Re: I hope they ran the tool on itself.
Nice try, human.
3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
Once again, I note that the FBI/CIA/NSA has not demanded mandatory, regular brain scans in order to read our every thought, and check we have no terrorist intent.
And I ask, is the reason they haven't done so that they do not think they should have such an access to our thoughts, or is it merely that the technology does not exist – yet?
Under the terms leaked so far, transnational corporations would have the right to sue governments for loss of earnings if they pass laws that hurt their profits
I really cannot comprehend how anybody claiming to work for a government can have thought this was a good idea.
"Oh hey, you've discovered that our new drug was causing cancer, so now you're trying to ban it; but that would make us lose money, so you'll just have to reimburse us then."
Fuckwits.
So how do they use my WiFi passwords for ads?
Unless I missed an episode, Google knows nothing about your WiFi passwords. You might be confusing with the StreetView WiFi slurp, which consisted in Google recording transmissions from unprotected WiFi (i.e. without password).
I don't think that protects you much. Unless you reject all cookies from Google, and possibly unless you use some kind of anonymising service to change your IP, Google will still have a profile on you.
The only difference is that instead of being about user xyz@gmail.com, it will be about "the user with ID cookie 12345", or possibly about "the user from IP address 123.456.789"
Isn't there a simple (for the users) way to ensure that no app would have undesirable side effects?
It's more tricky than it looks. Say, any game involving other players, like Clash of Clans, will ask to address your address book and access the internet. That can already cause a lot of mischief.
In the end, it really depends more on whether you trust the maker of the app, than what the app demands.
On a larger scale it's been repeatedly established in recent surveys that most people don't agree with the idea that climate change is mainly caused by human activities.
Because a population-wide survey is the proper way to know whether something is correct, as opposed to doing a scientific study, right? …Right?
I mean, I also harbour doubts on the question, but that's because I doubt the quality of scientific studies done so far, not because the majority of the population thinks this way or the other.
The surprising thing is that considering Google mostly only makes money when somebody clicks on an ad, and since Google makes money hand over fist, then indeed there must be plenty of people willing, not only to see, but also to click on ads.
No, I don't know who these people are either.
They have a http://www.google.com/humans.txt file.
Also required reading: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
(Though admittedly this particular story did not happen in an Amazon warehouse).
Microsoft are over a 1$ billion a quarter ahead of AWS in cloud revenue
Yes, I'm sure their accountants would like us to believe that too. Not that revenue and market share are the same thing anyway.
So a year out of date then....
2015 is not over, so you can't have numbers for 2015. Anyway, do you seriously want us to believe that Microsoft could catch up on a lead of 28% to 10% in five months?
Shill.
Apple has caught the market’s changing tastes just in time
Er… Actually, it took them two years to catch up with that particular changing taste of the market. The larger size of the iPhone 5 was already considered at the time as a reaction move to the popularity of bigger phones; and the iPhone 6 came two years after that. Have a look at this article from two years ago:
Of course, they had many good reasons for that; in particular they wanted to simplify the life of developers and give them a small number of screen resolutions to work with. That particular condition is one they had to break with the iPhone 6 and the 6+, each having a new aspect ratio, and downsampling to display apps made for previous versions: The Ultimate Guide To iPhone Resolutions
One of the reasons the iPhone 6 has been so popular is that it finally has a larger size.
The Brunels are featured in no less than three videos of the Big, bigger, biggest series: Bridges, tunnels, and cruise ships.
At least, emojis are restricted to the written word; they cannot be said aloud like "lol". If internet slang dies out, people will have to find proper words to express themselves.
Of course, we might find ourselves again in this kind of situation: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=19991120.
I have a confession to make: I'm cynical about laws. I don't believe that laws are written to enforce what is right and just, or balance of crime and punishment, but merely to ensure a functioning society with a minimal amount of trouble.
One of the reasons for my position is that what is considered right and just varies considerably with time and place. Slavery, homosexuality are viewed in a very different light now from two centuries ago. Copyright law is no different.
Copyright law and the content industry are in my view evolving to protect artists in ways appropriate to the current technology. It used to be that possession of an official recording gave you the right to listen to the music it contained. Giving, selling or inheriting the physical object transferred that right. Copying was hard and caused loss of quality, so little needed to be done to stop people from doing it.
Nowadays, since copying without loss of quality has become trivial and widespread, the industry is moving to licensing. You buy the right to listen to the music, with eventual time restrictions. The right cannot be resold or given away. This is becoming both possible and necessary because of the Internet.
The key point is that when an old law is becoming increasingly difficult or impossible to enforce, the solution is not to introduce increasingly complex systems to enforce it. The law does not necessarily represent a moral absolute which must be enforced no matter the cost; it is often merely the most efficient means to an end. If it is not efficient any more, it is more reasonable to change the law in a way that attempts to achieve the same goals, than to turn society upside down to try to keep the statu quo.
Attempting to shame China and India about copyright law does not seem very efficient to me.
Wasn't there some kind of hugely successful campaign getting people to write to the FCC and ask it to introduce net neutrality rules? Could we start a similar campaign to write to Rand Paul and ask him to kindly shut the fuck up? Since he has an election coming up, perhaps he would pay attention to what the people think?
As I understand it, German publishers had complete control on how much of their scraped data Google News would display. And they all eventually let Google News display as much as they wanted, because they would lose traffic otherwise.
Google News is just another platform to advertise your web site. Instead of paying money for it, you have to agree to let them display your data for free. But you can hardly complain that you're losing business because your competitors are advertising their product more aggressively than you.
Google News might be especially troublesome for big publishers, since it is not a platform where they can "outspend" their smaller competitors, who seem more willing than them to "pay" for Google News coverage.
That's pretty bad. I understand that Powershell is considered by its users as superior to bash, but at least that's a problem that bash does not have.
I can totally imagine the reasons for which MS would have developed its own rather than going with bash, between the fact bash was considered the competition, that it would have been losing face to adopt it, that they were intelligent enough to create something better, influential enough to get their solution accepted, and so on…
Feels a lot like something Google would do nowadays. MS seems to have grown humble in comparison.
Whenever biologists can't figure out something about an animal, they say it's for mating rituals.
And whenever archaeologists can't figure out something about a civilization, they say it's religious.
Probably because if that's the only explanation they can come up with, well then it must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes has a lot to answer for.