Oceans will rise. Plantlife will die out. Atmospheric oxygen won't get replenished (at least not nearly as fast.) Billions could potentially face long-term droughts and famines.
But yeah, the sky is unlikely to literally fall. Unless we also get slammed by a meteor. That would be just the cherry on top! Which is good because cherries might not exist by that point.
If the only problem with increased global temperatures was a dip in Florida real estate prices, people wouldn't really care that much. But that's just the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended.) We talk about ocean rise because its fairly easy to measure and fairly easy for laypeople to understand, but its not even close to the biggest problem we'll be facing, never mind being the only one.
Biggest problem will be the food supply. Things that grow where they currently do may not, leading to farmers either having to move or switch crops. Which means our diets are going to have to change to match whatever the farmers come up with.
Natural plantlife will have a much harder time since they don't get to pack up and drive 100 miles north when it gets too hot for them. They just die out and that's that. Animals that rely on that plantlife for food and shelter will of course die out as well, though some of them will probably be able to make the trek toward more hospitable areas and be able to find new food sources there.
The lack of natural vegetation, especially if it impacts the worlds large forest areas to any great degree, will also impact the world's oxygen supply meaning we're going to have to figure out a way to extract oxygen for ourselves -- whether from CO2 like plants do or from other sources. And if we can't do that on the scale necessary to maintain our needed 21% in the atmosphere we're going to have to start building biodomes for our farmed animals. For ourselves we could also do that or just everyone starts using a respirator that can inject extra O2 for us.
I mean this is all conjecture of course, and none of this happens fast on the scale of human lifespans, so we've got time to come up with workarounds in order to save our species.. but our way of life will be changed far more significantly than "move 10 miles inland," and much of the other life on the planet may simply have to be left to die out since a human lifespan is the blink of an eye compared to the geologic and evolutionary timescales that such a massive climate shift would normally require.
That's a terrible analogy. Mostly because there's a large chunk of the population who would listen to that one new-age homeopathic dingleberry over the opinion of actual doctors. Maybe not as many as climate change deniers but still a depressingly large number.
That said, I'm mixed about the X's. Certainly its annoying to hit one accidentally but there's not really any other easy way to close a tab, never mind closing a bunch of tabs (but not enough to warrant rearranging to make Close to the right effective, for example.)
I mean there's Ctrl+F4 which I use plenty, but we can't expect grandma to be memorizing keyboard commands. And even for my own usage, that requires switching to the tab first and I often find myself closing a bunch of tabs with X that I can identify with just the header text and I don't want to waste the time waiting for the page to redraw (and often even reload) before I can close it.
Heh. I switched to Chrome because FF was getting shittier and shittier back in the day. Now Chrome is following through. Maybe its time for Opera to return to the spotlight? Or some people have mentioned Palemoon.. never heard of that before but might be worth checking out if Chrome continues down this remove-everything path (how long until they remove tabbed browsing all together and call it a "fresh, new way to browse!"?)
EULA which directs you to their Privacy Policy, which in turn provides for various forms of data collection.
You're welcome to hate on EULAs all you want, but until the courts have fully come down on one side or the other (and they seem to be leaning more to the valid side,) you should consider this them asking and your using the software to be your agreement.
I would say if you don't like it just use something else but lets face it, all EULA's are basically the same -- "we own everything and you own nothing, but you still take all of the liability if anything goes wrong. Anything you generate using our software automatically grants us an irrevocable license to use your work at no cost and by the way we can unilaterally change these terms whenever we feel like we're not getting a good enough deal out of it."
There's a HUGE difference between cleaning things up and moving less-used options into submenus and other "hidden" places, vs removing those features entirely.
Close tabs to the right is already in a menu many people don't even know exist, never mind use. So why are they singling out those two options when there's say, "Bookmark all tabs" on that same menu which by their own stats is used 1/10th as much?
In TFA, it even has a ranking of several features. Close to the right is used more than say, Mute Tab.
And they're still keeping "bookmark all tabs", a feature with 1/10th the usage of Close to the right.
Makes you wonder if someone in the "feature"-assigning group is on Microsoft's payroll. Chrome and FF keep removing features and getting slower while MS at least is trying to make a useful browser (pretty unsuccessfully so far but hey if all they have to do is wait for the competition to implode, they'll still win at the end of the day!)
Microsoft builds a new, frequently unnecessary language every 3 or 4 years anyway.. I doubt they'd have a problem with that. How well they'd do, especially in the first few iterations, is up for grabs though of course.
You can somewhat think of it as a weak form of references. A prospective employer is likely to try searching you out on LI to see who you know and what they do (and of course you can store resume-like information such as job history and whatnot on LI if you want as well.)
As long as you're not looking for a new job or considering doing such though, its mostly just a spam generation system.
By your logic, the only database systems in the world should be Oracle and MSSQL.
Just because all the "big" players are currently absurdly over-complicated and expensive doesn't mean there isn't or shouldn't be a desire for something more reasonable.
Hell I'm sure there's already more than one open source CRM out there. Just a question of one of them getting enough features and enough public awareness to become "big" in the same kind of context that Postgres or MySQL are well-known and well-used alternatives to Oracle and MSSQL. Sure they still require some knowledge but its not like you have to hire a $300/hr consultant to get a Postgres database running well enough for small to mid-sized projects.
They're too lazy to break the TOR protocol? They're too lazy to hack bitcoin? These are systems specifically designed to eliminate the evidence trail! That's their entire purpose for existing!
And there are LOTS of people who are constantly looking for holes in these systems. And when they do find one, we don't sit there going "yay now privacy can be broached by anyone with enough resources!" we say "that's a scary bug it needs to be fixed ASAP!"
Which is good, in general. Such systems are used to protect the privacy of dissenters in China and the Middle East and other places where "don't like the government" is considered a far worse and punishable crime than CP. If the cops here could simply be "not lazy" and break through those systems, so could the governments of oppressive nations.
We've collectively gotten together and (for now) decided that the benefit to mankind as a whole is worth the cost of the occasional person getting away with downloading CP (presumably if they were creators, finding the victims would be more important than exposing the contents of their hard drives and there would be a significantly greater chance of non-digital artifacts existing and being findable.)
Of course we generally try to avoid appointing judges who would order such things, and if one ever did then the accused probably should hold themselves in contempt because that judge is going to get fired very quickly and the trial will start anew with a (presumably) saner judge, who would lift the contempt charges and everything resumes as normal.
Our system is setup so that no one person is allowed to go too insane without some form of check on them.
The trouble is not so much that it makes law enforcement difficult but frequently impossible.
If you hide something in your safe, it can be difficult to get at. You need warrants and someone who knows how to drill a safe without setting off any safety features and whatever else. But its doable.
If you hide something behind strong encryption on the other hand, it is literally impossible to get at without the key. There simply isn't enough computing power in the world to break strong encryption, in the general case.
Now whether or not that warrants eroding the 4th and 5th amendments is definitely up for grabs. Especially when you consider that there are changes on the other side of the coin as well -- a safe could only hold so much stuff, so there was a limit to how much incrimination evidence may be found in a single safe. You average smartphone on the other hand provides your entire list of contacts, your browsing history, any files you've got stored.. The privacy invasion potentially goes much, much deeper when you gain access to a modern smartphone than when you gain access to a safe.
While I'm sure there's no shortage of racism involved in that particular distinction, there could also be very valid reasons.. specifically witness testimony.
Chances are you can find someone who will claim they witnessed an assault or saw some kid selling drugs or whatever.. possibly not accurate testimony since its been shown time and again that peoples' memories aren't terribly reliable in stressful situations, never mind the possibility of outright deceit. But you can often find someone to step forward.
Compare that to some dude who's got CP on his computer. Chances are if there's witnesses at all, they will either be a) involved or b) the ones that reported it. I don't imagine there's a whole lot of "knew about it but just didn't care" in relation to this particular issue (and we'd probably say they're abetting anyway given how strictly we prosecute CP offenses.)
Presumably by the time the courts are ordering decryption, the computer has gone through forensics by actual computer forensics people.
Your possibility might apply to the cop who's beating down your door and just trying to get a quick takedown but if you refuse that initial step it will go to people who know what they're doing long before it goes to a judge.
Well someone, somewhere needs to have the ability to decrypt them. They're rather useless otherwise and you may as well just delete the files. And if you have a way to decrypt them at all, then they could easily extend this ruling of contempt to include any intermediate steps required.
The only way "I don't know how to decrypt them" really holds up even in a hypothetical is if you were using an asymmetric key to generate the encrypted files for an anonymous third party that you have no direct contact with, and they managed to get you at just the right time between purging your local copies and shipping off the encrypted ones.
And even then, you'd have to have some way to get the data to said third party which means a trail of some sort (albeit possibly a cold trail if it leads out of the country or something.)
Sadly your best bet in a situation like this is to appeal to the constitution.. somewhere between the 4th and 5th amendments in this case.. but even that's on shaky ground as the courts are still trying to figure out how (or even if) 200 year old laws should be applied to modern digital devices.
Judges and the police are granted their authority by the state (and thus by the people, at least in principle.) That's hardly "materialis[ing] from nowhere in particular."
I suspect by "don't work," they mean "are impractical" more than "technologically impossible." Because YT allowed those annotations to be pretty much entirely free-form, they don't really have a way to enforce them being touchscreen-friendly.
Not that I have any inside knowledge of how Google operates, I just can't see the problem being their programming capabilities.
I don't speed up videos but I definitely turn off annotations a lot.
They're definitely handy when they're just overwriting typos or such, but the abuse of them is incredible. There's probably dozens if not hundreds of abusive annotations for every useful one.
As for end screens and cards.. I don't know if they'd be more relevant but they would definitely be more out of the way. So that's a bonus.
Next thing YT needs to do is fix the embedded ads. Ads at the beginning of a video are annoying to be sure, especially when they're 30+ seconds long and completely irrelevant to anything you care about. But ads that cut out in the middle of a word is just horrific. At the very least they should try to do some sort of AI trick to search for the end of sentences or something.. maybe even provide tools for video uploaders to indicate where scene fades are or something if they have to. Cause as it is, YT videos that have mid-stream ads are basically unwatchable.
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Oceans will rise. Plantlife will die out. Atmospheric oxygen won't get replenished (at least not nearly as fast.) Billions could potentially face long-term droughts and famines.
But yeah, the sky is unlikely to literally fall. Unless we also get slammed by a meteor. That would be just the cherry on top! Which is good because cherries might not exist by that point.
If the only problem with increased global temperatures was a dip in Florida real estate prices, people wouldn't really care that much. But that's just the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended.) We talk about ocean rise because its fairly easy to measure and fairly easy for laypeople to understand, but its not even close to the biggest problem we'll be facing, never mind being the only one.
Biggest problem will be the food supply. Things that grow where they currently do may not, leading to farmers either having to move or switch crops. Which means our diets are going to have to change to match whatever the farmers come up with.
Natural plantlife will have a much harder time since they don't get to pack up and drive 100 miles north when it gets too hot for them. They just die out and that's that. Animals that rely on that plantlife for food and shelter will of course die out as well, though some of them will probably be able to make the trek toward more hospitable areas and be able to find new food sources there.
The lack of natural vegetation, especially if it impacts the worlds large forest areas to any great degree, will also impact the world's oxygen supply meaning we're going to have to figure out a way to extract oxygen for ourselves -- whether from CO2 like plants do or from other sources. And if we can't do that on the scale necessary to maintain our needed 21% in the atmosphere we're going to have to start building biodomes for our farmed animals. For ourselves we could also do that or just everyone starts using a respirator that can inject extra O2 for us.
I mean this is all conjecture of course, and none of this happens fast on the scale of human lifespans, so we've got time to come up with workarounds in order to save our species.. but our way of life will be changed far more significantly than "move 10 miles inland," and much of the other life on the planet may simply have to be left to die out since a human lifespan is the blink of an eye compared to the geologic and evolutionary timescales that such a massive climate shift would normally require.
That's a terrible analogy. Mostly because there's a large chunk of the population who would listen to that one new-age homeopathic dingleberry over the opinion of actual doctors. Maybe not as many as climate change deniers but still a depressingly large number.
Sure it might be nice when your winter is 37 instead of 27, but its gonna suck when summer is 107 instead of 97.
Of course the local temperature in the particular few square miles you care about is pretty much entirely irrelevant to these discussions anyway.
Ctrl+shift+T is your friend.
That said, I'm mixed about the X's. Certainly its annoying to hit one accidentally but there's not really any other easy way to close a tab, never mind closing a bunch of tabs (but not enough to warrant rearranging to make Close to the right effective, for example.)
I mean there's Ctrl+F4 which I use plenty, but we can't expect grandma to be memorizing keyboard commands. And even for my own usage, that requires switching to the tab first and I often find myself closing a bunch of tabs with X that I can identify with just the header text and I don't want to waste the time waiting for the page to redraw (and often even reload) before I can close it.
Heh. I switched to Chrome because FF was getting shittier and shittier back in the day. Now Chrome is following through. Maybe its time for Opera to return to the spotlight? Or some people have mentioned Palemoon.. never heard of that before but might be worth checking out if Chrome continues down this remove-everything path (how long until they remove tabbed browsing all together and call it a "fresh, new way to browse!"?)
I don't know about IE/Edge, but FF and Chrome both save your tabs and restore them after a crash (or at least give you the option to do so.)
So its not all THAT manly anymore.
Yes.
EULA which directs you to their Privacy Policy, which in turn provides for various forms of data collection.
You're welcome to hate on EULAs all you want, but until the courts have fully come down on one side or the other (and they seem to be leaning more to the valid side,) you should consider this them asking and your using the software to be your agreement.
I would say if you don't like it just use something else but lets face it, all EULA's are basically the same -- "we own everything and you own nothing, but you still take all of the liability if anything goes wrong. Anything you generate using our software automatically grants us an irrevocable license to use your work at no cost and by the way we can unilaterally change these terms whenever we feel like we're not getting a good enough deal out of it."
There's a HUGE difference between cleaning things up and moving less-used options into submenus and other "hidden" places, vs removing those features entirely.
Close tabs to the right is already in a menu many people don't even know exist, never mind use. So why are they singling out those two options when there's say, "Bookmark all tabs" on that same menu which by their own stats is used 1/10th as much?
How? :P.. I have a bit over 200 on any normal day and I had to get The Great Suspender in order to keep memory usage sane -- on my 32gb system.
In TFA, it even has a ranking of several features. Close to the right is used more than say, Mute Tab.
And they're still keeping "bookmark all tabs", a feature with 1/10th the usage of Close to the right.
Makes you wonder if someone in the "feature"-assigning group is on Microsoft's payroll. Chrome and FF keep removing features and getting slower while MS at least is trying to make a useful browser (pretty unsuccessfully so far but hey if all they have to do is wait for the competition to implode, they'll still win at the end of the day!)
Unskilled yes, but anything that takes 18 years to develop usually comes with a decent price tag anyway.
Microsoft builds a new, frequently unnecessary language every 3 or 4 years anyway.. I doubt they'd have a problem with that. How well they'd do, especially in the first few iterations, is up for grabs though of course.
You can somewhat think of it as a weak form of references. A prospective employer is likely to try searching you out on LI to see who you know and what they do (and of course you can store resume-like information such as job history and whatnot on LI if you want as well.)
As long as you're not looking for a new job or considering doing such though, its mostly just a spam generation system.
By your logic, the only database systems in the world should be Oracle and MSSQL.
Just because all the "big" players are currently absurdly over-complicated and expensive doesn't mean there isn't or shouldn't be a desire for something more reasonable.
Hell I'm sure there's already more than one open source CRM out there. Just a question of one of them getting enough features and enough public awareness to become "big" in the same kind of context that Postgres or MySQL are well-known and well-used alternatives to Oracle and MSSQL. Sure they still require some knowledge but its not like you have to hire a $300/hr consultant to get a Postgres database running well enough for small to mid-sized projects.
They're too lazy to break the TOR protocol? They're too lazy to hack bitcoin? These are systems specifically designed to eliminate the evidence trail! That's their entire purpose for existing!
And there are LOTS of people who are constantly looking for holes in these systems. And when they do find one, we don't sit there going "yay now privacy can be broached by anyone with enough resources!" we say "that's a scary bug it needs to be fixed ASAP!"
Which is good, in general. Such systems are used to protect the privacy of dissenters in China and the Middle East and other places where "don't like the government" is considered a far worse and punishable crime than CP. If the cops here could simply be "not lazy" and break through those systems, so could the governments of oppressive nations.
We've collectively gotten together and (for now) decided that the benefit to mankind as a whole is worth the cost of the occasional person getting away with downloading CP (presumably if they were creators, finding the victims would be more important than exposing the contents of their hard drives and there would be a significantly greater chance of non-digital artifacts existing and being findable.)
In principle, sure.
Of course we generally try to avoid appointing judges who would order such things, and if one ever did then the accused probably should hold themselves in contempt because that judge is going to get fired very quickly and the trial will start anew with a (presumably) saner judge, who would lift the contempt charges and everything resumes as normal.
Our system is setup so that no one person is allowed to go too insane without some form of check on them.
The trouble is not so much that it makes law enforcement difficult but frequently impossible.
If you hide something in your safe, it can be difficult to get at. You need warrants and someone who knows how to drill a safe without setting off any safety features and whatever else. But its doable.
If you hide something behind strong encryption on the other hand, it is literally impossible to get at without the key. There simply isn't enough computing power in the world to break strong encryption, in the general case.
Now whether or not that warrants eroding the 4th and 5th amendments is definitely up for grabs. Especially when you consider that there are changes on the other side of the coin as well -- a safe could only hold so much stuff, so there was a limit to how much incrimination evidence may be found in a single safe. You average smartphone on the other hand provides your entire list of contacts, your browsing history, any files you've got stored.. The privacy invasion potentially goes much, much deeper when you gain access to a modern smartphone than when you gain access to a safe.
While I'm sure there's no shortage of racism involved in that particular distinction, there could also be very valid reasons.. specifically witness testimony.
Chances are you can find someone who will claim they witnessed an assault or saw some kid selling drugs or whatever.. possibly not accurate testimony since its been shown time and again that peoples' memories aren't terribly reliable in stressful situations, never mind the possibility of outright deceit. But you can often find someone to step forward.
Compare that to some dude who's got CP on his computer. Chances are if there's witnesses at all, they will either be a) involved or b) the ones that reported it. I don't imagine there's a whole lot of "knew about it but just didn't care" in relation to this particular issue (and we'd probably say they're abetting anyway given how strictly we prosecute CP offenses.)
Presumably by the time the courts are ordering decryption, the computer has gone through forensics by actual computer forensics people.
Your possibility might apply to the cop who's beating down your door and just trying to get a quick takedown but if you refuse that initial step it will go to people who know what they're doing long before it goes to a judge.
Well someone, somewhere needs to have the ability to decrypt them. They're rather useless otherwise and you may as well just delete the files. And if you have a way to decrypt them at all, then they could easily extend this ruling of contempt to include any intermediate steps required.
The only way "I don't know how to decrypt them" really holds up even in a hypothetical is if you were using an asymmetric key to generate the encrypted files for an anonymous third party that you have no direct contact with, and they managed to get you at just the right time between purging your local copies and shipping off the encrypted ones.
And even then, you'd have to have some way to get the data to said third party which means a trail of some sort (albeit possibly a cold trail if it leads out of the country or something.)
Sadly your best bet in a situation like this is to appeal to the constitution.. somewhere between the 4th and 5th amendments in this case.. but even that's on shaky ground as the courts are still trying to figure out how (or even if) 200 year old laws should be applied to modern digital devices.
Uhh is right.. wtf are you talking about?
Judges and the police are granted their authority by the state (and thus by the people, at least in principle.) That's hardly "materialis[ing] from nowhere in particular."
Or he means his employer happens to use Google Sheets to store employee data. Which is hardly a far-fetched concept.
I suspect by "don't work," they mean "are impractical" more than "technologically impossible." Because YT allowed those annotations to be pretty much entirely free-form, they don't really have a way to enforce them being touchscreen-friendly.
Not that I have any inside knowledge of how Google operates, I just can't see the problem being their programming capabilities.
I don't speed up videos but I definitely turn off annotations a lot.
They're definitely handy when they're just overwriting typos or such, but the abuse of them is incredible. There's probably dozens if not hundreds of abusive annotations for every useful one.
As for end screens and cards.. I don't know if they'd be more relevant but they would definitely be more out of the way. So that's a bonus.
Next thing YT needs to do is fix the embedded ads. Ads at the beginning of a video are annoying to be sure, especially when they're 30+ seconds long and completely irrelevant to anything you care about. But ads that cut out in the middle of a word is just horrific. At the very least they should try to do some sort of AI trick to search for the end of sentences or something.. maybe even provide tools for video uploaders to indicate where scene fades are or something if they have to. Cause as it is, YT videos that have mid-stream ads are basically unwatchable.