Until this story, I'd never heard of them. Would it have hurt to included a brief sentence or two in the summary as to why it's "a loss for the tech community"?
Gigaom is a media company (mostly news aggregation and blogging) founded by writer/journalist Om Malik, who turned out to be the company's only asset. After he left for greener pastures in 2014, the site slid quickly into obscurity.
And the real kick in the ass is that apple will immediately slash prices 80% once an android competitor comes out and hangs around in this artificial market long enough until people realize singing talking wrist watches are about as practical as google glass.
o.O
When has Apple ever slashed prices in response to competition? Their playbook on competition reads "we have no competition, all similar products are inferior". They might decide that the hardware specs (which are traditionally very modest in every Apple rev1 product) need a bump, to keep the price point the same and satisfy their aforementioned competitive mantra. That's the kick in the ass; 12 months from now the rev2 product will have a screen with twice the resolution, it will have a CPU capable of full motion video, enough ram to run iOS 9.0, etc. and all the early adopters will be left with an outdated relic.
Screw it, let's go make a new Amish colony.
So, you think you need to reinvent the Amish lifestyle for some reason, to do away with technology, when they already have a perfectly good lifestyle that has done away with technology. Good luck with that. A few years from now I bet you will think you need a "new" way of talking face to face, by some magic wires and magnetic coils. The reinvention shouldn't stop there, though! Transistorize it, and write a packet layer to make it easier for several users to share the channel. Are you writing this down (in pencil)? Good, you are going to have a lot of stuff to make if you want to live comfortably.
Why would you ever think the word "new" is appropriate in this context?
In 10 years, half of humanity will have had enough of this bullshit and will have hacked their way to privacy, or have decided that the internet just isn't worth it, or will have adapted multiple identities so as to confuse others.
And I should know, as I am traditionally an early-adopter, and have taken all three paths myself. I am also currently at the point of thinking it's better to destroy the current internet and rebuild it -- but without all the bullshit.
The internet is certainly better off without the 50% which is complete bullshit. The problem is, at this point we have no idea which 50% that is.
I remember that episode. It was CSI:Miami.
But seriously, if *that's* the thing that put you off then I don't even know how you made it that far. Mostly because CSI Miami departed the land of the firmly ground in reality and wound up tethered somewhere in high orbit far before that episode.
That said it was certainly my favourite of the CSI series. Possibly because of that. None of the shows were remotely realistic in a wide variety of ways (oh god the pixels please no don't zoom any more!!!11), but since CSI Miami more or less gave up any pretense that it was meant to be and instead was 45 minutes of Horatio being awesome, saving women and children and shooting very heavily armed but remarkably inaccurare bad guys it was actually far more entertaining.
Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah B-)
You could say that this new spinoff
[sunglasses]
Is CSI: DOA
[yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah]
progress towards CNC-milling a pancreas.
That's interesting. Where I work we're making progress on human transplants of a web-scale ficas using nothing but red staplers crowd funded via a new meta-material crypto currency based on a Bitcoin NoSQL kernel which solves the pressing problem of laser mounted sharks doxing bio-hackers via Twitter's NSA paper trail.
Ohh, so close. You were "SSL exploit" away from Bingo.
Whatever Hillary did/does is SOP throughout the entire system, which really is a series of cartels. If you want to flog the dead horse, knock yourself out. It will make no difference at election time.
What was the name of that movie where the doctor is kidnapped to deal with gunshot wounds?
Doc Hollywood, right?
Thinking that's the most likely outcome from my POV as well.
After all, if you're pressed into service as a "hacker", it wouldn't take much to discreetly slip information to the authorities, considering that most cartel types don't strike me as being technically uber-literate. Sure it would be a massive risk, but totally doable depending on the environment.
There are enough other hackers under duress willing to snitch on you for trying to send a mayday, plus they are probably operating under the stance of "do what we say and we will kill you, don't do what we say and we will kill your family". On top of that your mayday is likely to end up in the hands of police or military on the narcos payroll.
Part of the Radio Narco objective is to monitor communications of crime fighting orgs. If you did get a mayday sent to the right people, you and the rest of the captives are as good as dead as soon as they start planning the rescue team, and if they do find out it was you who sent the mayday your family is probably going to disappear too. It's a supremely shitty situation all around.
However, you're not really going to be doing much better with the Russian government that the US government...
So, maybe *don't* join the Russian government's spy agency, *don't* steal a bunch of incriminating proprietary information about their secret dealings, and *don't* spread it to the world media? I mean, if he learned anything from this whole experience it's probably *don't* do that, amiright?
Really bad idea. If he was going to do this he should have never bothered leaving in the first place.
One plausible scenario is that he left in order to continue his work (although its unclear if he has been directly involved since handing the data off to Greenwald and Poitras) and create more visibility for himself. The only reason for returning, since as many will point out life in prison is not preferable to a free life in Russia or almost any other country, is so that he can continue his work by creating a zoo of a trial that drags on for years and hangs in the media like a raincloud over the US government, constantly reminding people of what the NSA/CIA did/does and what they are willing to do to maintain their grip on information. Eventually a politician (probably a presidential candidate) will come to his rescue as a goodwill gesture and motivate the right people to free him on parole, mostly to get him out of the media so he can live a reclusive existence in remote California or Texas or something.
The range on the GoPro's Wi-Fi is so short that someone within Wi-Fi range is a few steps away from physical access anyway., and you only ever use the Wi-Fi when you're actively using the GoPro - you would know immediately when someone connected to it and fucked with it.
Someone else nearby might download the footage and see what i'm looking at with my gopro! Oh wait...
The first thing I do on windows is change the settings to show tilename extensions. Much of the confusion I see in others can be directly traced to the fact that they don't know what their files are.
Stop being afraid to make someone learn something useful to use a computer.
That being said, don't make people learn useless things. Design a powerful set of useful things to learn each of which is valuable and worth learning and remembering and then reward people for learning them by maintaining their usefulness
Making things overly simple robs users of the power to make things simple for themselves, and ends upt complicating their interaction with the computer.
The problem is that almost all forms of email consumption (browser based webmail, outlook, etc) have pretty good warnings regarding certain file types that it's a really really bad idea to run (they even try to explain this to the user to some extent) and the users just fly past those warnings on their way to doom. What good is it to show a user "important tax return info.docx.exe" instead of "important tax return info.docx" when they really should only try to open it if they see "important tax return info" (type: word document) anyway? All this nuance is completely lost. Take away their local admin privileges already, and address the real issue (that users privilege should never exceed their knowledge.)
You do realize these kids were tested first to see if they had a peanut allergy.
FTA: "All had been given skin-prick tests to make sure they were not already allergic to peanuts. "
So they took precautions to make sure they kids weren't already allergic, something a parent isn't going to know. If you kids are allergic to eggs or had eczema, they might be at risk to having an allergy to peanuts. So the first thing you don't do is shove peanuts down their throats! You'd better have your child tested first. IF, they don't have an allergy, THEN you can give them peanuts, which should help prevent them from developing one.
Which is interesting because the allergists I've talked to don't seem to think the pin prick test for peanuts is conclusive. Apparently since this headline isn't "Children drop dead after being told to eat peanuts 'For Science'" that it is a decent way to test for it.
Part of it was public awareness. You'd find it common in previous generations that people would tell you "it's all in your head" and other less than helpful answers to problems you had with things as allergies and many other health issues. Now, as this study suggests, that once there was public awareness, people were having their children avoiding high allergy risk foods and in doing so making the problem worse as humans are prone to do.
Or better yet you would just drop dead from an as-yet-unnamed disease (anaphylaxis) and the death certificate would list "Phrenitis" as the cod. What allergies?
Except it doesn't. Try reading medical research sometime. Repeated exposure to an allergen can cause allergies.
And then one big dose of that allergen causes it to go away. How fucked up is that? Really, allergies make no fucking sense. This data suggests early exposure doesn't lead to developing an allergy in the absence of some other trigger, but people exposed early and often can still get them. Our bodies really are just fucking with us.
Perfection is acheived only on the point of collapse. - C. N. Parkinson
