Actually Uber's argument is that their technology is not really fully autonomous and it's more like Tesla calling their system auto pilot.
So if you have Teslas driving on california why can't you have Ubers'?
Aside from the point that you seem to be conflating production vehicles with test rigs, how about the fact that Tesla went and got their $150/year permit in CA?
The following companies have their CA permits. Only Uber is being an uber douchebag about it.
Yes. While there are a very small number of companies listed that I've never heard of, I can understand why the rest of them would be interested in testing autonomous vehicles. This whole fight by Uber against California makes no sense. Uber's business model relies on them pushing costs for car ownership, insurance, maintenance and yearly fees to their drivers. I've not yet seen anybody suggest a good reason why owning autonomous vehicles makes any sense for Uber. I have to ask if this whole idea really makes any sense for Uber. Is it just some crazy idea by an out of touch ans possibly incompetent management that thinks it will somehow lead to greater profits?
Since Uber is currently losing $700 million per quarter, and they just backed out of their Chinese investment which means the loss is probably more like $1.2 billion per quarter, I don't think we'll have Uber around to worry about much longer.
The real reason they didn't want to register their cars in California (they'll still have to register them in Arizona, by the way), is that they would be required to report any accidents they were involved in to the state, and they didn't want the public to find out how shitty their robot cars really are.
I think it could really be that Uber management doesn't know what it is doing, as evidenced by the losses you cite. We had another article yesterday on Uber pulling the cars off the California roads without any information on where they were going next. As one poster very accurately pointed out, this whole autonomous car thing actually makes no business sense. Uber has to buy the cars, get the autonomous driving stuff put in, pay for maintenance and insurance. Heck, in my state you can easily pay more than $150 a year just to get your license plate renewed and I assume California has similar fees. Drawing a line in the sand over $150 doesn't make any sense given how this whole idea doesn't seem to make any financial sense over all. Maybe this is some horribly misguided upper management designed plan to make Uber look hipper than Lyft, who is now advertising successfully in the US with the simple message that you can tip your driver in the Lyft app and who knows why you can't do that in Uber. We're moving all the time to a more cashless society and I can see how having to carry around some smaller bills all the time just to avoid stiffing your Uber driver on the tip is a negative for some riders. Maybe this is some crazy idea that if Uber owns the cars and they are autonomous then you don't have to tip and that will give them an advantage over Lyft, but offhand this seems like a dumb way to deal with the fact that some users don't like having to tip with cash.
All clues point to the fact that the ISP's owners are using the chaos created by the Ukrainian civil war to host cyber-crime operations on their servers.
or more likely the owners and staff were gunned down or driven off by the civil war, leaving the doors open and business office available for other sundry activities.
Possible, but not "more likely". In the past decade I spent a good amount of time in Ukraine and I've been to a lot of different parts of it, particularly in the Russian speaking parts. In fact, the last city I went to is now completely under control of rebels and airport I flew out of in Donnetsk doesn't exist any more. While I do still have mostly good memories of being there, I can tell you that in general the people in Ukraine are a lot less honest than you'll find by default in Western Europe. This is especially true in Russian speaking regions. I regard it as a holdover legacy of the Soviet Union and its collapse. The Soviet Union essentially legalized bribery by not caring enough to punish people who took bribes. And the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a bunch of greedy, low class Communist Party connected individuals who grabbed formerly state run businesses for pennies on the dollar and manipulated those into vast personal fortunes. So a lot of Ukrainians have learned that corruption is everywhere, nobody wants to stop it, and everybody who gets ahead cheated their way to the top. It could be that people who've always lived there are still there and exploiting the situation or it could be new people are exploiting it or this is being done to fund the Russian government sending weapons across the border. All I can say is that with the chaos and anarchy currently in that part of Ukraine that whoever is doing it is probably never going to be stopped by whoever is in charge as they're likely paying those people off.
In the USA a rather significant chunk of their users are pretty hard core Republican Party supporters. And a large number of these people live for false news. Fact checking means nothing to them. One of the ways the right has been able to get false news to spread is by rebuking fact checkers. For example, one person I know simply refuses to believe anything Snopes posts. Why?
1) Snopes got fooled on something that was a parody which it didn't understand and labeled a hoax. I don't remember exactly what it was. But it was a really bad miss on their part because it was pretty obvious to everybody not at Snopes that it wasn't serious. This made Snopes look untrustworthy or possibly dishonest themselves.
2) Certain right wing groups have labeled Snopes as an agent of the Democratic Party. Since they are debunking a lot more nonsense attacking Democrats than Republicans, those who don't look beyond the surface can be rather easily convinced that this is the case.
3) Some people have figured out that by saying that Snopes is lying that there's basically no other well known reputable source to fact check anything, so people don't bother to check stuff because they don't think they can trust anybody.
4) The right also has an excuse, used recently by one of Trump's cabinet nominees, of "I'm not an official news source, so it's not my job to fact check what I pass on."
I have come to the sad conclusion that in the USA at least we're living in a "post-fact, post-truth" world where it no longer matters if anything is truthful or accurate if enough people believe it. Too many people I know just don't care anymore about whether anything is accurate if it matches up with their political beliefs or attacks those they disagree with. This is going to have disastrous consequences for the world in general. Russia has been living in this kind of world for a very long time and China is well on its way to it too. China is whipping up nationalistic sentiments to support the Communist Party dictatorship that it won't be able to control. My biggest fear is that a war with China is going to start because some Chinese general took it on himself to start an attack based on some kind of lie he believed after years of being whipped into a frenzy that the USA is out to get China. You guys think it was bad when the whole Iraq War was started by the USA on lies about WMD? Wait until a war gets started on a tweet that is a lie. We're not that far off.
IBM's principle strategy for the past decade has been moving work to lower cost countries (layoffs), stock buybacks, and acquiring other companies; these lower costs, increase earnings per share, and starve R&D of funding.
This is correct but I'd add to this that apparently one thing they aren't doing as they lay off US workers is laying off US management. I believe we've had reports of this and through a remote family connection I know a US IBM employee in middle management who has expressed zero concern about ever being laid off. All I can say is my previous employer did this too - laid off many of the US employees and kept the US based management - and it didn't work out so well for them. One of the things we found is that US customers get tired of never being able to talk to US support staff. Sometimes foreign accents are a problem.
Another famous IBM tactic of the past, and I have no idea how much they do it today, is to buy out smaller competitors and simply shut them down. Ever heard of Sequent Computers? Probably not for most of you. The reason is that IBM bought them out, made some big talk about integrating some Sequent technology into AIX, and then in the end just shut down the whole company and laid off virtually everybody because integrating their technology was going to actually take some work and IBM didn't want to do that.
I am not sure they are really trying too hard in the first place. I speak Mandarin (have been studying for many years), have a good resume and appropriate technical background, and spent substantial time in China to have a general idea of how things are - yet I have never been able to attract interest of any Chinese company. Given what I know about their local tech workforce, that's not at all surprising. They have excellent pool of well qualified candidates.
I've been to China too and I've seen ads placed in English in major foreign newspapers that seem willing to theoretically hire foreigners, but a problem with almost all of these is that they have additional requirements that almost impossible for a foreigner to meet. For example, you can't just speak Mandarin and English but you have to also be fluent or really close to it in Cantonese or Shanghaiese. If a foreigner really knew all those languages they might really have a chance to be hired, but you can probably count on one or two hands how many non-ethnically Chinese foreigners can speak Mandarin plus Cantonese or Shanghaiese. Heck, you basically can't even learn Shanghaiese outside of China if you even want to. Try to find books on it if you're curious. There are at least Cantonese learning materials in the English speaking world but not as many as for Mandarin.
As the Bangladeshi hack revealed, SWIFT isn't vulnerable. What was hacked was the underlying Windows interface that allowed remote transactions and disabling of the Oracle database confirmation messages. The hack consisted of altering two bytes in a running Windows process.
That's a question of semantics, my friend. If an application runs on Windows and the underlying Windows is indeed vulnerable, then the application on top is vulnerable too. Maybe something really important like large money transfers shouldn't be running on Windows, but I can't say I'm surprised. I've got an IT support job that occasionally requires me to get with customer IT departments and a significant amount of our customers are still Windows only shops and they honestly don't know how to work with anything else.
I have never seen either onshore or offshore Asians works more than 40 hrs a week while my US co-workers covered for them out of hours or during their month long holidays. I have seen US workers work on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and the 4th of July (which should be illegal IMHO) only to be laid off. I don't buy it.
I agree but I have a point to add. Sometimes people work longer if they're not very good at their jobs. It takes them longer to do everything so they stay late. Inevitably their staying late is always interpreted by management as being due to this person being an awesome worker. I've seen this kind of thing first hand. Back in the late 90s I was on a different job and a sister department to mine hired a new tester. They paid to move her there from another state and gave her big bucks too. Her co-workers told me that she was terrible at the job and she stayed late every day because it took her 2 or 3 times as long as everybody else in that group to do the same work. I remember seeing a copy of her resume after she was hired and it was full of flat out lies, but the manager was a woman with poor IT skills (she was moved into management simply to prove that it wasn't impossible for a woman to be in company management) who didn't ask for any outside help in interviewing this lady. The lady stuck around for a few years, barely getting her work done and eventually a non-IT job came open in the company that required some travel and customer meetings and she moved into that.
So more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before. It reminds me of an episode of the US version of The Office. This may not be word for word what happened, but it's close enough to make my point.
Pam: I doubled my sales from the previous month.
Andy (sarcastically) : Yeah, to 2 from 1.
Pam: Yep.
Also, Trump could have a heart attack tomorrow - he may never become president. After all these years of negotiations, there's no reason for Japan to just drop it, based only on something someone said during a campaign; people say all kinds of things during campaigns. The US could even ratify TPP in 2020, after Trump leaves office. (At least I don't know if any time limit offhand.)
I know that a lot of people like to think that Trump will only be a one term president, but the odds are huge - or "yuge" as Trump says - that he'll serve two terms. Why?
1) Since 1900 most sitting presidents have won re-election to a 2nd term. You can roughly categorize the losers as being beaten during periods of great economic malaise. Trump and the Republicans are going to push through a lot of tax cuts that may be long term disasters but in the short term the economy should grow here.
2) Since Eisenhower was president, the US has alternated 8 years of Republican presidents with 8 years of Democratic presidents with the only exception being George H.W. Bush's 1998 election win that pushed the Republican presidency to 12 years in a row. This was followed by 8 years of a Democratic president and a return to the alternating cycle.
3) Trump seems to be in pretty good health.
4) Like it or not, this election showed that the Democrats are a minority party in this country and the odds are just going to be stacked against them for a long time to come. Rural America is solidly Republican. I just don't know if the Democrats will ever be able to take control of the House of Representatives again. Nancy Pelosi could live to be 100 and die being the last Democratic Speaker of the House. On top of that, her re-election as minority leader shows that the Democrats lack the new ideas and original thinking they are going to need if they ever want to control the House again.
I don't understand how they managed to raise $73.5 million fucking dollars for this; apparently I need an introduction some of these venture capital people...
It's impossible to predict who is and isn't going to make it so even losers still sometimes manage to get cash. It's just a wild guess by the VC people that maybe they'll make it. I very vaguely remember back in the internet boom of the 1990s that USA Today profiled a handful of start up companies over a long period. The only company I remember, and I don't remember their name at all, was some company that had this crazy idea of (if I remember correctly) doing something like representing websites by planets on your desktop. So if you clicked on Mars, for example, you might go to Amazon.com. They not only got funding for this, even for the times, crazy idea, they got Patrick Stewart, Capt. Picard himself, to act as their paid celebrity spokesperson. Even with a smaller web at the time as an IT professional I remember questioning the need for this kind of thing, but 2 or 3 graduates of some expensive East Coast university's business school got the idea and VC people gave them enough money to get them off the ground and hire employees and pay Patrick Stewart.
As another example of who can predict, look at Twitter. It can't turn a profit and you can make a strong case that not only is it completely useless it's actually harmful to society, yet it somehow remains in operation and people buy the stock for it.
But the jobs; the hopes for even more jobs; the defunding of the Saudi religious nuts and the good will (in the US flyover states) may very well hurt the Democrats for quite a while. If labor joins the Republicans because the Democrats have deserted them then... the balance of power will have been changed.
Organized labor isn't going to join the Republican Party. The Republicans will treat them just like they do the minorities - if your personal political philosophy makes you align with the Republicans then they will welcome your vote, but they're not going to push for anything that most people in those groups want. Republicans are very much anti-union and probably always will be. Organized labor is stuck with the Democrats and the Democrats did not abandon them but do note that a rather large number of Americans are not union members and have a pretty negative view of unions for a large variety of reasons. Many Americans see organized labor as self-serving to the point of borderline insanity.
Here's one example. I don't know anything about this seller but I bought this exact tool some time ago on Woot.com. You can find somewhat similar tools on Amazon and other websites under the name "life hammer" or "safety hammer". http://www.dhgate.com/product/...|3634601311
Radical Islam can't be a factor here. It's all due to climate change. The fact that your country doesn't have a very good handle on it's own radical insurgents doesn't mean you're looking for convenient scapegoats to deflect blame to. Naw.
A few years ago I went through TSA with my laptop. Naturally they wanted to search it. No problem. I thought.
I travel about once a year for personal reasons in the USA by plane, sometimes a little more. I've traveled overseas a bit too. I've had TSA people subject me to special screening. I once had US Customs decide I just had to be a smuggler after returning from a tourist trip to China because the agent at the airport decided that there was just zero chance I would go there as a tourist. I didn't care about getting "special treatment" so I went over to the special area so a different agent could go through my luggage and all he found was a teapot and a few Chinese souvenirs. He was really pissed off at the agent who flagged me because I was just a waste of his time. I was greatly amused by that. I've had some interesting encounters with customs in Ukraine too, but I can speak Russian which helps and nothing was really too wild there with customs. But one thing that has never, ever happened to me is having anybody interested in looking at my laptop. If you're brown skinned then there's not much you can do about profiling, but if you aren't, maybe you need to think about how you present yourself or dress when traveling because you are definitely doing something that is screaming that you need to be examined.
Apparently the guy survived a 12 story drop... what makes you think that suicide nets aren't already implemented?
No mention of suicide nets. Plus, can you imagine the negative publicity Amazon would get from putting up suicide nets in the USA? It's a completely different story to do that in China as Apple did, but their factory had really weird rules for the employees and was not in any way a typical Chinese workplace. I don't know what the odds are for surviving a 12 story drop, but it's not impossible. The odds aren't good, but one unofficial source I found put a 15 story fall at a 1 in 100 chance of survival. There was a documented case where a flight attendant survived a fall of about 20,000 without a parachute from an airplane, although I don't know the details of that.
TFS and TFA both utterly fail to identify or even mention one of the largest issues with mobile devices today.
Security.
Forget flying to the red planet to bridge the gap for survival. I could print the number of times we've read the words "root access" regarding mobile device hacking in 2016 and have enough material to build an actual bridge to Mars.
Totally agree with you. I've read so much stuff over the years about phone hacks that I am super paranoid about doing anything over my phone that involves me accessing a site I actually do care about having a secure connection to, such as my bank, credit card providers, etc. I control my main PC at home and keep the anti-virus updated and don't go to websites that I shouldn't be visiting if I care about security. I have a lot of confidence that I can connect safely and securely from that PC to wherever I need to go. I don't have that kind of confidence on my phone. Plus I'm not 12 years old so I actually do prefer the bigger screen on a PC and the easier ability to open multiple windows there for comparison if needed.
Power gone for half the time and armed guards? Power is not an issue in the cities, and armed guards? even the cops here don't carry arms. only the ones in our movies do.
I can only say that my Fortune 500 company has a large number of Indian workers in some major Indian IT city I'm too lazy to look up and they do lose power quite often or their network goes down for some random reason or the people managing their network screw it up. I've read on the BBC that people from India do complain about power outages all the time. Maybe you're just fortunate wherever you are. But yeah, I think the armed guards thing is pure exaggeration. I've never heard of that one at all.
It's the various academicians that still can't believe Trump won because, "nobody I know voted for Trump".
Put me in that corner. I accept the election result, but I'm baffled where all the Trump supporters came from. Most of my friends are die-hard Republicans, but I don't know a single person who (admitted) voting for Trump. I suspect that's because this election wasn't really fought along typical Republican vs Democrat, leftie vs rightie lines.
I can only tell you that I live in what is called a "red state" and I know plenty of people, including college educated, who voted for Trump. In fact every person I know who supports the Republican Party not only voted for Trump without even the slightest worry, a small number of them begged me to vote for him too.
"That $100 dollar brand new iPhone that I bought at the night market/store that sells electronics for a fraction of their cost stopped working. But I know it must be legit despite the low cost because the guy who sold it to me told me it was legit. Funny, neither he nor the store are there any more. What's wrong with your crap products, Apple?"
I've been to China. It's definitely that. Keep in mind that this is also a country where most of its citizens believe that you can't lose money on the stock market no matter what stock you buy - ever.
So why did democrats want it, and republicans not want it?
Actually, it's a lot more complicated than that. I'd say that most Democrats in Congress were against the TPP and most Republicans were quietly for it. Democrats opposed it because unions hate it and the Democratic Party relies on unions for votes. Most Republicans actually favored it because in theory the Republican Party supports all free trade deals. But then you got into the Republicans being the party of "No" which meant that they had to oppose Obama on one hand yet actually approving of what he did on the other. Had a Republican been president and submitted the deal as written to Congress, it would probably already be passed. Being the party of "No" caused them to stall for time and in the end they realized that a significant number of voters are upset about job losses and voting for a deal likely to lead to more job losses simply wasn't going to work.
This vote and the calls for protectionism in the USA and UK strike me as odd. Back in my day... it was the Conservatives and Republicans and similar parties defending trickle-down, supply-side, trade leads to growth, which leads to prosperity for everyone.
You remember correctly. But that was in the 1980s and things have changed. The Republicans began strongly embracing what I call "stupid people" in the past decade. I blame Karl Rove for this. I think it started roughly around 2004. You know how people too stupid to vote correctly in Florida all voted for Al Gore in 2000? They got flipped to the Republican side. This culminated in the queen of anti-intellectualism, Sarah Palin, running for vice-president in 2008.
Now there's support for reducing freedom of movement in the UK (and other places in Europe), and for the USA to erect trade barriers. All this time, the official explanation was that international trade was not a zero-sum game, that if there's more trade, everyone eventually gains and that protectionism was BAD. I can't remember if state investment on infrastructure was even worse than protectionism, but in any case it was something that Chicago school/Republican politicians just would not have.
I don't live in the UK so I'll let others comment on that, but as people without college degrees (not necessarily stupid though) and stupid people began to embrace the Republican Party, Sarah Palin pushed an anti-intellectual agenda that resonated big time with small town, non-college educated America. Palin has said multiple times that the only "real" America is the small town one, which just happens to be where a lot of people didn't go to college. If you can see a map of how the vote was broken out by county in the recent presidential election, you'll see that at least 90% of the US is red with the only blue areas being in bigger cities. As small town people have embraced the Republican Party, they've continued to lose jobs in manufacturing and the small towns where they live don't offer adequate replacement jobs. So this has led to a somewhat large group of people in small town America who see themselves and their small town life under siege. They're very receptive to being told that they are victims of forces beyond their control and only the Republicans can bring back those small town jobs that went away. They also tend to be very religious which brings them into conflict with societal changes like gay marriage where they see these changes as coming out of big cities and being pushed by Democratic Party elites who actively wish to bring harm to them.
Not only do they not care, they haven't for years now on Facebook. I grew up in rural area in a red state. The people I went to high school with and are friends with on Facebook are pretty strong Republican Party supporters. They truly don't care about the truth of any story they share any more. For those of you who don't know, one of the ways that right wing lies get spread on Facebook is that they got people convinced that Snopes is in fact dishonest and pushing a liberal agenda and you can't trust if for anything. I've seen people I know argue this when someone points them to Snopes to rebut some nonsense they are sharing. These people are in turn now convinced that you can't verify anything any more because anything that disagrees with what you agree with is a lie itself. They don't even question what they are sharing either, which is a real shame. I have to admit to really losing a lot of respect for some of my old school friends who I know are smart enough to think critically about what they are reading, but they don't care any more to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Uber's argument is that their technology is not really fully autonomous and it's more like Tesla calling their system auto pilot.
So if you have Teslas driving on california why can't you have Ubers'?
Aside from the point that you seem to be conflating production vehicles with test rigs, how about the fact that Tesla went and got their $150/year permit in CA?
The following companies have their CA permits. Only Uber is being an uber douchebag about it.
Yes. While there are a very small number of companies listed that I've never heard of, I can understand why the rest of them would be interested in testing autonomous vehicles. This whole fight by Uber against California makes no sense. Uber's business model relies on them pushing costs for car ownership, insurance, maintenance and yearly fees to their drivers. I've not yet seen anybody suggest a good reason why owning autonomous vehicles makes any sense for Uber. I have to ask if this whole idea really makes any sense for Uber. Is it just some crazy idea by an out of touch ans possibly incompetent management that thinks it will somehow lead to greater profits?
Since Uber is currently losing $700 million per quarter, and they just backed out of their Chinese investment which means the loss is probably more like $1.2 billion per quarter, I don't think we'll have Uber around to worry about much longer.
The real reason they didn't want to register their cars in California (they'll still have to register them in Arizona, by the way), is that they would be required to report any accidents they were involved in to the state, and they didn't want the public to find out how shitty their robot cars really are.
I think it could really be that Uber management doesn't know what it is doing, as evidenced by the losses you cite. We had another article yesterday on Uber pulling the cars off the California roads without any information on where they were going next. As one poster very accurately pointed out, this whole autonomous car thing actually makes no business sense. Uber has to buy the cars, get the autonomous driving stuff put in, pay for maintenance and insurance. Heck, in my state you can easily pay more than $150 a year just to get your license plate renewed and I assume California has similar fees. Drawing a line in the sand over $150 doesn't make any sense given how this whole idea doesn't seem to make any financial sense over all. Maybe this is some horribly misguided upper management designed plan to make Uber look hipper than Lyft, who is now advertising successfully in the US with the simple message that you can tip your driver in the Lyft app and who knows why you can't do that in Uber. We're moving all the time to a more cashless society and I can see how having to carry around some smaller bills all the time just to avoid stiffing your Uber driver on the tip is a negative for some riders. Maybe this is some crazy idea that if Uber owns the cars and they are autonomous then you don't have to tip and that will give them an advantage over Lyft, but offhand this seems like a dumb way to deal with the fact that some users don't like having to tip with cash.
All clues point to the fact that the ISP's owners are using the chaos created by the Ukrainian civil war to host cyber-crime operations on their servers.
or more likely the owners and staff were gunned down or driven off by the civil war, leaving the doors open and business office available for other sundry activities.
Possible, but not "more likely". In the past decade I spent a good amount of time in Ukraine and I've been to a lot of different parts of it, particularly in the Russian speaking parts. In fact, the last city I went to is now completely under control of rebels and airport I flew out of in Donnetsk doesn't exist any more. While I do still have mostly good memories of being there, I can tell you that in general the people in Ukraine are a lot less honest than you'll find by default in Western Europe. This is especially true in Russian speaking regions. I regard it as a holdover legacy of the Soviet Union and its collapse. The Soviet Union essentially legalized bribery by not caring enough to punish people who took bribes. And the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in a bunch of greedy, low class Communist Party connected individuals who grabbed formerly state run businesses for pennies on the dollar and manipulated those into vast personal fortunes. So a lot of Ukrainians have learned that corruption is everywhere, nobody wants to stop it, and everybody who gets ahead cheated their way to the top. It could be that people who've always lived there are still there and exploiting the situation or it could be new people are exploiting it or this is being done to fund the Russian government sending weapons across the border. All I can say is that with the chaos and anarchy currently in that part of Ukraine that whoever is doing it is probably never going to be stopped by whoever is in charge as they're likely paying those people off.
and a large flat-screen TV so I can display dashboards and statistics.
If you say it exactly like that perhaps your manager will believe that's the only possible use you'd have for such a TV.
In the USA a rather significant chunk of their users are pretty hard core Republican Party supporters. And a large number of these people live for false news. Fact checking means nothing to them. One of the ways the right has been able to get false news to spread is by rebuking fact checkers. For example, one person I know simply refuses to believe anything Snopes posts. Why?
1) Snopes got fooled on something that was a parody which it didn't understand and labeled a hoax. I don't remember exactly what it was. But it was a really bad miss on their part because it was pretty obvious to everybody not at Snopes that it wasn't serious. This made Snopes look untrustworthy or possibly dishonest themselves.
2) Certain right wing groups have labeled Snopes as an agent of the Democratic Party. Since they are debunking a lot more nonsense attacking Democrats than Republicans, those who don't look beyond the surface can be rather easily convinced that this is the case.
3) Some people have figured out that by saying that Snopes is lying that there's basically no other well known reputable source to fact check anything, so people don't bother to check stuff because they don't think they can trust anybody.
4) The right also has an excuse, used recently by one of Trump's cabinet nominees, of "I'm not an official news source, so it's not my job to fact check what I pass on."
I have come to the sad conclusion that in the USA at least we're living in a "post-fact, post-truth" world where it no longer matters if anything is truthful or accurate if enough people believe it. Too many people I know just don't care anymore about whether anything is accurate if it matches up with their political beliefs or attacks those they disagree with. This is going to have disastrous consequences for the world in general. Russia has been living in this kind of world for a very long time and China is well on its way to it too. China is whipping up nationalistic sentiments to support the Communist Party dictatorship that it won't be able to control. My biggest fear is that a war with China is going to start because some Chinese general took it on himself to start an attack based on some kind of lie he believed after years of being whipped into a frenzy that the USA is out to get China. You guys think it was bad when the whole Iraq War was started by the USA on lies about WMD? Wait until a war gets started on a tweet that is a lie. We're not that far off.
The leopard doesn't change it's spots.
IBM's principle strategy for the past decade has been moving work to lower cost countries (layoffs), stock buybacks, and acquiring other companies; these lower costs, increase earnings per share, and starve R&D of funding.
This is correct but I'd add to this that apparently one thing they aren't doing as they lay off US workers is laying off US management. I believe we've had reports of this and through a remote family connection I know a US IBM employee in middle management who has expressed zero concern about ever being laid off. All I can say is my previous employer did this too - laid off many of the US employees and kept the US based management - and it didn't work out so well for them. One of the things we found is that US customers get tired of never being able to talk to US support staff. Sometimes foreign accents are a problem.
Another famous IBM tactic of the past, and I have no idea how much they do it today, is to buy out smaller competitors and simply shut them down. Ever heard of Sequent Computers? Probably not for most of you. The reason is that IBM bought them out, made some big talk about integrating some Sequent technology into AIX, and then in the end just shut down the whole company and laid off virtually everybody because integrating their technology was going to actually take some work and IBM didn't want to do that.
I am not sure they are really trying too hard in the first place. I speak Mandarin (have been studying for many years), have a good resume and appropriate technical background, and spent substantial time in China to have a general idea of how things are - yet I have never been able to attract interest of any Chinese company. Given what I know about their local tech workforce, that's not at all surprising. They have excellent pool of well qualified candidates.
I've been to China too and I've seen ads placed in English in major foreign newspapers that seem willing to theoretically hire foreigners, but a problem with almost all of these is that they have additional requirements that almost impossible for a foreigner to meet. For example, you can't just speak Mandarin and English but you have to also be fluent or really close to it in Cantonese or Shanghaiese. If a foreigner really knew all those languages they might really have a chance to be hired, but you can probably count on one or two hands how many non-ethnically Chinese foreigners can speak Mandarin plus Cantonese or Shanghaiese. Heck, you basically can't even learn Shanghaiese outside of China if you even want to. Try to find books on it if you're curious. There are at least Cantonese learning materials in the English speaking world but not as many as for Mandarin.
As the Bangladeshi hack revealed, SWIFT isn't vulnerable. What was hacked was the underlying Windows interface that allowed remote transactions and disabling of the Oracle database confirmation messages. The hack consisted of altering two bytes in a running Windows process.
That's a question of semantics, my friend. If an application runs on Windows and the underlying Windows is indeed vulnerable, then the application on top is vulnerable too. Maybe something really important like large money transfers shouldn't be running on Windows, but I can't say I'm surprised. I've got an IT support job that occasionally requires me to get with customer IT departments and a significant amount of our customers are still Windows only shops and they honestly don't know how to work with anything else.
"They however do work a lot longer hours"
I have never seen either onshore or offshore Asians works more than 40 hrs a week while my US co-workers covered for them out of hours or during their month long holidays. I have seen US workers work on Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, and the 4th of July (which should be illegal IMHO) only to be laid off. I don't buy it.
I agree but I have a point to add. Sometimes people work longer if they're not very good at their jobs. It takes them longer to do everything so they stay late. Inevitably their staying late is always interpreted by management as being due to this person being an awesome worker. I've seen this kind of thing first hand. Back in the late 90s I was on a different job and a sister department to mine hired a new tester. They paid to move her there from another state and gave her big bucks too. Her co-workers told me that she was terrible at the job and she stayed late every day because it took her 2 or 3 times as long as everybody else in that group to do the same work. I remember seeing a copy of her resume after she was hired and it was full of flat out lies, but the manager was a woman with poor IT skills (she was moved into management simply to prove that it wasn't impossible for a woman to be in company management) who didn't ask for any outside help in interviewing this lady. The lady stuck around for a few years, barely getting her work done and eventually a non-IT job came open in the company that required some travel and customer meetings and she moved into that.
So more people are switching from Macs to Surface than ever before. It reminds me of an episode of the US version of The Office. This may not be word for word what happened, but it's close enough to make my point.
Pam: I doubled my sales from the previous month.
Andy (sarcastically) : Yeah, to 2 from 1.
Pam: Yep.
Also, Trump could have a heart attack tomorrow - he may never become president. After all these years of negotiations, there's no reason for Japan to just drop it, based only on something someone said during a campaign; people say all kinds of things during campaigns. The US could even ratify TPP in 2020, after Trump leaves office. (At least I don't know if any time limit offhand.)
I know that a lot of people like to think that Trump will only be a one term president, but the odds are huge - or "yuge" as Trump says - that he'll serve two terms. Why?
1) Since 1900 most sitting presidents have won re-election to a 2nd term. You can roughly categorize the losers as being beaten during periods of great economic malaise. Trump and the Republicans are going to push through a lot of tax cuts that may be long term disasters but in the short term the economy should grow here.
2) Since Eisenhower was president, the US has alternated 8 years of Republican presidents with 8 years of Democratic presidents with the only exception being George H.W. Bush's 1998 election win that pushed the Republican presidency to 12 years in a row. This was followed by 8 years of a Democratic president and a return to the alternating cycle.
3) Trump seems to be in pretty good health.
4) Like it or not, this election showed that the Democrats are a minority party in this country and the odds are just going to be stacked against them for a long time to come. Rural America is solidly Republican. I just don't know if the Democrats will ever be able to take control of the House of Representatives again. Nancy Pelosi could live to be 100 and die being the last Democratic Speaker of the House. On top of that, her re-election as minority leader shows that the Democrats lack the new ideas and original thinking they are going to need if they ever want to control the House again.
Two questions: (1) A telecom provider can push phone updates? (2) Phone manufactures provide phone updates?
Surprised that you had to ask, but since you did...
1) Yes for Android. No for iPhone. This is Android.
2) Yes.
I don't understand how they managed to raise $73.5 million fucking dollars for this; apparently I need an introduction some of these venture capital people...
It's impossible to predict who is and isn't going to make it so even losers still sometimes manage to get cash. It's just a wild guess by the VC people that maybe they'll make it. I very vaguely remember back in the internet boom of the 1990s that USA Today profiled a handful of start up companies over a long period. The only company I remember, and I don't remember their name at all, was some company that had this crazy idea of (if I remember correctly) doing something like representing websites by planets on your desktop. So if you clicked on Mars, for example, you might go to Amazon.com. They not only got funding for this, even for the times, crazy idea, they got Patrick Stewart, Capt. Picard himself, to act as their paid celebrity spokesperson. Even with a smaller web at the time as an IT professional I remember questioning the need for this kind of thing, but 2 or 3 graduates of some expensive East Coast university's business school got the idea and VC people gave them enough money to get them off the ground and hire employees and pay Patrick Stewart.
As another example of who can predict, look at Twitter. It can't turn a profit and you can make a strong case that not only is it completely useless it's actually harmful to society, yet it somehow remains in operation and people buy the stock for it.
But the jobs; the hopes for even more jobs; the defunding of the Saudi religious nuts and the good will (in the US flyover states) may very well hurt the Democrats for quite a while. If labor joins the Republicans because the Democrats have deserted them then ... the balance of power will have been changed.
Organized labor isn't going to join the Republican Party. The Republicans will treat them just like they do the minorities - if your personal political philosophy makes you align with the Republicans then they will welcome your vote, but they're not going to push for anything that most people in those groups want. Republicans are very much anti-union and probably always will be. Organized labor is stuck with the Democrats and the Democrats did not abandon them but do note that a rather large number of Americans are not union members and have a pretty negative view of unions for a large variety of reasons. Many Americans see organized labor as self-serving to the point of borderline insanity.
Here's one example. I don't know anything about this seller but I bought this exact tool some time ago on Woot.com. You can find somewhat similar tools on Amazon and other websites under the name "life hammer" or "safety hammer".
http://www.dhgate.com/product/...|3634601311
Radical Islam can't be a factor here. It's all due to climate change. The fact that your country doesn't have a very good handle on it's own radical insurgents doesn't mean you're looking for convenient scapegoats to deflect blame to. Naw.
A few years ago I went through TSA with my laptop. Naturally they wanted to search it. No problem. I thought.
I travel about once a year for personal reasons in the USA by plane, sometimes a little more. I've traveled overseas a bit too. I've had TSA people subject me to special screening. I once had US Customs decide I just had to be a smuggler after returning from a tourist trip to China because the agent at the airport decided that there was just zero chance I would go there as a tourist. I didn't care about getting "special treatment" so I went over to the special area so a different agent could go through my luggage and all he found was a teapot and a few Chinese souvenirs. He was really pissed off at the agent who flagged me because I was just a waste of his time. I was greatly amused by that. I've had some interesting encounters with customs in Ukraine too, but I can speak Russian which helps and nothing was really too wild there with customs. But one thing that has never, ever happened to me is having anybody interested in looking at my laptop. If you're brown skinned then there's not much you can do about profiling, but if you aren't, maybe you need to think about how you present yourself or dress when traveling because you are definitely doing something that is screaming that you need to be examined.
Apparently the guy survived a 12 story drop... what makes you think that suicide nets aren't already implemented?
No mention of suicide nets. Plus, can you imagine the negative publicity Amazon would get from putting up suicide nets in the USA? It's a completely different story to do that in China as Apple did, but their factory had really weird rules for the employees and was not in any way a typical Chinese workplace. I don't know what the odds are for surviving a 12 story drop, but it's not impossible. The odds aren't good, but one unofficial source I found put a 15 story fall at a 1 in 100 chance of survival. There was a documented case where a flight attendant survived a fall of about 20,000 without a parachute from an airplane, although I don't know the details of that.
TFS and TFA both utterly fail to identify or even mention one of the largest issues with mobile devices today.
Security.
Forget flying to the red planet to bridge the gap for survival. I could print the number of times we've read the words "root access" regarding mobile device hacking in 2016 and have enough material to build an actual bridge to Mars.
Totally agree with you. I've read so much stuff over the years about phone hacks that I am super paranoid about doing anything over my phone that involves me accessing a site I actually do care about having a secure connection to, such as my bank, credit card providers, etc. I control my main PC at home and keep the anti-virus updated and don't go to websites that I shouldn't be visiting if I care about security. I have a lot of confidence that I can connect safely and securely from that PC to wherever I need to go. I don't have that kind of confidence on my phone. Plus I'm not 12 years old so I actually do prefer the bigger screen on a PC and the easier ability to open multiple windows there for comparison if needed.
Power gone for half the time and armed guards? Power is not an issue in the cities, and armed guards? even the cops here don't carry arms. only the ones in our movies do.
I can only say that my Fortune 500 company has a large number of Indian workers in some major Indian IT city I'm too lazy to look up and they do lose power quite often or their network goes down for some random reason or the people managing their network screw it up. I've read on the BBC that people from India do complain about power outages all the time. Maybe you're just fortunate wherever you are. But yeah, I think the armed guards thing is pure exaggeration. I've never heard of that one at all.
It's the various academicians that still can't believe Trump won because, "nobody I know voted for Trump".
Put me in that corner. I accept the election result, but I'm baffled where all the Trump supporters came from. Most of my friends are die-hard Republicans, but I don't know a single person who (admitted) voting for Trump. I suspect that's because this election wasn't really fought along typical Republican vs Democrat, leftie vs rightie lines.
I can only tell you that I live in what is called a "red state" and I know plenty of people, including college educated, who voted for Trump. In fact every person I know who supports the Republican Party not only voted for Trump without even the slightest worry, a small number of them begged me to vote for him too.
"That $100 dollar brand new iPhone that I bought at the night market/store that sells electronics for a fraction of their cost stopped working. But I know it must be legit despite the low cost because the guy who sold it to me told me it was legit. Funny, neither he nor the store are there any more. What's wrong with your crap products, Apple?"
I've been to China. It's definitely that. Keep in mind that this is also a country where most of its citizens believe that you can't lose money on the stock market no matter what stock you buy - ever.
So why did democrats want it, and republicans not want it?
Actually, it's a lot more complicated than that. I'd say that most Democrats in Congress were against the TPP and most Republicans were quietly for it. Democrats opposed it because unions hate it and the Democratic Party relies on unions for votes. Most Republicans actually favored it because in theory the Republican Party supports all free trade deals. But then you got into the Republicans being the party of "No" which meant that they had to oppose Obama on one hand yet actually approving of what he did on the other. Had a Republican been president and submitted the deal as written to Congress, it would probably already be passed. Being the party of "No" caused them to stall for time and in the end they realized that a significant number of voters are upset about job losses and voting for a deal likely to lead to more job losses simply wasn't going to work.
This vote and the calls for protectionism in the USA and UK strike me as odd. Back in my day... it was the Conservatives and Republicans and similar parties defending trickle-down, supply-side, trade leads to growth, which leads to prosperity for everyone.
You remember correctly. But that was in the 1980s and things have changed. The Republicans began strongly embracing what I call "stupid people" in the past decade. I blame Karl Rove for this. I think it started roughly around 2004. You know how people too stupid to vote correctly in Florida all voted for Al Gore in 2000? They got flipped to the Republican side. This culminated in the queen of anti-intellectualism, Sarah Palin, running for vice-president in 2008.
Now there's support for reducing freedom of movement in the UK (and other places in Europe), and for the USA to erect trade barriers. All this time, the official explanation was that international trade was not a zero-sum game, that if there's more trade, everyone eventually gains and that protectionism was BAD. I can't remember if state investment on infrastructure was even worse than protectionism, but in any case it was something that Chicago school/Republican politicians just would not have.
I don't live in the UK so I'll let others comment on that, but as people without college degrees (not necessarily stupid though) and stupid people began to embrace the Republican Party, Sarah Palin pushed an anti-intellectual agenda that resonated big time with small town, non-college educated America. Palin has said multiple times that the only "real" America is the small town one, which just happens to be where a lot of people didn't go to college. If you can see a map of how the vote was broken out by county in the recent presidential election, you'll see that at least 90% of the US is red with the only blue areas being in bigger cities. As small town people have embraced the Republican Party, they've continued to lose jobs in manufacturing and the small towns where they live don't offer adequate replacement jobs. So this has led to a somewhat large group of people in small town America who see themselves and their small town life under siege. They're very receptive to being told that they are victims of forces beyond their control and only the Republicans can bring back those small town jobs that went away. They also tend to be very religious which brings them into conflict with societal changes like gay marriage where they see these changes as coming out of big cities and being pushed by Democratic Party elites who actively wish to bring harm to them.
Not only do they not care, they haven't for years now on Facebook. I grew up in rural area in a red state. The people I went to high school with and are friends with on Facebook are pretty strong Republican Party supporters. They truly don't care about the truth of any story they share any more. For those of you who don't know, one of the ways that right wing lies get spread on Facebook is that they got people convinced that Snopes is in fact dishonest and pushing a liberal agenda and you can't trust if for anything. I've seen people I know argue this when someone points them to Snopes to rebut some nonsense they are sharing. These people are in turn now convinced that you can't verify anything any more because anything that disagrees with what you agree with is a lie itself. They don't even question what they are sharing either, which is a real shame. I have to admit to really losing a lot of respect for some of my old school friends who I know are smart enough to think critically about what they are reading, but they don't care any more to do so.