Re: So..
And yet absolutely bananas.
368 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Mar 2016
> You trust the company and all of its employees to respect your privacy and protect your belongings.
Even it you happen to do, it is not enough. You also need to trust the manufacturers of all involved equipment to not put any stupid backdoors there and support it the entire lifetime and fix bugs when they are – inevitably – found. You need to trust the company to not be hacked or just acquired by another company. You need to believe the backdoors that were installed upon requests from three letter agencies to be not misused. Etc.
Once something is digital, it will leak. The only exception is precious data you did not back up – then it will become corrupted and you will find the entire multiverse does not contain another copy.
> landlines will one day soon be a relic
Landlines are how you make a call to a specific place, and they have always been. If I call for example the grant office, the phone will ring there, will be answered by someone from the grant office, and that is the point. You are right that landlines may be someday replaced anyway – by immobile mobile phones.
This explains why I tend to get those terrible CAPTCHAs. I can tick more or less everything on your list.
For some of them I actually have no idea what it wants from me – like ‘store fronts’ (is this one an office or a store… and this one looks like laundrette…) or ’vehicles‘ (sure, kick scooters, skateboards and wheelbarrows are all vehicles, but is this how the machine sees them?). Several times I just gave up after getting an apparently endless stream of cropped ambiguous poorly shot rubbish in poor light to identify.
> don't allow blank Alt-Text…
A great way to ensure lots of crappy alt texts ranging from irrelevant to annoying.
For instance: A section title describing a program function also contains the corresponding icon. The section title already is what any screen reader needs to read. Not allowing blank alt text on the icon means it will at best contain something like ‘icon of Section-Title-Repeated-Verbatim’. How is that going to help anyone (as oppose to hinder)?
Even if the system was developed by aliens who have never heard about human races, its performance in poor light conditions (backlight, low light, …) would deteriorate quicker for dark skin faces. That's just how optics works.
Frist you have to admit this. Then we can talk about what to do about it. Shouting racism does not help anyone.
How can an ad need 60 seconds of CPU time? I happen to be running some image analysis on fast camera data now – and 60 seconds is enough to process 10+ GB video on a normal PC. Or almost enough to start Acrobat Reader…
Sorry for asking such a dumb question, I have not seen on-line ad for years.
Fortunately, the nice people developing what3emojis have aleady thought of that.
I didn't know such thing existed before reading your post. But a few seconds after saying ‘now we just need a way to encode addresses using emojis’ I realised this is so silly that it must exist. And sure it does…
Then if you misidentify a significant proportion of users and serve them the wrong content your advertising is likely to be less effective than when you serve neutral or random ads - a lot of folk might be a bit sensitive about having their gender misidentified
Nonsense.
If you serve random ads then half of the time people will see ads for the wrong sex (gender, whatever). If the thing works then this ratio will be [considerably] lower – by definition.
This all depends on how you define the baseline…
If your baseline is close to non-stress environment, then stress-free tests show results closer to true skill and stress environment shows the effect of stress. This is probably a reasonable baseline – and the conclusion would be then that even though the women were in fact more skilled they performed worse under stress. You can also choose the baseline differently. The only objective conclusion is the relative shift of performance when the amount of stress changes. In other words, women's performance was more sensitive to stress.
But unless you think stress the work environment should be as large as possible, it is kind of difficult to argue that removing stress disadvantages someone.
Sure, and why you had to write in weight?
Because no one says just ‘a kilo of apples and a kilo of gravel are equal’. The reaction to that would be ‘WTF?’ – and rightfully so.
Equal without qualifies means equal in all aspects that could be considered. Equal with qualifies limits the equality to some aspects. The qualifiers can be implicit – you might not have to always add ‘under the law’ if it there is enough context to make clear you mean this kind of equal. But your kilo example is just silly.
Do you want to render the Mandelbrot set or solve Sudoku? Use SQL[ite]!
Yes, the examples are ‘outlandish’ and typical SQL usage looks a bit different. But shell is undeniably a programming language – even if most of the time we use it to run simple commands.
> Inertia is a powerful thing. People are lazy and afraid of change.
That's why you need the everyone uses Inkscape, it's the default for vector drawing approach. You will get nowhere with the inferior replacement for program X mindset. And around here it's true that basically everyone uses Inkscape. Some creative types may do some weird things on their Macs. But it has always been so (and is not going to change), so they don't matter.
> question whether content is worth anything to anyone other than the website owners
But that's perfectly OK because the website owners can pay for hosting if they want people to see their content. It used to be normal and many still do that. Web went to hell exactly the moment when everyone decided to not pay and instead [try to] make many through ads.
I agree with the sentiment. On the other hand, getting robbed and killed is rarely a necessary part of something people want. Whereas tracking…
Even discounting the idiots who cannot find a store across the street without GPS, lots of services can only really work by identifying you, getting your location and cross-referencing it with some big database (i.e. sending it somewhere ‘to the cloud’). Often even not keeping history of locations would break them, to varying degree.
I do not use any such service (in fact do not even carry any phone most of the time), but many people do and do like them. Trying to forbid the tracking part of tracking may prove rather unpopular (read: impossible). You can forbid by law the data selling part – and it should be forbidden. But will it be enough?