Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Wearable how? (Score 1) 18

They have had tiny devices you stick into your skin for a few years now. They are expensive, and a PITA. If they fall out, you have to throw them away. You cannot get them wet. You cannot go swimming with the devices. You have to be very careful when bathing.

So is this something you wear like as watch? I don't see how. I think it would need to test your blood.

So how is this new? How is this "wearable?"

Comment Re:Uhoh (Score 2) 126

There are lots of higher-level technical jobs that pay annual salaries far exceeding $100k. If it takes only three years to recoup the $100k, if the employee works for them for five years, they've still saved a fairly considerable amount of money.

On top of that I wouldn't be surprised at all if it's possible to take fees paid to the government as tax-writeoffs. Sufficiently large firms might well simply write off the money spent this way directly against their taxes.

Comment Re:Uhoh (Score 5, Insightful) 126

its not meant to make them stop using it. its meant to stop them from using it to replace there entire workforce with them. if someone is Reilly talented and worth the money there gonna have to pay for it. otherwise hire local.

You know what would work better than that?

Subpoenaing the hiring managers and HR staff and their records to see what sorts of applicants they've received domestically and to interview existing staff of the company and any 'heathunter' types they've used to fill jobs before to find out if they're actually having trouble filling jobs or if instead they're simply trying to replace more expensive domestic employees with foreign workers at reduced salaries.

There have been far too many examples where laid-off or soon-to-be-laid-off employees described the active process of training their replacements with great detail. If they wanted to really make a dent they would take those claims seriously and investigate accordingly, and levy heavy, heavy penalties. I'm thinking something like 10x the original employees' salaries kinds of fines.

Comment Re: PJ must be losing her mind over this! (Score 3, Informative) 92

Yes and her main focus battling the legality of the Copyright term extension act CTEA before the ZSconunix case reared its ugly headthat fight was lost before the Supreme Court essentially scotus said the constitution gave congresss unilateral power when it came to power. So don't think any fight is over.

Comment It's all about the money. (Score 1) 79

Personally, Walmart finally caved for two reasons:

1) They were starting to lose customers who want to use contactless payments, especially now with new and renewed credit cards or debits cards with the Visa or Mastercard labeling now all offering the ability to pay by "tapping" on a terminal. Walmart's recent earnings report supports this view.

2) Walmart was watching with interest how other contactless payment holdouts like WinCo Foods (western USA supermarket chain), H-E-B Grocery Company (mostly Texas supermarket chain) and Home Depot (national hardware superstore chain) started to implement contactless payments in the last 18 months. Since it appears the switchover had little effect on the bottom line, that's why Walmart was finally convinced to upgrade their payment terminals to include contactless payment support.

Comment Re: humble opinion (Score 1) 61

Task Manager's expanded view does include GPU monitoring and has done for quite some time now, but it wasn't added until they achieved a certain level of market ubiquity (and, presumably, the relevant APIs were in place). I'm guessing that Microsoft now feels that NPUs have reached a similar state and will be adding the extra "NPU" sub-tab to the existing Performance tab where other hardware resources are monitored, and adding some additional AI-related monitoring functionality to the existing GPU one.

You don't have to use it (SysInternal's tools are much more comprehensive), but if you just need an overview level of insight into what is going on when your system's fans start to sound like a jet turbine, it's still a pretty good starting point into what's up.

Comment Re:Or (Score 1) 72

Trouble with trying to run a study on the Amish is that their lifestyles are pretty significantly different all around. Comparing groups on either side of a hard dividing line (there was a study in the UK of shingles vaccines where over/under a certain age was a hard line in the sand) works well because the lifestyles of the population groups are basically the same.

Comment Re:Soo (Score 2) 86

I'm assuming that this works because when the AP is communicating with endpoints in fixed locations, the AP can tell when signal quality changes as attenuators move through the space. This might work better with modern 'beam forming' APs using modern 802.11 standards, but theoretically one could constantly measure the signal strength between a stationary endpoint and the AP and observe when that signal is weaker than it otherwise should be.

If there are insufficient stationary endpoints it might not work so well unless it can somehow measure reflectivity with enough precision to know that something moved through.

Comment Re:I'm German (Score 2) 86

That's why it's necessary to take the concept of Communism and understand that it's an unattainable asymptote. Humanity is what gets in the way, we're selfish and we would nearly all of us take in order to have for ourselves even if our peers don't have the option. It would take a post-scarcity economy (think the situation of The Federation in Star Trek) for there to even be a chance at something working, it would require that anyone can have access to almost anything that's new.

I don't look at specific socialist concepts as unattainable though. The way a society treats its young, its old, its infirm, its poor, its powerless, and the way it curbs the excesses of those who've managed to profit off of said society speaks volumes for it. And unfortunately we're failing big-time now because a whole lot of people will voluntarily go against their own best interests and the interests of those in similar circumstances.

Comment Re:First and foremost... (Score 1) 121

The problem with this argument, from the shop's point of view, is that the UK is in the middle of a shoplifting epidemic. The policing resources simply aren't there to deal with small scale (or even flagrant and much larger scale) shoplifting. It now seems to be rare for police officers to attend reports of shoplifting at all. And so effectively shoplifting becomes legalised, which is obviously hurting the big chain stores financially and potentially devastating for smaller shops.

Shops are trying to find some way to respond to this to protect themselves. They typically tell staff, even security staff, not to get physical with shoplifters as they walk out, not least because the risk of something worse happening and the business becoming liable for it is significant. But then the shoplifters know this and some of them will just walk in and openly empty a shelf into a bag and walk out again without paying because they know no-one will try to stop them.

Shops also know that our court system is completely overwhelmed at the moment and there is little chance of bringing any successful civil action to recover damages from shoplifters who aren't even being arrested by the police and put through the criminal justice system.

So what do they have left? Basically, they're trying to spot the "usual suspects" and refuse them entry in the first place, which is a less risky proposition in terms of potential for physical violence and quite effective because a lot of shoplifting is done by the same people, or they're trying to make it more physically difficult to steal goods, for example by using locking systems or keeping high value items behind counters where customers can't just pick them up. But these systems aren't perfect, far from it, and what we're discussing here today is one of the significant problems.

Obviously this kind of technology can have very bad consequences, as we see here. I don't think it should be used if it's not highly reliable, given the potential harm done in cases where it gets something wrong. But I do have some sympathy with the shops who are looking for something -- anything -- to reduce the threat they're facing because the rule of law has failed in retail settings.

Comment Re:Payday Loans *2 (Score 1) 150

Unfortunately debt is wealth for those who can manage to convince those who loan money to make those loans to them, particularly if one can find a way to convert the borrowed money into one's personal money while shedding the debts in specially-tailored bankruptcies.

This is partly why there are whole classes of investors that buy struggling companies, separate them into business-units where one unit gets saddled with basically all the debts, sells-off the good bits for profit, and sends the red-ink business unit into bankruptcy.

This is also why some businessmen will set up company after company and leverage naming rights and other costs to said companies to have those companies pay-out to said businessmen, then let the companies die on the vine and go into bankruptcy after extracting as much wealth out of the other investors and lenders. And they are allowed to do this again and again and again since these aren't personal bankruptcies.

The bankruptcy process needs significant reform. Those who engage in these practices one time need to be barred from serving in or owning new corporations in a controlling capacity after the second time. Once is a fluke, twice is the beginning of a pattern.

Slashdot Top Deals

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows. - Frank Zappa

Working...