Fake news usually exhibits tell tale signs that it is fake. It contains little or no veracity, references "unnamed sources", comes with a clickbait headline, comes from untrustworthy sources / authors, and in notable cases is explicitly debunked on snopes or similar.
If Facebook / Google can rank sites based on relevance they sure as hell can rank news on trustworthiness. Most of it could be ranked automatically and human moderators could be used in contentious or borderline cases.
And yet Snopes manages to identify bogus stories with a handful of journalists and 1/1000th the budget of Facebook. So I don't really buy that excuse. Especially since Facebook is already making efforts to identify and downrank clickbait.
Fake news can and does from both political wings. I see no reason that Facebook cannot squelch bullshit wherever it comes from - impartially, transparently and fairly. And perhaps some (a lot) does target the right and it might spark a backlash to snuff it out. Man the fuck up and do it. The alternative of allowing it so the stupid propagates is FAR worse as we are now witnessing.
Trump is a far more serious threat to the world than tech. The next 4 years are going to be marked by a profoundly anti-science, alt-right administration that will find new and novel ways to fuck the planet and people who live on it.
It's great that some of MP3 is out of patent but there are many more audio / video codecs which are in patent and people need. It would be nice if Fedora could curate these codecs and stick them on RPMFusion and make it easy for people to install them without effort. I doubt it would take much effort to wrap it up in a simple UI with some legal disclaimers and present it to the user when they attempt to play an affected file.
Safety requires an attentive driver AND a vehicle with the reaction times to respond to emergency situations. By allowing the driver to check out Tesla is NOT being safe. The vehicle software has already demonstrated that it can fuck up badly and an attentive driver may be all that's there to prevent a fatal accident.
The car cannot be said to be safe as it could and should be until it starts forcing the driver's attention. Allowing them to take their hands off the wheel for more than a few seconds is unacceptable.
All PLC / SCADA networks should be closed networks. The biggest danger is some doofus in the factory connecting a PC or router to the same network and inadvertantly exposing it to the world. In most other cases, security can be managed adequately with some locked cabinets. Most PLCs already reside inside locked cabinets to stop workers from pulling wires out on purpose or by accident.
PLCs are designed to run on closed networks and normally have no protection around their firmware. They're expected to be commissioned and forgotten about. Some PLCs will even boot their firmware straight from an SD card slot which can be modified to make the PLC do anything. They are not secure in any way, shape or form.
Adding security could be done of course, and perhaps there are things to be done that should be. But for the majority of deployments total security adds complexity to protect against a threat which is extremely unlikely to ever happen. If you want to protect your PLCs from being tampered with, there is a far simpler solution - buy a big secure cabinet and a big padlock. If you're super paranoid, fill any firmware update slots with epoxy.
And by that logic we shouldn't lock our doors because it won't stop a criminal armed with a sledgehammer. Except most criminals aren't armed with sledgehammers and good locks would prevent opportunistic thieves.
Geoblocking would make it significantly harder to fly a drone over a prison without much effort. Yes someone determined could expend more effort to subvert the block but that doesn't render it useless. It means they require the technical skill to hack a drone or fly it unassisted. The latter probably isn't even viable if the prison has radio signal jammers. It also means if a person is caught flying a drone over a restricted space that it removes one excuse from their defence and increases their culpability if they are flying a hacked drone.
Voltage and phasing in Europe is different from the US as is the influence of different car manufacturers & lobbies. Probably explains the difference although the US and Europe systems have kind of converged into similar forms. Ultimately though the important thing is Europe also recognized the need for a single standard and has already issued a directive for countries to follow.
The directive mandates Mennekes Type 2 with or without AC/DC combined charger and also says users should be able to charge on an ad hoc basis. More or less what I was saying about about non discretionary points that accept common forms of payment. That means in a few years that every charge point should be compatible with every electric vehicle in Europe. It should also mean the end of CHAdeMO and other charge types.
Even Tesla chose a type 2 charger (albeit one with additional DC charging capabilities) in Europe because the directive was coming. So even they saw the way the wind was blowing. Although they really should be using the combined charger or offering to incorporate their super-charging-DC-in-the-absence-of-a-DC-combined-charger capability into the standard.
Car manufacturers are engaged in a stupid pissing match over charging formats and related matters. It ends up with duplication of effort and vertical platforms where one car can't charge from another port, and where consumers become pawns in some stupid format war.
Federal and state support should be SAE J1772 with DC fast charge and force car makers into line. No CHAdeMO, no Tesla proprietary charge, no Mennekes. A single standard. It would also help if all charge points were required by law to accept common forms of payment and not be exclusive to one make or model of vehicle. i.e. charging should be like filling up a gasoline vehicle, not some vertical thing where charge stations only support certain brands of vehicles or discriminate against competitors.
That might inconvenience people with existing vehicles (they'll have to use cables) but the long term benefit is obvious. It removes a format war, risk of verticality / monopolies and increases consumer confidence in electric vehicles.
Other regions in the world like Europe might choose Mennekes with DC fast charge as their single format but the same point applies.
I think it's great that we have solar panels that look like tiles (at least when viewed from the ground) and integrated power walls. I'd desperately love to use solar if I thought that it would reduce my power consumption bills down to practically nothing and the tech paid for itself.
It matters how long it would take to pay for itself. i.e. the point where the investment in solar costs less than the amount I would pay the utility company. If break even is 5 years, possibly 10 then people will go with it, but if it's longer than that then it it's not a value proposition. The battery life of the power wall or the solar cell efficiency may even degrade over time, perhaps requiring replacement. There could be ancillary costs such as added servicing & maintenance, or even higher house insurance premiums (due cost of rebuild, risk of fire). On the flip side, can I hasten break even point by selling power back to the grid?
And Solar City / Tesla might not even go with the buy outright option and instead screw people over with some kind of leasing model. I wonder how long the lease lasts and what happens if you cancel - can your tiles be used with someone else's storage solution? Do Solar City turn up and remove the tiles or power pack from the wall? Or disconnect your supply with a punitive reconnection fee? Obviously lock-in to a single provider is bad whether it is a utility company, or a solar panel provider. People thinking they're sitting pretty by moving to solar might be in for a rude awakening.
I used it during and after it emerged from beta and even back then it would bother you to "top up" to continue using it. I uninstalled it soon after. I don't know what it does these days but services like Tunnelbear give you a small-ish amount of data for free per month but you can pay for unlimited use if you want. Maybe Opera should do likewise.
Firefox is built around a mostly single threaded CPU renderer. Servo tries to push as much rendering and other stuff onto the GPU and uses Rust to enforce concurrency meaning the frame rate is higher and it should be stable too. That said, the web is full of quirky / broken content and that's where the effort goes to ensure the new browser works with the existing content.
But this isn't a new phenomena. Mozilla / Firefox developed from a project called NGLayout (next generation layout) which was developed to replace the engine in Netscape 4.x. The NGLayout engine was a LOT faster than it's predecessor but it still took several years before it became a viable replacement. It wasn't until about Mozilla 0.7 that it could be considered on par with what it was replacing.
Of all the social media platforms I think I like Twitter the best. Aside from some interesting content it's the one that has least ability to monetize me aside from injecting the odd advert in my feed. Sadly for investors, that's the same reason that they appear to be losing so much money.
So are you complaining that Notepad is too Unix-like philosophy, or are you complaining that it hasn't kept up with the times? Maybe adding ribbons, making the UI more like Chrome, or throwing some JavaScript on it to host it on the cloud would be better? As I recall, those UI changes were very lauded by Slashdot.
I'm complaining it is not fit for purpose in any sense. It can't even open some random README that comes with a product because it might have Unix style line endings. It would be a relatively trivial option to detect the line ending style when opening a file and correctly render and save back to it. It doesn't even do that.
Off the top of my head, here are some ways it could be improved:
Why can't it grey out the options I don't have permission to modify or at least show an icon in a column which indicates read-only?
In sections such as HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT why can't I click on a file extension and have a summary of what process opens that file, what shell extensions are associated with it and so on. Why can't I click on an interface IID and see what DLL or EXE hosts it and also what objects interfaces are by the same binary. Why can't I deregister the DLL from the editor. Separate tools like OLE view are necessary for this but they could be incorporated into regedit.
Why won't Regedit help with all the bullshit introduced with Wow6432 where chunks of the registry are in different places thanks to various 32-bit and 64-bit differences? e.g. maybe let me flip from 32-bit to 64-bit view or show both together in separate panels where I can see the information in one place.
Why can't I live monitor changing values in the registry? Why can't I snapshot the registry and observe what values have changed since the last snapshot?
Why can't I right mouse on a REG_SZ holding a path in the registry and choose "Explore to here"?
Why can't I import / export bits of the tree using the clipboard instead of via files?
Some changes are more modest than others. I'm sure people who spend their life in this tool could think of other ways. The point is that for all the effort has put into the front end of Windows, they're barely lifted a finger to improve the lower level stuff.
Notepad is greatest for nothing whatsoever. It is a crap editor by any reasonable definition. Given how many files such as readmes, config files that have Unix line endings, it would be nice if Microsoft lifted a finger and made the trivial changes necessary to open and save these files properly. Other things that would be useful would be in/outdenting selected text, UTF-8/UTF-16 conversion, some config settings to control indentation tab / space behaviour, being able to "save as" a file without it tacking.txt on the end, and a few other minor improvements. Nothing that would take a few developers more than a month to implement.
And yeah you can replace it for something else but that excuse Notepad for being so terrible in the first place. Seriously. Open Notepad.exe in Windows 3.1 and aside from wide character support and some minor differences it's the exact same thing.
The other tools I singled out which are in Windows are antiquated too. I expect anyone who has to use them on a regular basis could think of 10 or so often minor or modest changes that would make them substantially better.
I think the Pebble gets the concept better than most Android, Apple devices but it's still only "up to" 7-10 days (depending on version) and that depends on the watch face used and activities. They're also not very pretty devices although they're cheap by smart watch standards. I think the threshold for me would be at least a month with a display capable of performing and refreshing as well as an LCD.
Now how about updating notepad, fax & scan, regedit, msconfig, et al. Some of these tools which are still necessary in Windows are positively arcane and have barely changed in years. Notepad in particular is so antiquated it can't even convert line endings. Tools like fax & scan is riddled with usability issues.
But hey we have some crappy 3d painting functionality in MS Paint! Hooray?
The doors on most 4/5 door cars are fairly narrow. It's the 2/3 door cars which tend to have long doors. The way I'd see it is if the car has doors on the front then it makes little sense to splash out for gull wing doors on the back. Yes it makes getting into the last row slightly easier but not a huge amount.
I think sliding doors could work better than gull wing even if only the back doors were done but I don't see how they'd get the front doors to slide at the same time. At least sliding doors would be mechanically simpler and probably better at keeping water out.
The quality of other content on Netflix has been declining for some time. It's hardly surprising that as the other content turns to shit their own might stand out a bit better. Entire TV shows / series as well as movies have simply disappeared from the service.
Secondly, their service used to be all about relevance - start Netflix and you were recommended shows / films based on viewing preferences. But now they aggressively promote their own content whether the show is of relevance or not. New shows appear in enormous banners, and sometimes video clips as soon as you start the service
So do people "prefer" their content? I don't know if that can be said because they have been systematically undermining the other content for some time. I also believe that if people were asked if they wanted Netflix to spend $100 million on a series they weren't interested in or $100 million to buy the rights to hundreds of quality movies and shows (not dreck) for a year that they might prefer the latter option.
I wear a watch because I like to be able to tell the time without whipping out a phone for the same purpose. Especially if I'm driving, in a meeting, running or whatever. I can also time myself, set an alarm and a few other things. The screen is always on, it has a nice big display, it's waterproof, the battery has lasted 18 months and I expect I'll get at least another 6-12 months more out of it and it cost me the grand sum of €20.
Watches aren't just for bling, they're there to tell the time. A watch that needs to charge constantly, or needs to be pushed / shaken to show the time, or is hard to read in sunlight is a pain in the ass. That's why "smart" watches fail. They compromise the most basic function that they are supposed to perform. Instead we get shit like wrist cameras, half assed phone sync functionality, heart rate monitors etc. If someone produces a smart watch that tells the time with an always-on display, that works in and out of doors, that lasts weeks or months between charges then we might be getting somewhere. The other stuff is merely a bonus at that point.
Those gull wing doors were always a gimmick, a "hook" to ensure coverage for the vehicle. I'm sure it's neat to watch them ponderously open and close via sensors, hydraulics and motors but there is a simpler, cheaper and practical solution - a regular car door, and if necessary a little catch on the mid row seats that slides them forward or tilts them. The regular door keeps out the rain, opens and closes more quickly, doesn't need a bunch of electronics to function and does the same job.
It's notable that the gull wing doors are always demoed in tight spaces because that's about the only place they tenuously offer any advantage, but since the front row has regular doors I'm not sure how that's supposed to make sense either.
Slashdot Mirror
If Facebook / Google can rank sites based on relevance they sure as hell can rank news on trustworthiness. Most of it could be ranked automatically and human moderators could be used in contentious or borderline cases.
And yet Snopes manages to identify bogus stories with a handful of journalists and 1/1000th the budget of Facebook. So I don't really buy that excuse. Especially since Facebook is already making efforts to identify and downrank clickbait.
Fake news can and does from both political wings. I see no reason that Facebook cannot squelch bullshit wherever it comes from - impartially, transparently and fairly. And perhaps some (a lot) does target the right and it might spark a backlash to snuff it out. Man the fuck up and do it. The alternative of allowing it so the stupid propagates is FAR worse as we are now witnessing.
Trump is a far more serious threat to the world than tech. The next 4 years are going to be marked by a profoundly anti-science, alt-right administration that will find new and novel ways to fuck the planet and people who live on it.
It's great that some of MP3 is out of patent but there are many more audio / video codecs which are in patent and people need. It would be nice if Fedora could curate these codecs and stick them on RPMFusion and make it easy for people to install them without effort. I doubt it would take much effort to wrap it up in a simple UI with some legal disclaimers and present it to the user when they attempt to play an affected file.
The car cannot be said to be safe as it could and should be until it starts forcing the driver's attention. Allowing them to take their hands off the wheel for more than a few seconds is unacceptable.
All PLC / SCADA networks should be closed networks. The biggest danger is some doofus in the factory connecting a PC or router to the same network and inadvertantly exposing it to the world. In most other cases, security can be managed adequately with some locked cabinets. Most PLCs already reside inside locked cabinets to stop workers from pulling wires out on purpose or by accident.
Adding security could be done of course, and perhaps there are things to be done that should be. But for the majority of deployments total security adds complexity to protect against a threat which is extremely unlikely to ever happen. If you want to protect your PLCs from being tampered with, there is a far simpler solution - buy a big secure cabinet and a big padlock. If you're super paranoid, fill any firmware update slots with epoxy.
Geoblocking would make it significantly harder to fly a drone over a prison without much effort. Yes someone determined could expend more effort to subvert the block but that doesn't render it useless. It means they require the technical skill to hack a drone or fly it unassisted. The latter probably isn't even viable if the prison has radio signal jammers. It also means if a person is caught flying a drone over a restricted space that it removes one excuse from their defence and increases their culpability if they are flying a hacked drone.
The directive mandates Mennekes Type 2 with or without AC/DC combined charger and also says users should be able to charge on an ad hoc basis. More or less what I was saying about about non discretionary points that accept common forms of payment. That means in a few years that every charge point should be compatible with every electric vehicle in Europe. It should also mean the end of CHAdeMO and other charge types.
Even Tesla chose a type 2 charger (albeit one with additional DC charging capabilities) in Europe because the directive was coming. So even they saw the way the wind was blowing. Although they really should be using the combined charger or offering to incorporate their super-charging-DC-in-the-absence-of-a-DC-combined-charger capability into the standard.
Federal and state support should be SAE J1772 with DC fast charge and force car makers into line. No CHAdeMO, no Tesla proprietary charge, no Mennekes. A single standard. It would also help if all charge points were required by law to accept common forms of payment and not be exclusive to one make or model of vehicle. i.e. charging should be like filling up a gasoline vehicle, not some vertical thing where charge stations only support certain brands of vehicles or discriminate against competitors.
That might inconvenience people with existing vehicles (they'll have to use cables) but the long term benefit is obvious. It removes a format war, risk of verticality / monopolies and increases consumer confidence in electric vehicles.
Other regions in the world like Europe might choose Mennekes with DC fast charge as their single format but the same point applies.
Obviously the problem is not that but drones dropping contraband like drugs, money, phones, weapons into the compound.
It matters how long it would take to pay for itself. i.e. the point where the investment in solar costs less than the amount I would pay the utility company. If break even is 5 years, possibly 10 then people will go with it, but if it's longer than that then it it's not a value proposition. The battery life of the power wall or the solar cell efficiency may even degrade over time, perhaps requiring replacement. There could be ancillary costs such as added servicing & maintenance, or even higher house insurance premiums (due cost of rebuild, risk of fire). On the flip side, can I hasten break even point by selling power back to the grid?
And Solar City / Tesla might not even go with the buy outright option and instead screw people over with some kind of leasing model. I wonder how long the lease lasts and what happens if you cancel - can your tiles be used with someone else's storage solution? Do Solar City turn up and remove the tiles or power pack from the wall? Or disconnect your supply with a punitive reconnection fee? Obviously lock-in to a single provider is bad whether it is a utility company, or a solar panel provider. People thinking they're sitting pretty by moving to solar might be in for a rude awakening.
I used it during and after it emerged from beta and even back then it would bother you to "top up" to continue using it. I uninstalled it soon after. I don't know what it does these days but services like Tunnelbear give you a small-ish amount of data for free per month but you can pay for unlimited use if you want. Maybe Opera should do likewise.
But this isn't a new phenomena. Mozilla / Firefox developed from a project called NGLayout (next generation layout) which was developed to replace the engine in Netscape 4.x. The NGLayout engine was a LOT faster than it's predecessor but it still took several years before it became a viable replacement. It wasn't until about Mozilla 0.7 that it could be considered on par with what it was replacing.
Of all the social media platforms I think I like Twitter the best. Aside from some interesting content it's the one that has least ability to monetize me aside from injecting the odd advert in my feed. Sadly for investors, that's the same reason that they appear to be losing so much money.
So are you complaining that Notepad is too Unix-like philosophy, or are you complaining that it hasn't kept up with the times? Maybe adding ribbons, making the UI more like Chrome, or throwing some JavaScript on it to host it on the cloud would be better? As I recall, those UI changes were very lauded by Slashdot.
I'm complaining it is not fit for purpose in any sense. It can't even open some random README that comes with a product because it might have Unix style line endings. It would be a relatively trivial option to detect the line ending style when opening a file and correctly render and save back to it. It doesn't even do that.
Why can't it grey out the options I don't have permission to modify or at least show an icon in a column which indicates read-only?
In sections such as HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT why can't I click on a file extension and have a summary of what process opens that file, what shell extensions are associated with it and so on. Why can't I click on an interface IID and see what DLL or EXE hosts it and also what objects interfaces are by the same binary. Why can't I deregister the DLL from the editor. Separate tools like OLE view are necessary for this but they could be incorporated into regedit.
Why won't Regedit help with all the bullshit introduced with Wow6432 where chunks of the registry are in different places thanks to various 32-bit and 64-bit differences? e.g. maybe let me flip from 32-bit to 64-bit view or show both together in separate panels where I can see the information in one place.
Why can't I live monitor changing values in the registry? Why can't I snapshot the registry and observe what values have changed since the last snapshot?
Why can't I right mouse on a REG_SZ holding a path in the registry and choose "Explore to here"?
Why can't I import / export bits of the tree using the clipboard instead of via files?
Some changes are more modest than others. I'm sure people who spend their life in this tool could think of other ways. The point is that for all the effort has put into the front end of Windows, they're barely lifted a finger to improve the lower level stuff.
And yeah you can replace it for something else but that excuse Notepad for being so terrible in the first place. Seriously. Open Notepad.exe in Windows 3.1 and aside from wide character support and some minor differences it's the exact same thing.
The other tools I singled out which are in Windows are antiquated too. I expect anyone who has to use them on a regular basis could think of 10 or so often minor or modest changes that would make them substantially better.
I think the Pebble gets the concept better than most Android, Apple devices but it's still only "up to" 7-10 days (depending on version) and that depends on the watch face used and activities. They're also not very pretty devices although they're cheap by smart watch standards. I think the threshold for me would be at least a month with a display capable of performing and refreshing as well as an LCD.
But hey we have some crappy 3d painting functionality in MS Paint! Hooray?
I think sliding doors could work better than gull wing even if only the back doors were done but I don't see how they'd get the front doors to slide at the same time. At least sliding doors would be mechanically simpler and probably better at keeping water out.
Secondly, their service used to be all about relevance - start Netflix and you were recommended shows / films based on viewing preferences. But now they aggressively promote their own content whether the show is of relevance or not. New shows appear in enormous banners, and sometimes video clips as soon as you start the service
So do people "prefer" their content? I don't know if that can be said because they have been systematically undermining the other content for some time. I also believe that if people were asked if they wanted Netflix to spend $100 million on a series they weren't interested in or $100 million to buy the rights to hundreds of quality movies and shows (not dreck) for a year that they might prefer the latter option.
Watches aren't just for bling, they're there to tell the time. A watch that needs to charge constantly, or needs to be pushed / shaken to show the time, or is hard to read in sunlight is a pain in the ass. That's why "smart" watches fail. They compromise the most basic function that they are supposed to perform. Instead we get shit like wrist cameras, half assed phone sync functionality, heart rate monitors etc. If someone produces a smart watch that tells the time with an always-on display, that works in and out of doors, that lasts weeks or months between charges then we might be getting somewhere. The other stuff is merely a bonus at that point.
It's notable that the gull wing doors are always demoed in tight spaces because that's about the only place they tenuously offer any advantage, but since the front row has regular doors I'm not sure how that's supposed to make sense either.