Slashdot Mirror

Data would be like sunshine, if Facebook/Google/etc were capable of blocking out large portions of the sky to prevent the sun from shining on anyone else. Hey, maybe that's why Facebook is building a satellite and Google is building balloons.

DuckDuckGo's sources include Yahoo(now Oath) and Bing. ( https://duck.co/help/results/s... ).

And Yahoo gets their results from google. ( https://searchengineland.com/y... )

And Bing gets results from google ( https://www.wired.com/2011/02/... )

You'd think that you could include sensors that would allow it to make adjustments to keep it upright, much the same way that a person will naturally do this while riding a bicycle. I'd be more worried about the person riding it feeling disconnected from these adjustments and falling off or feeling discomforted instead.

If they're looking for a smaller vehicle, why not build something more like an auto rickshaw? There are plenty of times you need multiple passengers and these do take up a lot less road space. Even really fancy designs are far less expensive than a car and that's probably over-engineered for a simple taxi.

You continue to attempt to use anecdotes and assertions as counterpoints to actual data. We can't and shouldn't try to count every time a conservative feels that their ideas are too terrible to share. They have free speech, not freedom from the social consequences of speech.

Also you don't read your own links. That NRA flag had to be removed not because it was an NRA flag but because it was an object outside of a window. If it were a Pride flag or a Care Bears banner it would've been treated the same way.

If Ben Shapiro's background-level of racism isn't strong enough for your senses, check out his statements on the Israeli-Palenstinian conflict.

Milo's over-the-top sexism and transphobia are legendary.

Have you ever heard of the concept of allowing a racist to speak so as to show the world his foolishness?

Oh yes, that was a terrible mistake. Debating terrible ideas doesn't help immunize people to it, people don't seem to need "immunizing," instead it spreads it to vulnerable populations who are almost impossible to "cure," and over the last few decades the world has tried it, with terrible consequences. If the "marketplace of ideas" school of thought had any merit, we would not have a renaissance of racism and an epidemic of fake news.

The same numbers we've been discussing show that many leftist professors have been shouted down - more than those on the right. Again I don't care about anecdotes, just real, hard data. Anecdotes are worthless. Imagine at least three anecdotes of a leftist professor being shouted down for each anecdote of a right-wing professor being shouted down that you can find, if you like anecdotes so much. That would be in line with the data.

This sort of business strategy is as old as the hills. I'm not sure why this particular example is all that surprising or reprehensible. Savvy consumers can beat the system in other areas by, e.g., reusing razor blades much longer than the manufacturer intended or refilling toner cartridges, and here it's even easier -- they can just not use the "smart TV" functionality.

As for being "junk", maybe you think call cell phone batteries are "junk" or something

Absolutely they are. Cell phone batteries are terrible. The whole lot of them.

And remember that aforementioned swelling problem? Yep. (both types of failures were caused by swelling during operation, albeit for different reasons). Pouch cells are what you choose when you want something cheap and easy to make, but durability and reliability are not at the top of your concerns list.

"isn't immune to US government influence" is a gross understatement (I assume you were being ironic!). We know that US companies up and down the stack have been clandestinely legally compelled to compromise user security in favor of national security goals.

Software: NSA-designed Ecliptic Curve encryption algorithm adopted by companies (RSA, Microsoft, Cisco) despite widespread suspicion that they were designed with backdoors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ...and then all the stuff Snowden exposed. Heck, even all of these 'transparency reports' are admissions that the government is forcing US companies to do things that they would prefer not too.

Meanwhile, the US have quite a history of computer hardware sabotage:
Deliberately faulty processors designed to destroy oil pipeline, resulting in huge explosion:
https://www.wired.com/2004/03/...
"Every microchip they stole would run fine for 10 million cycles, and then it would go into some other mode. It wouldn't break down, it would start delivering false signals and go to a different logic... It was a huge explosion. The Air Force thought it was a 3-kiloton blast."

so, yes, we should assume that Huawei is just as vulnerable to state manipulation and exploitation as any similar US company.

... the way the Chinese are taking the concept of an orwellian state further to unseen depths on a biweekly basis, is it not?

Don't kid yourself that this is only in China, although yes it is scary as fuck.

RFID tags in clothing has been a thing for roughly a decade now.
https://rfid4u.com/rfid-for-uniform-and-laundry-tracking/

The UK has done it
https://www.engadget.com/2007/10/21/uk-secondary-school-tests-rfid-embedded-uniforms/

Brazil has done it
https://www.zdnet.com/article/uniform-computer-chips-track-student-locations/

India has done it
http://www.childsafetyindia.com/

The US has schools that have done it too
https://www.wired.com/2012/09/rfid-chip-student-monitoring/

Those are just the ones I remember reading about. I have no doubt plenty of other places are doing it as well.

Material Design: "The visual details are delightful, and the paradigmatic underpinnings — that interfaces are three-dimensional constructions, composed of layers of “physical” components — are refreshingly novel. But I’ll spare you more “oohs” and “aahs” over the language’s use of bright colors, large images, and depth. If we take anything from Material Design it isn’t how to use color,how your ease timing should be set, or what the resting elevation of an object should be.It’s not the details themselves we take away, it’s how the details combine to create purposeful brand experience...." https://www.wired.com/insights...

And that, unlikely as it might seem, is the most comprehensible of the first page of links a quick search turned up.

Now that you've been enlightened, you are no doubt ready to embrace those paradigmatic underpinnings (whatever that means). Good luck to you on your journey into this fantastic new technology.

https://www.wired.com/2009/10/...

Facebook is neither an advertising company or a tech company. It's a databroker. Their true power lies in getting data about user behaviour into the hands of banks, insurers, governments, etc. That can be used to inform ads. Or it can be used to inform hiring decisions, manipulate elections, etc.

"Facebook, longtime friend of data brokers, becomes their stiffest competition"
https://www.washingtonpost.com...

"Facebook, the new king of databrokers?"
https://www.wired.com/insights...

I'll bet you were on board with the "640K is enough memory" bullshit too.

He never said it.

It is a well-known fact, that ethnic Chinese abroad spy for China en-masse. Some willingly, some — under coercion.

One immediate step a country could take is to treat them with increased suspicion, which in the US is both against the laws and the morals — targeting expats from a particular country is denounced (and even prosecuted) as "racial profiling" — a trait Chinese society itself does not poses.

Until we overcome this weakness against Chinese — the way we are overcoming it with the Russians, for example, our highest-tech research will remain at risk.

The educational versions of all those apps don't collect data.

Except when they do. There have even been article posted here over the years of them getting caught.

https://www.wired.com/2015/12/...

Remember Windows for Warships? One app divided by zero and crashed the entire network. First time we lost a navy ship to a zero since WWII.

The difference is that pizzerias aren't a natural monopoly

There is no such thing. "Natural Monopoly" is a myth. In my town, the same pole carrying a FiOS cable to my house carries a Comcast cable to my neighbor's. It could carry 20 more...

Google, for example, would've loved to lay its own fiber nation-wide, but got thwarted by "numerous regulatory challenges.".

you are better off with the government monopoly since there is less of a motive for them to squeeze their customers for more money

?? Why? The incentive is the same, while the means of doing it are more powerful. Haw many have successfully fought an increase of their property taxes?

plus you can vote out the people in charge if they get abusive

The cost of your child's schooling quadrupled since 1960ies (inflation-adjusted) — you didn't even realize this until now, much less voted anyone out over it.

When dealing with a corporate monopoly, you have no choice but to keep paying whatever they ask.

Governments — local governments, like this town's — are the reason many places have such limited choice of ISPs. Allowing the same people to offer their own monopoly just helps them solidify the unfortunate situation.

Funny, nearly every place that has tried it has had good results

If this were true, you would've cited examples. You didn't. Because it is not true.

First, the city comes in and installs the lines.

Why does it have to be the city? Of course, it does not. It could be, uh, I dunno, Google Fiber?The cities just needs to stop sabotaging it.

maintain the infrastructure, which, it turns out, is something that government does pretty well.

Does it? Are you referring to the reliably pot-holed roads, or the poles with wires, which should've been buried in the ground long ago to not be susceptible to snow-storms?

Why Zuckerbergâ(TM)s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasnâ(TM)t Fixed Facebook — April 2018

The Apology API is known to be of limited ultimate effect when called in a continuous digging motion.

The bunker is real, and it's spectacular.

Safari - bundles more Apple crapware, UI is janky on Windows, Apple spies on you the same as Google does

I'm not sure Apple spies on you, and they are one of the better browsers in terms of privacy. But the ugly bit about Apple is that they will stop giving you updates to Safari if you aren't upgrading your hardware fast enough. OSX drops support for more older models every release, and Safari drops support for older versions of OSX.

Your best bet when it comes to browsers is use an iPhone, at least Apple maintains support for a very long time on older hardware and older OSes. Using an iPhone as your main system works assuming you only need to watch content and don't need to create anything yourself. (coding, photoshop, video editing, writing, publishing, composing, etc)

Freedom of speech has never meant freedom to libel or incite violence towards others for example, nor does it cover things like false advertising.

Freedom of speech also does not mean that governments should be able to freely spread false information to their citizens. In Myanmar, it's gotten to the point that Facebook has been used to facilitate outright genocide by spreading altogether false claims about the local muslim minority, and this has been coming from the highest levels of authorities. Facebook recently banned a general of the army from the platform after it came to light that he had been publishing actual photos of dismembered children, claming them to have been killed by the Rohingya, a claim for which there is no supporting evidence.

Meanwhile, the Myanmar government and military have been among the most adept and sophisticated users of Facebook, using the platform to put out their own narrative of the Rohingya crisis. The office of the Commander-in-Chief in March posted photos of dismembered children and dead babies, claiming they were attacked by Rohingya terrorists, to counter British MPs, who were sharply critical of the country’s handling of the Rohingya crisis.

Keep in mind the international stance is that the Myanmarian army has been actively conducting what's basically ethnic cleansing by killing civilians and driving them into exodus. This is a military regime actively using the social network to spread their own propaganda to facilitate and justify genocide, and up until this point FB has done nothing about it, even though similar activities have been going on for a few years. A UN report found that the Myanmarian military has clear genocidal intent behind their actions and that Facebook and disinformation have been a part of this operation.

So this is case of the state using a popular social media network in the country to push their own genocidal narrative and propaganda. So what Facebook must do, and what it's now slowly starting do do is the opposite of what you're saying: not to allow the state to use its power to feed false propaganda to its citizenry to justify genocide.

Imagine if your own government started to do something similar, demonizing one group of individuals and pushing false information through the platforms to support their narrative: 'Look at what the jews/the muslims/the blacks have done, they must be interned to prevent further crime!" Would you still be screaming 'b.-b-but the state must be free to lie to its own citizenry because of freedom of speech!", because I doubt that. That's not what freedom of speech is about.

Either way, people want to know when autonomous vehicles will get here, when they will be ready. Here’s the unsatisfying but correct answer: never. “The technology is constantly being updated,” says Nidhi Kalra, a roboticist who co-directs the Rand Corporation’s Center for Decision Making Under Uncertainty. “Sometimes we will talk about it as if, ‘We have this self-driving car, we have this product.’ But with software updates, there’s a new vehicle every week.”

This is what differentiates the autonomous vehicle from even the most advanced cars rolling off the production lines in places like Detroit: so. much. software. More than half a million lines of code will power the various systems and algorithms that could one day help self-driving cars go anywhere. That includes localization systems, overlaid with high-definition maps to help the vehicles understand where they are. And perception systems, which help vehicles determine exactly what’s going on around them (Is that really a person? Should I expect her to walk in front of the vehicle?) And planning systems, which synthesize all that info and actually chart the vehicle’s journey from this intersection to that one. Oh, and the software that actually makes the thing move without a foot to push a gas pedal or a hand to guide a steering wheel.

There’s a reason experts are softly backpedaling expectations on autonomous vehicle tech—this stuff is complicated. Add in weather, terrain, and car cultures that differ from city to city, and you can see why companies like Waymo are only testing in specific places. (Ever heard of a Pittsburgh left?) Testing everywhere would be nigh-impossible. And just like your iPhone, your Snap app, or your Tesla, these cars have code that will get updated, and updated a lot.

“Any product is going to be improved over time,” says Mike Wagner, co-founder and CEO of Edge Case Research, which helps robotics companies build more robust software. “That’s life-cycle maintenance in any system.”

that [Comcast internal servers] traffic doesn't cross the public internet,

But THAT's the trick. Think of your normal (techie) home. You've got servers and storage. You've got infrastructure: cabling, routers, WiFi hubs, and a link to "outside." You've got clients, wired and wireless. You might have peak BANDWIDTH problems which you ignore, or continual problems you fix fix by upgrading equipment: speed, wifi, storage.

But that's your HOME. It's a single one-charge per item with slight depreciation. (And power charges and lightning strikes.) This is also Comcast, with lots and LOTS of cabling. But they've got a network with clients, servers *1, and infrastructure and it's all paid for *2 and can charge you for access to all of it and profit. As. Long. As. You. Stay. Inside.

Once you hit that outward going edge router, two absolutely horrible things happen: you're using their bandwidth to access the internet at large and not paying them for it. *3 And, you're not looking at and subsidizing *their* servers.

So let's watch a movie. Comcast: Client hits home router, the city hub, a larger hub, is sent to a large city containing one of their replicated servers. Bandwidth usage occurs, and 11GB of data is sent across their wires to your home. TA-DAA! The End, roll credits.

Outside NetFlix/YouTube/PornHub: Same exact thing, but instead of a server, data hits their network edge and leaves their network going into the cloud. *4 It merges with all of the other raindrops, eventually ending up at your far-away remote site, where 11GB of data is sent from the internet thru their edge router and that 11GB is sent through their infrastructure to you. The ONLY DIFFERENCE is the relative destination: internal server vs edge router. Oh, and did I mention that their server is free while the edge has a continuing cost per bandwidth?

NOW let's bring in the bandwidth cap. What actually is it? It's just a cap of data on the edge router. If it actually affected their own system they wouldn't have excluded it from usage. So that cap is also a way to prompt you to look at their own "free data" services, or risk going over on NetFlix and paying +$10/each 50G or whatever the charge is. "See? NetFlix isn't as cheap as you THOUGHT it was! Buy us and always have a known fixed monthly charge." *5

Verizon is the same. Metered bandwidth, but OH! You can view our servers as much as you want. (They included ESPN on that.) So I did. I watched the entire SuperBowl game, previews, game, and afterwards on my phone. I'd go to bed, fire it up and mute it. I'd get up and go to the bathroom later and reset/restart it. During the day I'd fire it up as well. For a month. I *FORGET* my usage, it was well over my normal (old, actually unlimited) account usage. Cell tower wireless bandwidth usage isn't (normally) the limiting problem with them either, it's that nasty old "outside" internet.

*1 the licensed media on their servers might have a continuing monthly/annually cost
*2 It's paid for or they wouldn't have it. The LOAN they took out for it for capital expenditures, however, probably is not.
*3 You are paying for it, but not paying them for their servers. How dare you think you could look thru their atmosphere but then look at something ELSE besides their pretty, shiny servers?
*4 Netflix had a policy whereby they would provide and maintain free hardware for ISPs to lower the edge router bandwidth so that all of their usage would be "ISP local". Comcast didn't want it, I wonder why?
*5 I am altering the deal; pray i don't alter it any further. TV only

Interesting Old Links:
I

Here is the Wired article. Yes, it is relatively old, but it does show that this technology can be misused.

Faxing is annoying and slow. But it "just works."

Except when faxes get sent to the wrong place or get hacked

Wired ran a similar story in April: Why Zuckerberg's 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn't Fixed Facebook

In 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, a website called Facemash began nonconsensually scraping pictures of students at Harvard from the school's intranet and asking users to rate their hotness. Obviously, it caused an outcry. The website's developer quickly proffered an apology. "I hope you understand, this is not how I meant for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter," wrote a young Mark Zuckerberg. "I definitely see how my intentions could be seen in the wrong light."

Why are there fewer riders? Because of blacks and the safety issues that go with increased black ridership. This is a significant point for women who pay a 'pink tax' to take alternate forms of transportation to ensure safety while traveling. The media won't say this directly, so they say it indirectly using the term 'safety': https://www.wired.com/story/ny...

some Instagram accounts are making serious money (> $10,000 per post) according to a story on Wired (may be paywalled, sorry).

Even money those accounts are some of the ones most heavily engaged in purchasing likes/followers/etc.

is the false positive or false negative rates for these machine learning algorithms. While many people would argue that the consequence of an error in this case is zero, some Instagram accounts are making serious money (> $10,000 per post) according to a story on Wired (may be paywalled, sorry).

An article about what Fei Fei Li has been up to for a few years: Stanford, Google, etc. And the things she is now worried about. Here is the link: https://www.wired.com/story/fei-fei-li-artificial-intelligence-humanity/

Another good example is this year's Nobel Prize winner:
https://www.wired.com/story/me...
From the article: "He hadn’t asked permission, he didn’t write a protocol, nothing. He simply shot from the hip."
It's amazing the amount of scientific discoveries that are discovered like this.
Likewise, just like with education, money isn't everything, and many times some of the best results come
from underfunded places with shoestring budgets or places where the scientists are "forgotten" and left
to their own devices.

Do please tell Mr. Rogozin that we have the trampoline he ordered.

Inefficient? Yes, but somehow the world hasn't come up with a better way yet. We can't even get decent peer review in many cases because there's simply no money/glory in reviewing other people's work. The peer review system has mostly been broken for a long time because of that simple fact.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
https://www.wired.com/2014/12/...
https://wattsupwiththat.com/20...

> Since a human being exposed for two days to even 10
> roentgens would only have an even chance of survival , the
> radiation belt obviously present an obstacle to space flight."
>
> Yet they sent men to the Moon a mere 10 years later (take
> note of the rustic '60s hardware and the narrow window they
> shove anti-radiation shields

A few answers...
1) They did not spend "2 days" in the belts. They "rocketed through" at earth escape velocity.
2) You're talking about the radiation in space. The walls of the Apollo capsule cut down on the radiation passing through.
3) The flight path avoided the worst of the Van Allen belts (around earth's equator) by flying around it.

https://www.popsci.com/blog-ne...
> Over the course of the lunar missions, astronauts were
> exposed to doses lower than the yearly 5 rem average
> experienced by workers with the Atomic Energy Commission
> who regularly deal with radioactive materials.

> and geostationary satellites, invented by *a science fiction author*, the famous Arthur C. Clarke

Get serious already.. Physics 101. Since the time of Sir Isaac Newton (and his formulation of the law of gravity). it has been known that a satellite (natural or artificial) at a specific distance above the equator would revolve around the earth synchronously with the earth's rotation. Arthur C. Clarke "invented" nothing. He merely wrote a sci-fi story about the (mis)use of such a satellite to broadcast porn

> remain fully functional for decades in the midst of the 2nd radiation belt at ~22000 miles of altitude.

It's called "hardened circuitry". Consumer grade electronixs would die in a few months. One reason satellites are so expensive is that their circuitry is hardened against radiation. It could be done for your laptop... if you were willing to pay $50,000 for it.

> What about constellations that haven't updated their shapes
> since the times of Ptolemy who himself, for his Almagest,
> relied on even older, by about 500 years, documents?

They *DO* change... ve-r-r-r-r-y slowly. Try 150,000 years... https://www.wired.com/2015/03/...

> * How is it that daylight opacifies the sky so that no *light emitting* star is to be seen from Earth

Sigh... it does no such thing. Starlight is *VERY* faint. Our eyes (and cameras) only have a small dynamic range between the dimmest object they can resolve while not getting blinded (cameras overexposed) by brighter objects or background. Have you ever been out in the countryside at night at new moon and seen The Milky Way? Try it at night from a city with streetlights present You'll have a hard time seeing any stars. The stars are just as bright during the day as they are at night.

BTW, same thing happened on the Moon (Apollo camera images) with no atmosphere. The reflected glare off the moon's surface drowns out the stars when photographing the rover, etc. However, pointing up at the sky would see stars if no reflacted glare off mountains, etc..

Because without those, you can detect brain activity in a dead fish by fMRI.
https://www.wired.com/2009/09/...

It's not American businesses job to refute totalitarian regimes.

That's true, unless the president has a conspiracy theory that the business is plotting against him:
https://www.wired.com/story/co...

The thing about Stamos is, he is wrong in one respect. Tim Cook is trying to influence opinions on privacy vs. security by speaking his mind.

I think you missed the point. Mr. Cook spouts off about user privacy, but happily hands over all Chinese user data to the Chinese govt. So privacy is good for US users, but not good for Chinese users. Too bad for them.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...

And the hypocrisy re: Google is that for the most part Google doesn't do business in China, and recently shut down a project that was aimed at providing a China-approved service.
https://www.wired.com/story/co...

Don't get me wrong, I think both companies should do business in China. It's better for them to be there in business with caveats than to be locked out completely. That opens the door for them to be a force for change at some later date. But Mr. Cook should be a little more careful about what he says on his marketing parades.

opened five moths ago

Hm. You must mean five of these?

Same road they've been promising to travel real soon now for at least 25 years - but why would they start now, when they can get so much out of Trump for nothing more than another promise?

And don't forget, he actually tore up the agreement with another potential nuclear threat, showing how little point there is in committing to anything.

Note that per law the seller must inform the buyer and offer a refund. The action is a requirement of the seller, not the buyer. And cancelling (which seems to be happening more than new orders) can take months to resolve as well. But when you're funding operations on deposits, things get dicey when people want their deposits back. Losing hundreds of millions of dollars a month doesn't help the situation at all.

Yes, congratulations dumbass, you've just discovered that every elecronic system in existence has some limitations. Pretty soon you might even figure out that the computer thingy you bought isn't actually powered by magic smoke.

Every driver assist system in existence has problems with stationary vehicles under some circumstances:

https://www.wired.com/story/te...

You can buy every component of a highly modular AR-15 except for the "central frame" with no regulation - they are not legally considered guns. All you need to 3D print that frame, the lower receiver, and you can have any weapon the AR-15 is designed to become, without breaking any laws, or creating any paper trail. Or you could just buy yourself an 80% complete kit and finish it yourself, it's still not legally considered a gun.

https://www.wired.com/story/de...

>A 3D printed receiver I could see being useful...

Exactly. And that's the point. A fully 3D printed gun is just a media novelty to get people talking.

The key however, is that the lower receiver, just a frame that holds together some of the key bits that do the actual work, and gets a serial number, is the *only* piece of a modern, modular gun, that is legally considered a gun. Everything else can be bought at any physical or online store with no more regulation than for cabinet hinges.

3D print the lower receiver, and you've got yourself everything you need for a modern LEGO gun. Heck, you don't even need the printer - you can buy 80% complete pre-milled lowers that you can finish yourself, complete with jigs. Also not legally considered a gun (that doesn't kick in until you reach 81% complete).

As posted above by another:
https://www.wired.com/story/de...

So, really, this article is about trying to trace whoever printed that cache of black-market 3D-printed lower receivers you just confiscated.

Because you don't understand the underlying issue at hand.

This is the best write-up I've seen as to the reasoning: https://www.wired.com/story/de...

And now you understand even less.

Anyone can build their own unregistered fire arm right now. They don't even have to put a serial number on it, if they have no intention of selling it.

As to building a lowcost cheap gun, anyone who has a pair of hands and some basic plumbing equipment can do it any time they like.

Are you going to require a license to have a pipe wrench, to buy a length of pipe, a nail ?

Nope, they help demonstrate the issues with federal gun control laws: https://www.wired.com/story/de...

Because you don't understand the underlying issue at hand.

This is the best write-up I've seen as to the reasoning: https://www.wired.com/story/de...

Why do you think that more is possible?

Application development.

Do you think processors are going to get faster?

Yes, they are. Moore's Law "being dead" doesn't mean processors aren't getting faster. It just means the industry no longer doubles the number of transistors every two years.

Also, Spectrum was never "valued" at $6 billion.

Ok?

You do realise that you can do your own research, right?

E.g. some other resources that discussed the topic:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/q...
https://www.wired.com/2014/04/...
https://brendaneich.com/2014/0...

But there wasn't an argument to lose, merely an insight into a potential factor behind Mozilla's reduction in relevance.

At least short sighted. The progression of the pirate stations to the internet has been going on for over 20 years now. https://www.wired.com/1997/12/...

Voyagers 1 and 2 had less than 70 kB of RAM. Data was stored on tape drives.

You don't need a lot of RAM to provide lots of functionality. You only need a lot to allow for lazy/sloppy programming. We've just moved towards the lazy/sloppy end because transistor fab technology has drive then price of RAM into the dirt, meaning it's cheaper just to put 4-16 GB into every modern computer than it is to pay programmers more to write small and concise code.

And what happens if your computer leaves your house because someone decided they want it more than you? Will they have access to data, passwords, etc that could affect you? Do you hate that the bank makes you use a pin for you bank card? Password to login with your account to online banking?

Have you not heard of the botnets created with routers, other IoT devices that used default passwords? This is a valid case for reducing the number of rogue IoT devices on the internet that can affect everyone with DoS attacks. In this case the politicians are correct, although I'm sure some of the big California-based mega-companies perhaps suggested this to save them some trouble down the road.

https://www.wired.com/story/re...