I'll preface this with the fact I live in the UK, so it's largely illegal to make false claims in advertisements.
You could just make it illegal to scam people, you know?
Is that not already illegal in your country? I thought it was. The problem you've got is that where does a scam stop and stupidity begin. It's not quite that black and white. Whilst obvious scams should be stopped, at some point you've got to give up and admit that ultimately we can't protect a truly dedicated idiot from themselves. Here in the UK we have education campaigns and monthly articles about how some poor pensioner was scammed out of her life savings, but it keeps happening. Ultimately I'd rather not have to put all pensioners under 24 hour surveillance for the sake of a few who just don't get it.
The simple rule "advertisement must be truthful" would kill all this bullshit instantly
Do you mean The Truth (nods and smiles) or The Truth (frowns and shakes head)?
The problem is the truth can get pretty subjective. There aren't very many ways to subjectively measure it. Hell, most of your news channels completely fail at fact checking which _is_ one of the few ways to objectively measure truth and even then, this doesn't stop facts from being misrepresented to push an agenda.
To a Christian, that god exists is the truth. The problem with challenging that held truth is that you can't. Ultimately we cannot say certain that god does not exist because we don't have objective evidence. Sure we have logic and reason, very sound arguments but absolute fact, nope. not a sausage. So the "truth" of god remains open to interpretation.
It's not even a FREEZE PEACH issue. The truth simply isn't an objective measure.
However the US can start by making it illegal to tell complete falsehoods in advertisement like the rest of the world. You can't define the truth in absolutes because it's difficult to prove beyond reason, but you can define a lie because they're easy to disprove beyond reason.
Basically, there was a push in the early 90's to put this stuff under some long overdue regulations, so the snake oil industry organized a huge campaign to defend their business model. They ran ads about how evil government was coming to take your precious, essential, life giving, natural supplements away for their Big Pharma cronies, or something to that effect, and their customers wrote a lot of letters to politicians demanding the supplement manufactures be given leeway.
It worked, con artists successfully convinced the public (enough of it anyway) to act against their own best interests, and that's how you can sell homeopathy as a sleep aid, curry powder as a weight loss pill, the latest superfruit fad as the wonder everything pill, and other items of questionable benefit as something with the deceptive appearance of medical value. You just have to say the magic words "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease" on your product.
And Americans wonder why we don't want to buy your meat... it could have anything in it, asbestos sold as a cure for the common cold.
At least over here in the UK, you have to keep your claims suitably nebulous that a reasonable person would not construe them as having an actual effect on medical conditions. They have to advertise "feelings" and nondescript benefits to get you to buy their pills which are specifically designed to not do anything as that way they avoid doing FDA testing. Trying to claim that they'll have an unproven medical or health effect is an easy way to get a huge fine and lawsuit.
Pharma companies make more out of vitamin placebos than boner pills. Produce 1000 for $1, sell them in packs of 30 for $5.
Use gmail for work for decade+, spam has certainly never been a problem.
Although, it does seem to be a bit aggressive sometimes.
I'm pretty sure in the 12 years I've been using Gmail I've never had a false positive. The only way I'd know is if someone emailed me and then told me and this to date has never happened. The biggest issue is sometimes the commercial emails I want end up in Spam (I.E. offers from any company in Las Vegas for some reason) but that isn't a major issue for me. Even the spam folder is mostly ads from companies I don't want to hear from rather than actual spam.
Conversely I have a Hotmail account that I've had since 1997, it used to be my primary email before GMail came along, its full of almost nothing but spam, Russian women that allegedly "want" to meet me (nah, pale and blonde isn't my thing), business proposals from people who I've never heard of, even the odd Nigerian prince.
The side effect for the company. Other then just printing millions of CD's for you app and selling them for a hundreds of dollars. You now need to maintain a full data-center to handle the data for millions of customers.
Cloud is good when you need to share across networks. Or you are a small organization who just doesn't have a secure infrastructure. But for others having software that you can buy and keep updated (or not) yourself is useful. There isn't too many features past office 97 that I really need. Why can't I use office 97 for work.
I think the way Adobe et al. have gone is that the software is still loaded on your local PC and just checks the server every few minutes to make sure you're still allowed to use it. Its cloud DRM or Dickmove as a Service.
Those of us who play video games have been warning you about this for ages. I suspect piracy will pick up again.
The ultimate goal is to slow people down to the speed limit. To try and accomplish that, the police issue fines: “you don’t want to pay that every time you drive too fast”, and to instill the idea that the likelihood of getting a fine when speedin is quite high: “we are watching”. For the second point, the police over here actually do publish the locations of speed traps themselves... just not all of them. A study suggests that it actually helps; people don’t keep checking the mile markers to see if they are near the speed trap, they tend to stick to the limit for a far larger stretch rather than keep speeding (and slamming the brakes as soon as they spot the camera).
In some other European countries it is illegal to announce the location of speed traps. One radio station got around that by reporting incidences of “falling stars” instead.
Which European countries? I wish to make a note to avoid them.
The UK publishes the locations of fixed and average speed cameras... It's almost as if they just want you to slow down.
I've never been a believer in the "revenue" conspiracy theory because it just doesn't make sense to have a revenue stream designed to discourage repeat custom (if they truly were trying to raise revenue, they'd lower the fines so they're less trouble to pay and maybe give you a 14 day period where it's halved, like parking fines in the UK). However if speed cameras are to achieve the goal of slowing speeding traffic, they need to be visible and noticeable when you're on the road, not days after the event.
When it comes to correcting bad behaviour on the roads, nothing is as effective as a liveried police car though.
It's only recently -- the past 5 or so years -- that a certain cadre of very loud right-wingnut boors have shown up.
I think it goes back further than that. My sense is that it crept up steadily post-9/11, but spiked after Barack Obama was first elected. The target shifted from him to Hillary Clinton (his presumptive successor) over the next 8 years, with "Benghazi", "but her e-mails", and "lock her up" calls from the right-wing chorus. And it spiked yet again during the lead-up to the 2016 POTUS election, I suspect with help from Russian troll-farms.
I think they've always been here. Slashdot has a large population of Libertarians, both the nutbar total anarchist kind and the less nutty "anrachy for rich people (but police protection from the poor)" kind, we've always had a fair share of right leaners, its the rise of the far right that is the issue, the far right-wing has always been here but they've always been too scared to spew their bile. The problem with/. is the same with almost everywhere. The rebranding of white supremacists rebranded themselves as "Alt-Right" to fool people into thinking they aren't bigoted arseholes, this largely worked and so every bigoted arsehole is emboldened and claiming victim status whenever they are rightfully called a bigoted arsehole.
I relish the day when the worst we had were GNAA and Swichuer trolls combined with the odd troll linking to goatse. They were good times.
Also, the GP forgot that there has always been a large population of Apple fanboys on/.
What a PITA that would be, I'm guessing that takes a lot of the fun out of after market exhaust systems.
On the other hand: What a PITA the consequences of not having emissions checks are!
Aftermarket exhaust systems are fine as long as you leave the catalytic converter in (or replace it with a new one). You've just got to put our approximately the same emissions as the OEM system. Yearly checks (called M.O.T's for the Americans playing along at home) aren't arduous if you've got a semi-maintained vehicle and really keep the unroadworthy cars off the road, the ones with broken control arms, rusted bodies and chassis, Bare brake pads, twisted rotors and faulty electrics.
That was for Ireland and bank crime.
Getting caught with the tools for a crime on the way to do a crime.
That is what the software is needed for. To continually tell Americans that the Republic of Ireland (ROI) is a completely different nation to the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories... None of which include the ROI.
As for "real freedom" that's fairly subjective based on what you consider freedom to be. There probably isn't any country in the world that everyone would say is a perfect bastion of freedom- because it's a precarious balance. Some would consider the US to be less free with it's lack of representative vote (electoral system), a political system that is biased towards a two party system, lack of an unbiased media (everything leans one way or the other to a degree), world's highest incarceration rate, lack of egalitarian education or health systems. (wealthy areas have much better schools, and rich people get better care). Lots of "morality laws" based on drugs, alcohol, sexual morality.
This
The UK is actually one of the better nations for personal liberty, even amongst developed nations. We treat drug offences are minor crimes (most drug offences are routinely ignored). The powers of the police to actually make arrests is very limited (and when violated, you are "de-arrested", not released without charge or have a charge trumped up against you), you'll never be pulled over for doing 10 over on the motorway, let alone have your cash confiscated on the spot as "drug money". Our prison population is far too large though, for the number of prisons we actually have.
Nor do we regulate the morality of sex. In fact it's a running joke that whatever sexual proclivity you have, it'll cost you £300 in London. Yes, prostitution is legal here in England and Wales (pimping is not though).
We've got a few foibles like cutting into a queue being a near capital offence. But all nations have their foibles.
Personal liberty is one of the four British core values.
What I'd like to know is what this prediction software is actually doing. Sure it sounds scary and the Beeb sucks at technology reporting, but what if it is just trying to automate what CID (detectives) already do and draw patterns? It could be as simple as "Guv, there's been a lot of car fefts in 'Ackney, might want to put a few extra uniforms down there", maybe even going as far as to identify the types of cars being stolen, approximate times, any connection between the owners (same dealer/mechanic). There's no point in complaining that this is Minority Report, without actually knowing what's happening. Lets not base our entire knowledge of things based on movies, we're not the US president.
OTOH, we are the nation that actually deployed Skynet.
People will notice. I mean, yes, they'll be suckered in for the "new", but soon they'll find out that the new is just a new coat of paint on the old. And then? You think they'll get "6G" (or whatever the next gen thing will be) once they have been burned now?
Fuck those quarter-report idiots.
Like they noticed AT&T passing off 3G as 4G... Right, guys, right? They all noticed that.
Back when G had a definition, few people knew it. Now it doesn't have a definition, so phone companies can call whatever they like 5G. Its not like the US has an advertising standards agency or anything to punish companies who deliberately advertise misleading information. Hell, AT&T would get away with it by simply saying that 5G stands for G-G-G-G-Good.
They system was poisoned a long time ago but it never harmed the people doing the poisoning.
How about end-of-life on security updates and OS upgrades?
What end user cares about those?
Keep in mind that the majority of people buying smartphones are just consumers. They don't want to use the device for anything specific, just consume through it. As long as they can do that, why do they care about the OG or whatever it is you called it.
Such a high minimum wage will never work because living wages aren't capitalist and this is literally white genocide and minimum wages literally killed the Lindbergh baby and a living wage is exactly the same thing as burning a flag and worse than 23 Benghazis and *pant pant pant*
You must be reading the wrong forecasts. Hourly windows for the next day are pretty accurate these days
So accurate that they need to keep changing them.
I'm not sure where the Atlantic got it's data from, but they need to come here to the UK. Met managed to predict there would be snow last week... but couldn't say which day. Weather is easy to predict in temperate climates where the patterns do not change dramatically.
You might be referring to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Like somebody who is top of their game in field A assumes their knowledge is sufficient in field B.
They may also be bad at stats and be completely unaware of it.
This.
The article didn't define "better educated". Someone with an MBA or degree in Communications knows sweet fuck all about medicine and biochemistry. Not everyone who graduates from tertiary education is smart (conversely, not everyone who takes a trade is dumb, shit, one of the smartest people I know is a hotel clerk but he fucked up his life early by getting a girl pregnant at 17). This is why your work history becomes more important than your education after a few years.
No, I'm pretty sure the police need to wise up. This does not sound like something that required action by the police.
The problem the police have is that if it turns out it was not a joke, they'll be hung for it.
Not the culture that created them, nor the parents who left automatic weapons where kids could get them (hell, probably gave them the guns). Thoughts and prayers for the people modding this down, thoughts and prayers.
Kid threatens to shoot up school. Kid faces charges. As it should be.
Unless the threat/joke was actually credible, the kid should not have been charged. Believe it or not, there are ways to discipline children without involving the police and courts.
You know, if you really wanted to cut down on school shootings, maybe your culture should stop glorifying guns and violence. Just a crazy idea. Maybe, just maybe also control your guns better so that they aren't left out in the open for kids to grab, you know, be responsible with dangerous things you own.
But who am I kidding, there is an inevitable mod down waiting for even suggesting such sensible things. Thoughts and prayers to those modding this down, gourd press.
It's worth pointing out that English is the second most spoken language in the world and arguably the most widely spoken language since the only one with more speakers is Mandarin Chinese which is predominantly only spoken in one country.
English is still the most widely spoken language, Mandarin has 1.07 billion speakers whilst English has 1.12 billion.
The difference between them is that Mandarin has 908 million L1 (native) speakers and English has 378 million L1 speakers. What makes English the most widely spoken language is that there are 742 million L2 speakers. Spanish by comparsion has more L1 speakers, 442 million but only 70 million L2.
Ultimately English is going to remain the international language because Mandarin is far too strict and rigid for the majority of non-native speakers to learn. Even Spanish, which is fairly flexible, is difficult for a lot of non-Europeans. English is a very fault tolerant language, it permits radical changes in syntax and grammar, yet is still perfectly understandable.
From what I've seen amongst friends and acquaintances, there are only three reasons most people upgrade these days:
1. The battery life has decreased to the point that it's unusable, and they don't seem to understand that you can change the battery.
2. The phone stops working and is out of warranty.
3. They're on a "plan" which amortizes the cost of the phone over several years, it's time for a renewal, and the provider has offered them a "deal" which they think is good.
I can boil that one down in to 1 reason.
1. The phone they have is good enough.
Smartphones are now mature. There's no huge advantage to buying a new model because it will only have minor differences. There aren't any more "killer" features to add, most improvements will not be noticed by the user, making fonts slighlty clearer, improving memory management, so on and so forth. There just isn't the impetus to upgrade any more.
It's a well-known secret that both parties have an agreement to slowly raise the minimum wage below the rate of inflation but to have a big media shit-storm every time to socially signal to "their" voters that they're being represented. The whole thing might be the biggest con in history.
I've got to love the notion that government is extremely incompetent and wasteful up until the point of a conspiracy theory where they become the single most effective and efficient organisation in the world.
I tend to disbelieve conspiracy theories because I've worked in government. There is no way they'd be able to do something that devious in secret. Basically I employ Hanlon's razor, Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Claiming the government is secretly devious whilst managing to keep the traps of 600 odd scocio/psychopaths who love self aggrandising shut every and changing that 600 every 4 years is one step above saying "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens".
Still not gonna let you vape in a meeting though. It's your disgusting habit, not mine. Go away.
Same rules exist for e-cigarettes as for normal cigarettes. Here in the UK this means they can't be used in any enclosed shared environment.
However you'll lose any criticism for vaping once you've used it to help a family member kick the habit for good. My brother in law is, was, a life long smoker. I bought him a vape kit from the UK in 2016 and he hasn't had a smoke for over 2 years. He's even winding down the amount of nicotine he's vaping.
It'd be great if everyone in my office switched to vaping. The lift would stop smelling of smoke, I wouldn't have to walk through clouds of acrid smoke when I walk out the door. I could actually stand being within 2 metres of them. You might not like the sickly sweet smell of some vape solutions... But if that annoys you, you will not be able to stand being in the same room as an indoor smoker.
If all smokers switched to vape tomorrow, would there be a massive overall improvement in health? Of course there would be.
Yes, but they would risk being lost in giant vape-clouds of hipster douche-baggery -- a great detriment of the rest of us.:-)
But a massive reduction in the amount of foul, acrid smoke clouds that hang around for hours, not to mention smokers dragging that smell into the office with them which have long been the domain of arrogant arseholery that have long been at great detriment to the rest of us.
On balance, the vape clouds are a huge improvement.
How many actual stranger attacks on children are there? Seems like a lot because it sells news, so it is over reported. There was one around here about 30 years back, sad because the kid vanished at a baseball game, but the news still talks about it.
Most child kidnappings seem to be by their divorced other parent and even most molestation is by relatives, friends and trusted figures like the priest, coach or scout leader.
Whilst you're 100% correct that most child disappearances (well, kidnappings and disappearances in general) are done by family or close, trusted people, the reason why we still talk about it 30 years later is because we're genetically programmed to care about children, and not just our own. This genetic programming is often combined with the media's love of hyperbole to get eyeballs to blow stories completely out of proportion (erm... see Madeline McCann).
However it also should be noted that the last 30 (probably 50) years there's been a huge emphasis on teaching children about the dangers of strangers which has done a lot to cut down on abductions.
Have you seen the deal that Wisconsin was going to give them at the expense of the taxpayers? No one was going to benefit from that arrangement except for Foxconn. They could have put all that money towards encouraging tech development in their state instead.
And even then it still wasn't enough to make it profitable.
The US needs to decide if it's a developed or developing nation. If you want to be a highly developed nation, then you need to stop thinking that cheap manufacturing is a good thing, it's not. You want your workforce so highly educated that they will want better jobs than screwing on toothpaste caps. You want industries that the developing world cannot compete with like high tech manufacturing, bio and nano tech and fields outside of manufacturing completely. What you don't want is to keep people in minimum wage manufacturing jobs.
Yeah, it's their second most profitable quarter ever, second only to their year-ago quarter, which was the most profitable quarter in history, not just for Apple, but for any company ever.
Doomed!
If only we could all be doomed so successfully...
Sarcasm aside, they actually are doomed in the grand scheme of things, the same as Sears was doomed 50 years ago. This may be what we look back on in 10 or 20 years and say was "peak Apple", but it's hard to say anything with certainty now.
And I predicted this years ago.
Apple's growth was entirely due to the fact there were markets they hadn't entered yet like China. Smartphones matured years ago, there aren't any more big leaps to make, no revolutions to be had even though Apple are still playing catchup to Android. Because phones are mature people are replacing them less frequently. Most of the people I know with Iphones are still using old ones, 4's 5's and 6's. They'll keep them until they die because they are good enough and none of them is willing to drop £1000 on a phone.
When the 4 was released, it was discovered that 4 out of every 5 purchases was replacing an earlier model, I wouldn't be surprised to find that this was now 7 out of 8.
There is also nothing special about them any more. Even someone on benefits can get one these days. To the average person, there's no difference between Android and IOS, hell they don't even know what the two are because to them, it's just a phone. Apple falling out of fashion means that they'll go back to just buying "a phone" regardless of if it's Samsung, Apple, Nokia or Huawei. Most people who have an Apple phone are not rabid fanboys... same with Android phones, most people couldn't care less.
So really for Apple this is a bad time because they've realised their in a perfect storm of not being special, lack of customer loyalty, stupid pricing and technological maturity that no marketing can quell.
The current crop of UX designers seem to be following the philosophy of listen to what your audience wants and make sure to avoid that at all cost. We've gone from vivid intricate icons to stick figures in shades of grey!
The problem is that they are "UX designers", not HMI engineers.
UX is a bollocks field made up by Apple to explain why their interfaces were contrary to HMI and HCI wisdom.
Until companies get designers out and engineers in, we'll continue to have horrible interfaces foisted on us... And to be honest, Google are the least worst offenders here.
Slashdot Mirror
You could just make it illegal to scam people, you know?
Is that not already illegal in your country? I thought it was. The problem you've got is that where does a scam stop and stupidity begin. It's not quite that black and white. Whilst obvious scams should be stopped, at some point you've got to give up and admit that ultimately we can't protect a truly dedicated idiot from themselves. Here in the UK we have education campaigns and monthly articles about how some poor pensioner was scammed out of her life savings, but it keeps happening. Ultimately I'd rather not have to put all pensioners under 24 hour surveillance for the sake of a few who just don't get it.
The simple rule "advertisement must be truthful" would kill all this bullshit instantly
Do you mean The Truth (nods and smiles) or The Truth (frowns and shakes head)?
The problem is the truth can get pretty subjective. There aren't very many ways to subjectively measure it. Hell, most of your news channels completely fail at fact checking which _is_ one of the few ways to objectively measure truth and even then, this doesn't stop facts from being misrepresented to push an agenda.
To a Christian, that god exists is the truth. The problem with challenging that held truth is that you can't. Ultimately we cannot say certain that god does not exist because we don't have objective evidence. Sure we have logic and reason, very sound arguments but absolute fact, nope. not a sausage. So the "truth" of god remains open to interpretation.
It's not even a FREEZE PEACH issue. The truth simply isn't an objective measure.
However the US can start by making it illegal to tell complete falsehoods in advertisement like the rest of the world. You can't define the truth in absolutes because it's difficult to prove beyond reason, but you can define a lie because they're easy to disprove beyond reason.
The so-called Quack Miranda Warning.
Basically, there was a push in the early 90's to put this stuff under some long overdue regulations, so the snake oil industry organized a huge campaign to defend their business model. They ran ads about how evil government was coming to take your precious, essential, life giving, natural supplements away for their Big Pharma cronies, or something to that effect, and their customers wrote a lot of letters to politicians demanding the supplement manufactures be given leeway.
It worked, con artists successfully convinced the public (enough of it anyway) to act against their own best interests, and that's how you can sell homeopathy as a sleep aid, curry powder as a weight loss pill, the latest superfruit fad as the wonder everything pill, and other items of questionable benefit as something with the deceptive appearance of medical value. You just have to say the magic words "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease" on your product.
And Americans wonder why we don't want to buy your meat... it could have anything in it, asbestos sold as a cure for the common cold.
At least over here in the UK, you have to keep your claims suitably nebulous that a reasonable person would not construe them as having an actual effect on medical conditions. They have to advertise "feelings" and nondescript benefits to get you to buy their pills which are specifically designed to not do anything as that way they avoid doing FDA testing. Trying to claim that they'll have an unproven medical or health effect is an easy way to get a huge fine and lawsuit.
Pharma companies make more out of vitamin placebos than boner pills. Produce 1000 for $1, sell them in packs of 30 for $5.
Use gmail for work for decade+, spam has certainly never been a problem.
Although, it does seem to be a bit aggressive sometimes.
I'm pretty sure in the 12 years I've been using Gmail I've never had a false positive. The only way I'd know is if someone emailed me and then told me and this to date has never happened. The biggest issue is sometimes the commercial emails I want end up in Spam (I.E. offers from any company in Las Vegas for some reason) but that isn't a major issue for me. Even the spam folder is mostly ads from companies I don't want to hear from rather than actual spam.
Conversely I have a Hotmail account that I've had since 1997, it used to be my primary email before GMail came along, its full of almost nothing but spam, Russian women that allegedly "want" to meet me (nah, pale and blonde isn't my thing), business proposals from people who I've never heard of, even the odd Nigerian prince.
The side effect for the company. Other then just printing millions of CD's for you app and selling them for a hundreds of dollars. You now need to maintain a full data-center to handle the data for millions of customers.
Cloud is good when you need to share across networks. Or you are a small organization who just doesn't have a secure infrastructure. But for others having software that you can buy and keep updated (or not) yourself is useful. There isn't too many features past office 97 that I really need. Why can't I use office 97 for work.
I think the way Adobe et al. have gone is that the software is still loaded on your local PC and just checks the server every few minutes to make sure you're still allowed to use it. Its cloud DRM or Dickmove as a Service.
Those of us who play video games have been warning you about this for ages. I suspect piracy will pick up again.
The ultimate goal is to slow people down to the speed limit. To try and accomplish that, the police issue fines: “you don’t want to pay that every time you drive too fast”, and to instill the idea that the likelihood of getting a fine when speedin is quite high: “we are watching”. For the second point, the police over here actually do publish the locations of speed traps themselves... just not all of them. A study suggests that it actually helps; people don’t keep checking the mile markers to see if they are near the speed trap, they tend to stick to the limit for a far larger stretch rather than keep speeding (and slamming the brakes as soon as they spot the camera).
In some other European countries it is illegal to announce the location of speed traps. One radio station got around that by reporting incidences of “falling stars” instead.
Which European countries? I wish to make a note to avoid them.
The UK publishes the locations of fixed and average speed cameras... It's almost as if they just want you to slow down.
I've never been a believer in the "revenue" conspiracy theory because it just doesn't make sense to have a revenue stream designed to discourage repeat custom (if they truly were trying to raise revenue, they'd lower the fines so they're less trouble to pay and maybe give you a 14 day period where it's halved, like parking fines in the UK). However if speed cameras are to achieve the goal of slowing speeding traffic, they need to be visible and noticeable when you're on the road, not days after the event.
When it comes to correcting bad behaviour on the roads, nothing is as effective as a liveried police car though.
It's only recently -- the past 5 or so years -- that a certain cadre of very loud right-wingnut boors have shown up.
I think it goes back further than that. My sense is that it crept up steadily post-9/11, but spiked after Barack Obama was first elected. The target shifted from him to Hillary Clinton (his presumptive successor) over the next 8 years, with "Benghazi", "but her e-mails", and "lock her up" calls from the right-wing chorus. And it spiked yet again during the lead-up to the 2016 POTUS election, I suspect with help from Russian troll-farms.
I think they've always been here. Slashdot has a large population of Libertarians, both the nutbar total anarchist kind and the less nutty "anrachy for rich people (but police protection from the poor)" kind, we've always had a fair share of right leaners, its the rise of the far right that is the issue, the far right-wing has always been here but they've always been too scared to spew their bile. The problem with /. is the same with almost everywhere. The rebranding of white supremacists rebranded themselves as "Alt-Right" to fool people into thinking they aren't bigoted arseholes, this largely worked and so every bigoted arsehole is emboldened and claiming victim status whenever they are rightfully called a bigoted arsehole.
/.
I relish the day when the worst we had were GNAA and Swichuer trolls combined with the odd troll linking to goatse. They were good times.
Also, the GP forgot that there has always been a large population of Apple fanboys on
What a PITA that would be, I'm guessing that takes a lot of the fun out of after market exhaust systems.
On the other hand: What a PITA the consequences of not having emissions checks are!
Aftermarket exhaust systems are fine as long as you leave the catalytic converter in (or replace it with a new one). You've just got to put our approximately the same emissions as the OEM system. Yearly checks (called M.O.T's for the Americans playing along at home) aren't arduous if you've got a semi-maintained vehicle and really keep the unroadworthy cars off the road, the ones with broken control arms, rusted bodies and chassis, Bare brake pads, twisted rotors and faulty electrics.
That was for Ireland and bank crime.
Getting caught with the tools for a crime on the way to do a crime.
That is what the software is needed for. To continually tell Americans that the Republic of Ireland (ROI) is a completely different nation to the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Crown Dependencies and British Overseas Territories... None of which include the ROI.
As for "real freedom" that's fairly subjective based on what you consider freedom to be. There probably isn't any country in the world that everyone would say is a perfect bastion of freedom- because it's a precarious balance. Some would consider the US to be less free with it's lack of representative vote (electoral system), a political system that is biased towards a two party system, lack of an unbiased media (everything leans one way or the other to a degree), world's highest incarceration rate, lack of egalitarian education or health systems. (wealthy areas have much better schools, and rich people get better care). Lots of "morality laws" based on drugs, alcohol, sexual morality.
This
The UK is actually one of the better nations for personal liberty, even amongst developed nations. We treat drug offences are minor crimes (most drug offences are routinely ignored). The powers of the police to actually make arrests is very limited (and when violated, you are "de-arrested", not released without charge or have a charge trumped up against you), you'll never be pulled over for doing 10 over on the motorway, let alone have your cash confiscated on the spot as "drug money". Our prison population is far too large though, for the number of prisons we actually have.
Nor do we regulate the morality of sex. In fact it's a running joke that whatever sexual proclivity you have, it'll cost you £300 in London. Yes, prostitution is legal here in England and Wales (pimping is not though).
We've got a few foibles like cutting into a queue being a near capital offence. But all nations have their foibles.
Personal liberty is one of the four British core values.
What I'd like to know is what this prediction software is actually doing. Sure it sounds scary and the Beeb sucks at technology reporting, but what if it is just trying to automate what CID (detectives) already do and draw patterns? It could be as simple as "Guv, there's been a lot of car fefts in 'Ackney, might want to put a few extra uniforms down there", maybe even going as far as to identify the types of cars being stolen, approximate times, any connection between the owners (same dealer/mechanic). There's no point in complaining that this is Minority Report, without actually knowing what's happening. Lets not base our entire knowledge of things based on movies, we're not the US president.
OTOH, we are the nation that actually deployed Skynet.
People will notice. I mean, yes, they'll be suckered in for the "new", but soon they'll find out that the new is just a new coat of paint on the old. And then? You think they'll get "6G" (or whatever the next gen thing will be) once they have been burned now?
Fuck those quarter-report idiots.
Like they noticed AT&T passing off 3G as 4G... Right, guys, right? They all noticed that.
Back when G had a definition, few people knew it. Now it doesn't have a definition, so phone companies can call whatever they like 5G. Its not like the US has an advertising standards agency or anything to punish companies who deliberately advertise misleading information. Hell, AT&T would get away with it by simply saying that 5G stands for G-G-G-G-Good.
They system was poisoned a long time ago but it never harmed the people doing the poisoning.
How about end-of-life on security updates and OS upgrades?
What end user cares about those?
Keep in mind that the majority of people buying smartphones are just consumers. They don't want to use the device for anything specific, just consume through it. As long as they can do that, why do they care about the OG or whatever it is you called it.
Such a high minimum wage will never work because living wages aren't capitalist and this is literally white genocide and minimum wages literally killed the Lindbergh baby and a living wage is exactly the same thing as burning a flag and worse than 23 Benghazis and *pant pant pant*
*mops forehead with fedora*
You forgot to mention HER EMAILS.
You must be reading the wrong forecasts. Hourly windows for the next day are pretty accurate these days
So accurate that they need to keep changing them. I'm not sure where the Atlantic got it's data from, but they need to come here to the UK. Met managed to predict there would be snow last week... but couldn't say which day. Weather is easy to predict in temperate climates where the patterns do not change dramatically.
You might be referring to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Like somebody who is top of their game in field A assumes their knowledge is sufficient in field B.
They may also be bad at stats and be completely unaware of it.
This.
The article didn't define "better educated". Someone with an MBA or degree in Communications knows sweet fuck all about medicine and biochemistry. Not everyone who graduates from tertiary education is smart (conversely, not everyone who takes a trade is dumb, shit, one of the smartest people I know is a hotel clerk but he fucked up his life early by getting a girl pregnant at 17). This is why your work history becomes more important than your education after a few years.
Kids need to wise up
No, I'm pretty sure the police need to wise up. This does not sound like something that required action by the police.
The problem the police have is that if it turns out it was not a joke, they'll be hung for it.
Not the culture that created them, nor the parents who left automatic weapons where kids could get them (hell, probably gave them the guns). Thoughts and prayers for the people modding this down, thoughts and prayers.
Kid threatens to shoot up school. Kid faces charges. As it should be.
Unless the threat/joke was actually credible, the kid should not have been charged. Believe it or not, there are ways to discipline children without involving the police and courts.
You know, if you really wanted to cut down on school shootings, maybe your culture should stop glorifying guns and violence. Just a crazy idea. Maybe, just maybe also control your guns better so that they aren't left out in the open for kids to grab, you know, be responsible with dangerous things you own.
But who am I kidding, there is an inevitable mod down waiting for even suggesting such sensible things. Thoughts and prayers to those modding this down, gourd press.
It's worth pointing out that English is the second most spoken language in the world and arguably the most widely spoken language since the only one with more speakers is Mandarin Chinese which is predominantly only spoken in one country.
English is still the most widely spoken language, Mandarin has 1.07 billion speakers whilst English has 1.12 billion.
The difference between them is that Mandarin has 908 million L1 (native) speakers and English has 378 million L1 speakers. What makes English the most widely spoken language is that there are 742 million L2 speakers. Spanish by comparsion has more L1 speakers, 442 million but only 70 million L2.
Ultimately English is going to remain the international language because Mandarin is far too strict and rigid for the majority of non-native speakers to learn. Even Spanish, which is fairly flexible, is difficult for a lot of non-Europeans. English is a very fault tolerant language, it permits radical changes in syntax and grammar, yet is still perfectly understandable.
From what I've seen amongst friends and acquaintances, there are only three reasons most people upgrade these days:
1. The battery life has decreased to the point that it's unusable, and they don't seem to understand that you can change the battery.
2. The phone stops working and is out of warranty.
3. They're on a "plan" which amortizes the cost of the phone over several years, it's time for a renewal, and the provider has offered them a "deal" which they think is good.
I can boil that one down in to 1 reason.
1. The phone they have is good enough.
Smartphones are now mature. There's no huge advantage to buying a new model because it will only have minor differences. There aren't any more "killer" features to add, most improvements will not be noticed by the user, making fonts slighlty clearer, improving memory management, so on and so forth. There just isn't the impetus to upgrade any more.
It's a well-known secret that both parties have an agreement to slowly raise the minimum wage below the rate of inflation but to have a big media shit-storm every time to socially signal to "their" voters that they're being represented. The whole thing might be the biggest con in history.
I've got to love the notion that government is extremely incompetent and wasteful up until the point of a conspiracy theory where they become the single most effective and efficient organisation in the world.
I tend to disbelieve conspiracy theories because I've worked in government. There is no way they'd be able to do something that devious in secret. Basically I employ Hanlon's razor, Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Claiming the government is secretly devious whilst managing to keep the traps of 600 odd scocio/psychopaths who love self aggrandising shut every and changing that 600 every 4 years is one step above saying "I'm not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens".
Still not gonna let you vape in a meeting though. It's your disgusting habit, not mine. Go away.
Same rules exist for e-cigarettes as for normal cigarettes. Here in the UK this means they can't be used in any enclosed shared environment.
However you'll lose any criticism for vaping once you've used it to help a family member kick the habit for good. My brother in law is, was, a life long smoker. I bought him a vape kit from the UK in 2016 and he hasn't had a smoke for over 2 years. He's even winding down the amount of nicotine he's vaping.
It'd be great if everyone in my office switched to vaping. The lift would stop smelling of smoke, I wouldn't have to walk through clouds of acrid smoke when I walk out the door. I could actually stand being within 2 metres of them. You might not like the sickly sweet smell of some vape solutions... But if that annoys you, you will not be able to stand being in the same room as an indoor smoker.
If all smokers switched to vape tomorrow, would there be a massive overall improvement in health? Of course there would be.
Yes, but they would risk being lost in giant vape-clouds of hipster douche-baggery -- a great detriment of the rest of us. :-)
But a massive reduction in the amount of foul, acrid smoke clouds that hang around for hours, not to mention smokers dragging that smell into the office with them which have long been the domain of arrogant arseholery that have long been at great detriment to the rest of us.
On balance, the vape clouds are a huge improvement.
How many actual stranger attacks on children are there? Seems like a lot because it sells news, so it is over reported. There was one around here about 30 years back, sad because the kid vanished at a baseball game, but the news still talks about it.
Most child kidnappings seem to be by their divorced other parent and even most molestation is by relatives, friends and trusted figures like the priest, coach or scout leader.
Whilst you're 100% correct that most child disappearances (well, kidnappings and disappearances in general) are done by family or close, trusted people, the reason why we still talk about it 30 years later is because we're genetically programmed to care about children, and not just our own. This genetic programming is often combined with the media's love of hyperbole to get eyeballs to blow stories completely out of proportion (erm... see Madeline McCann).
However it also should be noted that the last 30 (probably 50) years there's been a huge emphasis on teaching children about the dangers of strangers which has done a lot to cut down on abductions.
Have you seen the deal that Wisconsin was going to give them at the expense of the taxpayers? No one was going to benefit from that arrangement except for Foxconn. They could have put all that money towards encouraging tech development in their state instead.
And even then it still wasn't enough to make it profitable.
The US needs to decide if it's a developed or developing nation. If you want to be a highly developed nation, then you need to stop thinking that cheap manufacturing is a good thing, it's not. You want your workforce so highly educated that they will want better jobs than screwing on toothpaste caps. You want industries that the developing world cannot compete with like high tech manufacturing, bio and nano tech and fields outside of manufacturing completely. What you don't want is to keep people in minimum wage manufacturing jobs.
Yeah, it's their second most profitable quarter ever, second only to their year-ago quarter, which was the most profitable quarter in history, not just for Apple, but for any company ever.
Doomed!
If only we could all be doomed so successfully...
Sarcasm aside, they actually are doomed in the grand scheme of things, the same as Sears was doomed 50 years ago. This may be what we look back on in 10 or 20 years and say was "peak Apple", but it's hard to say anything with certainty now.
And I predicted this years ago.
Apple's growth was entirely due to the fact there were markets they hadn't entered yet like China. Smartphones matured years ago, there aren't any more big leaps to make, no revolutions to be had even though Apple are still playing catchup to Android. Because phones are mature people are replacing them less frequently. Most of the people I know with Iphones are still using old ones, 4's 5's and 6's. They'll keep them until they die because they are good enough and none of them is willing to drop £1000 on a phone.
When the 4 was released, it was discovered that 4 out of every 5 purchases was replacing an earlier model, I wouldn't be surprised to find that this was now 7 out of 8.
There is also nothing special about them any more. Even someone on benefits can get one these days. To the average person, there's no difference between Android and IOS, hell they don't even know what the two are because to them, it's just a phone. Apple falling out of fashion means that they'll go back to just buying "a phone" regardless of if it's Samsung, Apple, Nokia or Huawei. Most people who have an Apple phone are not rabid fanboys... same with Android phones, most people couldn't care less.
So really for Apple this is a bad time because they've realised their in a perfect storm of not being special, lack of customer loyalty, stupid pricing and technological maturity that no marketing can quell.
The current crop of UX designers seem to be following the philosophy of listen to what your audience wants and make sure to avoid that at all cost. We've gone from vivid intricate icons to stick figures in shades of grey!
The problem is that they are "UX designers", not HMI engineers.
UX is a bollocks field made up by Apple to explain why their interfaces were contrary to HMI and HCI wisdom.
Until companies get designers out and engineers in, we'll continue to have horrible interfaces foisted on us... And to be honest, Google are the least worst offenders here.