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Comment Why did you ever think privacy matters to most? (Score 2) 113

by SuperKendall (#49769801) Attached to: Privacy Behaviors Changed Little After Snowden

Look at what people willingly broadcast to the public over Twitter/Facebook.

Given that, why would you think they would care at all about privacy?

If you believe in privacy, you can't make the vast majority of people care about it. All we can do as computer professionals is try to provide as much privacy as possible, for those that do not know nor care...

Comment Specs seem a little weaker (Score 1) 133

Apart from the display, the specs seems bit weaker on the Dell - the Macbook Pro has more storage capacity, and a faster processor even in the base configuration.

Also the Macbook Pro 15" now has the ForceTouch track pad, which will be more useful over time (and Apple makes excellent trackpads anyway, Force Touch or not).

I have a Macbook Pro 15" Retina currently, that I use in non-scaled mode (so I get 1:1 use of the pixels). I'm not really sure how much better the higher resolution would look on that small a display.

Submission + - From Amazon Security Engineer to Homeless 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I will be homeless and without any resources in one week. Any advice is welcome. Seattle/King County shelters are overcrowded and public housing hasn't accepted applications for months.

I started working at Amazon Nov 2013 as an E-Commerce Platform Security Engineer. I was an unusual applicant with special considerations — I have persistent chronic pain from a cancer that has been surgically treated but took years to be diagnosed. I was assured before being hired that I could get pain management and still work for Amazon.

A mere four months into working before management started to arrange special meetings for me. I wasn't performing "on the right trajectory" for an Amazon employee. I mentioned the Fentanyl transdermal patches as a source of brain fog, but my boss, perhaps being a security guy and suspicious of everything, actually had the audacity to imply I was wearing some sort of labeled tape placebo, and he recommended if this is what's holding me back, I get off the stuff ASAP. Two months of withdrawal later, and my job performance was even worse, despite ice packs and daily physical therapy. At this point I developed a crippling sense of fear pervasive in everything I did, personal or professional, and persistent chest pain became the new norm.

In pain every day, my motivation collapsed. I've been living on savings until now. I've applied for Leave of Absence as well as Short/Long term disability, but I have yet to collect any benefits. Despite my established symptomatology of cancer history and chronic pain, the Disability evaluators have insisted on a psychiatric evaluation (which has taken months, services are booked to forever out here). I'm starting to feel like all these psych requests are a way for the Disability evaluators to run me in circles and not pay any compensation.

Where did I go wrong? Should Amazon have accommodated my illness and cut me more slack? Are there companies that are more understanding of chronic illness? I was getting good work done. I can write testable, correct, highly-performant software for an implementation which spans an entire service stack. But of course, so can most of you. I'm clearly a lesser job candidate. Is there a place in the world for me besides Section 8 HUD housing?

Submission + - How Employers Get Out of Paying Their Workers

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: We love to talk about crime in America and usually the rhetoric is focused on the acts we can see: bank heists, stolen bicycles and cars, alleyway robberies. But Zachary Crockett writes at Pricenomics that wage theft one of the more widespread crimes in our country today — the non-payment of overtime hours, the failure to give workers a final check upon leaving a job, paying a worker less than minimum wage, or, most flagrantly, just flat out not paying a worker at all. Most commonly, wage theft comes in the form of overtime violations. In a 2008 study, the Center for Urban Economic Development surveyed 4,387 workers in low-wage industries and found that some 76% of full-time workers were not paid the legally required overtime rate by their employers and the average worker with a violation had put in 11 hours of overtime—hours that were either underpaid or not paid at all. Nearly a quarter of the workers in the sample came in early and/or stayed late after their shift during the previous work week. Of these workers, 70 percent did not receive any pay at all for the work they performed outside of their regular shift. In total, unfairly withheld wages in these three cities topped $3 billion. Generalizing this for the rest of the U.S.’s low-wage workforce (some 30 million people), researchers estimate that wage theft could be costing Americans upwards of $50 billion per year.

Last year, the Economic Policy Institute made what is, to date, the most ambitious attempt to quantify the extent of reported wage theft in the U.S.and determined that “the total amount of money recovered for the victims of wage theft who retained private lawyers or complained to federal or state agencies was at least $933 million.” Obviously, the nearly $1 billion collected is only the tip of the wage-theft iceberg, since most victims never sue and never complain to the government. Commissioner Su of California says wage theft has harmed not just low-wage workers. “My agency has found more wages being stolen from workers in California than any time in history,” says Su. “This has spread to multiple industries across many sectors. It’s affected not just minimum-wage workers, but also middle-class workers.”

Comment Not bad at all (Score 4, Insightful) 122

by SuperKendall (#49760383) Attached to: Oculus Founder Hit With Lawsuit

I was a backer. Were you? Or do you feel compelling to complain on behalf of other people?

I got the main thing I backed it for - a dev kit.

Facebook buying them means an investment in learning to program for the Rift is probably 1000x more useful than it would have been otherwise.

I understand people are wary of Facebook, and for good reason. But I have seen huge upsides with pretty much no downside since Facebook bought the company.

Comment Re:but I thought 90fps was the thing (Score 1) 35

Sony's headset is meant to reproject frames before render as needed to convert 60+FPS into steady 120FPS.

That seems fine as far as display goes, but part of that requirement for 90+FPS is that head-tracking is congruent... if "real" tracking only is happening at 60FPS, will the faster display framerate really matter as far as people feeling sick after a while (or in some cases instantly...)

Submission + - Neural implants let paralyzed man take a drink (foxnews.com)

Submitted by mpicpp
mpicpp writes: Erik Sorto was shot in the back 13 years ago and paralyzed from the neck down. Yet recently the father of two lifted a bottle of beer to his lips and gave himself a drink, even though he can’t move his arms or legs.

Mr. Sorto, 34, picked up his drink with a robotic arm controlled by his thoughts. Two silicon chips in his brain read his intentions and channeled them via wires to the prosthetic arm on a nearby table. The team that developed the experimental implant, led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology, reported their work Thursday in the journal Science.

“That was amazing,” Mr. Sorto said. “I was waiting for that for 13 years, to drink a beer by myself.”

Mr. Sorto’s neural implant is the latest in a series of prosthetic devices that promise one day to restore smooth, almost natural movement to those who have lost the use of their limbs through disease or injury, by tapping directly into the signals generated by the brain.

For years, laboratories at Brown University, Duke University and Caltech, among others, have experimented with brain-controlled prosthetics. Those devices include wireless implants able to relay rudimentary mental commands, mind-controlled robotic leg braces, and sensors that add a sense of touch to robotic hands. In 2012, University of Pittsburgh researchers demonstrated a brain implant that allowed a paralyzed woman to feed herself a chocolate bar using a robot arm.

Comment More than PR (Score 5, Insightful) 385

by SuperKendall (#49747339) Attached to: What Was the Effect of Rand Paul's 10-Hour "Filibuster"?

The question is, would he have done this even if not running for president?

The answer is obviously yes, based on past behavior. Rand Paul has been one of the few people willing to go on record voting against things he does not agree with, instead of not voting at all.

So while of course some element of it is PR, that is not the core reason as to why he did this.

Comment RTFA (Score 1) 116

by SuperKendall (#49741053) Attached to: Hydrogen-Powered Drone Can Fly For 4 Hours at a Time

The article has a picture of the CURRENTLY WORKING drone. It doesn't have large tanks of anything, it has two small tubes of hydrogen.

I think you have greatly miscalculated the pressures needed by this system. It's not storing pounds of the stuff, just 4oz or so across two fairly large tubes...

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"Who alone has reason to *lie himself out* of actuality? He who *suffers* from it." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

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