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Comment Re:bullshit (Score 1) 533

Ok, for the sake of argument, let's say that the union president misread Tesla's management and that they are, in fact, neutral towards the idea of unionization. What of it? A large piece of what I said was that the OP had completely glossed over unions fighting against Tesla outside of the factories, and I provided an example of a large and well-known one doing so. Even if the employee's union isn't fighting Tesla, the point still stands: trade unions are attacking Tesla.

Comment Re:bullshit (Score 1) 533

You're (I believe inadvertently) painting an inaccurate picture when it comes to Tesla's stance towards unions. Even if they are neutral towards employee unions (more on that in a minute), NADA is still one of the largest unions in the automotive industry, and has made no bones about the fact that they are opposed to Tesla's business model. Unions have been attacking Tesla from the start and continue to do so even now. Factory employee unions may not be a part of the fray yet, but they're hardly the only type of trade union.

Moreover, on the topic of employee unions, Musk may say he's neutral, but Tesla's actions make it clear that it is hardly neutral. From another article (emphasis mine):

Musk's opinions on unionization aren't clear. When he announced the Fremont factory's purchase from Toyota, Musk told The Chronicle that "on the question of the union, we're neutral." [...]

Tesla's last annual financial report struck a far less welcoming note. It listed the possibility of union activity under "risks" to the business.

"The mere fact that our labor force could be unionized may harm our reputation in the eyes of some investors and thereby negatively affect our stock price," reads the report, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "Additionally, the unionization of our labor force could increase our employee costs and decrease our profitability, both of which could adversely affect our business, prospects, financial condition and results of operations."

[...] Other Tesla managers, [UAW President Bob] King said, seemed to be opposed. Musk, he said, was "very open and said he would respect what the workers wanted. But his operating management has done the opposite."

And, contrary to your claims regarding Uber, it has been facing issues from trade unions, namely taxi, limo, and other professional driver unions across the country that have been campaigning extremely hard to keep Uber out. I'll grant that they are almost entirely operating against Uber at the city and state level, but that pressure on the governments is originating from the unions. Without the unions campaigning, the city governments likely wouldn't be getting involved at all.

That said, I do agree with you that the summary grossly missteps by suggesting that the issue of state-level protectionist regulators has much of anything to do with the complaints of small-government folks.

Comment Re:Security (Score 3, Insightful) 112

It's not just a matter of what could go wrong. It's a matter of what has already gone wrong. They've traded the possibility that a vulnerability will be used to compromise the system for the certainty that the system will be compromised from the get-go. The whole point of securing a system such as this one is to ensure the credibility of the results, but security (regardless of the variety) can't add credibility to something that never had it to begin with.

Comment Re:about time (Score 3, Interesting) 47

He only claimed that they paid no attention to user experience, not that they're shoddy at engineering things. The examples you provided actually demonstrate that point.

For instance, I read a few years back about how Bezos had then-recently hired designers to redo the website since its design seems like an over-crowded holdover from the '90s, before disregarding their ideas entirely because he couldn't bear to be without all of the stuff that's currently packed in. Likewise, their software for the Kindle Fire line can do some really neat stuff, but everything I've heard and seen indicates that it's sub-par from an experience perspective (e.g. unresponsive/laggy UI, inconsistent app designs/flows, disregard for common and obvious use cases). As for AWS and logistics, what of them? Logistics is entirely internal, while AWS isn't aimed at end users at all.

They can and do make cool stuff that's well-engineered, but there's a big difference between good engineering and good design. I, and I believe the OP, are accusing them of lacking the latter when it comes to their consumer-facing endeavors. Pretty much everything about Amazon feels like a cheap commodity, which is fine when I want cheap cables from their Amazon Basics line that I'll plug in once and never touch again, but isn't so good when it's something I'm interacting with on a daily basis, such as their site.

Comment Re:No exhaustive.. (Score 4, Insightful) 285

Kernighan wasn't involved until much later, according to Ritchie's own history of the language. C was a direct successor to B, which was Thompson's brainchild, and he was directly involved in much of the development of C, though Ritchie was the lead on it.

People often assume it was Kernighan and Ritchie because they co-authored the seminal book on the language (the eponymous K&R white book), but that book didn't even get published until almost 6 years after C was already complete.

Comment Re:Netflix rating engine sucks (Score 2) 86

Teams of researchers from around the globe competed for the $1,000,000 Netflix Prize way back in 2009, that would be awarded to the team that managed to improve the algorithm by even 10%. It took them the better part of a year to accomplish it, and you seem to think that a lone programmer can just get in there and knock out a lot of low-hanging fruit to substantially improve things?

I don't deny that there's always room for improvement (such as the example you provided), but suggesting that it can all be fixed by "hiring a programmer" is a bit naive.

Comment Re:IMDB is full of descriptors (Score 3, Insightful) 86

You do realize that IMDb is a type of wiki, right? The tags are user-submitted. They're good for some stuff, but probably not so useful for the sorts of things Netflix likely needs them for. Besides which, IMDb is owned by Amazon, so there's likely all sorts of legal issues in using its data for their service.

Comment Re:Absolutely Awesome (Score 1) 200

I love it too, but just because I love it, doesn't mean that I don't also think it's something that could have turned out really badly. The video clearly shows a number of near misses, and the last thing I want landing on a fireworks barge is a flaming, sparking machine that fell from the sky. Considering these fireworks were all directly over the barges, any near misses he had were also over them.

Even so, that doesn't temper the fact that the video is absolutely outstanding. I'm just glad it turned out okay.

Comment Only thing that's changed... (Score 1) 132

The only thing that's changed is that I've made a point of getting away from free services and moving over to for-pay services with revenue streams that I understand, since I know they won't disappear in a year or two when they fail to successfully monetize their users or decide it's not worth it any more. Plus, I know how they're monetizing me: I'm putting cash directly into their pockets, without any of the funny business involving targeted ads, opting me in to stuff against my wishes, or selling my data to other companies.

Feedbin is the RSS reader to use. I tried Feedly, but it didn't allow .opml exports of feeds, and the last thing I wanted to do was lock myself into a new service right after leaving the last one. Feedbin is snappy, regularly updated with nice enhancements, and can be accessed from a number of clients. Absolutely love it, and the price is pretty good too.

I also switched from Gmail to FastMail. Again, it's a case of knowing where the money is coming from and getting more control over how my data is being used as a result. It's been a great change so far, and I've had far less issues using it once I got it all set up.

Comment Re:Not a VIP box at the Olympics (Score 5, Informative) 63

Wish I had mod points, since AC has it right. If you check the document attached with the article, page 26 has the actual invitation itself, and it clearly says the event is in D.C., rather than in Sochi, and there's no mention at all of a VIP box or anything of the sort. This story went from "Comcast cordially invited them to an opening ceremony event at the Newseum" in the actual invitation to "Comcast invited them to an event for the Sochi opening ceremony" in the article to "Comcast invited them to a VIP box at Sochi" in the \. summary.

It's a non-story. Just regular schmoozing. Though the fact that regular schmoozing is a non-story might be a story in and of itself...

Comment Re:Why do we have screen savers? (Score 1) 349

Other than the issue I mentioned with other signals commandeering CEC, DPMS has all of the same issues I already enumerated:
1) It's not consistently carried to the TV if there are devices in between.
2) It's oftentimes not obvious to the user that it exists or how to enable it.
3) It isn't available with every form of cabling.
4) Not all TVs support it.

So, yes, a solution exists, but as with the ones I mentioned, it only covers some situations, not all, and that's exactly why screensavers still exist, since they cover all situations.

Comment Re:John Smith? (Score 2) 148

Perjury is a felony in the US, carrying potentially serious jail time as a sentence. As such, it's not a civil matter that you need to be involved in; the criminal courts handle this stuff. Just let the courts or states' attorneys know that the guy is engaging in perjury, give them evidence of it, and they'll either take care of it or not. It costs you very little, but potentially costs them quite a bit.

Comment Re:But.. but... (Score 2) 299

First Law of Superpowerdynamics: Only well muscled young men with washboard abs and manboob pecs get super powers

I thought most of them got the washboard abs and whatnot because of their super powers. Consider:
1) Captain America: he was a wuss until he was given the serum that made him a super-human.
2) Spider-Man: a nerd that got pushed around until he was bitten by a weird spider.
3) Batman: used his "Has Gobs of Cash" superpower to get extensive training.

Comment Re:Why do we have screen savers? (Score 1) 349

I would ask why we still have screen savers.

Isn't it obvious? The devices outputting screensavers can't turn off the screen in most cases, that's why. And since they're the ones controlling the content, they're the ones best-suited to tell when burn-in might become an issue. Putting up a screensaver is effectively their only means of recourse.

With HDMI cables carrying CEC commands (e.g. your TV telling your audio/video receiver to power on), it's possible this situation may change in the future. For now, however, not all devices support CEC (which, incidentally, also goes by a variety of brand names, making things confusing for consumers), and many users hook up their devices indirectly (e.g. A/V switch or AVR), so the CEC commands wouldn't reach the intended device anyway. There's also the issue that Monoprice and others sell IR-over-HDMI kits that commandeer the CEC channel in the HDMI cable in order to get IR signals from your remote control into a closet somewhere else.

Long story short, there's no way for a device like a Fire TV to turn off the actual TV itself reliably. Some of the time? Sure. But with certainty in every case? Definitely not. That's why screensavers are still used.

Comment Re:Somebody has to do it (Score 1) 178

I mean something like this, hard to find, which creates an almost undetectable security flaw [...]

[...] makes me wonder why this attack hasn't been seen in the wild before.

Seems like you answered your own question.

Besides which, the flaw may be ephemeral. Ideally, the flaw would be done in such a way that when the compiler tried to recompile itself (e.g.updating it with new features), it would re-add the flaw to its own binary, perpetuating the cycle. But the bad guys don't have to do it that way. They could just as easily leave out that code and only allow the flaw to exist in one version of the compiler. Whenever the compiler gets updated, the backdoor logic in the compiler would be gone, along with anyone's best chance for noticing something was wrong, but the software that was compiled using that tainted compiler would continue to exist for years and years. It's an attack that cleans up after itself, effectively.

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