consumer profiling to identifying money laundering by watching the literally cash flow around the country. And all these 20s dispensed from all these ATMs around round the city all showing up in an out of state "laundrymats" bank deposits... or whatever other irregularities...
You seem to be trying to take your personal preferences and apply them to myself and the millions of other people who have found social networking to be useful despite the annoyances that come with it
I'm trying very hard to keep my "personal preferences" out of it. I am just saying one can get along fine without it. That its not 'necessary evil'.
I find it nice to stay abreast of the developments in my friend's lives.
I get that.
Want another anecdote?
I don't doubt that happens.
Do you want another anecdote? If we all submitted right now, to having our blood, DNA, and fingerprints taken a whole whack of crimes could be solved, a whole whack of people with diseases could be diagnosed and treated, a whole bunch of families could be re-uinited, missing children found, ... there's all kinds of good things we can do with that.
The chance to see someone I haven't seen in more than a decade is well worth the aggravation of Facebook.
Do you play the lottery too? Because winning a million bucks is a pretty good deal for the winners. Not so much for everyone else though. And I'm not even sure you won a million bucks... more like you won... $150.
But seriously, you haven't seen them in a decade. Pragmatically, if you didn't see them in Helsinki it wouldn't really make an iota of difference to you. Pragmatically you have lots more long lost friends all over the place, and not seeing any of them hasn't lost you any sleep.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy bumping into people I haven't seen in years too... but I really don't see a valid argument to justify signing up to an advertising network just to slightly increase the frequency it happens.
And what if you get back from Helsinki and find your place has been robbed because you posted you were going away on facebook. I know people its happened to. Their kids shared with their friends they were going away on facebook; the perps were never properly caught but their kids heard through the grapevine at school how an older sibling of a friend of a friend or something who saw the facebook post...
The chance to see someone I haven't seen in more than a decade is well worth the aggravation of Facebook.
Is it really? Or have you just not been badly burned yet? With facebook, we're just starting to grasp how nasty it can be to be on the losing end.
Everything else aside, big data, the government spying, insurance company and advertising companies trying to more effectively deny you coverage or sell you crap you don't need. Setting all that aside.
Facebook hasn't resulted in a net benefit to our happiness. Plenty of studies agree. There are some useful features and you can cherry pick positive anecdotes, but for most people facebook hasn't made life better.
For most of them, it's wasted scads of their time, created drama, caused them embarrassment, caused them stress. Exposed them to petty gossip and other peoples drama, other peoples narcissism, etc... and for what? The off chance when they are in Europe someone they know from a different part of Europe will happen to be where they are going...
You sir...you won a small lottery. Congrats.
Its still mostly a losing game. And that's even before factoring in nastiness of what big-data, and government etc are looking to do with you with it.
Damn straight. The older engineers created it for them to be the antisocial shitheads; and now there's damned kids all over their lawn.
Don't blame me if your friends have a low signal to noise ratio.
Without meaning to be offensive, why do you think your marathon updates are something all your friends want to read broadcasts about? Its a big event for -you- sure; and far better than your thoughts on breakfast... but there is no real particular need or urgency for me know about it, the day it happens, in a broadcast message. It can wait until we see eachother again; I'll say what's new... and you'll have something genuinely interesting to talk about. I'll be genuinely interested in hearing about it. What did we need facebook for exactly?
If we were friends, and I was on facebook, sure I wouldn't complain about it. 4 posts in 6 months is not excessive noise at all. But I'd hardly miss it if I didn't hear about until we met up somewhere or talked.
I run road races; many of them only provide useful updates via FB,
Yeah, and I concede the point that there are some REALLY stupid organizations out there. And while it hasn't happened yet, it may one day happen that there is some event I want to deal with that I need an FB account for.
But I'd also take the opportunity to point out how stupid it is for an organization to let facebook or any company have total control over their access to their customers/followers/etc.
Whether its facebook, or ebay, or amazon... if your entire presence is at their whim, your fucked if they decide to fuck with you.
Run your own site, and use facebook etc to get people to it. Engage your customers on facebook -- its where they are so you need to be there too... but don't let facebook own your customers.Then if you and facebook part ways you aren't out of business. And if facebook says "jump", you don't have to say "how high".
I think most reputable businesses and organizations get this, only the really bottom end, the local hairdresser or the mom and pop donair shop with their menu online are 'facebook' only.
) I have friends all over the world; literally, on every continent. Is there a better centralized method of communicating with them? Should I send out a broadcast e-mail to all of them every time something noteworthy happens in my life?...
Anything a friend broadcasts me is rarely worth reading. And a broadcast email etc for something like a baby being born etc ... is fine.
2) I have friends that only communicate via Facebook. They won't talk on the phone, they don't text, and they rarely check/answer e-mail.
Easy. Those aren't friends. :) Seriously... they WON'T communicate with you except on facebook, so therefore you MUST be on facebook?
3) Ever tried dating in the modern world without Facebook? It's instantly assumed that you're hiding something, which to be fair is frequently the case for people that refuse to share Facebook with would-be mates.
No. But then I'd consider that a handy filter. Anyone who thought I needed a facebook account isn't worth my time.
4) There's an ever growing list of companies and events that decline to maintain a webpage or otherwise keep it updated. If you want to stay abreast of their developments the only way is via FB or Twitter. This ties back into the critical mass comment from earlier.
I've yet to encounter one. Several local businesses have facebook pages instead of websites, but its public and it comes up when i search for them, even though I don't have a facebook account. Of course I can't "follow" them... but that's their loss not mine.
Facebook is a necessary evil.
No, its really not. I'm living without it just fine. No one in my household has an account. The kids think its stupid, and don't even want accounts.
Sure when we visit an aunt at thanksgiving we're a few months behind on the news... so what that we didn't know my niece has a new boyfriend the day it happened or that my brother in law has a new job? Catching up, gives us something to talk about.
I think you are strongly underestimating the amount of tracking and profiling that happens when you make purchases using a credit card. I presume you're familiar with Target's "pregnancy detection" profiling that caused an uproar a few years ago.
Quite familiar. But remember, that's just within Target's own loyalty card. That's not the federal government, and that's not Target tracking you even at other stores. As it happens I do use the loyalty card at the supermarket I use and I'm generally ok with THEM tracking / trending what I'm buying with it there.
I don't generally object to a given store knowing what I've bought AT that store. Indeed i consider it fairly inevitable. After all, I walk up to a cashier show them all my purchases, they look at my face, and then take my payment... if they wanted to keep track of people paying cash, it's all there.
What about Facebook linking the purchases you make in brick & mortar stores to ads they have shown you while you're browsing?
I don't have a facebook account. But the system allegedly isn't personally providing purchase personally identifying information. Supposedly its all hashes. Personally I'd love to see it audited to be sure but you are probably over estimating the value of the data.
I suppose this is also a matter of perspective: I consider the risk of database purchase profile data to have a larger potential for adverse consequences for me than the risk of losing the amount of cash/stored value I carry.
Fair enough.
Your kids get what we give them or they do without and get left behind
Because their education will be incomplete if they don't know how to set up their G+ profile and use Hangouts? Your school is chronically underfunded and yet this is what you are teaching them?
No offense, and honestly, I doubt this is even the case. Hopefully they just use GAFE have some cloud storage for some written assignments, and to work on said written assignments in google apps, and everything else is pretty much off; and maybe a school email address that only can send / receive within the schools domain; parents are given the kids passwords when they sign the permission slips. Of course 365 doesn't have the equivalent of G+ etc to deal with, so that's not an issue.
That's roughly how my kids Office 365 is setup.
The point being, that one CAN do it responsibly. Or one can do absurd and ridiculous things like require the kids fill out a G+ profile, and spend class time learning and being encouraged to use hangouts to communicate... I've seen shit like that proposed.
it's as simple as that and we can't afford to apologize.
There's a lot of things kids need, but having the school load them into an advertising network, and train them how to enter their information into it is not one of them.
Being able to get a notification as soon as the freezer fails, or the sump pump fails, or the furnace fails would make a big difference in just how shitty your day is going to end up being.
Murphy's law dictates that whatever you aren't monitoring will be what fails. And if you monitor "everything" then the monitoring system itself will fail.
I generally share your sentiment, but reality is a bitch sometimes. :)
Who said you have to load thousands of dollars at a time on a preloaded cash-equivalent card?
Common sense does. I gave a typical example, my evening yesterday. Just regular run of the mill stuff. $700+ in one evening. Sure not every evening is like that, but how often am I going to load the card? I figure to live on a cash or (cash equivalent card) I'm going to be loading the card with at LEAST $1000 to $1500 at a time. And that'll get me a few to a month tops. The alternative would be what? Loading it daily based on what I expect my daily expenses to be? That's a pain in the ASS and it STILL means I'm wandering around with $1000 in my pocket far more often than I'd like.
And you're welcome to enjoy having the federal government track everything you do while paying the credit card companies for that "privilege" through interest charges and higher prices passed through to you by retailers.
Oh, look: I can misrepresent your position just as easily as you do mine.
I don't think that's THAT much of a misrepresentation. I'm not sure how much personally identifying information they actually take. It sounds like the law doesn't allow them to collect personally identifiable information at all, making it somewhat less egregious than you make out. (Although I also readily concede I don't easily believe that they are within the law. I am optimistic that we could get them there.)
When was the last time you were mugged/robbed, had your house burgled, lost a non-trivial amount of cash, or had cash destroyed in a fire?
I personally have never been mugged or robbed. Although my brother's had his car stolen, and my wife's family home has been burgled several times (consoles, games, jewelry, cash, and CDs). My grandfather has been mugged.
I'm also not particularly likely to get mugged because I'm rarely out and about alone, don't use transit, practically never withdraw cash from ATMs, and never use check cashing companies. Muggers target just those sorts of people -- after all, who better to mug than the guy who you just saw pull a wad out of an ATM, and who is now walking home alone... so MY personal (lack of) mugging experiences aren't necessarily representative of everyone elses circumstances.
I've never lost a non-trivial amount of cash because I don't carry much to lose. I've lost (or have had stolen?) my wallet on at least 2 occasions. And had it found/returned on one of them, minus the cash. And its gone through the wash/dry cycle at least twice as well.
Further cash is pretty durable compared to 'stored value cards'. I've had gift cards that couldn't be read (value lost), Credit cards that wouldn't read, debit cards that wouldn't read, etc.
But you can take and old worn 20 bill, put it through the washing machine, retrieve the pieces, and as long as you have enough of it they'll give you a new 20. I've done it. (See washing machine incidents above.) When my cards stop working, they just stop working -- fortunately most of them are just proxies for the value in an account, and not store of value for the account itself.
In my experience cash is significantly more durable than cards. (Because even if damaged, its usually still recognized and accepted as cash.)
though I wanted to point out that early highrise steel workers rarely used safety lines
Fair enough, safety in general has come a long way. I'm not sure when steel toed boots and hard hats become de rigeur for that matter either.
It's one of the reasons that construction firms went out of their way to hire Mohegans, as for some reason they didn't get the vertigo that's common amongst most of the rest of the human race. Actually, they still fill the ranks of steelworkers to this day.
Seems to be a myth.
There ARE a lot of native american's in steework, but it seems to be more cultural (feats of fearlessnes being revered -- aka its a macho thing) and economic (reservation inhabitants don't have a lot of real opportunities) reasons behind it.
And then once a demographic has a foothold in a market, its common to grow. Friends and family apply to where friends work, because friends and family will refer or help get them hired...), children apply where Dad can help get them in, and it becomes inter-generational.
I take it you find cash fatally flawed for those same reasons: the possibility of theft, loss, or destruction.
Yes. I don't wander around the streets with $100s or $1000s of dollars on me for precisely those reasons.
I do make small purchases with cash all the time, but the amount's I'd ever be faced with losing are not significant enough to matter. Last night alone I bought groceries, plus gas, plus the car battery unexpectedly needed to be replaced, and the delay caused by the latter meant we grabbed take out for dinner. All in $~400 in groceries between the farmers market, butcher, and supermarket, $170 for the battery, $80 for takeout, $60 for gas. over $700. I don't need or want to be carrying that around, because I would miss that if I lost it.
Of course, cash is anonymousâ"which you don't get with a credit card or check.
I don't really get it with cash either if the person taking my money knows who I am.
Are you okay with the federal government tracking every purchase you make with plastic?
No. I am not, "Ok with that".
Because they are. ... through a controversial data-mining program that is widely regarded as operating outside its legal authority...
So how about we just rein them in instead of playing cat and mouse with them.
But sure in the meantime, if you are buying something you don't want tracked arrange for an cash envelope drop in a park at night on Halloween or something.
Just give me a card that plugs into the USB port and that I can charge up at the 7-11 with cash...
And then when someone steals it, or it just spontaneously stops working one day... sure you'll still be ok with that?
School isn't a democracy
School boards are elected.
Plus as a publicly funded, attendance is essentially mandatory (private and homeschooling alternatives aside), AND it involves children.
It should be held to the highest privacy standards.
A public school absolutely should NOT be loading advertising companies with profiles of our children. As a parent and as a taxpayer I am against it on both fronts.
I absolutely should have some say in whether my kids are served up to google.
And schools are generally pretty upfront and careful. I get asked for permission for pictures of our kids to appear on the school website (declined). We had to sign permission for our kids to be setup on Office 365 (as that's what their school is trying it out instead of g-apps). After a lot of consideration we elected to allow it, but monitor the kids on it closely, and are using it as a 'teaching opportunity'. But we could have declined it.
I do know of some parents who have hyper stances against their kid using the internet etc; and as far as I know the schools have always made allowances to accomodate these. Just as they allow parents to opt kids out of sex-ed, biology dissections, field trips, and any other topics that a subset of parents may find objectionable.
Your assertion that schools can ram google or anything else down our throats and we can only say, "thank you sir, please, can i have some more?" or pull our kids out of school entirely is just ridiculous.
The differences between applying this to the police and to the general public
Is that the police would be subject to it, while at work, in their work provided vehicle. Same as any of us who drive a vehicle that's part of a corporate fleet that is tracked.
It wouldn't apply to the police's personal vehicle.
It gets a little tiring to hear that all Win8 needs is a bunch of reconfigurion and/or installing classic-shell/charms to make it perfectly usable.
Win8 need that. 8.1 really doesn't, and by the looks of things 10 furthers the trend towards usability.
As for the other settings that "need" tweaking there's always been bad defaults. Your remembering the past with rose colored glasses. Win 98 had "active destkop" to turn your desktop background into a web page. Remember turning that off 1000 times?
XP - at launch people didn't like the 'fisher price' look, and millions of them spent hours making it look just like windows 2000.
Windows 7 -- people didn't like aero -- aero snap, aero peek, the new task switcher, transparency...
And I didn't even mention the rocky start UAC had. But surely you don't think we should return to the XP, run-as-administrator-if-you-want-anything-to-work days.
Win8 insists on imposing the Windows Store experience on everyone, at every turn.
Huh? You set your login up as a local account. And don't launch any "metro" apps (I just unpin them from the start screen, and map images, music, and video to VLC/XBMC/itunes/etc...) the only "metro" app I use is netflix. Microsoft store never makes its presence known.
Apologies if this sounds curt. I just finished 30+ hours of downgrading my mother-in-laws laptop to Win7, at her insistence.
From 8 or 8.1 ? 8.1 is much improved. Beyond that, I could be sarcastic and say "Congrats you found an older person who doesn't want change." because often as not that's all it is.
But even so, I readily concede 8.1 needs more configuration out of the box than 7 did for the average desktop user. Most of the stuff on the default start screen is garbage and should be un-pinned. Programs should open with the desktop version not the full screen tablet version on a desktop, etc.
But I don't think it needs classic shell anymore. And the 8.1 start button (right click) is actually faster to get into a lot of stuff than win 7.
I certainly wouldn't waste 30 hours of my time downgrading it to 7.
That sounds more like a case of "she can have as much of your time she likes for free" so she just expects you do it. When she buys a new car she'll probably find she likes something about the old car more. The instrument cluster, or the seat fabric, or perhaps the trunk release switch was in a more convenient spot, whatever --- and if someone was available to spend 30 hours converting her new car to be 'just so' for free she'd probably insist they do that too. No offense, its just how people are -- hell the example I gave about the trunk release is my own -- I'm STILL not used to the new location of the trunk release in my new car -- and still reach for it in the old location. If I could move just "change it" at no effort or expense to myself... I probably would. Its just human nature to want what we are used to.
Yahoo has a search engine
Powered by Bing.
People use Google.
My dislike of Google is starting to cause me to rethink that. I'm in the process of switching to duckduckgo myself.
It certainly hasn't hit critical mass yet... but google is getting steadily more obnoxious and heavy.
FTA: "These gains did not come at the expense of Windows 7, which still managed to grow 0.34 points to 53.05 percent."
Its not surprising really, if you have 7 there's really no compelling reason to upgrade to 8.1. Note that I like 8.1 just fine, its not worth the trouble of upgrading from 7. Especially not at the prices Microsoft is charging for it. I've got 3 Win7 laptop/PCs and even 2 older laptops the kids now use that still have Vista... I'd put 8.1 on all of them... but not at $120 for 8.1 or $200 for 8.1 Pro EACH. I'm simply not going to pay $600 to $1000 to upgrade my home computers to 8.1.
If it were to cost $200 or less to upgrader the entire home, sure. I'd do it, but not at $1000. Not when I know Windows 10 is coming. Not when I know the old laptops are only last another year or so. Not when I know why I buy a new laptop it'll come with the current version on it.
People migrate to the current versions with apple because its free, and in the last few years before that nearly free. Couple that with Apple's extremely aggressive discontinuation of support for anything more than 1 version back and people HAVE to upgrade.
Microsoft is more established in enterprises, and has much longer support cycles... it doesn't matter how good windows 7 is (nevermind your feelings about 8.1 or the upcoming 10 are) .. XP is still clinging on and will for years to come.
Reality is that consumers will get the new OS when they buy a new computer. And businesses will get the new OS -- any new OS, kicking and screaming, when they have no choice.
Windows 8.1 sends my every search query to Microsoft if I don't block them by IP at the DNS, router, and hosts file levels.
Gosh...if you search for something, and it looks on the web, it gets sent to the web search engine. Those bastards.
Oh wait... well, suppose you don't WANT it to search the web, just the local computer? And Microsoft forces every search to go the web? Those bastards!
Oh wait... you can turn that 'feature' off? Let me guess -- its a registry hack or some obscure command line thing right? Its actually simpler to block them at the DNS, router, and hosts level... Those bastards.
Oh wait... its a simple gui accessible option in search. The section is called "Use Bing to search online" and the option is called "Get search suggestions and web results from Bing", and its a simple on or off.
Well... other operating systems don't pull this shit... uhoh... OSX Spotlight has this option too? And Ubuntu does too?
Overreact much? Did you even think to look whether you could simply turn it off before you ran to your firewall configuration in your router?