I've tried to address this issue with SSA: One-third of Americans have no cellphone service. That's all SSA will allow!
Most banks do this with an eMail account: If they're uncertain (e.g., you've been offline for a long time), they'll send you a random string of digits you must provide back on the login page, so they know you're YOU.
But, the SSA decided that if you don't have a cellphone, you don't deserve access to My SSA at all.
My guess: The contractor they engaged to implement the recently mandated two-factor authentication made a side deal with AT&T or Verizon to get extra money by only implementing something from which they financially benefit!
Please write to SSA and tell them this is not a way to treat citizens...they MUST implement the email option in their two-factor authentication, in my opinion.
1. They unload Win10 on the world, only partially designed, and sucker us into doing their product testing. Then, the add more and more complexity with unnecessary "features" that are mere click bait.
2. Then, the declare it's the last of the "Windows" line (unlikely, and a stupid claim by an executive without credibility to assert it.)
3. Now, they plan to get rid of productive employees. Why? "Bottom line" or, as Jack Welch said, early in his career at GE CEO, "the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder return on investment." Then, two years ago, after retirement, he admits in Forbes' magazine that his was "...the dumbest idea in the world."
4. And Microsoft is joining the cadre of companies with "great (aka overpaid) CEOs" (usually self-proclaimed) who produce poor results over the long-term (see http://www.wsj.com/articles/be...). They're about to fall off a cliff...and they think they're on solid ground. Mark my words.
Another unsubstantiated "economic theory" posted by a financial illiterate. Knowledge bears no relationship to money; it does bear some relationship to work.
You can't BUY knowledge...you can buy (and have a relationship with) knowledgeable people, and some of it might rub off.
If Money can buy Knowledge, how is it that Trump/Drumpf is so ignorant???
His "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" is a masterpiece of writing, explaining how totally WRONG most economists are about nearly everything they say. e.g.: There is no such think as a "free market," there are always rules, regulations, legislation that--for example, keep practitioners of homeopathy from being considered 'doctors,' because they have no evidence that it is anything but a placebo. Or, for another example, that truckers hauling things for sale still have to adhere to speed limits, for safety's sake. Or, the FDA, so hated by the Right, that mandates that drugs for sale have to meet certain proven safety requirements (too bad they don't regulate profits as well).
Or, for another one of those 23 things: Jack Welch said, when he headed General Electric, that the first duty of any business was to "maximize shareholder value." Then, in Forbes a couple of years ago, he admitted that (and I quote) it was "the dumbest idea in the world!"
He doesn't idolize Communism, but he sure picks at the threads of what the 1% would have us believe...except the United States Constitution gives us the right to learn from a writer, like Chang, that they're all blowing smoke up our economics for their own selfish benefit.
Do-nothing Darrell Issa is NOW concerned about H1B abuse, because people in his district (a high-tech hotbed North of San Diego) have been having their jobs overtaken by imported, lower-cost workers...conveniently, just before his performance is questioned by challengers for his Seat in the House of Representatives. He could've done this anytime in the past two (or four) years, but, no-o-o. He waits until he can make it a CAMPAIGN ISSUE to help his faltering reputation. His Democratic challenger is now approaching parity in polling, so, pull out the project he SHOULD have been working on for the past several years in office. But, schemer that he is, he's held it in reserve until it could save his butt...and he hopes you forget about all the butts of working who've lost their jobs because of his passive attitude toward constituents in prior years!
I wouldn't. Most residential phones are moving to VOIP; if you have Internet it dramatically cuts your phone bill.
The "Callers'" number can be blocked, and some unreputable robocallers do that. But, then I block all calls that don't identify themselves via Caller ID.
Umm, I still think the tariffs for "wire-line phone service) charge the CALLING parting, not the CALLED party...at least in every U.S. state I know of. International calls TO you are billed by the carrier at "waters' edge." However, on cellular service you're getting charged for "air time," aka the time you spent at originator OR recipient of a call...that's the cellular scam.
It's why I take these measures: 1. I use VOIP at my home, instead of paying AT&T their exorbitant tariff. Because data demands of voice are so small, it'll work on 'most any Internet service even the slowest. I pay $25.00/month for unlimited calling anywhere in North America. I do not subscribe to AT&T or other telco VOIP; it's a ripoff.
2. I register with the FTC "Do Not Call" list; reputable companies use it. The rest are outlaws. I report outlaws to the FTC regularly by eMail.
3. I have a cordless phone system at home with a central station (Panasonic, if you're interested; DECT models) that has a "Call Block" feature: Anytime I hear a voice message from a robocaller, I press Call Block...thereafter, if they call again, it rings ONCE, then never again. Eventually, they put my number on their "DO NOT CALL" list, because it costs them money.
4. I only list my landline phone on my business card, or in any on-line registration that demands it, never my cellphone.
As a result, I have yet to ever pay a monthly cellphone bill higher than the minimum contract amount.
Out here in rural America (I'm near Lake Tahoe), we hear nothing but Big Business Buzz. I've got the best there is in the County Seat: 12 Mb/s, barely enough for my small business...but nothing near what it would take to attract significant business growth, because we're not "visible" enough, and the Republican congress has made sure there's been no money (even though most rural areas are as Red as Hell) for broadband through the Rural Utilities Service, or other federal medium.
Google could create a massive economic boom in rural America...but "shareholder return" is more important to them than trying to help solve economic problems outside big cities. But, even Jack Welch, the original progenitor of "shareholder value" has now called it "the dumbest idea in the world." (See http://www.forbes.com/sites/st...)
Even the Tennessee Valley Authority spawned the USDA's Rural Electrification Service to bring electricity to rural areas...back when politicians still gave a damn about their constituents' needs.
So, Google, why won't you return my phone calls about serving rural markets? Are citizens in rural areas less VALUABLE to our Country, in your eyes? Where does YOUR food come from?
BB apparently depends on government business for a large fraction of its' income. This is just "dancing to the piper's tune."
Chen appears to be siding with his major "customer," to forego his failure at making a product that non-governmental customers want to buy. He is also apparently wholly ignorant of constitutional rights to privacy in the U.S., as outlined by Alan Westin's seminal and masterful "Privacy and Freedom" (1967).
You "Get" an apartment with a larger replicator, of course.
And, in general, your "greatest shortcoming" is endemic to all stories, from those around the communal campfires of our far ancestors, to today's novels: The "backstory" is a set of presuppositions, evident to the participants in the drama itself. To me, it is that pattern of unstated presuppositions that makes a story great: You have to suspend your own belief patterns of what happened prior to your own birth, and adopt a different pattern of presuppositions to make sense of the narrative of the story. And, in Star Trek, Spock's pattern of presuppositions, for example, is quite different from Kirk's, 'tho they share those of the Federation. From that, rich storytelling emerges. I find that the people who don't appreciate science fiction are those who find understanding that principle beyond their ken.
...and coercive. And backwards. Unnecessarily complex, too.
The simplest solution is best: Allow a second form of the Control Panel | Program and Features, with a check mark box in front of every entry. Now, let the Administrator use that view to click on all items that should be removed, and do it all in one session (with as many automatic reboots as necessary). The code can figure out the dependencies and adjust the order to do the independent stuff first, and so-on down the tree.
Only M$ could come up with this inverse of the logical approach so it will, inevitably, trash things you wanted to keep! Because, of course, M$ knows better than any user how "best" to manage the users' own computer systems.
And, again, M$ declares: "We are the King of the O.S. world; you mere customers are only objects to be manipulated to our satisfaction!"
They were intended to be principles designed INTO the robot. Anyone can build a device (and call it a robot) that violates one of the three laws: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."
Amen! As I point out below, it's the difference between knowing what the end result it supposed to be, and tinkering to see if you can make it work without knowing what "it" is!
It was 1962, at C-E-I-R. I was a "junior programmer," two-steps lower than dirt, paid less than the departmental secretary. But, there was a team there (many of whom went on to be well-known names) who were writing code to punch on cards to feed the 4K (7-bit bytes) IBM 1401. I needed to learn what they were doing, so I started reading the 1401's assembly code of a package of utilities (read/write tape, Fibonacci sort, etc.), and offering suggestions for improvement...until they let me start making those suggestions myself. The card deck was called CELIB (C-E-I-R Library), and I discovered a copy of that deck of cards in an Australian government agency where they were still using it (about 15 years later) on an ancient 1401 that, by that time, had grown all the way up to the maximum of 16,000 bytes of memory! And I proved it to them by showing them my name in the comments of some of the code they were still using, where we would note what we'd changed, and when.
After I'd grasped how IBM 1401 assembly language worked, I started taking home a binder of the kernel code of the IBM operating system IBSYS, for the IBM 7090; we had one of the first. (The 1401 was used to copy card decks to tape, so we could mount the tape on the 7090, instead of spending precious time on that $800/hour computer loading the card decks at the card-readers' speed; all printer output also went to tape, which we moved over to the cheaper 1401 to actually print out on the then novel IBM 1403 printer).
Once I'd figured out how some of the "kernel" of IBSYS worked, I began to realize that "Coding" wasn't "Programming." That led me to begin to understand the "bottom-up" (write some code, see if it does what you want, revise it, repeat) versus "top-down" (here's what we want to accomplish: Now, break that down into codeable, callable subroutines, which--in turn--were broken down into smaller bits of code, like CELIB) models of design. That lead to initial "Principles of Programming" in which we started with System Analysis (what exists; what's needed?), and did top-down decomposition into documented procedures, which then were written in the languages of the day: Assembly, FORTRAN, COBOL, and so on. Looking back, it was fun to survive those early years understanding how architects and engineers created new buildings--by starting with what the building was intended to achieve ("Start with the a definition of the end state")--all the way down to the laying of the flooring--in what came to be known as "top-down system design."
It's been a fun ride. I still chuckle at people trying to start with coding, without a clear plan of what it is they want to eventually achieve. Coding is just the implementation of design. It's the tip of the spear...but you still gotta know how to find the game you want to throw it at! I still write the occasional utility--sometimes in.bat files--just because its' such an engrossing activity. But, I still start with a sketch of what I want to achieve before I turn to the computer to actually "code."
I'll grant you that. I had 6 Mb/s here in rural California, and in the evenings (while my computers are backing up, using the internal wired network) traffic collisions frequently interrupted what I was watching on Netflix. However, I upgraded to 12 Mb/s ($10/mo more) and--No More Collisions...and a happy spouse, too!
Nor is it proven that the problem is within Firefox...it could as well be in the Tor modifications to Firefox...if, indeed, there is such a problem at all.
Wild speculation, whether here at/., or at Motherboard, is absent evidence. If I were an agent of the FBI and I DIDN'T know ANYTHING about some putative "back door" into Tor, I'd claim I did, to scare the #$&*%^ out of people who DO use Tor. They can, apparently, legally do that with impunity as officers for the law.
Until there's evidence to support this idle speculation, it is bunkum.
if we CHOOSE to be: The Oxford English Dictionary defines "Scientist" as:"One who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences." Bill Nye is certainly as qualified as a student of Climate Science as anyone else; even a serial rapist can qualify to be identified as a scientist if they diligently study one or more of the sciences; a disreputable scientist, to be sure, but a student of science nonetheless.
It is those who reject "climate change" out of hand--with no scientific basis or study, relying solely on their own self interest--who are not scientists. (I would be happier if all politicians had to become ardent and proven students of "political science," on of the fields within "the humanities" field, before they could run for public office.)
Sarah Palin's only notable study of anything but her own self-aggrandizement has been her assertion that she reads "...all of them..." when asked which newspapers she reads. That isn't "study," that's a bald-face lie.
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried to address this issue with SSA: One-third of Americans have no cellphone service. That's all SSA will allow!
Most banks do this with an eMail account: If they're uncertain (e.g., you've been offline for a long time), they'll send you a random string of digits you must provide back on the login page, so they know you're YOU.
But, the SSA decided that if you don't have a cellphone, you don't deserve access to My SSA at all.
My guess: The contractor they engaged to implement the recently mandated two-factor authentication made a side deal with AT&T or Verizon to get extra money by only implementing something from which they financially benefit!
Please write to SSA and tell them this is not a way to treat citizens...they MUST implement the email option in their two-factor authentication, in my opinion.
1. They unload Win10 on the world, only partially designed, and sucker us into doing their product testing. Then, the add more and more complexity with unnecessary "features" that are mere click bait.
2. Then, the declare it's the last of the "Windows" line (unlikely, and a stupid claim by an executive without credibility to assert it.)
3. Now, they plan to get rid of productive employees. Why? "Bottom line" or, as Jack Welch said, early in his career at GE CEO, "the purpose of a corporation is to maximize shareholder return on investment." Then, two years ago, after retirement, he admits in Forbes' magazine that his was "...the dumbest idea in the world."
4. And Microsoft is joining the cadre of companies with "great (aka overpaid) CEOs" (usually self-proclaimed) who produce poor results over the long-term (see http://www.wsj.com/articles/be...).
They're about to fall off a cliff...and they think they're on solid ground. Mark my words.
Another unsubstantiated "economic theory" posted by a financial illiterate. Knowledge bears no relationship to money; it does bear some relationship to work.
You can't BUY knowledge...you can buy (and have a relationship with) knowledgeable people, and some of it might rub off.
If Money can buy Knowledge, how is it that Trump/Drumpf is so ignorant???
His "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism" is a masterpiece of writing, explaining how totally WRONG most economists are about nearly everything they say. e.g.: There is no such think as a "free market," there are always rules, regulations, legislation that--for example, keep practitioners of homeopathy from being considered 'doctors,' because they have no evidence that it is anything but a placebo. Or, for another example, that truckers hauling things for sale still have to adhere to speed limits, for safety's sake. Or, the FDA, so hated by the Right, that mandates that drugs for sale have to meet certain proven safety requirements (too bad they don't regulate profits as well).
Or, for another one of those 23 things: Jack Welch said, when he headed General Electric, that the first duty of any business was to "maximize shareholder value." Then, in Forbes a couple of years ago, he admitted that (and I quote) it was "the dumbest idea in the world!"
He doesn't idolize Communism, but he sure picks at the threads of what the 1% would have us believe...except the United States Constitution gives us the right to learn from a writer, like Chang, that they're all blowing smoke up our economics for their own selfish benefit.
Oops: error correction: Last sentence: ...about all the butts of working PEOPLE who've lost...
Do-nothing Darrell Issa is NOW concerned about H1B abuse, because people in his district (a high-tech hotbed North of San Diego) have been having their jobs overtaken by imported, lower-cost workers...conveniently, just before his performance is questioned by challengers for his Seat in the House of Representatives.
He could've done this anytime in the past two (or four) years, but, no-o-o. He waits until he can make it a CAMPAIGN ISSUE to help his faltering reputation. His Democratic challenger is now approaching parity in polling, so, pull out the project he SHOULD have been working on for the past several years in office. But, schemer that he is, he's held it in reserve until it could save his butt...and he hopes you forget about all the butts of working who've lost their jobs because of his passive attitude toward constituents in prior years!
I wouldn't. Most residential phones are moving to VOIP; if you have Internet it dramatically cuts your phone bill.
The "Callers'" number can be blocked, and some unreputable robocallers do that. But, then I block all calls that don't identify themselves via Caller ID.
Um...report to the FTC, not the FCC.
Umm, I still think the tariffs for "wire-line phone service) charge the CALLING parting, not the CALLED party...at least in every U.S. state I know of. International calls TO you are billed by the carrier at "waters' edge." However, on cellular service you're getting charged for "air time," aka the time you spent at originator OR recipient of a call...that's the cellular scam.
It's why I take these measures:
1. I use VOIP at my home, instead of paying AT&T their exorbitant tariff. Because data demands of voice are so small, it'll work on 'most any Internet service even the slowest. I pay $25.00/month for unlimited calling anywhere in North America. I do not subscribe to AT&T or other telco VOIP; it's a ripoff.
2. I register with the FTC "Do Not Call" list; reputable companies use it. The rest are outlaws. I report outlaws to the FTC regularly by eMail.
3. I have a cordless phone system at home with a central station (Panasonic, if you're interested; DECT models) that has a "Call Block" feature: Anytime I hear a voice message from a robocaller, I press Call Block...thereafter, if they call again, it rings ONCE, then never again. Eventually, they put my number on their "DO NOT CALL" list, because it costs them money.
4. I only list my landline phone on my business card, or in any on-line registration that demands it, never my cellphone.
As a result, I have yet to ever pay a monthly cellphone bill higher than the minimum contract amount.
Out here in rural America (I'm near Lake Tahoe), we hear nothing but Big Business Buzz. I've got the best there is in the County Seat: 12 Mb/s, barely enough for my small business...but nothing near what it would take to attract significant business growth, because we're not "visible" enough, and the Republican congress has made sure there's been no money (even though most rural areas are as Red as Hell) for broadband through the Rural Utilities Service, or other federal medium.
Google could create a massive economic boom in rural America...but "shareholder return" is more important to them than trying to help solve economic problems outside big cities. But, even Jack Welch, the original progenitor of "shareholder value" has now called it "the dumbest idea in the world."
(See http://www.forbes.com/sites/st...)
Even the Tennessee Valley Authority spawned the USDA's Rural Electrification Service to bring electricity to rural areas...back when politicians still gave a damn about their constituents' needs.
So, Google, why won't you return my phone calls about serving rural markets? Are citizens in rural areas less VALUABLE to our Country, in your eyes? Where does YOUR food come from?
BB apparently depends on government business for a large fraction of its' income. This is just "dancing to the piper's tune."
Chen appears to be siding with his major "customer," to forego his failure at making a product that non-governmental customers want to buy. He is also apparently wholly ignorant of constitutional rights to privacy in the U.S., as outlined by Alan Westin's seminal and masterful "Privacy and Freedom" (1967).
If your phone won't boot, how will you get rid of the malware without losing all your data???
You "Get" an apartment with a larger replicator, of course.
And, in general, your "greatest shortcoming" is endemic to all stories, from those around the communal campfires of our far ancestors, to today's novels: The "backstory" is a set of presuppositions, evident to the participants in the drama itself. To me, it is that pattern of unstated presuppositions that makes a story great: You have to suspend your own belief patterns of what happened prior to your own birth, and adopt a different pattern of presuppositions to make sense of the narrative of the story. And, in Star Trek, Spock's pattern of presuppositions, for example, is quite different from Kirk's, 'tho they share those of the Federation. From that, rich storytelling emerges. I find that the people who don't appreciate science fiction are those who find understanding that principle beyond their ken.
...and coercive. And backwards. Unnecessarily complex, too.
The simplest solution is best: Allow a second form of the Control Panel | Program and Features, with a check mark box in front of every entry. Now, let the Administrator use that view to click on all items that should be removed, and do it all in one session (with as many automatic reboots as necessary). The code can figure out the dependencies and adjust the order to do the independent stuff first, and so-on down the tree.
An example is at http://www.techattend.com/unin...
Only M$ could come up with this inverse of the logical approach so it will, inevitably, trash things you wanted to keep! Because, of course, M$ knows better than any user how "best" to manage the users' own computer systems.
And, again, M$ declares: "We are the King of the O.S. world; you mere customers are only objects to be manipulated to our satisfaction!"
They were intended to be principles designed INTO the robot. Anyone can build a device (and call it a robot) that violates one of the three laws: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law."
What a waste of electrons, /. !!!
Coding and programming are not the same thing. One is a subset of the other, and you need that broader horizon.
Amen! As I point out below, it's the difference between knowing what the end result it supposed to be, and tinkering to see if you can make it work without knowing what "it" is!
It was 1962, at C-E-I-R. I was a "junior programmer," two-steps lower than dirt, paid less than the departmental secretary. But, there was a team there (many of whom went on to be well-known names) who were writing code to punch on cards to feed the 4K (7-bit bytes) IBM 1401. I needed to learn what they were doing, so I started reading the 1401's assembly code of a package of utilities (read/write tape, Fibonacci sort, etc.), and offering suggestions for improvement...until they let me start making those suggestions myself. The card deck was called CELIB (C-E-I-R Library), and I discovered a copy of that deck of cards in an Australian government agency where they were still using it (about 15 years later) on an ancient 1401 that, by that time, had grown all the way up to the maximum of 16,000 bytes of memory! And I proved it to them by showing them my name in the comments of some of the code they were still using, where we would note what we'd changed, and when.
After I'd grasped how IBM 1401 assembly language worked, I started taking home a binder of the kernel code of the IBM operating system IBSYS, for the IBM 7090; we had one of the first. (The 1401 was used to copy card decks to tape, so we could mount the tape on the 7090, instead of spending precious time on that $800/hour computer loading the card decks at the card-readers' speed; all printer output also went to tape, which we moved over to the cheaper 1401 to actually print out on the then novel IBM 1403 printer).
Once I'd figured out how some of the "kernel" of IBSYS worked, I began to realize that "Coding" wasn't "Programming." That led me to begin to understand the "bottom-up" (write some code, see if it does what you want, revise it, repeat) versus "top-down" (here's what we want to accomplish: Now, break that down into codeable, callable subroutines, which--in turn--were broken down into smaller bits of code, like CELIB) models of design. That lead to initial "Principles of Programming" in which we started with System Analysis (what exists; what's needed?), and did top-down decomposition into documented procedures, which then were written in the languages of the day: Assembly, FORTRAN, COBOL, and so on. Looking back, it was fun to survive those early years understanding how architects and engineers created new buildings--by starting with what the building was intended to achieve ("Start with the a definition of the end state")--all the way down to the laying of the flooring--in what came to be known as "top-down system design."
It's been a fun ride. I still chuckle at people trying to start with coding, without a clear plan of what it is they want to eventually achieve. Coding is just the implementation of design. It's the tip of the spear...but you still gotta know how to find the game you want to throw it at! I still write the occasional utility--sometimes in .bat files--just because its' such an engrossing activity. But, I still start with a sketch of what I want to achieve before I turn to the computer to actually "code."
Extend the peace offering on the one hand, while holding the axe behind his back.
Candidly, I wouldn't trust Holder any more now, than I did when he was overzealously prosecuting people while in office!
Um, er...that's YOUR choice. You can use any computer to subscribe to Netflix, and let it drive your TV.
I'll grant you that. I had 6 Mb/s here in rural California, and in the evenings (while my computers are backing up, using the internal wired network) traffic collisions frequently interrupted what I was watching on Netflix. However, I upgraded to 12 Mb/s ($10/mo more) and--No More Collisions...and a happy spouse, too!
Except that cable (in your walls) has VASTLY greater bandwidth capacity than Ethernet! MoCA proves that, handily.
Perhaps you might reverse your argument; it would make better sense.
Nor is it proven that the problem is within Firefox...it could as well be in the Tor modifications to Firefox...if, indeed, there is such a problem at all.
Wild speculation, whether here at /., or at Motherboard, is absent evidence. If I were an agent of the FBI and I DIDN'T know ANYTHING about some putative "back door" into Tor, I'd claim I did, to scare the #$&*%^ out of people who DO use Tor. They can, apparently, legally do that with impunity as officers for the law.
Until there's evidence to support this idle speculation, it is bunkum.
You assume, of course, it is "creamy" or possesses other positive attributes.
From afar, I would observe that "woman cave" would likely be repellent to most sentient human beings!
if we CHOOSE to be: The Oxford English Dictionary defines "Scientist" as:"One who is studying or has expert knowledge of one or more of the natural or physical sciences." Bill Nye is certainly as qualified as a student of Climate Science as anyone else; even a serial rapist can qualify to be identified as a scientist if they diligently study one or more of the sciences; a disreputable scientist, to be sure, but a student of science nonetheless.
It is those who reject "climate change" out of hand--with no scientific basis or study, relying solely on their own self interest--who are not scientists. (I would be happier if all politicians had to become ardent and proven students of "political science," on of the fields within "the humanities" field, before they could run for public office.)
Sarah Palin's only notable study of anything but her own self-aggrandizement has been her assertion that she reads "...all of them..." when asked which newspapers she reads. That isn't "study," that's a bald-face lie.