You raise some concerns worth consideration, but I think you may be letting fear get the better of you. There are good reasons to fear monocultures, but I don't see how those concerns apply here.
If there ends up being only one main source for all vendors then HTML will be defined by whatever the code does rather than by any standards process.
You're letting the tail wag the dog if you think that's a problem. An independent standards process serves no purpose if there aren't different sources for parts that need to work together. In a single-source situation, the primary benefit to having a standard is that new entrants trying to break into the field have something against which they can design their new approach, but the standard wouldn't be going away in your scenario, just the process used to drive its development. Maintaining a separate process in a time when there's no need for it would mean maintaining bureaucracy for its own sake.
And then it will be very difficult to move on if Chromium goes bad.
First, how is that situation any different than what we have now? It's hard today to create and maintain a competitor to Chromium. It's always been hard. If you want to build on existing work, you don't have many choices. You can't adopt Microsoft's closed frameworks. Everyone given the opportunity to adopt Firefox's (e.g. Safari, Chrome, and Opera) has decided to go elsewhere, so odds are you would too. You could do what Apple did with WebKit and fork a smaller code base to get your start, but even that's tremendously difficult. And starting a new project from the ground up would be no more nor less difficult in a world where Chromium was all we had than it is today.
Second, even if it does go bad, anyone can fork it. Monocultures are bad when you're incapable of escaping them, but when there's no lock-in, there's nothing stopping a new entrant from developing the next step in the evolution of the technology by building on what is already there.
Third, when you have competitors working together on a shared resource, there's a lot of incentives aligned to ensure that the shared resource doesn't "go bad". It may fail to improve as much as it could, but...
Which means that there will be no incentive to make Chromium good.
I actually agree with you, but I'm not convinced it's a problem in practice.
Consider the very similar situation we were in a few years back when Apple and Google were working together on WebKit. One improvement Google realized would yield significant performance and security benefits was a multiprocess architecture, but adding it to WebKit would mean sharing it with their competitor. The incentives weren't aligned for them to improve WebKit, so that's the end of the story, right?
No! Things played out differently in reality.
Instead, Google baked their improvements into Chromium (which sits on top of WebKit), giving Chrome a significant competitive advantage over Safari. Apple responded with the creation of WebKit2 (which baked the multiprocess architecture directly into the rendering engine). As development of WebKit and WebKit2 diverged, Google eventually forked WebKit as Blink, which Opera has benefitted from already, and which Microsoft allegedly stands to benefit from as well.
So, in one sense, WebKit proper has indeed failed to improve as a result of the misaligned incentives, but that's missing the forest for the trees. If we look at the whole picture we see that the end users for all of the involved companies have benefitted, that the state of technology has advanced, and that the lack of improvement to WebKit itself is neither here nor there, since its development continues on under the names of Blink and WebKit2.
If we trace the path from KHTML to Chrome, we necessarily go through WebKit, which began as a KHTML fork on a Unix-based platform (OS X). As such, Chrome has true *nix roots. The OP never suggested that KHTML was anything other than Linux, but your claim would seem to suggest that Chrome's heritage is exclusively from Linux roots, not *nix roots, which is ignorant of history and utterly incorrect.
If stupid Apple simply added another option to the "Do Not Disturb" function that allowed no calls nor texts from any number not on contact lists this stuff wouldn't be a problem.
Settings > Do Not Disturb > Allow Calls From > Contacts Only Settings > Messages > Filter Unknown Senders
"Stupid apple" already added the options you want. The latter setting has been available for a few years already. The first one is a relatively recent addition, however, so I'll excuse you for being unaware of it.
Is it being a curmudgeon when it's for the right reasons? I'm not so sure...;)
I've been putting off calling my ISP because they jacked up my rates just a few months after I upgraded my service to get rid of their data cap. Coworkers of mine are paying about 75% of what I'm paying for the exact same service from the exact same company in the exact same city. I had service from this same company about 10 years back that cost me about 30% of what I'm paying now. I had no data caps and had more than enough speed, even by today's standards. I was a very happy customer. I'd gladly go back to that plan if they still offered it, but then they instituted data caps without warning and started an annual cycle of increasing the minimum speeds they offered from "more than I need" to "WAY more than I need" as an excuse to justify their price hikes. I'm just as frustrated as you are about the high speeds people (namely me) are getting, but I'm frustrated because it costs me money without providing additional value.
And I'd be one to know how much speed I actually need. My grad research involved what was at the time the largest web crawl in academia, for which we had virtually unlimited access to a connection that handled the entire needs of a university with roughly 55,000 students at the time. In everyday, personal use, the difference between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps is largely a matter of "having the best", since even when sites or services deliver content at those speeds to individual users, the performance gap almost always goes unnoticed by humans. Sustained uploads and downloads are where higher speeds shine, but most uploads are handled as incremental background tasks (e.g. backups, photo/video syncing, etc.), which hides the performance gap. Likewise, most sustained downloads are preceded by buffering, thus hiding the performance gap. It's rare that a person with 25 Mbps or more to themselves encounters a scenario where their user experience would be significantly improved by having speeds an order of magnitude greater.
That said, the rural situation is a dumpster fire. It's one thing to say that 25 Mbps is enough, but when that's all you get for your whole household, that isn't enough, and it's even worse that whole swaths of the population are lucky if they can get even that for their household. To me, to problem isn't that bandwidth is a limited resource that's being consumed by people with crazy fast connections, resulting in rural folks getting nothing; the problem is that rural folks don't even have access to the resource in the first place. And we're not talking about people living in the boonies. I have plenty of friends and coworkers who live within 20 minutes of me (a suburbanite in a metropolitan area) who have no access to wired broadband. They've had to turn to cellular hotspots, satellites, or WISPs, all of which come with their own problems (e.g. low data caps, need a 75 foot antenna, low speeds, high latency, etc.). One of them even got their whole neighborhood together, talked to the local cable ISP, and offered to throw tens of thousands of dollars at them if the ISP would simply run service less than a half mile from the trunk line to the neighborhood. No dice. Even if it costs them nothing to lay the line, it isn't worth it to them to be on the hook for supporting a line that only services a few dozen homes at most.
All of which is to say, the whole situation is an absolute mess that needs to be fixed, and rants are more than justified. No need to apologize.
That's because Messages had this ability even before DnD was added. Settings > Messages > Filter Unknown Senders. It turns off notifications for anyone not in your contacts and dumps their texts into a different screen in Messages. It's been available for several years.
All of which is to say, "stupid Apple" was a few years ahead of you in coming up with and deploying your suggestions. The problem still exists.
No, you need permission to push your updates to OTHER USER'S devices. You can update your own software without issue.
If a user wants automatic updates, they can receive your update automatically. If a user doesn't want automatic updates, you shouldn't be pushing something to their device. If you are, that's a problem, and it's what Apple is addressing here.
It's actually about both (as well as cost and availability), but I was responding specifically to the OP's rant about bandwidth, hence why I limited myself to that topic.
I take it you’re unaware that 4K only needs about 25 Mbps to stream without buffering? Anyone with minimum “broadband” speed can stream it, so while I agree that work needs to be done to improve things and would even suggest that a rant is warranted, I don’t know that I agree with the specific focus of your rant.
You know the best evidence it's not a mistake? Apple hasn't sued Bloomberg yet.
I've heard several people suggest this is evidence of something. I'm eager to hear your attempt at reading the tea leaves.
Apple is more than happy to sue journalists. They do it all the time to "protect trade secrets" and "stop leaks."
But they haven't sued Bloomberg over this.
Odd.
I'm afraid your interpretation undermines itself.
If Apple sues journalists "all the time" to discourage leaking, then how does a lack of a suit serve as evidence of a leak? Quite the contrary, it would actually suggest the opposite: that the article was bereft of leaked info over which Apple could sue. After all, if Bloomberg's article was true, your belief about Apple's lawsuit habits would have us conclude that Apple should have sued Bloomberg by now. Thus, the fact that Apple hasn't sued already would suggest (but not prove) that Bloomberg's article isn't true.
That said, I don't ascribe to your belief that "Apple is more than happy to sue journalists" "all the time". If they did, wouldn't they have sued Gizmodo after Gizmodo acquired a lost iPhone prototype? That didn't happen. Nor did Apple sue anyone these last several years each time parts, pictures, and technical diagrams have leaked in the weeks leading up to major product announcements. Nor did anyone get sued when private builds for unannounced products were discovered to be accessible from outside their network and developers were able to document new features and product details in advance of the product's announcement. In fact, the last time I'm aware of Apple suing journalists was way back in 2004, when, as you suggested, they sued in order to combat a leak that had occurred.
I'm not saying it never happens, but I'm not aware of any lawsuits against journalists in the post-Jobs era of Apple, so—at least from my viewpoint—a lack of a lawsuit here is just par for the course. Besides which, what's Apple supposed to sue them for if the story is false? The best I can figure is defamation or libel, but it's incredibly bad PR for the world's most popular brand to pick on the little guys for saying mean things. And if the story is true, what are they supposed to sue them for? I can't think of anything.
To me, not suing is the only thing that makes any sense, regardless of if the article is true or not.
The problem is because of the PATRIOT ACT, NSLs, the FISA court and the NDAA 2014 [...]
Let me stop you right there. You'd have a really good point, if not for the fact that Apple has explicitly denied being under an NSL or gag order of any sort. I'd guess that you're familiar with warrant canaries, right? So you likely already know that the government can compel companies to remain silent about a gag order, but it can't compel them to lie about being under one. Thus, if Apple is lying it's because they've chosen to do so of their own volition, not because they're being compelled to do so by an NSL or gag order.
Setting aside the logical fallacy you're engaging in by attempting to poison the well, virtually nothing about Bloomberg's story makes sense.
They say the chips were first noticed in mid-2015 at Apple and that Apple and Amazon dropped Super Micro as a supplier in response to the discovery, but Apple didn't stop using Super Micro boards until after an unrelated issue in mid-2016 and Amazon was still using Super Micro boards as recently as a few months ago. They say the chips were caught at Amazon because the chips were phoning home using the Internet, but the allegedly affected servers at Amazon weren't even connected to the Internet in the first place. They claimed that nearly 10,000 Super Micro boards were affected at Apple, but the most Super Micro boards ever in Apple's possession was nearly an order of magnitude fewer than that. They say that numerous people in the affected companies and governments of multiple nations had direct knowledge of these incidents, yet these people, companies, and governments are denying any such knowledge, even going so far as—in the case of Apple—to say so under oath to Congress while affirming that there's no gag order or NSL at play.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg is apparently unsure enough about their own reporter's story that they've sent out at least one fresh reporter, possibly more that we don't know about, to investigate the merits of the original story. Of course, their doubt isn't surprising, given that their own background source (one of their only named sources in the original article) has come out against the story because he considers it wholly implausible that the Chinese were already doing everything that he said could theoretically be possible in exactly the way he described. And while most of us here understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, they've failed to produce evidence of any kind, extraordinary or otherwise, despite claims that would suggest there should be an abundance of evidence to choose from across a multitude of organizations (e.g. e-mails, pictures, the chips themselves, etc.).
So who are you going to believe: reporters whose own organization doubts them, whose own sources don't believe them, and whose extraordinary evidence doesn't exist, or literally everyone else who would have knowledge of the subject?
Bloomberg, on the whole, is a good news organization, and Apple has certainly had its missteps, but all signs point to this story being a mistake on Bloomberg's part.
Pretty much. The millennial stereotype would have you believe that they're entitled brats with an outsized sense of self-worth and an unwillingness to work hard. As it turns out, most of these sorts of traits are measurable and have been tracked by researchers across a representative sample of the American population for decades, allowing researchers to see whether or not those claims have any merit.
By all accounts, they don't.
Since about the 1940s, most of those sorts of traits have only shifted by, at most, a single digit percent in terms of their prevalence in the American population. The millennials actually scored better in most of those traits than the boomers and gen Xers did at the same point in their lives, but the differences were so slight as to not matter. The millennials trying to push boomer stereotypes are just as wrong as the boomers are about the millennials.
It may be the case that the bad ones in the millennial generation are more extreme than the bad ones in prior generations (i.e. I haven't seen any studies on the topic), but there's no statistical basis that I'm aware of to suggest that millennials, taken as a cohort, are meaningfully better or worse than previous generations. Despite that, they got a bad rap early on, and now whenever we see a millennial who fits the stereotype, our confirmation bias convinces us that our preconceived view of them is correct, in the same way that we might not think twice about the bad male drivers we interact with all day, but a bad woman driver? Clearly indicative of the fact that women are bad drivers, right?
I’m picking up what you’re putting down, and I’ll admit it’s a different tack than what I thought you were initially taking, but it’s still a moot point. If it’s considered gambling, then it’s illegal in the US because those transactions are a form of interstate commerce. As such, none of the tax regulations particular to gambling come into play.
So, I did a little sleuthing around to follow up on this. This writeup walks through several topics in more detail, but the most relevant thing on that page is this quote from EU regulations, which elaborates specifically on the processing of photos:
The processing of photographs should not systematically be considered to be processing of special categories of personal data as they are covered by the definition of biometric data only when processed through a specific technical means allowing the unique identification or authentication of a natural person.
I.e. Only when the processing of an image results in data that can be used to uniquely identify the individual is it considered sensitive data. Similarly, the official site would seem to indicate the same, since it says that biometric data is considered sensitive when it's "processed solely to identify a human being".
A photo, obviously, could be used to do so in theory, but if the processing doesn't actually do so and they aren't passing it along to any other systems that might do so, then they wouldn't seem to be collecting "sensitive data". And if they aren't collecting sensitive data, they only need to meet a lower bar for lawful processing (e.g. only a legitimate interest would be necessary, rather than user consent, from what I understand).
Also worth noting, even if it had been classified as sensitive data, explicit consent is NOT the only way to lawfully process it. There are four other ways to do so as well.
That makes no sense. You might as well have mentioned that some of these games may cause seizures in people with epilepsy. It's a concern, sure, but it's of no more relevance here—in a conversation about whether loot boxes should be regulated as gambling—than tax evasion is. It's just something unrelated that may be a problem with certain types of games.
There's nothing unique about loot boxes when it comes to the topic of tax evasion. Loot boxes can be sold for real money in some games, and some people may use that mechanism for tax evasion, but that's equally as true of any other virtual item that can be sold for real money in a game, whether it's a weapon, a skin, a piece of gold, or whatever else.
There may be something worth investigating there, but that's a separate concern that has nothing to do with the unique characteristics of loot boxes.
Fact-checking myself: this species doesn't carry malaria. They do carry the other diseases I mentioned, as well as Yellow Fever, Dengue, and others, but malaria was the big one I mentioned, and I got that fact very wrong, so I apologize for that.
That's a fair question that needs to be answered, but whatever those costs may be, they must be weighed against the thousands of people who die or are afflicted each year by diseases such as Zika, West Nile, Yellow Fever, and other ailments spread by this species. We aren't talking about wiping this species out because we find them to be a nuisance. We're talking about doing it because tens or hundreds of thousands of people have been debilitated or lost their lives and more will be too if we take no action. That fact seems to get lost as we argue about hypothetical repercussions in ecosystems.
We aren't wiping them out just because. We're wiping them out because lots and lots and lots of people are suffering and dying. Provided we've done our due diligence and have determined that the risk of a dire impact to the ecosystem is minimal—and by all accounts, that seems to be the case—it seems to me that this action would be justified.
As an aside, while there's a finality to the extinction of a species that needs to be considered solemnly and with care, the extinction of a species is by no means an unusual thing. Species go extinct on an everyday basis, though whether it's one every few days or hundreds every day is a subject of debate. I don't bring this up to repeat the (fallacious) argument that species extermination is justified because it happens all the time. Rather, I bring it up to highlight our collective hypocrisy: we care about the extinction of familiar species because they are familiar, even if we are incapable of pointing to anything that makes their extinction more significant than that of any other species.
In the case of mosquitoes, we're so familiar with them that we've excused them as being mere nuisances. I can't help but think that if we treated them as something unfamiliar by looking at them with fresh eyes, that we'd collectively do a much better job at assessing the situation. They aren't a mere nuisance, and their extinction—so far as we know—would not have a significant impact on the ecosystem. As such, their loss is of no more nor less concern than that of any other species.
While I understand and agree that we need to be very careful with exterminating species, I think the Slashdot crowd may be living in a bit of a first world bubble in this case. This species is the primary vector for malaria, West Nile, Zika, and any number of other life threatening or debilitating illnesses. It's one thing when we're talking about wiping out species so we can build more strips malls, but literally hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year due to bites delivered by this species, so the stakes are considerably higher. Vaccines and medicine help treat specific diseases, but new diseases are constantly appearing, at which point mosquitos reassume their role in helping disease spread.
The benefit of the suggested approach is that it has no risk of spreading beyond the immediately obvious impact (i.e. the extinction of a species). We wouldn't be introducing anything new into the ecosystem that could disrupt it further (e.g. predatory species, infectious disease, toxins, mutations, etc.), and from what I've heard, alternative food sources exist for all known predators of mosquitoes in all regions where they eat mosquitoes. Taken on the balance against hundreds of thousands of human lives lost every year, we must be willing to risk more, but we're thankfully in a position where we need not do so since the risk with this approach is by all accounts minimal. When the stakes are this high and we've done our due diligence to determine that the risks are so low, why wouldn't we take what we believe to be a low-risk action to save so many lives? Anything less is either irrational or a gross devaluing of human life.
Would the GDPR actually help with most of those? If the billboard isn't sending anything back, but is instead simply processing your appearance locally and then acting locally on that information, is there any actual collection of data, so far as the GDPR is concerned? What about if the sensor that scans you is a black box that only outputs booleans corresponding to your traits (Beard: Yes. Long hair: No. Sunglasses: Yes.) and that even that data only ever stays on-device and never leaves to go to anyone's database? If those are considered a form of data collection that requires disclosure and consent, then how is taking any picture in public legal?
Honest questions. I'm not in the EU and and don't do business there, so I don't know the ins-and-outs of the GDPR, but it seemed to me, based on my limited understanding, that none of these were necessarily running afoul of the GDPR.
My wife has had cancer twice.. Don't talk like "delayed gratification" is a weakness of character.
An inability to delay gratification is a weakness of character. But so is a miserly attitude that prevents one's enjoyment of today. Your wife's illness clearly taught you the latter, but the former is just as important. There's a balance to be had.
We actually had a similar (though less severe) experience to yours, but it was the former lesson that my wife learned instead. She came down with a mystery illness on the last day of our honeymoon. There wasn't a day that went by that she wasn't doubled over in pain for the next six months. We were passed from specialist to specialist until an infectious diseases doctor was finally able to identify the one-in-a-million root cause and tell us how it could be treated.
But before the treatments could start, we needed to write a check (in the second week of the year) that would max out our deductible (for a HDHP, no less). I wrote the check on the spot without a second thought; my wife freaked out, asking where the money would come from, how we could afford it, what sort of things we'd need to cut from our budget, etc.. When I told her that the money was already set aside, that it was there for exactly this sort of purpose, and that it wouldn't impact anything in our budget, she finally understood the importance in thinking beyond today. Small changes made years prior were all that had been necessary to prevent an unexpected major expense from becoming a catastrophic financial situation.
Of course, learning that former lesson hasn't stopped us from practicing the latter one by traveling Italy, building a gaming computer, renovating much of our home, taking a cruise, and doing a huge number of other things for our own enjoyment since the treatment wrapped up. It just means that we've also made sure we have the money ready in case we need it again.
But for all we know, you live in a box and put all your money into retirement. Everyone has their own idea of the sacrifices they want to make now versus later.
I want to address the point you're raising in just a sec, but the AC was making a simple statement of fact: that most Americans can't pay for all of those things. All we need is one counterexample from an American in the bottom half of income to disprove that claim, so the fact that I was easily able to afford those things on less than the median income is sufficient to disprove what the AC is asserting. That's all I was getting at.
But the point you're raising is also worth addressing.
I've been fortunate in life, in that I had a semester as an undergrad and then another period of several years as a grad student that compelled me to understand how far a dollar could be stretched. Those experiences continue to shape my financial outlook today, years later, but that doesn't mean I live a life of austerity. If anything, I think that I get to enjoy the here and now more than ever.
I'm the sole source of income in our home, yet we're easily able to afford a 3 bed/2 bath 1800 sqft. house on a third of an acre in a nice neighborhood, have two vehicles that we own outright, eat out regularly and have no shortage of food in the home, max out my HSA every year and have health/dental/vision insurance covered for everyone, set aside enough for our eventual retirement, have never accepted any form of welfare, have no debt other than the mortgage, and have always had so much left over that we've been able to be generous with our charitable giving as well (enough so that I've needed to itemize my deductions every year). By all accounts, I'm rich in all ways. These days I admittedly make a decent bit more than the median income, which has allowed us to add a number of things on top of the list I just said, but all of what I said was equally as true when I was below the median income just a handful of years ago.
As such, I utterly reject the false dichotomy that I see many Americans assume: that you must live for today or tomorrow. I've had no trouble doing both.
My wife had that assumption when we got married. I insisted she could have her cake and eat it too: that we could enjoy today fully and set aside enough for tomorrow, provided we were able to let our priorities actually take priority in our budget, rather than hemorrhaging funds on items that commanded an outsized share of our budget for the value (e.g. shelter, amusement, whatever) they brought. It took six months for her to come around, but she's gung-ho now. She was finally, for the first time, able to have a guilt-free enjoyment of today without anxiety about tomorrow hanging over her head, and she's also getting to enjoy her favorite things more often than she did before, now that we've been able to reduce the spending on items that were over-budgeted for what they were. Most of the less important stuff is still around, of course, but it now gets budgeted an amount that's commensurate with the value it brings.
All of which is to say, you don't need to be austere to afford necessities and nice things. The only reason there's any pushback about this is because we've become culturally conditioned to treat gluttonous spending as the norm, which has led to people looking at you like you're crazy when you suggest obvious steps like living within your means, sticking to a budget, or reconsidering the value of your expenses. The fact is, this isn't complicated stuff that requires big sacrifices. I was able to make it work—both as a poor grad student just barely above the poverty line and as a rich professional with a good income—so I know others can do it too.
The fact that I was able to do all of those quite easily with a salary below the median income would disprove your claim that most Americans aren't earning enough. I'd be willing to believe that most Americans don't do those things, but suggesting that they don't earn enough to do those things is patently false. Alternatively, I'd believe that many Americans don't earn enough to do those things, but that isn't what you said.
In terms of monetization, the helpful rule of thumb I heard several years ago was that it takes about 1 million views per month to make a comfortable living on YouTube. That number may no longer be accurate, but once you recognize that it's likely still something on that order of magnitude, you start to realize just how many people on YouTube are nothing more than hobbyists or part-timers. An entry level full-timer working 40 hours per week would need to be skilled enough to match our channel's monthly output with less than 1.5 minutes of effort.
To say the least, the gulf between where they are and where a channel like ours is is vast.
And yeah, I agree that at first blush it seems that cosplayers made a lot of sense, but as I thought on it more, I started to question that choice. From what I understand, there are basically two forms of effective advertising: the ones intended to directly influence purchasing decisions by catching someone at the right moment, and the ones that lay the groundwork by establishing brand awareness before that moment arrives. People watching cosplay videos aren't making a purchasing decision so his ads would only accomplishes the latter, but brand awareness advertising needs to be sustained and broad for it to work, which this campaign was not. Hence why I suggested he might've had more success with food videos (or, even better, novelty gift videos), since he'd be more likely to catch people as they were considering purchases.
Slashdot Mirror
You raise some concerns worth consideration, but I think you may be letting fear get the better of you. There are good reasons to fear monocultures, but I don't see how those concerns apply here.
If there ends up being only one main source for all vendors then HTML will be defined by whatever the code does rather than by any standards process.
You're letting the tail wag the dog if you think that's a problem. An independent standards process serves no purpose if there aren't different sources for parts that need to work together. In a single-source situation, the primary benefit to having a standard is that new entrants trying to break into the field have something against which they can design their new approach, but the standard wouldn't be going away in your scenario, just the process used to drive its development. Maintaining a separate process in a time when there's no need for it would mean maintaining bureaucracy for its own sake.
And then it will be very difficult to move on if Chromium goes bad.
First, how is that situation any different than what we have now? It's hard today to create and maintain a competitor to Chromium. It's always been hard. If you want to build on existing work, you don't have many choices. You can't adopt Microsoft's closed frameworks. Everyone given the opportunity to adopt Firefox's (e.g. Safari, Chrome, and Opera) has decided to go elsewhere, so odds are you would too. You could do what Apple did with WebKit and fork a smaller code base to get your start, but even that's tremendously difficult. And starting a new project from the ground up would be no more nor less difficult in a world where Chromium was all we had than it is today.
Second, even if it does go bad, anyone can fork it. Monocultures are bad when you're incapable of escaping them, but when there's no lock-in, there's nothing stopping a new entrant from developing the next step in the evolution of the technology by building on what is already there.
Third, when you have competitors working together on a shared resource, there's a lot of incentives aligned to ensure that the shared resource doesn't "go bad". It may fail to improve as much as it could, but...
Which means that there will be no incentive to make Chromium good.
I actually agree with you, but I'm not convinced it's a problem in practice.
Consider the very similar situation we were in a few years back when Apple and Google were working together on WebKit. One improvement Google realized would yield significant performance and security benefits was a multiprocess architecture, but adding it to WebKit would mean sharing it with their competitor. The incentives weren't aligned for them to improve WebKit, so that's the end of the story, right?
No! Things played out differently in reality.
Instead, Google baked their improvements into Chromium (which sits on top of WebKit), giving Chrome a significant competitive advantage over Safari. Apple responded with the creation of WebKit2 (which baked the multiprocess architecture directly into the rendering engine). As development of WebKit and WebKit2 diverged, Google eventually forked WebKit as Blink, which Opera has benefitted from already, and which Microsoft allegedly stands to benefit from as well.
So, in one sense, WebKit proper has indeed failed to improve as a result of the misaligned incentives, but that's missing the forest for the trees. If we look at the whole picture we see that the end users for all of the involved companies have benefitted, that the state of technology has advanced, and that the lack of improvement to WebKit itself is neither here nor there, since its development continues on under the names of Blink and WebKit2.
If we trace the path from KHTML to Chrome, we necessarily go through WebKit, which began as a KHTML fork on a Unix-based platform (OS X). As such, Chrome has true *nix roots. The OP never suggested that KHTML was anything other than Linux, but your claim would seem to suggest that Chrome's heritage is exclusively from Linux roots, not *nix roots, which is ignorant of history and utterly incorrect.
If stupid Apple simply added another option to the "Do Not Disturb" function that allowed no calls nor texts from any number not on contact lists this stuff wouldn't be a problem.
Settings > Do Not Disturb > Allow Calls From > Contacts Only
Settings > Messages > Filter Unknown Senders
"Stupid apple" already added the options you want. The latter setting has been available for a few years already. The first one is a relatively recent addition, however, so I'll excuse you for being unaware of it.
Gawd, I am becoming a curmudgeon
Is it being a curmudgeon when it's for the right reasons? I'm not so sure... ;)
I've been putting off calling my ISP because they jacked up my rates just a few months after I upgraded my service to get rid of their data cap. Coworkers of mine are paying about 75% of what I'm paying for the exact same service from the exact same company in the exact same city. I had service from this same company about 10 years back that cost me about 30% of what I'm paying now. I had no data caps and had more than enough speed, even by today's standards. I was a very happy customer. I'd gladly go back to that plan if they still offered it, but then they instituted data caps without warning and started an annual cycle of increasing the minimum speeds they offered from "more than I need" to "WAY more than I need" as an excuse to justify their price hikes. I'm just as frustrated as you are about the high speeds people (namely me) are getting, but I'm frustrated because it costs me money without providing additional value.
And I'd be one to know how much speed I actually need. My grad research involved what was at the time the largest web crawl in academia, for which we had virtually unlimited access to a connection that handled the entire needs of a university with roughly 55,000 students at the time. In everyday, personal use, the difference between 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps is largely a matter of "having the best", since even when sites or services deliver content at those speeds to individual users, the performance gap almost always goes unnoticed by humans. Sustained uploads and downloads are where higher speeds shine, but most uploads are handled as incremental background tasks (e.g. backups, photo/video syncing, etc.), which hides the performance gap. Likewise, most sustained downloads are preceded by buffering, thus hiding the performance gap. It's rare that a person with 25 Mbps or more to themselves encounters a scenario where their user experience would be significantly improved by having speeds an order of magnitude greater.
That said, the rural situation is a dumpster fire. It's one thing to say that 25 Mbps is enough, but when that's all you get for your whole household, that isn't enough, and it's even worse that whole swaths of the population are lucky if they can get even that for their household. To me, to problem isn't that bandwidth is a limited resource that's being consumed by people with crazy fast connections, resulting in rural folks getting nothing; the problem is that rural folks don't even have access to the resource in the first place. And we're not talking about people living in the boonies. I have plenty of friends and coworkers who live within 20 minutes of me (a suburbanite in a metropolitan area) who have no access to wired broadband. They've had to turn to cellular hotspots, satellites, or WISPs, all of which come with their own problems (e.g. low data caps, need a 75 foot antenna, low speeds, high latency, etc.). One of them even got their whole neighborhood together, talked to the local cable ISP, and offered to throw tens of thousands of dollars at them if the ISP would simply run service less than a half mile from the trunk line to the neighborhood. No dice. Even if it costs them nothing to lay the line, it isn't worth it to them to be on the hook for supporting a line that only services a few dozen homes at most.
All of which is to say, the whole situation is an absolute mess that needs to be fixed, and rants are more than justified. No need to apologize.
That's because Messages had this ability even before DnD was added. Settings > Messages > Filter Unknown Senders. It turns off notifications for anyone not in your contacts and dumps their texts into a different screen in Messages. It's been available for several years.
All of which is to say, "stupid Apple" was a few years ahead of you in coming up with and deploying your suggestions. The problem still exists.
You need permission to update your OWN software
No, you need permission to push your updates to OTHER USER'S devices. You can update your own software without issue.
If a user wants automatic updates, they can receive your update automatically. If a user doesn't want automatic updates, you shouldn't be pushing something to their device. If you are, that's a problem, and it's what Apple is addressing here.
It's actually about both (as well as cost and availability), but I was responding specifically to the OP's rant about bandwidth, hence why I limited myself to that topic.
I take it you’re unaware that 4K only needs about 25 Mbps to stream without buffering? Anyone with minimum “broadband” speed can stream it, so while I agree that work needs to be done to improve things and would even suggest that a rant is warranted, I don’t know that I agree with the specific focus of your rant.
You know the best evidence it's not a mistake? Apple hasn't sued Bloomberg yet.
I've heard several people suggest this is evidence of something. I'm eager to hear your attempt at reading the tea leaves.
Apple is more than happy to sue journalists. They do it all the time to "protect trade secrets" and "stop leaks."
But they haven't sued Bloomberg over this.
Odd.
I'm afraid your interpretation undermines itself.
If Apple sues journalists "all the time" to discourage leaking, then how does a lack of a suit serve as evidence of a leak? Quite the contrary, it would actually suggest the opposite: that the article was bereft of leaked info over which Apple could sue. After all, if Bloomberg's article was true, your belief about Apple's lawsuit habits would have us conclude that Apple should have sued Bloomberg by now. Thus, the fact that Apple hasn't sued already would suggest (but not prove) that Bloomberg's article isn't true.
That said, I don't ascribe to your belief that "Apple is more than happy to sue journalists" "all the time". If they did, wouldn't they have sued Gizmodo after Gizmodo acquired a lost iPhone prototype? That didn't happen. Nor did Apple sue anyone these last several years each time parts, pictures, and technical diagrams have leaked in the weeks leading up to major product announcements. Nor did anyone get sued when private builds for unannounced products were discovered to be accessible from outside their network and developers were able to document new features and product details in advance of the product's announcement. In fact, the last time I'm aware of Apple suing journalists was way back in 2004, when, as you suggested, they sued in order to combat a leak that had occurred.
I'm not saying it never happens, but I'm not aware of any lawsuits against journalists in the post-Jobs era of Apple, so—at least from my viewpoint—a lack of a lawsuit here is just par for the course. Besides which, what's Apple supposed to sue them for if the story is false? The best I can figure is defamation or libel, but it's incredibly bad PR for the world's most popular brand to pick on the little guys for saying mean things. And if the story is true, what are they supposed to sue them for? I can't think of anything.
To me, not suing is the only thing that makes any sense, regardless of if the article is true or not.
The problem is because of the PATRIOT ACT, NSLs, the FISA court and the NDAA 2014 [...]
Let me stop you right there. You'd have a really good point, if not for the fact that Apple has explicitly denied being under an NSL or gag order of any sort. I'd guess that you're familiar with warrant canaries, right? So you likely already know that the government can compel companies to remain silent about a gag order, but it can't compel them to lie about being under one. Thus, if Apple is lying it's because they've chosen to do so of their own volition, not because they're being compelled to do so by an NSL or gag order.
Setting aside the logical fallacy you're engaging in by attempting to poison the well, virtually nothing about Bloomberg's story makes sense.
They say the chips were first noticed in mid-2015 at Apple and that Apple and Amazon dropped Super Micro as a supplier in response to the discovery, but Apple didn't stop using Super Micro boards until after an unrelated issue in mid-2016 and Amazon was still using Super Micro boards as recently as a few months ago. They say the chips were caught at Amazon because the chips were phoning home using the Internet, but the allegedly affected servers at Amazon weren't even connected to the Internet in the first place. They claimed that nearly 10,000 Super Micro boards were affected at Apple, but the most Super Micro boards ever in Apple's possession was nearly an order of magnitude fewer than that. They say that numerous people in the affected companies and governments of multiple nations had direct knowledge of these incidents, yet these people, companies, and governments are denying any such knowledge, even going so far as—in the case of Apple—to say so under oath to Congress while affirming that there's no gag order or NSL at play.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg is apparently unsure enough about their own reporter's story that they've sent out at least one fresh reporter, possibly more that we don't know about, to investigate the merits of the original story. Of course, their doubt isn't surprising, given that their own background source (one of their only named sources in the original article) has come out against the story because he considers it wholly implausible that the Chinese were already doing everything that he said could theoretically be possible in exactly the way he described. And while most of us here understand that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, they've failed to produce evidence of any kind, extraordinary or otherwise, despite claims that would suggest there should be an abundance of evidence to choose from across a multitude of organizations (e.g. e-mails, pictures, the chips themselves, etc.).
So who are you going to believe: reporters whose own organization doubts them, whose own sources don't believe them, and whose extraordinary evidence doesn't exist, or literally everyone else who would have knowledge of the subject?
Bloomberg, on the whole, is a good news organization, and Apple has certainly had its missteps, but all signs point to this story being a mistake on Bloomberg's part.
Pretty much. The millennial stereotype would have you believe that they're entitled brats with an outsized sense of self-worth and an unwillingness to work hard. As it turns out, most of these sorts of traits are measurable and have been tracked by researchers across a representative sample of the American population for decades, allowing researchers to see whether or not those claims have any merit.
By all accounts, they don't.
Since about the 1940s, most of those sorts of traits have only shifted by, at most, a single digit percent in terms of their prevalence in the American population. The millennials actually scored better in most of those traits than the boomers and gen Xers did at the same point in their lives, but the differences were so slight as to not matter. The millennials trying to push boomer stereotypes are just as wrong as the boomers are about the millennials.
It may be the case that the bad ones in the millennial generation are more extreme than the bad ones in prior generations (i.e. I haven't seen any studies on the topic), but there's no statistical basis that I'm aware of to suggest that millennials, taken as a cohort, are meaningfully better or worse than previous generations. Despite that, they got a bad rap early on, and now whenever we see a millennial who fits the stereotype, our confirmation bias convinces us that our preconceived view of them is correct, in the same way that we might not think twice about the bad male drivers we interact with all day, but a bad woman driver? Clearly indicative of the fact that women are bad drivers, right?
I’m picking up what you’re putting down, and I’ll admit it’s a different tack than what I thought you were initially taking, but it’s still a moot point. If it’s considered gambling, then it’s illegal in the US because those transactions are a form of interstate commerce. As such, none of the tax regulations particular to gambling come into play.
So, I did a little sleuthing around to follow up on this. This writeup walks through several topics in more detail, but the most relevant thing on that page is this quote from EU regulations, which elaborates specifically on the processing of photos:
The processing of photographs should not systematically be considered to be processing of special categories of personal data as they are covered by the definition of biometric data only when processed through a specific technical means allowing the unique identification or authentication of a natural person.
I.e. Only when the processing of an image results in data that can be used to uniquely identify the individual is it considered sensitive data. Similarly, the official site would seem to indicate the same, since it says that biometric data is considered sensitive when it's "processed solely to identify a human being".
A photo, obviously, could be used to do so in theory, but if the processing doesn't actually do so and they aren't passing it along to any other systems that might do so, then they wouldn't seem to be collecting "sensitive data". And if they aren't collecting sensitive data, they only need to meet a lower bar for lawful processing (e.g. only a legitimate interest would be necessary, rather than user consent, from what I understand).
Also worth noting, even if it had been classified as sensitive data, explicit consent is NOT the only way to lawfully process it. There are four other ways to do so as well.
That makes no sense. You might as well have mentioned that some of these games may cause seizures in people with epilepsy. It's a concern, sure, but it's of no more relevance here—in a conversation about whether loot boxes should be regulated as gambling—than tax evasion is. It's just something unrelated that may be a problem with certain types of games.
There's nothing unique about loot boxes when it comes to the topic of tax evasion. Loot boxes can be sold for real money in some games, and some people may use that mechanism for tax evasion, but that's equally as true of any other virtual item that can be sold for real money in a game, whether it's a weapon, a skin, a piece of gold, or whatever else.
There may be something worth investigating there, but that's a separate concern that has nothing to do with the unique characteristics of loot boxes.
Fact-checking myself: this species doesn't carry malaria. They do carry the other diseases I mentioned, as well as Yellow Fever, Dengue, and others, but malaria was the big one I mentioned, and I got that fact very wrong, so I apologize for that.
That's a fair question that needs to be answered, but whatever those costs may be, they must be weighed against the thousands of people who die or are afflicted each year by diseases such as Zika, West Nile, Yellow Fever, and other ailments spread by this species. We aren't talking about wiping this species out because we find them to be a nuisance. We're talking about doing it because tens or hundreds of thousands of people have been debilitated or lost their lives and more will be too if we take no action. That fact seems to get lost as we argue about hypothetical repercussions in ecosystems.
We aren't wiping them out just because. We're wiping them out because lots and lots and lots of people are suffering and dying. Provided we've done our due diligence and have determined that the risk of a dire impact to the ecosystem is minimal—and by all accounts, that seems to be the case—it seems to me that this action would be justified.
As an aside, while there's a finality to the extinction of a species that needs to be considered solemnly and with care, the extinction of a species is by no means an unusual thing. Species go extinct on an everyday basis, though whether it's one every few days or hundreds every day is a subject of debate. I don't bring this up to repeat the (fallacious) argument that species extermination is justified because it happens all the time. Rather, I bring it up to highlight our collective hypocrisy: we care about the extinction of familiar species because they are familiar, even if we are incapable of pointing to anything that makes their extinction more significant than that of any other species.
In the case of mosquitoes, we're so familiar with them that we've excused them as being mere nuisances. I can't help but think that if we treated them as something unfamiliar by looking at them with fresh eyes, that we'd collectively do a much better job at assessing the situation. They aren't a mere nuisance, and their extinction—so far as we know—would not have a significant impact on the ecosystem. As such, their loss is of no more nor less concern than that of any other species.
While I understand and agree that we need to be very careful with exterminating species, I think the Slashdot crowd may be living in a bit of a first world bubble in this case. This species is the primary vector for malaria, West Nile, Zika, and any number of other life threatening or debilitating illnesses. It's one thing when we're talking about wiping out species so we can build more strips malls, but literally hundreds of thousands of people are dying every year due to bites delivered by this species, so the stakes are considerably higher. Vaccines and medicine help treat specific diseases, but new diseases are constantly appearing, at which point mosquitos reassume their role in helping disease spread.
The benefit of the suggested approach is that it has no risk of spreading beyond the immediately obvious impact (i.e. the extinction of a species). We wouldn't be introducing anything new into the ecosystem that could disrupt it further (e.g. predatory species, infectious disease, toxins, mutations, etc.), and from what I've heard, alternative food sources exist for all known predators of mosquitoes in all regions where they eat mosquitoes. Taken on the balance against hundreds of thousands of human lives lost every year, we must be willing to risk more, but we're thankfully in a position where we need not do so since the risk with this approach is by all accounts minimal. When the stakes are this high and we've done our due diligence to determine that the risks are so low, why wouldn't we take what we believe to be a low-risk action to save so many lives? Anything less is either irrational or a gross devaluing of human life.
Would the GDPR actually help with most of those? If the billboard isn't sending anything back, but is instead simply processing your appearance locally and then acting locally on that information, is there any actual collection of data, so far as the GDPR is concerned? What about if the sensor that scans you is a black box that only outputs booleans corresponding to your traits (Beard: Yes. Long hair: No. Sunglasses: Yes.) and that even that data only ever stays on-device and never leaves to go to anyone's database? If those are considered a form of data collection that requires disclosure and consent, then how is taking any picture in public legal?
Honest questions. I'm not in the EU and and don't do business there, so I don't know the ins-and-outs of the GDPR, but it seemed to me, based on my limited understanding, that none of these were necessarily running afoul of the GDPR.
My wife has had cancer twice.. Don't talk like "delayed gratification" is a weakness of character.
An inability to delay gratification is a weakness of character. But so is a miserly attitude that prevents one's enjoyment of today. Your wife's illness clearly taught you the latter, but the former is just as important. There's a balance to be had.
We actually had a similar (though less severe) experience to yours, but it was the former lesson that my wife learned instead. She came down with a mystery illness on the last day of our honeymoon. There wasn't a day that went by that she wasn't doubled over in pain for the next six months. We were passed from specialist to specialist until an infectious diseases doctor was finally able to identify the one-in-a-million root cause and tell us how it could be treated.
But before the treatments could start, we needed to write a check (in the second week of the year) that would max out our deductible (for a HDHP, no less). I wrote the check on the spot without a second thought; my wife freaked out, asking where the money would come from, how we could afford it, what sort of things we'd need to cut from our budget, etc.. When I told her that the money was already set aside, that it was there for exactly this sort of purpose, and that it wouldn't impact anything in our budget, she finally understood the importance in thinking beyond today. Small changes made years prior were all that had been necessary to prevent an unexpected major expense from becoming a catastrophic financial situation.
Of course, learning that former lesson hasn't stopped us from practicing the latter one by traveling Italy, building a gaming computer, renovating much of our home, taking a cruise, and doing a huge number of other things for our own enjoyment since the treatment wrapped up. It just means that we've also made sure we have the money ready in case we need it again.
But for all we know, you live in a box and put all your money into retirement. Everyone has their own idea of the sacrifices they want to make now versus later.
I want to address the point you're raising in just a sec, but the AC was making a simple statement of fact: that most Americans can't pay for all of those things. All we need is one counterexample from an American in the bottom half of income to disprove that claim, so the fact that I was easily able to afford those things on less than the median income is sufficient to disprove what the AC is asserting. That's all I was getting at.
But the point you're raising is also worth addressing.
I've been fortunate in life, in that I had a semester as an undergrad and then another period of several years as a grad student that compelled me to understand how far a dollar could be stretched. Those experiences continue to shape my financial outlook today, years later, but that doesn't mean I live a life of austerity. If anything, I think that I get to enjoy the here and now more than ever.
I'm the sole source of income in our home, yet we're easily able to afford a 3 bed/2 bath 1800 sqft. house on a third of an acre in a nice neighborhood, have two vehicles that we own outright, eat out regularly and have no shortage of food in the home, max out my HSA every year and have health/dental/vision insurance covered for everyone, set aside enough for our eventual retirement, have never accepted any form of welfare, have no debt other than the mortgage, and have always had so much left over that we've been able to be generous with our charitable giving as well (enough so that I've needed to itemize my deductions every year). By all accounts, I'm rich in all ways. These days I admittedly make a decent bit more than the median income, which has allowed us to add a number of things on top of the list I just said, but all of what I said was equally as true when I was below the median income just a handful of years ago.
As such, I utterly reject the false dichotomy that I see many Americans assume: that you must live for today or tomorrow. I've had no trouble doing both.
My wife had that assumption when we got married. I insisted she could have her cake and eat it too: that we could enjoy today fully and set aside enough for tomorrow, provided we were able to let our priorities actually take priority in our budget, rather than hemorrhaging funds on items that commanded an outsized share of our budget for the value (e.g. shelter, amusement, whatever) they brought. It took six months for her to come around, but she's gung-ho now. She was finally, for the first time, able to have a guilt-free enjoyment of today without anxiety about tomorrow hanging over her head, and she's also getting to enjoy her favorite things more often than she did before, now that we've been able to reduce the spending on items that were over-budgeted for what they were. Most of the less important stuff is still around, of course, but it now gets budgeted an amount that's commensurate with the value it brings.
All of which is to say, you don't need to be austere to afford necessities and nice things. The only reason there's any pushback about this is because we've become culturally conditioned to treat gluttonous spending as the norm, which has led to people looking at you like you're crazy when you suggest obvious steps like living within your means, sticking to a budget, or reconsidering the value of your expenses. The fact is, this isn't complicated stuff that requires big sacrifices. I was able to make it work—both as a poor grad student just barely above the poverty line and as a rich professional with a good income—so I know others can do it too.
The fact that I was able to do all of those quite easily with a salary below the median income would disprove your claim that most Americans aren't earning enough. I'd be willing to believe that most Americans don't do those things, but suggesting that they don't earn enough to do those things is patently false. Alternatively, I'd believe that many Americans don't earn enough to do those things, but that isn't what you said.
In terms of monetization, the helpful rule of thumb I heard several years ago was that it takes about 1 million views per month to make a comfortable living on YouTube. That number may no longer be accurate, but once you recognize that it's likely still something on that order of magnitude, you start to realize just how many people on YouTube are nothing more than hobbyists or part-timers. An entry level full-timer working 40 hours per week would need to be skilled enough to match our channel's monthly output with less than 1.5 minutes of effort.
To say the least, the gulf between where they are and where a channel like ours is is vast.
And yeah, I agree that at first blush it seems that cosplayers made a lot of sense, but as I thought on it more, I started to question that choice. From what I understand, there are basically two forms of effective advertising: the ones intended to directly influence purchasing decisions by catching someone at the right moment, and the ones that lay the groundwork by establishing brand awareness before that moment arrives. People watching cosplay videos aren't making a purchasing decision so his ads would only accomplishes the latter, but brand awareness advertising needs to be sustained and broad for it to work, which this campaign was not. Hence why I suggested he might've had more success with food videos (or, even better, novelty gift videos), since he'd be more likely to catch people as they were considering purchases.