Is there anything dumber in this world (that are still recognisable human) than socialists?
Yes. Trump supporters. Though the ones in the KKK and the nazis are hard to recognize as human.
More seriously, it was an experiment. Relax. Yes the outcome was fairly predictable but sometimes what seems obvious actually isn't correct. So you run an experiment to find out. It was possible we'd find out something unexpected. This sort of data is why I think people who talk nonsense about a "post scarcity society" are talking complete nonsense because most people don't want to work if they don't have to.
Sprint Corp sued AT&T late on Thursday, saying it is misleading consumers into believing that they are using fifth generation wireless network, known as 5G, a technology that has not yet been widely deployed.
It's kind of annoying that the FTC (or whatever three letter agency with jurisdiction) isn't sitting on them hard about this fraud. Marketing spin is one thing but this is pretty deeply shady.
If things go to court it is important to have expressed that you did not want to be tracked
Not at all. The laws regarding privacy in a public forum (like the internet) generally don't care whether or not your wish to be tracked. Absent express laws to the contrary there is a general presumption that you are not entitled to privacy in public outside of some specific circumstances. You setting a flag that you don't wish to be tracked will not provide any legal basis for collecting damages. Furthermore there are many ways to express your desire to not be tracked including using one or more of the many privacy add-ons and filters for exactly that purpose should that somehow become legally relevant.
It is the same as with rape. If the victim does not protest and tell the abuser to stop, then it can be argued it was consensual.
Wow. You have NO idea how consent works do you? Protesting is merely one way to indicate a preference and often it isn't important at all. There also are cases where victims are not expected to be able to protest. (underage, drunk, power imbalance, incapacitated, mentally handicapped, etc) For most crimes there is no requirement to protest for it to be an illegal act.
What "do not track" did was to tell the abuser to stop, so you can now actually claim damages.
If someone is doing something that harms you there is no requirement to tell them to stop. I don't have to tell someone to stop assaulting me or to stop robbing me for it to be illegal. All you have to do is prove that harm resulted or would have been reasonably expected to result.
I'm going to put a hold on LibreOffice updates until I get around to loading it up in a VM for testing,
Why would you do that if you weren't doing it before?
I'm all for feature and security updates but after having to deal with all the UI "improvements" in the UI's of various application (Firefox, Word, Windows, etc.) over the years I am hesitant to give up what I have become familiar with if I can avoid it.
You didn't read the summary. They didn't change the interface. They merely gave an alternative option that is NOT the default. The default is approximately unchanged. Some people like or at least are used to the current Microsoft interface so why not have an option to make those people comfortable? It won't be what I use but if it works for someone else then that is fine. My user interface preferences do not have to be universally shared.
Using advanced AI processing and machine learning, your phone will be able to expand the depth of field of the camera to remove that annoying blurring that occurs around objects further away.
Wow, you think there will be cameras that somehow will defy the laws of physics?
Now everything in your photos will be crisp, clear and in perfect focus - just the way they appear in real life.
This is already common tech in lots of smartphone cameras. When you use portrait mode, it is doing several things and one of them is often the simulation of the bokeh effect you get from good lenses. They are basically artificially blurring the background to simulate the effect and I imagine this is just a video application of the same basic concept. The lenses in most smartphone cameras are too small to have the depth of field necessary to blur backgrounds very effectively optically. It isn't that they are bad lenses, just that the laws of physics prevent them from doing this particular trick very well.
Of course they have to pretend AI is somehow involved so they can punch their buzzword bingo card.
The proper solution to the problem is for the ad companies to abide by it, either voluntarily or by law.
Ad companies will NEVER voluntarily respect the Do Not Track flag. WAY too much money at stake for that to happen. Seriously, you cannot be so naive as to think it was anything more than a feel good waste of time.
By removing it, Apple is telling the ad companies that Apple no longer cares about its users' privacy, and is inviting the ad companies to abuse Apple Safari users even more.
So you think removing an absurd feature that NEVER worked and never could have worked is somehow a bad idea? The only way DNT could possibly have worked is if it were backed up by laws with teeth which were never going to happen. Since it was a voluntary request those wishing to ignore it (for profit or malice) were free to do so legally.
This isn't Apple caring or not caring about privacy. It's Apple bowing to reality and not wasting resources on a useless feature that never had a prayer of doing what it's proponents hoped would happen. It was a dumb idea from the start and Apple is simply admitting this publicly.
No it wasn't. It was a reasonable solution that was intentionally sabotaged by Microsoft.
I'm certainly no fan of Microsoft but come on... It was an absurd and naive idea that never had a prayer of working. WAY too much money at stake and too little oversight for it to ever have had a prayer of working. It could not possibly have worked without being supported by pretty strict laws in the US and EU.
"Do Not Track" was supposed to represent an affirmative request by the user to not be tracked.
Are you seriously arguing that it was supposed to be opt-in and that somehow that would have been a good thing? So people who aren't aware of the option should be screwed by default?
They turned the flag on for everyone, so that it meant nothing. They intentionally poisoned the concept.
It SHOULD be on by default. But even if it wasn't, it still would be roundly ignored by pretty much every company interested in tracking you. As requests go it was pretty much the equivalent of asking a shark to not eat you while you are bleeding in the water. It was a request and it was entirely predictable it was going to be ignored right from the start.
However, I find usage analytics in apps and websites immensely useful.
Don't give a shit unless you got informed consent in advance of the data collection. The "informed" bit of that is important and usually neglected by tech companies even if they do the "consent" part. And they usually don't bother with the consent. A 50 page legal click-through agreement does not equal informed consent.
TL:DR: The intent isn't always evil behind user tracking.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You might be honest but I have no way to know that and just because you might be honest doesn't mean the next guy is. And let's be honest, most user tracking does have intent that does not benefit the user and it is almost never restricted to just usability studies.
If they are actually cooperating actively with the Chinese government as is alleged then they are extremely bad at security. Bad does not necessarily equal incompetent depending on the perspective of the end user. It seems rather unlikely that Huawei hasn't been compromised in some significant manner.
The headline should be "Huawei invests more than anyone else in security, actually has a plan for it".
Whose security are they investing in is the question. Mine or China's?
So your alternative is to make the browser broken in a way that some things that now work fine will just never work again?
"Broken"? Are you seriously arguing that everything is working fine now? Look, I have no idea if this proposal by Google is a good idea or not and I wasn't commenting on that. I'm merely arguing that the "solutions" proposed by the post I responded to are non-starters. You aren't going to educate developers into doing the Right Thing. There are ALWAYS idiots out there making crap code and by and large the only way to deal with them is with technical constraints. A lot of developers just aren't as good as they think they are or the people paying their salaries aren't willing to pay the cost of Doing It Right. Putting technical constraints on a bit of technology can be a net gain if done right because it forces those same idiots to do things in a sane(r) manner. Some can handle the flexibility but lots more developers really actually do need some lanes for them to follow.
A good example of a constraint that worked out well is how Apple forced developers to use touch and did not provide a stylus for the iPad/iPhone for a long time. Developers on Windows historically tended to be lazy and treat the stylus as a sort of exotic mouse rather than the completely different writing device it really is. You've probably seen some of their work with a touch interface clumsily layered on to a mouse driver - it almost always sucks. And because they weren't forced to do it Right they never really wrote the software to take full advantage of a touch and stylus interface. Apple had to introduce an artificial constraint to force them to actually write software that wasn't just a minimal update of software designed for a keyboard and mouse. Developers and the companies that pay their salaries are to a degree understandably lazy and often don't want to do more than they have to if they have something that kinda-sorta-works.
Also the notion that you could introduce a tool that would make web browsing faster and have only developers use it only for debug is ridiculous. Literally everyone would use such a tool whether or not it was a good idea. You would, I would, and so would everyone you know.
Has anyone else noticed how painful it is use to CNN?
No because I don't visit their webpage. Just looked however and it is fine for me. Bear in mind though that I have Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, AdBlock Plus and the built in Firefox privacy settings running so I'm killing a TON of tracking and add stuff. Kind of feels like fucking with 4 condoms on though when I go to sites like that.
1) Crap web code, and specfically better educating the people that write it.
Good luck with that. Exactly how do you plan to reach all these millions of developers writing "crap" code and forcibly educate them? Sometimes forced constraints are not such a bad thing.
Your 'never slow mode' should only ever be a debug tool for people making web pages.
Yeah, have you met people? Because NOBODY I know would stay in their lane on that, myself included.
Mozilla's bugzilla installation has a feature where people can vote on bugs
Nice but popular does not necessarily equal important. As Henry Ford once said, "if I asked my customers what they wanted they would say 'a faster horse'."
I can't remember the last time a bug with lots of votes was resolved.
There is some survivorship bias in play there. Bugs with lots of votes are necessarily the ones that don't get resolved. That doesn't necessarily mean they are the most important things to resolve and those will tend to be bugs that get resolved before they get a lot of votes. So you are going to tend to see items with a lot of votes be items that have some sort of following but not generally high priority problems.
Furthermore most of the items on the list you linked to are not really bugs. They are feature requests. Nothing wrong with those but it's hardly surprising that many feature requests will tend to get ignored. A product cannot be all things to all people and remain useful.
In fact, I can't remember the last time a bug that was filed by a non-developer got resolved.
Presumably you can look this information up. Bear in mind that the VAST majority of non-developers do not and never will file bug reports. And just because someone does file a bug report does not make their opinion magically more important. Listening to customers involves far more than just watching the bug report list.
Yet you still manage to be salty about some bent railroad ties resulting from losing the war that the South started over an unforgivable practice of slavery.
Now if you would only clarify under what circumstances a reasonable person might consider Avast or AVG to actually be the better option you would actually have answered the question that was asked.
There are bugs that haven't been fixed for decades and they regularly WONTFIX many bugs.
A lot of things that people think are bugs are really just design decisions they don't prefer. While Firefox is certainly not perfect I don't see any of the other browsers being meaningfully better about dealing with their faults.
It's time Mozilla stops drinking the Chrome-aid and listen to it's users for once.
Has it occurred to you that maybe they are? Believe it or not, people have different opinions about what they want out of Firefox. Just because they don't agree with some vocal users doesn't mean they aren't listening to the others as well. If you don't like their choices you have other browsers that you can use and that's totally fine.
Until Mozilla does, use Waterfox or Pale Moon.
Yeah they don't really solve any problems for me and they create some new ones. If they work for you that's great.
Why anybody would think that allowing an AV provider to scan all their traffic including bank traffic by extension, is more "secure" - is beyond me.
Perhaps someone knows more about Avast and AVG than I do but I fail to see any meaningful advantage in them over the built in security software in Windows. Like so much AV software they just seem to slow things down and gum up the works while providing little real protection in the process for a lot of money. What are they doing that anyone actually needs?
Leaving 88% of the US States, not giving a hoot, about their population.
The state that could really hold Facebook's feet to the fire (California) evidently doesn't give a damn. It's not really clear to me what most of those other states can do about the problem. They have offices in Illinois and New York so that's something but their presence elsewhere is sparse to non-existent except online. So jurisdiction could be an issue.
Cardboard is cheap, light and easily recyclable. Is using stainless steel really better for the environment?
In a lot of cases yes. The phrase is "reduce, reuse, recycle" and you are supposed to do them in that order. Reusing is generally better than recycling. And just because you can recycle cardboard doesn't mean doing so is environmentally friendly. Any paper making (cardboard is essentially paper) is actually a pretty toxic and energy intensive process. If the stainless steel can see enough reuse cycles it easily could be a net improvement.
After all it needs extra collection and cleaning infrastructure (while there is an established paper / cardboard collection and recycling infrastructure), and has a much higher initial energy cost.
The paper recycling infrastructure is probably not as robust as you imagine it to be. Paper production is the fifth largest consumer of energy worldwide accounting for about 4% of global energy use.
The added weight (and thus higher emissions from transport) also needs to be taken into account.
I'm not quite sure you appreciate how heavy paper is. It's fairly easy to design a steel container that weighs less than a paper one for many use cases.
Western companies are generally excluded from the Chinese market by The Great Firewall and state sanctioned discrimination. So, there is probably little incentive to spend precious resources Chinese consumers.
A) There are plenty of western companies doing business in China quite successfully. I've been there and seen them first hand. That said the Chinese government definitely favors the home team so to speak but perhaps not to the degree you've been led to believe. Doing business in China is challenging but not impossible for foreign companies. B) There is LOTS of incentive to spend resources on Chinese customers. The sheer size of the market ensures that. The question is how much opportunity they are afforded to go after those customers.
Furthermore the differences in English dialects are very small compared to e.g. Chinese and Arabic. So it may be a stretch to compare the numbers directly and furthermore not taking purchasing power into account.
I'm not familiar with Arabic dialects but spoken Mandarin may as well be a different language between different parts of the country. Chinese is a tonal language which makes local dialects really hard to understand in some cases. WAY worse than just an English speaker with a thick local dialect. Imagine that having a US Southern accent instead of a US Midwest accent and that actually changed the meaning of words and you get a crude idea idea of the problem. I've been to China with native speakers and going from Shanghai to Chengdu our translators had a really hard time understanding what was being said. The written language is consistent but the spoken language could almost be considered dozens of related but different languages.
Interestingly in some cases it was easier for our translators to speak to each other in English than to try to understand each other in Mandarin because of the regional tonal differences.
I think if you look at the vast majority of people who play video games, nobody is throwing out games because they're four years old.
They might not throw them out but almost all of them sure as hell aren't playing them anymore. They are on to the next thing in most cases. Fortnite wasn't a thing 2 years ago and now every kid I know is playing it. Two years from now it will be something else. That's how it works and how is has worked for a long time. I was playing video games in the early 1980s and it was just as true then.
"Obsolete" doesn't mean "Can't run the latest stuff", it means "Is no longer useful".
Obsolete means many things and not being the current state of the art is definitely one of them. (that includes not running the latest stuff) The dictionary definition is "no longer produced or used; out of date." Plenty of things are useful that are also obsolete. Your Nintendo Wii is both useful and obsolete. The PC sitting 10 feet from me as I type this is both useful and obsolete.
What the GP is complaining about is the notion that you'll have to throw out existing hardware in 2 years because it'll stop working properly.
No he's complaining about having to send in the device for servicing because the battery went dead. I'm saying that he shouldn't buy that hardware if this is a deal breaker for him. I'm not saying his opinion of devices that are built like that is wrong, just that knowingly buying something like that and then pretending the company owes you something is absurd.
It's horrible, it's wrong, and it's not standard practice in the computer industry as a whole.
Ha! Have you seen a smartphone or a tablet in the last 10 years? It's absolutely standard practice. Lots of devices only last a few years and then have to be replaced. It's not wrong if the maker of the device and the buyer are both fine with it. You and I might not like it but our opinions are just opinions, not universal ethical standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there anything dumber in this world (that are still recognisable human) than socialists?
Yes. Trump supporters. Though the ones in the KKK and the nazis are hard to recognize as human.
More seriously, it was an experiment. Relax. Yes the outcome was fairly predictable but sometimes what seems obvious actually isn't correct. So you run an experiment to find out. It was possible we'd find out something unexpected. This sort of data is why I think people who talk nonsense about a "post scarcity society" are talking complete nonsense because most people don't want to work if they don't have to.
Sprint Corp sued AT&T late on Thursday, saying it is misleading consumers into believing that they are using fifth generation wireless network, known as 5G, a technology that has not yet been widely deployed.
It's kind of annoying that the FTC (or whatever three letter agency with jurisdiction) isn't sitting on them hard about this fraud. Marketing spin is one thing but this is pretty deeply shady.
If things go to court it is important to have expressed that you did not want to be tracked
Not at all. The laws regarding privacy in a public forum (like the internet) generally don't care whether or not your wish to be tracked. Absent express laws to the contrary there is a general presumption that you are not entitled to privacy in public outside of some specific circumstances. You setting a flag that you don't wish to be tracked will not provide any legal basis for collecting damages. Furthermore there are many ways to express your desire to not be tracked including using one or more of the many privacy add-ons and filters for exactly that purpose should that somehow become legally relevant.
It is the same as with rape. If the victim does not protest and tell the abuser to stop, then it can be argued it was consensual.
Wow. You have NO idea how consent works do you? Protesting is merely one way to indicate a preference and often it isn't important at all. There also are cases where victims are not expected to be able to protest. (underage, drunk, power imbalance, incapacitated, mentally handicapped, etc) For most crimes there is no requirement to protest for it to be an illegal act.
What "do not track" did was to tell the abuser to stop, so you can now actually claim damages.
If someone is doing something that harms you there is no requirement to tell them to stop. I don't have to tell someone to stop assaulting me or to stop robbing me for it to be illegal. All you have to do is prove that harm resulted or would have been reasonably expected to result.
I'm going to put a hold on LibreOffice updates until I get around to loading it up in a VM for testing,
Why would you do that if you weren't doing it before?
I'm all for feature and security updates but after having to deal with all the UI "improvements" in the UI's of various application (Firefox, Word, Windows, etc.) over the years I am hesitant to give up what I have become familiar with if I can avoid it.
You didn't read the summary. They didn't change the interface. They merely gave an alternative option that is NOT the default. The default is approximately unchanged. Some people like or at least are used to the current Microsoft interface so why not have an option to make those people comfortable? It won't be what I use but if it works for someone else then that is fine. My user interface preferences do not have to be universally shared.
Using advanced AI processing and machine learning, your phone will be able to expand the depth of field of the camera to remove that annoying blurring that occurs around objects further away.
Wow, you think there will be cameras that somehow will defy the laws of physics?
Now everything in your photos will be crisp, clear and in perfect focus - just the way they appear in real life.
You have eyes that defy physics too? Cool!
This is already common tech in lots of smartphone cameras. When you use portrait mode, it is doing several things and one of them is often the simulation of the bokeh effect you get from good lenses. They are basically artificially blurring the background to simulate the effect and I imagine this is just a video application of the same basic concept. The lenses in most smartphone cameras are too small to have the depth of field necessary to blur backgrounds very effectively optically. It isn't that they are bad lenses, just that the laws of physics prevent them from doing this particular trick very well.
Of course they have to pretend AI is somehow involved so they can punch their buzzword bingo card.
The proper solution to the problem is for the ad companies to abide by it, either voluntarily or by law.
Ad companies will NEVER voluntarily respect the Do Not Track flag. WAY too much money at stake for that to happen. Seriously, you cannot be so naive as to think it was anything more than a feel good waste of time.
By removing it, Apple is telling the ad companies that Apple no longer cares about its users' privacy, and is inviting the ad companies to abuse Apple Safari users even more.
So you think removing an absurd feature that NEVER worked and never could have worked is somehow a bad idea? The only way DNT could possibly have worked is if it were backed up by laws with teeth which were never going to happen. Since it was a voluntary request those wishing to ignore it (for profit or malice) were free to do so legally.
This isn't Apple caring or not caring about privacy. It's Apple bowing to reality and not wasting resources on a useless feature that never had a prayer of doing what it's proponents hoped would happen. It was a dumb idea from the start and Apple is simply admitting this publicly.
No it wasn't. It was a reasonable solution that was intentionally sabotaged by Microsoft.
I'm certainly no fan of Microsoft but come on... It was an absurd and naive idea that never had a prayer of working. WAY too much money at stake and too little oversight for it to ever have had a prayer of working. It could not possibly have worked without being supported by pretty strict laws in the US and EU.
"Do Not Track" was supposed to represent an affirmative request by the user to not be tracked.
Are you seriously arguing that it was supposed to be opt-in and that somehow that would have been a good thing? So people who aren't aware of the option should be screwed by default?
They turned the flag on for everyone, so that it meant nothing. They intentionally poisoned the concept.
It SHOULD be on by default. But even if it wasn't, it still would be roundly ignored by pretty much every company interested in tracking you. As requests go it was pretty much the equivalent of asking a shark to not eat you while you are bleeding in the water. It was a request and it was entirely predictable it was going to be ignored right from the start.
Facebook insists that combining all of that data is actually great.
I'm sure it is... for Facebook. For end users? Probably not so much.
In fact, the company says, it's keeping everyone safe from stuff like terrorism and child abuse.
That is such a non-sequitur I think my brain just broke.
Facebook has always been about connecting you with people and information you're interested in.
Noooo... Facebook has always been about monetizing you and the people and information you are interested in.
However, I find usage analytics in apps and websites immensely useful.
Don't give a shit unless you got informed consent in advance of the data collection. The "informed" bit of that is important and usually neglected by tech companies even if they do the "consent" part. And they usually don't bother with the consent. A 50 page legal click-through agreement does not equal informed consent.
TL:DR: The intent isn't always evil behind user tracking.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You might be honest but I have no way to know that and just because you might be honest doesn't mean the next guy is. And let's be honest, most user tracking does have intent that does not benefit the user and it is almost never restricted to just usability studies.
Huawei isn't particularly bad on security.
If they are actually cooperating actively with the Chinese government as is alleged then they are extremely bad at security. Bad does not necessarily equal incompetent depending on the perspective of the end user. It seems rather unlikely that Huawei hasn't been compromised in some significant manner.
The headline should be "Huawei invests more than anyone else in security, actually has a plan for it".
Whose security are they investing in is the question. Mine or China's?
So your alternative is to make the browser broken in a way that some things that now work fine will just never work again?
"Broken"? Are you seriously arguing that everything is working fine now? Look, I have no idea if this proposal by Google is a good idea or not and I wasn't commenting on that. I'm merely arguing that the "solutions" proposed by the post I responded to are non-starters. You aren't going to educate developers into doing the Right Thing. There are ALWAYS idiots out there making crap code and by and large the only way to deal with them is with technical constraints. A lot of developers just aren't as good as they think they are or the people paying their salaries aren't willing to pay the cost of Doing It Right. Putting technical constraints on a bit of technology can be a net gain if done right because it forces those same idiots to do things in a sane(r) manner. Some can handle the flexibility but lots more developers really actually do need some lanes for them to follow.
A good example of a constraint that worked out well is how Apple forced developers to use touch and did not provide a stylus for the iPad/iPhone for a long time. Developers on Windows historically tended to be lazy and treat the stylus as a sort of exotic mouse rather than the completely different writing device it really is. You've probably seen some of their work with a touch interface clumsily layered on to a mouse driver - it almost always sucks. And because they weren't forced to do it Right they never really wrote the software to take full advantage of a touch and stylus interface. Apple had to introduce an artificial constraint to force them to actually write software that wasn't just a minimal update of software designed for a keyboard and mouse. Developers and the companies that pay their salaries are to a degree understandably lazy and often don't want to do more than they have to if they have something that kinda-sorta-works.
Also the notion that you could introduce a tool that would make web browsing faster and have only developers use it only for debug is ridiculous. Literally everyone would use such a tool whether or not it was a good idea. You would, I would, and so would everyone you know.
Has anyone else noticed how painful it is use to CNN?
No because I don't visit their webpage. Just looked however and it is fine for me. Bear in mind though that I have Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, AdBlock Plus and the built in Firefox privacy settings running so I'm killing a TON of tracking and add stuff. Kind of feels like fucking with 4 condoms on though when I go to sites like that.
I remember i could open hundred of tabs in Firefox on a system with just a gigabyte of ram back in 2004.
And I bet you are going to try to convince us that such a workflow is somehow practical too...
Now Waterfox struggles with about 10 tabs on a 16gb system and I have to constantly re-open it.
Then I suggest you switch to a browser that actually works because I have no such problem with Firefox or Chrome or Edge or Safari.
1) Crap web code, and specfically better educating the people that write it.
Good luck with that. Exactly how do you plan to reach all these millions of developers writing "crap" code and forcibly educate them? Sometimes forced constraints are not such a bad thing.
Your 'never slow mode' should only ever be a debug tool for people making web pages.
Yeah, have you met people? Because NOBODY I know would stay in their lane on that, myself included.
Mozilla's bugzilla installation has a feature where people can vote on bugs
Nice but popular does not necessarily equal important. As Henry Ford once said, "if I asked my customers what they wanted they would say 'a faster horse'."
I can't remember the last time a bug with lots of votes was resolved.
There is some survivorship bias in play there. Bugs with lots of votes are necessarily the ones that don't get resolved. That doesn't necessarily mean they are the most important things to resolve and those will tend to be bugs that get resolved before they get a lot of votes. So you are going to tend to see items with a lot of votes be items that have some sort of following but not generally high priority problems.
Furthermore most of the items on the list you linked to are not really bugs. They are feature requests. Nothing wrong with those but it's hardly surprising that many feature requests will tend to get ignored. A product cannot be all things to all people and remain useful.
In fact, I can't remember the last time a bug that was filed by a non-developer got resolved.
Presumably you can look this information up. Bear in mind that the VAST majority of non-developers do not and never will file bug reports. And just because someone does file a bug report does not make their opinion magically more important. Listening to customers involves far more than just watching the bug report list.
Eh, my family most likely never owned slaves.
Yet you still manage to be salty about some bent railroad ties resulting from losing the war that the South started over an unforgivable practice of slavery.
Sometimes, one product is better than another.
Now if you would only clarify under what circumstances a reasonable person might consider Avast or AVG to actually be the better option you would actually have answered the question that was asked.
Speaking as an Atlanta native, we are well aware that Northerners have plenty of experience heating up railroad tracks.
Yeah maybe you'll think about not owning slaves sooner next time and then you could get over a bitch slap that happened 150 years ago.
There are bugs that haven't been fixed for decades and they regularly WONTFIX many bugs.
A lot of things that people think are bugs are really just design decisions they don't prefer. While Firefox is certainly not perfect I don't see any of the other browsers being meaningfully better about dealing with their faults.
It's time Mozilla stops drinking the Chrome-aid and listen to it's users for once.
Has it occurred to you that maybe they are? Believe it or not, people have different opinions about what they want out of Firefox. Just because they don't agree with some vocal users doesn't mean they aren't listening to the others as well. If you don't like their choices you have other browsers that you can use and that's totally fine.
Until Mozilla does, use Waterfox or Pale Moon.
Yeah they don't really solve any problems for me and they create some new ones. If they work for you that's great.
Why anybody would think that allowing an AV provider to scan all their traffic including bank traffic by extension, is more "secure" - is beyond me.
Perhaps someone knows more about Avast and AVG than I do but I fail to see any meaningful advantage in them over the built in security software in Windows. Like so much AV software they just seem to slow things down and gum up the works while providing little real protection in the process for a lot of money. What are they doing that anyone actually needs?
Leaving 88% of the US States, not giving a hoot, about their population.
The state that could really hold Facebook's feet to the fire (California) evidently doesn't give a damn. It's not really clear to me what most of those other states can do about the problem. They have offices in Illinois and New York so that's something but their presence elsewhere is sparse to non-existent except online. So jurisdiction could be an issue.
Cardboard is cheap, light and easily recyclable. Is using stainless steel really better for the environment?
In a lot of cases yes. The phrase is "reduce, reuse, recycle" and you are supposed to do them in that order. Reusing is generally better than recycling. And just because you can recycle cardboard doesn't mean doing so is environmentally friendly. Any paper making (cardboard is essentially paper) is actually a pretty toxic and energy intensive process. If the stainless steel can see enough reuse cycles it easily could be a net improvement.
After all it needs extra collection and cleaning infrastructure (while there is an established paper / cardboard collection and recycling infrastructure), and has a much higher initial energy cost.
The paper recycling infrastructure is probably not as robust as you imagine it to be. Paper production is the fifth largest consumer of energy worldwide accounting for about 4% of global energy use.
The added weight (and thus higher emissions from transport) also needs to be taken into account.
I'm not quite sure you appreciate how heavy paper is. It's fairly easy to design a steel container that weighs less than a paper one for many use cases.
Western companies are generally excluded from the Chinese market by The Great Firewall and state sanctioned discrimination. So, there is probably little incentive to spend precious resources Chinese consumers.
A) There are plenty of western companies doing business in China quite successfully. I've been there and seen them first hand. That said the Chinese government definitely favors the home team so to speak but perhaps not to the degree you've been led to believe. Doing business in China is challenging but not impossible for foreign companies.
B) There is LOTS of incentive to spend resources on Chinese customers. The sheer size of the market ensures that. The question is how much opportunity they are afforded to go after those customers.
Furthermore the differences in English dialects are very small compared to e.g. Chinese and Arabic. So it may be a stretch to compare the numbers directly and furthermore not taking purchasing power into account.
I'm not familiar with Arabic dialects but spoken Mandarin may as well be a different language between different parts of the country. Chinese is a tonal language which makes local dialects really hard to understand in some cases. WAY worse than just an English speaker with a thick local dialect. Imagine that having a US Southern accent instead of a US Midwest accent and that actually changed the meaning of words and you get a crude idea idea of the problem. I've been to China with native speakers and going from Shanghai to Chengdu our translators had a really hard time understanding what was being said. The written language is consistent but the spoken language could almost be considered dozens of related but different languages.
Interestingly in some cases it was easier for our translators to speak to each other in English than to try to understand each other in Mandarin because of the regional tonal differences.
I think if you look at the vast majority of people who play video games, nobody is throwing out games because they're four years old.
They might not throw them out but almost all of them sure as hell aren't playing them anymore. They are on to the next thing in most cases. Fortnite wasn't a thing 2 years ago and now every kid I know is playing it. Two years from now it will be something else. That's how it works and how is has worked for a long time. I was playing video games in the early 1980s and it was just as true then.
"Obsolete" doesn't mean "Can't run the latest stuff", it means "Is no longer useful".
Obsolete means many things and not being the current state of the art is definitely one of them. (that includes not running the latest stuff) The dictionary definition is "no longer produced or used; out of date." Plenty of things are useful that are also obsolete. Your Nintendo Wii is both useful and obsolete. The PC sitting 10 feet from me as I type this is both useful and obsolete.
What the GP is complaining about is the notion that you'll have to throw out existing hardware in 2 years because it'll stop working properly.
No he's complaining about having to send in the device for servicing because the battery went dead. I'm saying that he shouldn't buy that hardware if this is a deal breaker for him. I'm not saying his opinion of devices that are built like that is wrong, just that knowingly buying something like that and then pretending the company owes you something is absurd.
It's horrible, it's wrong, and it's not standard practice in the computer industry as a whole.
Ha! Have you seen a smartphone or a tablet in the last 10 years? It's absolutely standard practice. Lots of devices only last a few years and then have to be replaced. It's not wrong if the maker of the device and the buyer are both fine with it. You and I might not like it but our opinions are just opinions, not universal ethical standards.