You may not have noticed by Google removed a similar VPN service from their Play store last week, for exactly the same reason. If anything it looks like Apple saw that and realized that they were not adequately checking VPNs on their own app store.
The issue is the lack of a proper privacy policy, not the fact that they spy on you. Spying is fine, as long as it's clearly stated in the privacy policy. Otherwise they would have banned the Facebook app too.
The basic concept of solar road surfaces has been proven. There was a trial with a bike path that produces decent amounts of energy, around 70kWh/m2/year in northern Europe.
Some idiots criticised the cost of the prototype, or pointed out that solar PV on roofs nearby would generate about twice that much. Can you imagine the politics of the local government wanting to use private individual's roofs to generate electricity, or creating shade by erecting panels all over the place? The whole point is that the road is there anyway and accepted as a black stripe through the area, and it gets significant money thrown at it for maintenance anyway.
In China there is a 1.2 mile test section on a major highway that uses transparent concrete. Seems to be working reasonably well so far. It's that kind of innovate to get costs down and increase durability that will be needed to make solar road surfaces economically viable.
Browsers run Javascript in a VM. It's not the same as running code directly on the CPU, and a world away from changing the CPU microcode that runs below all other protection mechanisms.
CPU microcode malware would be incredibly hard to detect or mitigate. We are reliant on CPU vendors keeping it secret enough to prevent abuse.
Would the licence even apply to the end user? Will a licence agreement pop up on screen asking the user to agree to Intel's terms when they install a Red Hat OS or update one?
Because it seems likely that the end user will never even hear about the patch, and innocently go run some benchmarks when they find their system has slowed to a crawl.
Will be interesting to see how Microsoft handles it too. Someone is living in a fantasy world if they think people are going to stop benchmarking and posting the results online.
The CPU is fully open source, but you need more than just a CPU to make a useful computer.
It's still a very important project. Aside from anything else it offers other open source projects a decent CPU core to use, unencumbered by patents or copyright and fully supported by tools like GCC and Linux.
We have gone from trying to conserve energy because food was hard to come by to being surrounded by too much food and struggling to get enough exercise. So adapting to our environment would be burning 4000 calories a day just sitting around.
the person is not doomed. If the person is truly motivated, they can bust their ass, eat super-healthy, and even do things like get a fecal transplant to favor the correct gut bacteria, and make significant improvement.
Is that realistic though? If they have to work full time, which not only takes up a lot of time and energy but requires them to not be super tired for months or years on end, is this super healthy diet and exercise regime a realistic option? That is assuming it even worked, which it doesn't...
Fecal transplant is very promising but not widely available and typically not available on socialised healthcare or insurance plans.
A friend of mine is getting a gastric sleeve fitted today, funnily enough, which is an effective treatment but which took her years of failed counselling and diets and weight loss groups and gyms to get to. I think they only really gave in now because she wants children and if they wait any longer they will be paying out for IVF as well. This is not a good situation for anyone, especially when we have treatments now.
It's really just this attitude that it's all the fat person's fault and if they were just not such a gluttonous slob with no willpower they could be thin that is holding back efforts to address the problem.
If it were as easy as eating less and doing more exercise then people wouldn't find it so hard to lose weight. Clearly it's more than just balancing the calorie chequebook.
The main problem is that once you have put on significant weight your body fights you to stop to taking it off. If you try to eat fewer calories it cranks up the feelings of hunger and reduces energy consumption, making you feel tired, which in turn has mental health consequences over the longer term.
Even if you don't believe that, you must surely accept that blaming people for "gluttony" doesn't work either. Berating and denigrating them for being overweight does not help or encourage them to lose weight. From a pure engineering point of view we need a better solution.
I'd say it's more important to focus on having all eligible citizens able to vote, than it is to exclude non-eligible people. Especially considering that all the evidence is that voter fraud is minuscule but voter suppression is a huge problem.
Actually they do, because you can forensically analyze the ballot papers. Writing style, fingerprints etc. For mis-counting you can simply re-count. You can also physically secure them, e.g. with a tamper evident seal on the ballot box that is checked when it arrives at the counting area.
Moral principals evolved with language. It's our ability to understand other people's situations and feelings (empathy) by them telling us that drives us to behave morally towards them. When this mechanism breaks down (different languages preventing communication, sociopaths and people on the autism scale who find it hard to empathise) is when people start to act less morally, in general.
On the contrary, I'm actually going back to Firefox after being on PaleMoon for years. The new add-on system, improved security/performance and especially the built in privacy enhancements make it worth using again.
PaleMoon is okay but a couple of things piss me off about it. Firstly their update system is broken. Sometimes when you update it forgets your settings and uninstalls your add-ons. Whatever the add-on update mechanism is seems to be broken too. A while back an update deleted a lot of people's bookmarks too.
The other issue is performance. The most recent update fixed a problem with images not loading (!) but it still has problems.
PaleMoon always had poor compatibility with extensions and now that Firefox is ditching the old ones it will only get worse. For example you need a modified version of GreaseMonkey and it's old, and now basically unmaintained as the upstream project drops support for the codebase. uBlock is the same, all the work is on the new Firefox/Chrome extension API.
They probably won't until the next major architecture revision. Aside from anything else new flaws keep being found and if they try to patch the current architecture they probably won't get them all, and being incompetent will probably create more.
Some countries require people to register to vote when they move in to an area. No ID required, just sign up. The government can easily check the names against its other databases of people who are eligible to vote, e.g. social security number holders. When people go to vote they just state their name and it is checked and marked off the list. People not registered could pretend to be someone else but risk being discovered when the real person also tries to vote.
It's not perfect, it still creates a small barrier to voting and doesn't detect 100% of fraud or catch all criminals, but it does give us reliable stats on the amount of fraud and prevent most of it.
Other options for checking including simple things like comparing the number of votes cast to the population of known legal voters in the area. It's really not hard to strike a good balance, just look at how other countries do it.
Even that isn't enforced though. There are examples of take-down notices being sent by people who don't represent the copyright holder on an automatic basis, and nothing happens to them.
Who is responsible for prosecuting people who do this?
I use a VPN for all my torrenting anyway, but my ISP still gets bogus notices for stuff I have not downloaded. Honestly some of it is quite insulting, I mean how dare they insinuate that I like those Twilight movies?!
Anyway, my ISP is obliged to forward the notices to me. I asked them if I need to do anything and they said no, it's just a legal obligation on their part. So I blocked the email address (with a bounce message stating that copyright warnings are not accepted) and that was that.
Now we also have to deal with "citizen journalists", aka bloggers and Twitter pundits.
Remember that map of crimes supposedly committed in Germany by immigrants? It included things like accidental toaster fires as "arson" and logged multiple reports of the same crime as multiple crimes.
The only oversight and fact checking is other bloggers and YouTube debunkings, which of course you rarely see when someone passes the map around on Facebook. Worse still, some people will use it as evidence of the mainstream media hiding things from them, when in fact they just don't run it precisely because they care about truth and accuracy.
I sincerely doubt anyone in the media is going to admit that "well maybe those people complaining about those illegals might have been justified"...ever.
May I direct you to the Daily Mail, which has been doing this since long before Facebook was around. Their history of complaining about and blaming immigrants for everything goes back well over a century.
Humans have always, generally, hated strangers in their midst. It's a tribal thing.
The key word there is "strangers", i.e. people who they are ignorant of. After all, once they know and understand them they are not strangers any more.
When people don't know someone it's easier for them to blame them for things, to mis-attribute problems to them or accept conspiracy theories about them. It's easier to de-humanize them and treat them as a group, to generalize and to stereotype.
It's not a tribal thing, it's an ignorance thing. That's why the solution is education and why schools try to teach kids about cultural differences so they don't think about strangers that way.
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You may not have noticed by Google removed a similar VPN service from their Play store last week, for exactly the same reason. If anything it looks like Apple saw that and realized that they were not adequately checking VPNs on their own app store.
The issue is the lack of a proper privacy policy, not the fact that they spy on you. Spying is fine, as long as it's clearly stated in the privacy policy. Otherwise they would have banned the Facebook app too.
The basic concept of solar road surfaces has been proven. There was a trial with a bike path that produces decent amounts of energy, around 70kWh/m2/year in northern Europe.
Some idiots criticised the cost of the prototype, or pointed out that solar PV on roofs nearby would generate about twice that much. Can you imagine the politics of the local government wanting to use private individual's roofs to generate electricity, or creating shade by erecting panels all over the place? The whole point is that the road is there anyway and accepted as a black stripe through the area, and it gets significant money thrown at it for maintenance anyway.
In China there is a 1.2 mile test section on a major highway that uses transparent concrete. Seems to be working reasonably well so far. It's that kind of innovate to get costs down and increase durability that will be needed to make solar road surfaces economically viable.
Browsers run Javascript in a VM. It's not the same as running code directly on the CPU, and a world away from changing the CPU microcode that runs below all other protection mechanisms.
CPU microcode malware would be incredibly hard to detect or mitigate. We are reliant on CPU vendors keeping it secret enough to prevent abuse.
Would the licence even apply to the end user? Will a licence agreement pop up on screen asking the user to agree to Intel's terms when they install a Red Hat OS or update one?
Because it seems likely that the end user will never even hear about the patch, and innocently go run some benchmarks when they find their system has slowed to a crawl.
Will be interesting to see how Microsoft handles it too. Someone is living in a fantasy world if they think people are going to stop benchmarking and posting the results online.
The CPU is fully open source, but you need more than just a CPU to make a useful computer.
It's still a very important project. Aside from anything else it offers other open source projects a decent CPU core to use, unencumbered by patents or copyright and fully supported by tools like GCC and Linux.
Even better, take Intel to small claims court and make them buy you a new AMD system.
That's what I did. The first round of patches were crippling for me.
We have gone from trying to conserve energy because food was hard to come by to being surrounded by too much food and struggling to get enough exercise. So adapting to our environment would be burning 4000 calories a day just sitting around.
the person is not doomed. If the person is truly motivated, they can bust their ass, eat super-healthy, and even do things like get a fecal transplant to favor the correct gut bacteria, and make significant improvement.
Is that realistic though? If they have to work full time, which not only takes up a lot of time and energy but requires them to not be super tired for months or years on end, is this super healthy diet and exercise regime a realistic option? That is assuming it even worked, which it doesn't...
Fecal transplant is very promising but not widely available and typically not available on socialised healthcare or insurance plans.
A friend of mine is getting a gastric sleeve fitted today, funnily enough, which is an effective treatment but which took her years of failed counselling and diets and weight loss groups and gyms to get to. I think they only really gave in now because she wants children and if they wait any longer they will be paying out for IVF as well. This is not a good situation for anyone, especially when we have treatments now.
It's really just this attitude that it's all the fat person's fault and if they were just not such a gluttonous slob with no willpower they could be thin that is holding back efforts to address the problem.
If it were as easy as eating less and doing more exercise then people wouldn't find it so hard to lose weight. Clearly it's more than just balancing the calorie chequebook.
The main problem is that once you have put on significant weight your body fights you to stop to taking it off. If you try to eat fewer calories it cranks up the feelings of hunger and reduces energy consumption, making you feel tired, which in turn has mental health consequences over the longer term.
Even if you don't believe that, you must surely accept that blaming people for "gluttony" doesn't work either. Berating and denigrating them for being overweight does not help or encourage them to lose weight. From a pure engineering point of view we need a better solution.
If human rights are a "left" issue then yes, I'm far left. I fully support human rights, including for trans people.
Google started doing some good pricing on audiobooks, and the download is MP3 format. More competition is good.
I'd say it's more important to focus on having all eligible citizens able to vote, than it is to exclude non-eligible people. Especially considering that all the evidence is that voter fraud is minuscule but voter suppression is a huge problem.
Interesting that you trust Facebook now.
Actually they do, because you can forensically analyze the ballot papers. Writing style, fingerprints etc. For mis-counting you can simply re-count. You can also physically secure them, e.g. with a tamper evident seal on the ballot box that is checked when it arrives at the counting area.
Moral principals evolved with language. It's our ability to understand other people's situations and feelings (empathy) by them telling us that drives us to behave morally towards them. When this mechanism breaks down (different languages preventing communication, sociopaths and people on the autism scale who find it hard to empathise) is when people start to act less morally, in general.
I prefer Casio ones because they support engineering units better, but they are still $100...
The Chinese make some cheap graphic models: https://www.aliexpress.com/who...
Not exam certified but if you just need a decent graphic calculator they might be worth a punt.
On the contrary, I'm actually going back to Firefox after being on PaleMoon for years. The new add-on system, improved security/performance and especially the built in privacy enhancements make it worth using again.
PaleMoon is okay but a couple of things piss me off about it. Firstly their update system is broken. Sometimes when you update it forgets your settings and uninstalls your add-ons. Whatever the add-on update mechanism is seems to be broken too. A while back an update deleted a lot of people's bookmarks too.
The other issue is performance. The most recent update fixed a problem with images not loading (!) but it still has problems.
PaleMoon always had poor compatibility with extensions and now that Firefox is ditching the old ones it will only get worse. For example you need a modified version of GreaseMonkey and it's old, and now basically unmaintained as the upstream project drops support for the codebase. uBlock is the same, all the work is on the new Firefox/Chrome extension API.
They paid for an "unlimited" plan. Unlimited means without limit to normal people.
If nothing else ISPs should not be allowed to advertise things with limits as unlimited.
They probably won't until the next major architecture revision. Aside from anything else new flaws keep being found and if they try to patch the current architecture they probably won't get them all, and being incompetent will probably create more.
Some countries require people to register to vote when they move in to an area. No ID required, just sign up. The government can easily check the names against its other databases of people who are eligible to vote, e.g. social security number holders. When people go to vote they just state their name and it is checked and marked off the list. People not registered could pretend to be someone else but risk being discovered when the real person also tries to vote.
It's not perfect, it still creates a small barrier to voting and doesn't detect 100% of fraud or catch all criminals, but it does give us reliable stats on the amount of fraud and prevent most of it.
Other options for checking including simple things like comparing the number of votes cast to the population of known legal voters in the area. It's really not hard to strike a good balance, just look at how other countries do it.
Voter ID is not an audit trail. The ballot is still anonymous, it doesn't help prove that the box wasn't stuffed or votes changed or mis-counted.
Voter ID a way to exclude certain people from voting, that's all.
Even that isn't enforced though. There are examples of take-down notices being sent by people who don't represent the copyright holder on an automatic basis, and nothing happens to them.
Who is responsible for prosecuting people who do this?
I use a VPN for all my torrenting anyway, but my ISP still gets bogus notices for stuff I have not downloaded. Honestly some of it is quite insulting, I mean how dare they insinuate that I like those Twilight movies?!
Anyway, my ISP is obliged to forward the notices to me. I asked them if I need to do anything and they said no, it's just a legal obligation on their part. So I blocked the email address (with a bounce message stating that copyright warnings are not accepted) and that was that.
Now we also have to deal with "citizen journalists", aka bloggers and Twitter pundits.
Remember that map of crimes supposedly committed in Germany by immigrants? It included things like accidental toaster fires as "arson" and logged multiple reports of the same crime as multiple crimes.
The only oversight and fact checking is other bloggers and YouTube debunkings, which of course you rarely see when someone passes the map around on Facebook. Worse still, some people will use it as evidence of the mainstream media hiding things from them, when in fact they just don't run it precisely because they care about truth and accuracy.
I sincerely doubt anyone in the media is going to admit that "well maybe those people complaining about those illegals might have been justified"...ever.
May I direct you to the Daily Mail, which has been doing this since long before Facebook was around. Their history of complaining about and blaming immigrants for everything goes back well over a century.
Humans have always, generally, hated strangers in their midst. It's a tribal thing.
The key word there is "strangers", i.e. people who they are ignorant of. After all, once they know and understand them they are not strangers any more.
When people don't know someone it's easier for them to blame them for things, to mis-attribute problems to them or accept conspiracy theories about them. It's easier to de-humanize them and treat them as a group, to generalize and to stereotype.
It's not a tribal thing, it's an ignorance thing. That's why the solution is education and why schools try to teach kids about cultural differences so they don't think about strangers that way.