Paying fines is ineffective when you make more money in profit than it costs you to write the checks..

Facebook's problem is that they are falling out of favor due to their egregious privacy behavior in the quest for profit. Where they where once just a two bit company struggling to survive, now they are a huge multi-national company who's business model is based on tracking every thing they can about their "users" any way they can, then selling this information to companies who want to manipulate Facebook's users.

My guess is the fines will continue and money will keep flowing like water down the Mississippi river and where it comes from and goes will be just as clear.

What they need to do is put some personal responsibility on the line too. IF you allow the company to violate the law, then the company gets fined and you get criminal charges and possible jail time. This isn't going to stop until the people who control this have skin in the game. Otherwise, the fines are just a cost of doing business.

depends on which side you are on.

as a customer who has Prime, buying from amazon (not 3rd party) gives me great customer support, easy returns, pkgs that get lost are always credited without an argument and its worth the $100+ each year to get this level of support.

as an employee, I'd hate to work for amazon. I hear horror stories about it. being a vendor for them also must suck a lot (as it would to be a supplier for, say, walmart).

I often buy chinese electronics (maker parts and such) and when they work, great. when they fail to work, its an easy return. if they start to hate all the returns they get, this can be a self-correcting solution; japan used to really suck for quality and now they're at the top. same could happen with china; but we need to RETURN JUNK and not just eat the cost. when they get too many returns due to poor design, manuf or qa, then the'll learn how to properly sell to the international market.

We just had an article about AI Recruiters, and now this. Any company that relies upon "AI" (artificial incompetence?) for ranking things such as people or products will be gamed. Those that abuse the system will be successful, those that are honest will be lost forever. These companies are creating moral wastelands without any repercussions.

This is less about computers and more about the pseudo-science of psychology.

PhD? I'm only an MBA and even I see that they missed 'synergy' and 'win-win'.

VCV’s much-larger competitor, HireVue, which has raked in a staggering $93 million in funding and is backed by top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms like Sequoia, is hocking many of the same services.

I suspect the word they meant to use is "hawking".

Eh, my game is to include the full job description/add in 2 point white on white text in the resume margin.

Which is different to how I would game an actual human or HR drone.

CentOS is a clone of Red Hat Enterprise... They take the "up line vendor's" source code (which GNU license requires they release), remove the Red Hat copyrighted branding and patching stuff to build a clone. It generally installs and runs exactly like Red Hat Enterprise, just with different graphics and branding.

Generally it "computes" just as well as Red Hat, albeit with a bit of delay in the availability of patches and no paid support from Red Hat (though others surely offer similar services based on CentOS).

I didn't understand the purpose of Scientific Linux for this reason, it seemed like a rebranded CentOS with a slightly different default package selection...not a difference worth maintaining another distro over.

I can pretty much guarantee that more than 94% of cars wait at a red light. Even if you limit it to "the first car at the light", since the second car can't go unless the first one does. Unless you are including legal right-on-red in that statistic, which is a given.

Unless you live in some crazy lawless place, where people just randomly blow through lights and there are no police to give them tickets?

They block traffic. They run stop signs and red lights. They ride on sidewalks. They duck from the roads onto sidewalks and then ride across in pedestrian crosswalks. They don't stop for pedestrians (ever).

Lots of reasons to hate cyclists. Far far too many of them are assholes.

Fuck right off with your suggestion of not allowing bicyclists on any roads with speed limits higher than a bicyclists can maintain. Bicyclists are hard-pressed to maintain 15 mph. Lowest normal speed limit in the US is 25 mph. Non-highway speed limits are often 40-50 mph, and many roads don't have sidewalks. This would limit bicycles to maybe 5% of the roads in the US. Either play nice with cyclists or get off the fucking roads.

Well, it should be the other way around...bicycles on the roads are the "new comers".

I mean, let's face it...our modern roads are built for and paid for by the motorized vehicle operators.

The bikes trying to get in there, are not the primary reason for roads, and when they impede normal traffic flow of what these roads were designed and built for, then well....they need to accept that they are not welcome on them.

Again, I'm all for building out more bike lanes....when they can ride at their own safe, maintable speed, then they are safe.

But having fragile, hard to see, unprotected humans that can not sustain the speed limits on a road with motorized vehicles weighing at least 2000lbs and more, you're asking for limits.

The roads are there primarily for motorized vehicles, and the bicycles are secondary citizens....

Bicyclists would mix better with pedestrians than with motorized vehicles.

But no, it isn't fair to ask motorized vehicles to fuck off and get off the very roads that have been built for and paid for by them.

It affects me because they aren't any more perfect than anyone else and I've actually witnessed an auto cyclist accident caused by it. The cyclist blew the red, missed seeing an oncoming vehicle, and got hit by said vehicle that saw them too late. Thankfully, no serious harm was done, but it could easily have gone the other way and I see articles about it happening about weekly in my area. If a car has a green light they have a reasonable expectation that the way will be clear. They SHOULD still be looking, but everyone misses things they don't expect to see once in a while. And someone running a red light is something that shouldn't be happening. I don't care if you are a car, cycle, skateboard, or pedestrian. The red light DOES apply to you. Creating an unsafe situation simply because you don't want to be bothered to stop is a dick move. The only exception to this should be when there is an event that has police controlling the intersection. Then drivers expect to be directed by the officers in a safe manner and it's obvious that something different is happening, so they are more aware of possible issues.

Okay, I'm mystified as to why default passwords are even used any more. There should be never any reason to have a generic default password these days. Even when setting up accounts, the very first thing ought to be "Change your Password" and prevent anyone from completing signups without at least setting up a new password.

Systems found having default passwords should be named and shamed forever.

On some cars, the software has the capability of remotely turning off the engines of vehicles that are stopped or are traveling 12 miles per hour or slower, according to the manufacturer of certain GPS tracking devices.

Sounds a lot like what Dealerships do for risky car buyers https://www.cbsnews.com/news/car-repossession-device-starter-interrupter-auto-dealer-car-credit-city/

I had one on the last new car I bought (in cash), when I got home and noticed it I called the dealership and demanded they remove it. They first tried to assure me it was disabled and wouldn't cause any harm. I responded by saying it will cause less harm if its sitting on your desk instead of in my car. They finally agreed to remove it, and after 2 attempts with excuses like the mechanic that does that isn't in today, I finally said fine, I'll take it to a shop of my choosing and have them remove it. Then I guess I submit the bill to you? Oddly the guy that removes that stuff suddenly showed up to work 30 minutes later.

Most of these don't usually shut the engine off, they just prevent the car from being started after you turn the engine off, safer that way. The whole GPS thing is so they can send a tow truck to get back the car if you miss a payment.

My other car is almost 50 years old and I can draw the ignition and starter circuit for you on the back of a napkin; so good luck sneaking one of those in the mix. I can even point out the exact wires and what they do. If I ever had to hotwire my car I could do it with a few alligator clips in under 30seconds. But I'm not worried about anyone stealing it, nobody wants to drive a 50 year old stick shift car now a days, except me.

The quake is the first to be detected on a planetary body other than Earth or Moon.

That may not be true.

The Viking 2 lander had a functioning seismometer that picked up signals. However, wind vibrations made it difficult to interpret the results. (Unfortunately, Viking 1's seismometer malfunctioned, making it hard to corroborate candidate large-scale quake signals.)

A better summary would be to say the new probe is the first to definitively detect quakes on another planet.

For $32 million I'd do it, including starting a company to get'r done. Heck, I'd take $30 million.

I can see how this happened (I used to work at GE). Hertz thought they could outsource the whole thing and didn't put anyone in charge of it. They probably didn't look for demos or do any acceptance testing as they went. No driving the consultants. If anyone was in charge I'll bet the B-team at Hertz so they willingly accepted delays. At GE I saw fairly large outsource projects managed by 1 or 2 people. 1 was a technical manager who had his normal day jobs to manage, and the 2nd person was a junior engineer who a) had a day job b) would raise interesting "that doesn't work" issues and nobody would listen. On smaller jobs 1 person would fill both roles. Why Hertz went $32mm before pulling the plug is fascinating, hopefully a few people at Hertz have been reassigned or "decided to pursue other opportunities."

Gosh, If I divided that in half (16mm) and then divided that by $120,000 (a terrific salary) - I could hire 133 people (for a year). Of course not everyone makes $120k. A staff of 50 people over 2 or 3 years is easily supported by that money. $16mm for operating costs + $16mm for 50 people 3 years.

$32mm and it wasn't done. omg

I've personally been in a similar boat during a recession and it's not pleasant. Not a lot of alternatives during recessions. It's my opinion that unions and regulations offer a safety net to make the road of life less bumpy. True, you may not fly as high during good times, but won't crash as hard during the bad times.

If you're working on your own, you're responsible for yourself. That means building up a big enough nest egg to get you through recessions and tough times. If you fail to do that, the fault is not with the system. What's that saying? A failure to plan ahead on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.

If you're self-employed and find yourself living paycheck-to-paycheck (so to speak) so that you can't build up a nest egg, then maybe being self-employed isn't your thing. Maybe the best thing for you is to go back to being an employee, and the stability that having a constant guaranteed monthly income provides. There's nothing wrong with that. Some people just aren't cut out for working for themselves. But don't try to pass off your inability as evidence of a problem with the system.

The Libertarian philosophy is that some people work best for themselves, some work best as employees, and (for the more broad-minded) some work best with a heavily-structured union or government labor program. And it's up to each individual to figure out which works best for them (just like it's up to every employer to figure out which of these people they want to hire). The Liberal philosophy is that everyone needs a heavily-structured union/government labor program. People who hold single-minded philosophies like that tend to assume those apposed to them also hold single-minded philosophies, resulting in people like you mistakenly thinking Libertarians think everyone should work for themselves.

In a nutshell, the Libertarian viewpoint is to allow everything to be tried, so people can figure out for themselves what works best - everything from contract work to unions. They only get upset when you start passing laws prohibiting or favoring certain ways of working.

Libertarians would probably counter that a rough and tumble life strengthens discipline and weeds out "loser" genetics from the population.

It's not about weeding out. It's about freedom for everyone to find what works best for themselves. A freedom that's lost when you mandate that everyone do things your way, because your experience is that that way worked best for you, therefore (leap of unsubstantiated logic) it must be best for everyone.

Consulting Motto

"If you're not a part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem."

Sounds like someone as Accenture was taking that to heart.

This is why the Krill worship Avis.

The level of corruption and incompetence required to blow this is hard to fathom.

What do you expect from a company spun off from Enron's accountant.

I had a reason to look up the parking laws in a previous city I lived in. They specified that in limited-time spots, the limit applied per spot, per day. So in your example, if you were parked in a 15 minute spot for more than 15 minutes, in the same day, you would have broken the parking bylaw.

It's rarely enforced that way, but I imagine the law is written that way specifically to address the "but I left and came back" excuse.

It's not that complicated really. The guy with the notepad has no practical ability to database his results and cross compare with everyone else's results to reconstruct the daily habits of each car in the lot. Sure, it's technically possible, but it would be a labor intensive and time consuming task.

The automated readers would have no such difficulty. If we could trust that they would NEVER be mis-used in such a manner by ANYONE, it would be fine, but we can't.

When we can stop various law enforcement from going on massive fishing trips and then parallel constructing evidence, THEN we can have nice things.

No, not really. Reporting on this story a town said that the amount they receive from parking tickets is less than the salary of the person who went and did the ticketing. The point isn't to make money, the point is to make sure the parking space are for those doing shopping and not those just wanting to park all day. Since they'll probably have to replace this with parking meters then they'll probably make more money from that but have fewer shoppers because of the cost.

Of all the reasons to say chalking shouldn't be allowed, 'illegal search' is not one I would have even considered. I figured chalking could have been defeated legally based on the fact that it doesn't seem to really be proof of anything beyond that there is a chalk mark on your car put there at some time by some one (too many false-positive scenarios), at best it is only an indication of suspicion.

A way to block automatic updates.

The sad part is that drive letters exist because they copied it from the shit OS called CP/M. In typical MS fashion bought Quick-and-Dirty DOS (QDOS) for $50,000 and renamed it MS-DOS!

Even my Apple 2 used volume names AND the forward slash as a path separator for floppies with ProDOS in 1983!

Are you fucking serious? Have a USB key, cannot install Windows Updates. Who the fuck didn't test that?

I'm so glad I only use Windows 8.1 anywhere I can and Windows 10 only where I have to. Yeah, they'll sunset Windows 8.1 updates eventually, but hopefully by then we're finally able to swear off Windows for good. I'm only on Windows for games anymore.

Idiots

wouldn't break something as important as the keyboard

Just who do they think they are? Apple?

The fact that Windows has standard drive names isn't strange or "wrong". *nix has sda1 after all. Having standard volume names, drive letters or otherwise, is a good thing. The problem, like most annoying and persistent issues with Windows is that the implementation dates all the way back to the DOS and in this case the CP/M days and hasn't changed because of backwards compatibility. The good of course is that I can be reasonably sure that a lot of old shit will just work because Win32 is a stable API (stable in that it doesn't change). The bad is that I'm stuck with any limitations or bugs associated with those old systems.

Contrast with Linux userland which not only varies in massive ways between distributions but also can vary between releases. This breaks things and sometimes they don't get fixed. So pick your poison I guess.

https://ifixit.org/blog/16025/galaxy-fold-failure-causes/
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+Fold+Teardown/122600

Not the missing gorilla glass.

A document consisting of text and vector images with mild animation can appear more attractive to the majority of readers than a completely static document.

True, but the logical conclusion of that is the clickbait, pop-up hell that advertisers keep trying to turn the web into.

Appealing to the lowest common denominator in order to get more views is not the path to developing worthwhile content. Sometimes it's better if things don't appeal to the widest audience.

It doesn't work on all roads, it doesn't work in all weather, and it needs a safety driver.

If you watched the event video you'd know that Tesla's approach, with the sensors they have, does work on all roads and in all weather.

Indeed one of the problems they have with LIDAR only solutions is exactly that - t does't work in all weather, other sensors are important besides just visual.

They are very, very close to being able to not have any driver, and the way they train they have large amounts of real-world performance data to show regulators that they can drive as well as, or better than any human - even from cars that have not turned on Autopilot, it's still running the models for self driving and evaluating deviations from actual driving.

Tesla's approach of having a vast fleet of cars contributing to real world training is in fact the only way self driving cars will be able to work on all roads, and all weather... I don't think the camera/LIDAR debate is as clear as he makes it but there's some visual data LIDAR does not give you so he might be right there.

Almost having full self-driving is like almost reaching orbit: eventually it'll crash and burn.

Come on slashdot, just link to the actual source. It is this 3 hour long super in-depth must-watch talk full of interesting details by some technical people people from Tesla:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

(fast forward the first hour; it is some promotional screensaver)

Spoiler: it is awesome. And confidence inspiring. They are absolutely going to pull this off.

Clearly the micro-sats would need their own propulsion, but that would be much less that would be required from ground level.

That is a common misconception: that once you get to high altitude, you are practically in orbit. Being in orbit requires velocity, and velocity requires a huge energy input - much more than just getting up to 10s of kilometers of elevation.

A different slashdot commenter has summed it up as the 6-6-6 rule: Mach 6 at 60,000 ft altitude is a whopping 6% of the way to orbit.

Let's say you are aiming for low earth orbit: altitude 300 km and velocity about 7.72 km/sec. The potential energy for reaching orbital altitude is approximately m * g * h, or mass * 3e6 [J/kg]. The kinetic energy is 1/2 * m * v^2, or approximately mass * 3e7 [J/kg]. In other words, you have to put in 10x as much energy getting the object up to orbit velocity as you do in raising it to orbit altitude.

Not terribly practical. Most of the energy of achieving low Earth orbit is in reaching orbital velocity -- roughly 10x the speed of a high speed rifle bullet. There are advantages to designing an orbital launch vehicle that starts above most of the atmosphere. You can use a vacuum optimized rocket nozzle design and don't have to overcome aerodynamic resistance. But there's a proven solution to getting an orbital launch vehicle over most the atmosphere -- a first stage, which now can be reusable.

It's *conceivable* that an airship platform might be advantageous to a reusable first stage, certainly from an environmental point of view, but it's only likely to be competitive if it were somehow operating on a massive scale. That makes it an interesting engineering problem, but not something that will be pragmatic in our lifetimes.

There was also a company about a decade ago that was pursuing an airship to orbit scheme. The idea was to have a huge stratospheric balloon platform from which superlight airships could be launch; the airships would use buoyancy to achieve altitudes sufficient to employ ion thrusters, and then spend days or even weeks to achieve LEO. They had a DoD contract, but I suspect the military was more interested in the balloon platform than in the airship to orbit scheme.

In this unmanned application, why the need to use increasingly scarce helium? Hydrogen is cheaper and would work even better.

Of courage, you wouldn’t want to call it the Phoenix if it used hydrogen.

If you launched enough of these you could saturate the sky and not really need to worry about stationkeeping as a new one would drift in to a cell as other's exited on average and maintained in that equilibrium with just a little extra effort.

This would make a grea way to show ads for pepsi, or to allow facebook to stream videos direct to your cell phone form orbit while the visually track what you are doing.

The rocket equation says no.

A conventional rocket has to accelerate its fuel and its payload. A projectile system just has to accelerate the payload.