When someone has proof theyve penetrated your network security and is holding your bread and butter hostage you have two choices: 1. pay the bounty and reassess the network. 2. dont pay, eat the loss, and still reassess the network.
There isnt a CISSP section on stalling for time by bullshitting people who are clearly far more intelligent than you. If anything, you've just hardened their resolve to leak more out of sheer animosity.
In other words, don't even bother to pay because they're going to leak anyways. If not them, someone else will mysteriously get passed the data and it will leak out. So it's not even worth bothering paying it off.
Plus, the data is time-sensitive. It will go stale and worthless over time. If they claim to have full episodes, it likely will only be of the next couple of episodes (TV shows are barely finished editing when they air) so in the end after a while it's worthless. Oh yay, a bunch of people got to see next week's episode early.
Scripts, plans and other things? Sure they're nice, for the small crowd of videophiles that care about having every single thing about their favorite movie, but the vast majority of people just do not care about it. (Plus, everyone knows just because you have the shooting script, doesn't mean you have what they shot - shooting scripts and on screen action has diverged before and last minute edits aren't uncommon.).
Seriously fuck you Help Net Security. I really don't care about the security of most sites enough to have to memorize a unique password for them and most sites actually do understand this. Further if it is a site that I do care about the security I want to be able a secure password that I can remember. TR0b@dor is hard as hell for me to remember and will likely be in the first million passwords a cracking program will try. Second for an online attack you need enough entropy to stop an attacker who is rate limited. So 2^30 is likely strong enough (that's 3 common English words). If someone gets your salted hashed password file you are going to need 2^60 bits of entropy. 6 English words. Making be choose a password that is anywhere between those two lengths is either a waste of my time or insufficient security.
Exactly.
Your website may not be important to me, so I won't give it a very important password. It may be important to you, but not to me. Especially if you insist on a username and password to do the most basic things.
You want me to log in to download your free software? Sure, I'll create an account - with a wimpy password. I don't care if that software is your heart and soul and you missed your mother's funeral to release it on time. I just want the file.
You want me to log in to comment on your article? Well, ditto. Same for forums as well.
Hell, I fully expect those sites to be hacked, so why use a strong password? Might as well just make it "password" and be done with it - if someone's downloaded the password file then they have all the time in the world to crack it. I might as well assume your site has vulnerabilities that make it easy to steal the password file.
Oh yeah, my Paypal, Amazon and bank passwords? They're nice and secure.
This is why Ticketmaster has the option to check a box to be notified if more tickets become available. How can more tickets become available when you're already sold out? Answer: Because Ticketmaster is lying, cheating scum.
To be fair, the event organizers are lying cheating scum.
Because Ticketmaster only has around 30-40% of a venue's tickets to sell. Right off the top, 30% goes to credit card companies, promoters, etc as part of their "exclusive member benefits". Yes, if you want tickets, it often doesn't hurt to be a member of these cards. That's how credit cards and radio stations can offer tickets long after they sell out.
Another 30% goes to event employees themselves to pass out to friends and family. It's a fairly large group of people who get the opportunity to buy lots of tickets, cheap.
Then there's the remainder which are marked for general admission. Sometimes 10-20% are lopped off the top for VIPs and fan club members and early pre-sales people who can buy the tickets before the tickets go on sale.
That leaves the rest of the tickets to be sold as general admission. At which point the bots all take over.
That's why you see empty seats even at sold out events - sometimes the credit card companies simply don't release the unsold tickets, and the friends and family don't either. Add those VIP and fan club seats, and guess what? They go straight to the resale market. Only a very rare event organizer gets out, shakes down the leftover unsold tickets and then opens them up as a "new block of tickets". Sometimes it also plays to be last minute, those resale tickets from reserved blocks haven't been bought, so they release them as last minute sales (this is something regular scalpers do not have the ability to do - only the promo ticket and such can turn their reserved listings from resale back to unsold block. And no, reserved listing tickets are not paid for yet - credit card companies etc do not pay for them until you as a member book it. So the scores of resale tickets are really scores of companies all selling reserved tickets that haven't been paid for.
Basically, what happens is E911 embeds the location information in the control plane when you make a call, so it's the responsibility of the carriers and everyone to forward the data onwards to the emergency center.
AML is completely data and user plane. Basically, if you make an emergency call, your phone turns on GPS and location services (WiFi or other high-precision source). It also turns on data services (even if you have data roaming OFF, or do not have a data plan), and performs an NTP request to get the current date and time. It then takes that information and sends an SMS to emergency services.
E911 requires whole stack integration - mostly to get GPS data to the cellular modem so it can forward it on transparently to the user. AML is completely high level OS based - if you make an emergency call, the OS turns on cellular data and wifi, makes contact with NTP servers to set the local clock, then sends off an SMS.
Basically it's done because in Europe, E911 would be hard to implement because it requires upgrading the entire infrastructure to support it, while AML requires no upgrades since it uses existing infrastructure.
This is probably the reason why Europe has moved towards making roaming basically obsolete - because AML has the possibility for incurring charges on your bill which you cannot control. I mean, it would suck if you got into an emergency and then got hit with extra charges for the data use and the SMS. Especially if you do not have a data or texting plan where the per-use charges can be exorbitant. If you're a tourist, even more so - you witness something, call emergency services and now your phone bill is jacked up without you knowing. At $1/kb or more for per-use data, I'm sure people would be furious about it knowing they did NOT use any data at all except on WiFi. And likely same for SMS as well - foreign texting is expensive, and even more so when it's roaming.
So in the EU, because roaming is basically eliminated, it would get rid of the excess roaming charges from such data use and SMS use - you'd pay your normal rates regardless of where you are. (Of course, it's having issues because people would want to buy plans from cheaper countries since you can use it anywhere).
I would guess that they'd also waive the data charges too during an emergency call, but I won't know. I would also guess it could be subject to hijacking since it's just a normal SMS that is sent and we know of the SMS hijacks available with SS7. So it's possible for a bad actor to trigger the AML code in the OS and then trap the SMS that is sent to get a user's exact location.
2) All these fragmented little services realize that even though they're competing, they're also pissing off the consumer by lacking the basic interoperability you got by changing channels on a remote control and make some kind of broad, open joint effort to offer different subscriptions through the same interface.
In other words, the cable model where you get to bundle a bunch of services together for once price.
Didn't we just bash the cable industry for bundling and demand they start making things available "a la carte"? I mean, if they start bundling streaming services, it's the same thing - you'll get 10 you can't live without, and another 30 you pay for because that's the way it is. And if you try to subscribe to the 10 you want, it'll cost more than the 40 via the bundle (like a la carte now).
And no, one big player isn't any better. Just think of it as one big Comcast for all of the US as your only cable provider.
Perhaps the truth is, in the end, while paying $200/month for cable is too much, cord cutting will save some money, but not dramatically huge amounts. Instead of paying Comcast $200/month, you'll pay $100/month for the stuff you watch and stream, and maybe $50/month for your internet.
(And if you think piracy is the way, well, the studios claim they care, but they don't, because pirates don't count towards the numbers that matter - subscribers, or ad impressions. Perhaps all the lesser stuff will end up on Patreon and YouTube with them begging for you to support them for $5/month. Oh wait, that's an extra cost now. Yes, I saw one YouTuber gloat that he's happy YouTube is doing well and that it will destroy broadcast TV. Perhaps, but at least TV has a business model. Most YouTubers who make enough to do YouTube all day have to rely on tip jars and donations, as YouTube doesn't pay enough.
Of course, back on topic, one should pay for basic TV - at least what's available OTA for free, with OTA DVRs recording it for on-demand and everything.
And why do we forget services like iTunes and Amazon that let you buy your TV shows? For those who only watch a few programs, season passes aren't expensive. If you spend $2400 a year on cable, that buys 48 season passes of TV at $50/each. If all you care about are those programs, it's an option that will save money...
Really? Ships had pretty reliable means of open sea navigation for at good 1000++y before GPS and even before the first aircraft, gradually improved trough the centuries. Paper maps, magnetic compass, more or less accurate clocks, tools for optical measurements? Whatever happened to them?
Well, technically determining longitude reliably (and easily) was actually quite hard, and only became a solved problem in the past 300 years or so. The development of the marine chronometer was one of the major events that helped make it easy to determine your longitude. And any cheap digital watch qualifies as a chronometer by that standard. That's really how good modern timekeeping is. (It might not be good enough to navigate solely by, but if you're close enough to land, you don't need the watch to know your position and should perhaps rely on more local forms of navigation to avoid marine hazards nearby).
As well, it may be that the earth has been hotter at times in the past but never has the temperature risen at such an alarming rate. It's not just the temperature rising, it's the rate that it's changing.
From human records, that is false - the earth has not be hotter than it is now. It may be hotter prior to human civilization, but all the records we have (and proxies) indicate that today it's the hottest it's ever been. And it will be even if we halt all activity right now.
Granted, it USED TO BE hotter in the past, but we've already beat that record (recently).
In fact, XKCD has a very nice graph of the earth's temperature through history. The 0 degree mark is chosen as the 1961-1990 average temperature, but it's arbitrary. There was a period where it was about a half a degree warmer than that line, but at the very end, you can see we've exceeded that. It only happened about 5 years ago, at that.
It'll sort itself out. If people find it annoying to subscribe to every movie studio's streaming service, then they'll see a drop in overall revenue and will be forced to reintroduce their libraries to consolidated streaming services like Netflix. If people don't think it's too much hassle to subscribe to every movie studio's streaming service, then this will become the new norm and Netflix will die out (well, probably not since they're working hard to become their own studio).
From an end viewer's perspective, this means if you would prefer Disney's library be available on Netflix, then you shouldn't subscribe to Disney's new service. That way you send them a message that you don't like the change. As for what to do in the interim, The Oatmeal had a relevant comic.
The market is simply giving what people are demanding. A la carte. You want to buy by the channel, they're offering streaming services by the channel. Why buy Netflix which means you get dozens of movies from dozens of channels, when you only want the few movies from one or two channels?
It's just a lot easier for the market to make TV a la carte when you cut the cord than it is for cable providers to release a la carte offerings (which in general will only be cheaper if you only do watch 1 or 2 channels, but on a whole, most people will probably be better off with bundles).
Heck, Amazon and iTunes and others allow you do further and pay by the show.
Of course, people complain about how expensive it all is and won't someone please bundle it all up cheaper... because... cheaper! Maybe those evil cable companies bundling up dozens of channels were on to something after all....
Disney is a bit of a unique case though. They're gambling that kids begging for Disney movies will be able to override the parents' rational decision not to subscribe to Disney's streaming service after they pull their library from Netflix. They're probably right.
Think of it this way. Disney is the world's largest entertainment company by any measure you want - revenue, profit, size, etc.
They didn't get that way not knowing their audience.
Color is extremely subjective. Remember the dress color photo that went viral? Your brain basically takes an average of all the colors it sees, guesses what the color of the light is, and does an automatic white balance. It's really good at this, so a stop sign appears consistently red to the eye.*
Totally different for a machine. The auto white balance in cameras has gotten good, but it's still easy to fool in extreme lighting conditions. Especially if there are multiple color light sources, some pointed at the camera, some away. I carry a grey card so I can prop it up near the subject location and snap a picture. That way I have a calibrated color reference for subsequent photos I can use for a manual white balance. Unfortunately, an automatic car traversing an area for the first (and only) time doesn't have that luxury.
Luckily, road signs are of a very limited palette. Intentionally.
Stop signs are always a red octagon. Don't rely on words because you'll get messed up in Quebec whose stop signs say Arret instead of Stop (they say Stop in France). Same in Northern Canada where they will say Stop and Stop in the native language.
Construction signs are orange (which may be confused with red, but they are never octagonal). These are temporary road signs put up by a construction crew. You need to read the sign since the contents can be of any category.
Informational signs are white - these tell you about the road ahead - speed limits, merges, lane endings, etc.
Green signs are directional and point you to locations.
The last sign is the road divider, which is angled such that the the down slope points to the valid direction of travel. If there's a median, it will be sloping down from left to right, indicating you need to keep to the right of the sign. If it's an inverted chevron, it means you may travel to the left or right of the sign.
The system is designed to be quite redundant - you don't need to see color to read signs - an octagon will always be a stop sign, a road divider sign will always point out which lanes are safe for travel as long as you can see the stripes, and the others require interpreting the contents of the sign. You don't really need to know if the lane ending sign is permanent or temporary construction - as far as you're concerned, right now the lane is ending.
Most people will never be sued, so they are free to admit mistakes without repercussion.
One of the problems is the blame game. It used to be standard that if something went wrong, someone needs to be blamed for it. Said person is usually fired or reprimanded,
Of course, current methodology is far less blame and more how to fix it and prevent it from happening again.
I'll take that bet. After all, I've got Nokia, Blackberry, 3dfx, Voodoo, Via to back me up... (to name a few)
Except those companies weren't dependent on their competitor. Intel needs AMD for several reasons.
First, AMD is a credible competitor. You may be aware that Intel was under investigation for monopolistic practices that hurt AMD, so Intel's already got a taste of government regulation, You can bet killing AMD is not on Intel's radar - if nothing else, it keeps governments away from Intel. Having AMD weak but credible is a position most companies would love - they're weak enough that they're not really a threat, but credible that they are real competition.
Second, AMD and Intel have a sweet patent deal going on - lots of patents are cross-licensed between the two for basically free. Should AMD go down, those patents will not go to Intel for competitive reasons - Intel will probably be barred from the asset sale to avoid locking up essential patents. Other companies like ARM and MIPS will probably not enter into any sweetheart deals like what Intel is enjoying now.
Third, it's likely any government intervention will break up Intel - into fab, design and maybe software groups, That's not a good thing for Intel.
Intel's goals were to keep AMD propped up until they can sustain themselves - they were in dire straits not too long ago (it's why they spun out their fab business), save for a cash injection by Microsoft and Sony (Intel probably punted Microsoft and Sony to AMD to offer a stable source of income, plus Intel hates consoles).
The fact that AMD has a competitive architecture I'm sure makes Intel happy - it means Intel will not worry about AMD suddenly going bankrupt and triggering all sorts of anti-trust investigations.
Intel may have competitive architectures ready - again, they don't want to introduce them to avoid burying AMD.
Intel is huge - they aren't called ChipZilla for nothing. The fact they can do investments in fabs by basically being self-funded shows that they have tons of money to burn (Intel's fabs are used only by Intel - Altera is owned by Intel). Everyone else's fabs are used by other people as well - TSMC is a fab company like GlobalFoundries, Samsung has Apple to pay for their fabs, etc.
Exactly how does it prove that? Do you think that anyone who buys any component from anyone who was licensed to make that component automatically has a license to make everything that could be made with that component?
Well, presumably Intel paid all the patent license fees to make the product so customers could build stuff with it. It's called exhaustion - once you collect your fees for an item, you can't double dip and collect them again (something Apple accuses Qualcomm of doing).
Otherwise, where does it stop? If Intel pays, and Apple pays, why doesn't everyone who buys any cellphone also pay? Why can't Qualcomm come after you for patent license fees for the technologies in your phone?
Anyhow, the real reason is Qualcomm is pissed Apple crippled their chips. The reason Qualcomm chips are among the best performing are patents that Qualcomm won't license to other vendors. So what Apple did was make both chips, Intel and Qualcomm perform the same. Qualcomm doesn't like that because they want their chips to be faster so Apple's customers will demand the Qualcomm powered iPhones, but Apple hates when that happens (leads to a lot of returns) and Apple doesn't want to be beholden to Qualcomm as their only chip supplier.
Now, I assume the manufacturer has a similar Android App; but it is just cool that this can now be done in a reasonable manner, with a smartphone App./blockquote.
No, they don't. But they'll sell you a $1000 remote that'll pair up and do 1/3rd of what the iPhone does so you can use your Android phone with it. Of course, it'll disconnect every 3 minutes and half the time, when you adjust a setting, it doesn't apply. And heaven forbid you run down its battery as then it goes wonky and screws up your configuration as well.
And I wish I was joking.
And yes, people get steered away from the iPhone-compatible hearing aids towards "generic" wireless hearing ads ("works with anything if you buy this box!" (without it, no wireless connectivity)) because what if you don't want an iPhone? Of course, the hearing aids cost the same amount of money, people like the "works with Android too!" part, but forget they need to pony up $1000 to buy the sh*tty box that is as I described above. And while insurance covers your hearing ads, accessories like the wireless box aren't covered, so aren't you cool to spend more money?
In the end people choose to return the box and deal with the inability to use a phone properly rather than needing to carry a huge box that doesn't work.
Generally speaking, AMD get ahead when Intel screw up. Which is what they've been doing for the last few years, getting lazy with only making minor tweaks to the same architecture.
Once Intel sharpen their pencils and get to work, AMD have a hard time keeping up when Intel's R&D budget is larger than AMD's revenue.
Then Intel screw up again and the cycle repeats.
Or Intel screws up and slows down to avoid killing AMD. When AMD is in trouble, Intel is in trouble - you don't want the nice cushy arrangement with patents and market leadership to be upset because your competition dies out do you?
AMD was in dire straits running out of money. They got a reprieve in the form of Sony and Microsoft, likely because Intel pawned them off to give AMD 10 years of guaranteed cash.
Intel's letting Ryzen/Epyc/Threadripper play out on purpose - let AMD build up its cash reserves to the point where folding is no longer likely to give them government regulators and competition bureaus off Intel's back. Let AMD get some more marketshare so they appear good competition, and then keep them where they are.
Killing AMD does no one any good - not us as users, not Intel (they'd lose those nice zero-dollar cross-patent licenses, and likely have to pay others like ARM for the same patents, plus who knows how many years of government oversight, maybe even forced to break up - you can have fab side, you can have the design side, but not both). AMD where they are is good for Intel. AMD looking good is also good for Intel - hopefully AMD puts all the money in the bank for the lean times.
It is not like the CPU is testing for that particular combination of conditions alone and conditionally segfaulting. Really, there is a flaw in the CPU design which so far has only been demonstrated to exhibit itself under those conditions. That is much more worrying than the summary leads us to believe.
Well, think of a modern CPU as a collection of execution units, In most CPUs, execution units overlap in functionality - a complex instruction may issue several loads (memory to CPU) and stores (CPU to memory), cause several integer units to be called into play (to actually calculate data, or compute addresses) which may cause other loads and stores (especially if it requires hitting the page tables) and more computation. Oh yeah, and data is held in registers, which are renamed - non-dependent uses of a register will allocate a new temporary register between instructions, while dependent registers may be worked on independently if it's not needed until later (result forwarding - if one instruction is computing a complex memory address, and the next one uses it, that instruction can work without knowing what the final destination is until the last minute - usually a cycle before when the result is finally computed, and the result forwarded so it's ready when the following instruction actually needs it).
This complex dance is coordinated with a control unit controlled via microcode. And often, there will be combinations that get the control unit completely confused (especially so in hyperthread mode, which uses one core to emulate two processors, so one control unit has twice the accounting work). Just a bug that perhaps hangs onto a result a bit longer than it should causing another instruction using the same unit to corrupt the value. But that only happens if you get the control unit in a state caused by a series of instructions and then use another instruction that finally collapses the whole thing. Especially ones that happen using loads that get scheduled on the same core.
Our IT department went with Meraki security appliances, with great gusto, after I got one free from the Cisco demo.
The reason for it? It saves us a lot of time - and it survives in the oddest of places. Basically we use them for our satellite offices where there is no IT guy - we just tell them to unpack it, plug it in, and away it goes - we configure them to VPN into our Meraki firewalls and when they plug it in, it creates the tunnel and everyone's happy. We have ours in a warm spare arrangement - the main one goes down, the backup takes over with zero effort - the configurations are synced between the two automatically.
Maybe the biggest issue was when their content filters got messed up (it basically hashes every file transferred and determines if it's a clean file or malware) which resulted in a few of us needing to have it disabled (it interfered with datasheets), all our IT guy did was log in with his phone and set the user on the special group created for the purpose and it was fixed in minutes. Saves him from having to VPN into the network, get to the admin panel and configure it there.
Yes, it's subscription and it sucks. But out IT guy likes it a lot - it was far more featureful than the ASA we had, and when we started configuring a regular firewall appliance and service plans, the price didn't come out all much cheaper.
For some IT setups, the traditional model doesn't work - Meraki works great if the remote locations won't have dedicatee IT teams. Think things like retail stores where you might have an internet connection - a head office can send them a Meraki firewall, wifi and phone system and the store employees only needs to plug it in - the gear automatically gets the latest configuration files and auto-provisions itself.
I wonder how many of those are actually owned by the stores or are just relabeled versions of other brands. I know Costco (I think Trader Joe's too) does this.
Most private labels are owned by the store in question, but they contract out its production to generally well known brands to produce - almost no one produces private label stuff in house.
Costco's Kirkland brand (named after well, the city of Kirkland in Washington, where they started I believe) is basically specially packaged brand name stuff. As typical for Costco, it's usually of very high quality - Costco buys it in huge bulk orders that the brand name holding companies just do special runs for Costco. Costco also does special runs of other products, but doesn't label them under Kirkland - everyone knows about Costco specific models of products. Again, because they're large and can order in such large quantities that manufacturers will do custom requests.
But many other private labels are the same brand name stuff inside too. Unfortunately, everyone keeps it hush-hush as to who makes what and what is directly equivalent. The only way you find out is often during a recall where a name brand and a private label get simultaneously recalled (same product), or someone happens to leak it out.
I don't know about AmazonBasics, but I do know their stuff is OK. For someone who keeps losing USB cables on a monthly basis, I wouldn't bother with anyone but AmazonBasics. It's good enough. Ditto batteries - I use so little of them that we just buy a box and it sits there for a couple of years. If the remotes last a month shorter, no one's noticed.
Aren't we supposed to celebrate nerdism here? The spreadsheet was arguably the first useful application designed for non-programmers.
The spreadsheet was arguably the first killer app for a personal computer (not using PC because I don't want to refer to IBM PCs). VisiCalc was the app, and your computer was useless unless it had a copy of VisiCalc for it. And yes, all the major 8-bit PCs of the era had VisiCalc.
It was the reason anyone needed a PC - a business owner could justify getting a PC for VisiCalc because of its flexibility, and more importantly, its "what if" features. Update a projection on a spreadsheet and the program will recalculate it all, saving hours of tedious manual computation. You could use this to determine how to price a product, what the input costs would be (which change depending on quantity), how much profit and how many sales you'd need and then the spreadsheet would calculate it all.
Modern spreadsheets have added so much more functionality since then. It's effectively a huge simulation tool now. And some people have done interesting things with it. An accountant turned Excel into an RPG, which given what an RPG is, isn't too surprising.
Why would you want to build another hoover dam today? California produces more than twice the power from the hoover dam from wind. 96 people died in the construction of the hoover dam.
It's almost as if technology changes adjust the cost/benefit of various projects, obsoleting once acceptable ideas.
The problem with wind and solar energy is it's intermittent, or in technical terms, "non-dispatchable". What this means is simply, you may turn on the lights, and nothing comes - the supply may not be able to meet the demand. It's why they make giant turbine farms where they do - but there's always a risk that it could be in the middle of summer and people turn on the AC and nothing happen because as part of the baking heat, the winds stop blowing. You hope solar can take up the slack, but then it's an arid night and... you bake.
That's non-dispatchable electricity - you're really beholden to the environment to have the energy when you need it.
A hydroelectric dam is dispatchable. Because of the reservoir behind it, it can supply power when you need it - in essence it's a giant battery. So it can be a hot, windless night, and you can still have your air conditioners running because while the wind and solar farms aren't generating power, a hydroelectric dam can generate power. Other forms of dispatchable power include nuclear, coal, natural gas. Granted, it takes time to get them up and running from stopped, but they are available and ready. (and of all of those, the hydroelectric dam is a renewable energy source, not consuming anything after initial construction).
So while everyone tries to make "modern renewable" (solar, wind, run-of-the-river hydro) energy dispatchable, the unfortunate reality is, it isn't. It's why we have talk about grid-scale batteries - because none of those sources are constant and able to rapidly shift production capacity as needed.
It's still why people still talk about a base load - you need dispatchable power to make up for the times when the wind stops blowing (or, blows too hard) and the sun stops shining. Else one will have to start living... intermittently. That's what makes the real market value of dispatchable electricity almost 10 times more than that of non-dispatchable sources. When you need power, and the cheap wind/solar isn't available, you need the big guys who can ramp up production.
of course, people don't like hydroelectric dams because they do consume a lot of land and there's a bit of greenhouse gases released because of it, but it's one of the few dispatchable sources that are entirely renewable, and doesn't produce greenhouse gases to operate. It's clean, but it's old-school, which is why modern energy peddlers hate it.
I wouldn't call it an addiction, but I would call it playing into human weakness.
Humans are naturally attracted to bright glowing rectangles that have things that move on them. It doesn't have to be a smartphone screen, it could be a TV screen, or computer monitor. Or even airplane avionics.
When the old steam gauges of the past were replaced with the modern glass panels of the future, the attractiveness of such screen was noticable - your eyes are just drawn to them. Not really a big problem when the only planes to have them were airliners and military jets, but when they started appearing in GA aircraft, pilot distraction was noticed, especially on VFR flights where most of the flying is done by looking outside the aircraft (few to none flights are done VFR for commercial and military flights)
So I wouldn't call it addiction (unless you get withdrawal symptoms when it's taken away), but more of human nature - a glowing box with stuff on it is far more inviting to the eyes than anything around you, including the outside. Smartphones are just another instance of the glowing rectangle.
I'm not sure what gambling ever did to you, but to the rest of the world, gambling includes known odds and risk-taking.
I think OP really meant that these "gaming" or "gambling" apps really aren't transparent. I mean, let's say we do American roulette. The house advantage is the 0 and 00 spaces on the wheel, but the wheel is generally fairly balanced and the ball is generally going to land in any of the spots with equal frequency.
But who's to say the electronic version is going to be as fair? Perhaps because you bid on Black, it tilts the odds in favor of Red just a bit more? Instead of just under 50% (because 0 and 00 don't count) perhaps the odds of it landing on black have shifted to 35%.
The goal is of course, to give the house a rather large benefit.
Even a typical slot machine in Vegas typically pays 97-99 cents on the dollar (except the special fancy machines, which pay a lot less because of the novelty factor). Who knows what the app version pays out. It may say 99 cents on the dollar payout, but internally it can pay out far less.
There's really too many ways to cheat on an app to tilt the favor way towards the house. There's a reason why Nevada regulates gaming heavily
This is honestly to be expected. However, while encoding times have heavily increased and may eventually be a barrier for further optimizations, I don't expect that to occur until the drawbacks of said encoding times outweigh the benefits. In this case, massive savings in bandwidth (around 50% for hevc/vp9. Maybe a bit more for AV1). That would definitely be the biggest cost for a company like Netflix and other providers that deliver large amounts of data over a small set of files.
Eventually I think AV1 will win out over HEVC and VP9. In the case of HEVC, the patent mess has hindered adoption. In the case of VP9, the somewhat poor spec has done the same. Since AV1 seems to be a good attempt at fixing both along with the mass of companies that back it, there is a good chance that things will move quickly to just this one format. Google, Mozilla and Microsoft can simply ship updated browsers and add support for the format within a short period of time. Youtube will then slowly drop VP9 just like it dropped VP8 and h.264 (no 4k encodes in this case anymore).
I don't get to see why the codec issue is such a mess. Before everything was h.264, there were huge codec fights as well. Do we not remember VC-1, VP8/webm, MPEG4 ASP (aka DivX/XviD), MPEG2, and probably a few others that all fought for supremacy. And for a long time, it was thought that DivX/XviD would be the victor, having had massive adoption everywhere?
Just because we're having h.265, VP9, AV1, etc, doesn't mean diddly squat other than for a few years we're going to have a small mess on our hands, and one will get crowned the winner in a couple of years. For a time, Google wanted to switch everyone to VP8/webm and people were embedded VP8 decoders in hardware.
AV1 is in an interesting position - given it's not out yet, and the others are matured to the point they can be used. AV1 had better be bulletproof from the get-go or it will be ignored until it's more mature, at which point h.265 or VP9 could establish themselves as the standard.
Oh yeah, there's also the huge installed base of h.264, too.
Why is the central service unaware that the total game bucks in circulation suddenly jumped? The game needs routines that monitor the money supply.
Why is the central service not doling out and approving money?
If you get a dollar, or gold, or credit, it should be because the server handed it to you.- for doing whatever you did to earn it.
This sort of thing is supposed to be moderated by the server. If you do 10HP damage to an enemy, the server should tell you that you did 10HP damage and account for it properly. If the client said it did 100HP damage instead, the server ignores it and says 10HP damage was done. If the client says it has 18T gold, but the server says you have 10, then the server behaves like you have 10. Debuggers can do whatever the heck they want, but the truth is contained in the server.
If you're trusting the client, you're hacked, period. There's no fixing stupid.
FFS, first or second place hardly matters when there are only two fucking players left. This isn't about "leaders". This is about destroying the market altogether. You can't point at the other monopoly to dismiss or justify the existence of the arrogant and soul-crushing behavior of market domination. It's become a pathetic joke to even have anti-monopoly laws on the books anymore. At this rate, the world will be reduced to a dozen mega-corps within the next decade or two, with Amazon being the "Everything Everything" proxy. The middle class will dissolve away just as the concept of competition will. In the end, there will only be the 0.0001%, and the rest of the enslaved planet.
Except, e-commerce is easy to do. Without spending more than a few minutes of time, you can be set up and ready to accept credit card payments - Paypal makes it easy. Yes, it involves dealing with Paypal, but it's super-easy to accept credit cards without all the PCI crap. And you can quickly make up product pages on a web site and have Paypal manage a cart, too.
If you want to go fancy, there are online store sites as well like Shopify and Yahoo Shops - here these are more full service arrangements where you create product pages and they handle everything but shipping the product. You pay a monthly fee and they take a percentage of the payment, but you don't have to deal with Paypal, and they host and take all the payment and you just sit back. And yes, security issues are their problem, too.
Then there's also eBay if you really must.
There are many sellers who do all of them - they do Amazon, eBay and have their own e-commerce site. Sometimes it pays to check it out since their own site might actually be cheaper as they're not paying Amazon or eBay fees.
This part of the internet at least is amenable to the "little guy". Even big established companies may not run their own e-commerce site, but use Shopify as well - eliminates a lot of hassle but provides people a way to quickly order stuff. Nothing's more discouraging that trying to buy a product and ending up at "please call to talk to a distributor".
I wonder how many of those audiophiles would have claim they can even hear the difference.
You mean "Audiophools" right?
The best way with them is to say the more money you spend (not the more broke you are - there's a difference), the better anything sounds. That's all that matters - money spent.
If you can't spend a dollar now on something, then you really should've and you're missing out. And you'll be missing out until you spend that dollar on the gizmo. After which we have gizmo B which you also need, but you're missing out because you don't have the money.
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In other words, don't even bother to pay because they're going to leak anyways. If not them, someone else will mysteriously get passed the data and it will leak out. So it's not even worth bothering paying it off.
Plus, the data is time-sensitive. It will go stale and worthless over time. If they claim to have full episodes, it likely will only be of the next couple of episodes (TV shows are barely finished editing when they air) so in the end after a while it's worthless. Oh yay, a bunch of people got to see next week's episode early.
Scripts, plans and other things? Sure they're nice, for the small crowd of videophiles that care about having every single thing about their favorite movie, but the vast majority of people just do not care about it. (Plus, everyone knows just because you have the shooting script, doesn't mean you have what they shot - shooting scripts and on screen action has diverged before and last minute edits aren't uncommon.).
Exactly.
Your website may not be important to me, so I won't give it a very important password. It may be important to you, but not to me. Especially if you insist on a username and password to do the most basic things.
You want me to log in to download your free software? Sure, I'll create an account - with a wimpy password. I don't care if that software is your heart and soul and you missed your mother's funeral to release it on time. I just want the file.
You want me to log in to comment on your article? Well, ditto. Same for forums as well.
Hell, I fully expect those sites to be hacked, so why use a strong password? Might as well just make it "password" and be done with it - if someone's downloaded the password file then they have all the time in the world to crack it. I might as well assume your site has vulnerabilities that make it easy to steal the password file.
Oh yeah, my Paypal, Amazon and bank passwords? They're nice and secure.
To be fair, the event organizers are lying cheating scum.
Because Ticketmaster only has around 30-40% of a venue's tickets to sell. Right off the top, 30% goes to credit card companies, promoters, etc as part of their "exclusive member benefits". Yes, if you want tickets, it often doesn't hurt to be a member of these cards. That's how credit cards and radio stations can offer tickets long after they sell out.
Another 30% goes to event employees themselves to pass out to friends and family. It's a fairly large group of people who get the opportunity to buy lots of tickets, cheap.
Then there's the remainder which are marked for general admission. Sometimes 10-20% are lopped off the top for VIPs and fan club members and early pre-sales people who can buy the tickets before the tickets go on sale.
That leaves the rest of the tickets to be sold as general admission. At which point the bots all take over.
That's why you see empty seats even at sold out events - sometimes the credit card companies simply don't release the unsold tickets, and the friends and family don't either. Add those VIP and fan club seats, and guess what? They go straight to the resale market. Only a very rare event organizer gets out, shakes down the leftover unsold tickets and then opens them up as a "new block of tickets". Sometimes it also plays to be last minute, those resale tickets from reserved blocks haven't been bought, so they release them as last minute sales (this is something regular scalpers do not have the ability to do - only the promo ticket and such can turn their reserved listings from resale back to unsold block. And no, reserved listing tickets are not paid for yet - credit card companies etc do not pay for them until you as a member book it. So the scores of resale tickets are really scores of companies all selling reserved tickets that haven't been paid for.
E911 and AML are different.
Basically, what happens is E911 embeds the location information in the control plane when you make a call, so it's the responsibility of the carriers and everyone to forward the data onwards to the emergency center.
AML is completely data and user plane. Basically, if you make an emergency call, your phone turns on GPS and location services (WiFi or other high-precision source). It also turns on data services (even if you have data roaming OFF, or do not have a data plan), and performs an NTP request to get the current date and time. It then takes that information and sends an SMS to emergency services.
E911 requires whole stack integration - mostly to get GPS data to the cellular modem so it can forward it on transparently to the user. AML is completely high level OS based - if you make an emergency call, the OS turns on cellular data and wifi, makes contact with NTP servers to set the local clock, then sends off an SMS.
Basically it's done because in Europe, E911 would be hard to implement because it requires upgrading the entire infrastructure to support it, while AML requires no upgrades since it uses existing infrastructure.
This is probably the reason why Europe has moved towards making roaming basically obsolete - because AML has the possibility for incurring charges on your bill which you cannot control. I mean, it would suck if you got into an emergency and then got hit with extra charges for the data use and the SMS. Especially if you do not have a data or texting plan where the per-use charges can be exorbitant. If you're a tourist, even more so - you witness something, call emergency services and now your phone bill is jacked up without you knowing. At $1/kb or more for per-use data, I'm sure people would be furious about it knowing they did NOT use any data at all except on WiFi. And likely same for SMS as well - foreign texting is expensive, and even more so when it's roaming.
So in the EU, because roaming is basically eliminated, it would get rid of the excess roaming charges from such data use and SMS use - you'd pay your normal rates regardless of where you are. (Of course, it's having issues because people would want to buy plans from cheaper countries since you can use it anywhere).
I would guess that they'd also waive the data charges too during an emergency call, but I won't know. I would also guess it could be subject to hijacking since it's just a normal SMS that is sent and we know of the SMS hijacks available with SS7. So it's possible for a bad actor to trigger the AML code in the OS and then trap the SMS that is sent to get a user's exact location.
In other words, the cable model where you get to bundle a bunch of services together for once price.
Didn't we just bash the cable industry for bundling and demand they start making things available "a la carte"? I mean, if they start bundling streaming services, it's the same thing - you'll get 10 you can't live without, and another 30 you pay for because that's the way it is. And if you try to subscribe to the 10 you want, it'll cost more than the 40 via the bundle (like a la carte now).
And no, one big player isn't any better. Just think of it as one big Comcast for all of the US as your only cable provider.
Perhaps the truth is, in the end, while paying $200/month for cable is too much, cord cutting will save some money, but not dramatically huge amounts. Instead of paying Comcast $200/month, you'll pay $100/month for the stuff you watch and stream, and maybe $50/month for your internet.
(And if you think piracy is the way, well, the studios claim they care, but they don't, because pirates don't count towards the numbers that matter - subscribers, or ad impressions. Perhaps all the lesser stuff will end up on Patreon and YouTube with them begging for you to support them for $5/month. Oh wait, that's an extra cost now. Yes, I saw one YouTuber gloat that he's happy YouTube is doing well and that it will destroy broadcast TV. Perhaps, but at least TV has a business model. Most YouTubers who make enough to do YouTube all day have to rely on tip jars and donations, as YouTube doesn't pay enough.
Of course, back on topic, one should pay for basic TV - at least what's available OTA for free, with OTA DVRs recording it for on-demand and everything.
And why do we forget services like iTunes and Amazon that let you buy your TV shows? For those who only watch a few programs, season passes aren't expensive. If you spend $2400 a year on cable, that buys 48 season passes of TV at $50/each. If all you care about are those programs, it's an option that will save money...
Well, technically determining longitude reliably (and easily) was actually quite hard, and only became a solved problem in the past 300 years or so. The development of the marine chronometer was one of the major events that helped make it easy to determine your longitude. And any cheap digital watch qualifies as a chronometer by that standard. That's really how good modern timekeeping is. (It might not be good enough to navigate solely by, but if you're close enough to land, you don't need the watch to know your position and should perhaps rely on more local forms of navigation to avoid marine hazards nearby).
From human records, that is false - the earth has not be hotter than it is now. It may be hotter prior to human civilization, but all the records we have (and proxies) indicate that today it's the hottest it's ever been. And it will be even if we halt all activity right now.
Granted, it USED TO BE hotter in the past, but we've already beat that record (recently).
In fact, XKCD has a very nice graph of the earth's temperature through history. The 0 degree mark is chosen as the 1961-1990 average temperature, but it's arbitrary. There was a period where it was about a half a degree warmer than that line, but at the very end, you can see we've exceeded that. It only happened about 5 years ago, at that.
The market is simply giving what people are demanding. A la carte. You want to buy by the channel, they're offering streaming services by the channel. Why buy Netflix which means you get dozens of movies from dozens of channels, when you only want the few movies from one or two channels?
It's just a lot easier for the market to make TV a la carte when you cut the cord than it is for cable providers to release a la carte offerings (which in general will only be cheaper if you only do watch 1 or 2 channels, but on a whole, most people will probably be better off with bundles).
Heck, Amazon and iTunes and others allow you do further and pay by the show.
Of course, people complain about how expensive it all is and won't someone please bundle it all up cheaper... because... cheaper! Maybe those evil cable companies bundling up dozens of channels were on to something after all....
Think of it this way. Disney is the world's largest entertainment company by any measure you want - revenue, profit, size, etc.
They didn't get that way not knowing their audience.
Luckily, road signs are of a very limited palette. Intentionally.
Stop signs are always a red octagon. Don't rely on words because you'll get messed up in Quebec whose stop signs say Arret instead of Stop (they say Stop in France). Same in Northern Canada where they will say Stop and Stop in the native language.
Construction signs are orange (which may be confused with red, but they are never octagonal). These are temporary road signs put up by a construction crew. You need to read the sign since the contents can be of any category.
Informational signs are white - these tell you about the road ahead - speed limits, merges, lane endings, etc.
Green signs are directional and point you to locations.
The last sign is the road divider, which is angled such that the the down slope points to the valid direction of travel. If there's a median, it will be sloping down from left to right, indicating you need to keep to the right of the sign. If it's an inverted chevron, it means you may travel to the left or right of the sign.
The system is designed to be quite redundant - you don't need to see color to read signs - an octagon will always be a stop sign, a road divider sign will always point out which lanes are safe for travel as long as you can see the stripes, and the others require interpreting the contents of the sign. You don't really need to know if the lane ending sign is permanent or temporary construction - as far as you're concerned, right now the lane is ending.
One of the problems is the blame game. It used to be standard that if something went wrong, someone needs to be blamed for it. Said person is usually fired or reprimanded,
Of course, current methodology is far less blame and more how to fix it and prevent it from happening again.
Except those companies weren't dependent on their competitor. Intel needs AMD for several reasons.
First, AMD is a credible competitor. You may be aware that Intel was under investigation for monopolistic practices that hurt AMD, so Intel's already got a taste of government regulation, You can bet killing AMD is not on Intel's radar - if nothing else, it keeps governments away from Intel. Having AMD weak but credible is a position most companies would love - they're weak enough that they're not really a threat, but credible that they are real competition.
Second, AMD and Intel have a sweet patent deal going on - lots of patents are cross-licensed between the two for basically free. Should AMD go down, those patents will not go to Intel for competitive reasons - Intel will probably be barred from the asset sale to avoid locking up essential patents. Other companies like ARM and MIPS will probably not enter into any sweetheart deals like what Intel is enjoying now.
Third, it's likely any government intervention will break up Intel - into fab, design and maybe software groups, That's not a good thing for Intel.
Intel's goals were to keep AMD propped up until they can sustain themselves - they were in dire straits not too long ago (it's why they spun out their fab business), save for a cash injection by Microsoft and Sony (Intel probably punted Microsoft and Sony to AMD to offer a stable source of income, plus Intel hates consoles).
The fact that AMD has a competitive architecture I'm sure makes Intel happy - it means Intel will not worry about AMD suddenly going bankrupt and triggering all sorts of anti-trust investigations.
Intel may have competitive architectures ready - again, they don't want to introduce them to avoid burying AMD.
Intel is huge - they aren't called ChipZilla for nothing. The fact they can do investments in fabs by basically being self-funded shows that they have tons of money to burn (Intel's fabs are used only by Intel - Altera is owned by Intel). Everyone else's fabs are used by other people as well - TSMC is a fab company like GlobalFoundries, Samsung has Apple to pay for their fabs, etc.
Well, presumably Intel paid all the patent license fees to make the product so customers could build stuff with it. It's called exhaustion - once you collect your fees for an item, you can't double dip and collect them again (something Apple accuses Qualcomm of doing).
Otherwise, where does it stop? If Intel pays, and Apple pays, why doesn't everyone who buys any cellphone also pay? Why can't Qualcomm come after you for patent license fees for the technologies in your phone?
Anyhow, the real reason is Qualcomm is pissed Apple crippled their chips. The reason Qualcomm chips are among the best performing are patents that Qualcomm won't license to other vendors. So what Apple did was make both chips, Intel and Qualcomm perform the same. Qualcomm doesn't like that because they want their chips to be faster so Apple's customers will demand the Qualcomm powered iPhones, but Apple hates when that happens (leads to a lot of returns) and Apple doesn't want to be beholden to Qualcomm as their only chip supplier.
Or Intel screws up and slows down to avoid killing AMD. When AMD is in trouble, Intel is in trouble - you don't want the nice cushy arrangement with patents and market leadership to be upset because your competition dies out do you?
AMD was in dire straits running out of money. They got a reprieve in the form of Sony and Microsoft, likely because Intel pawned them off to give AMD 10 years of guaranteed cash.
Intel's letting Ryzen/Epyc/Threadripper play out on purpose - let AMD build up its cash reserves to the point where folding is no longer likely to give them government regulators and competition bureaus off Intel's back. Let AMD get some more marketshare so they appear good competition, and then keep them where they are.
Killing AMD does no one any good - not us as users, not Intel (they'd lose those nice zero-dollar cross-patent licenses, and likely have to pay others like ARM for the same patents, plus who knows how many years of government oversight, maybe even forced to break up - you can have fab side, you can have the design side, but not both). AMD where they are is good for Intel. AMD looking good is also good for Intel - hopefully AMD puts all the money in the bank for the lean times.
Well, think of a modern CPU as a collection of execution units, In most CPUs, execution units overlap in functionality - a complex instruction may issue several loads (memory to CPU) and stores (CPU to memory), cause several integer units to be called into play (to actually calculate data, or compute addresses) which may cause other loads and stores (especially if it requires hitting the page tables) and more computation. Oh yeah, and data is held in registers, which are renamed - non-dependent uses of a register will allocate a new temporary register between instructions, while dependent registers may be worked on independently if it's not needed until later (result forwarding - if one instruction is computing a complex memory address, and the next one uses it, that instruction can work without knowing what the final destination is until the last minute - usually a cycle before when the result is finally computed, and the result forwarded so it's ready when the following instruction actually needs it).
This complex dance is coordinated with a control unit controlled via microcode. And often, there will be combinations that get the control unit completely confused (especially so in hyperthread mode, which uses one core to emulate two processors, so one control unit has twice the accounting work). Just a bug that perhaps hangs onto a result a bit longer than it should causing another instruction using the same unit to corrupt the value. But that only happens if you get the control unit in a state caused by a series of instructions and then use another instruction that finally collapses the whole thing. Especially ones that happen using loads that get scheduled on the same core.
Our IT department went with Meraki security appliances, with great gusto, after I got one free from the Cisco demo.
The reason for it? It saves us a lot of time - and it survives in the oddest of places. Basically we use them for our satellite offices where there is no IT guy - we just tell them to unpack it, plug it in, and away it goes - we configure them to VPN into our Meraki firewalls and when they plug it in, it creates the tunnel and everyone's happy. We have ours in a warm spare arrangement - the main one goes down, the backup takes over with zero effort - the configurations are synced between the two automatically.
Maybe the biggest issue was when their content filters got messed up (it basically hashes every file transferred and determines if it's a clean file or malware) which resulted in a few of us needing to have it disabled (it interfered with datasheets), all our IT guy did was log in with his phone and set the user on the special group created for the purpose and it was fixed in minutes. Saves him from having to VPN into the network, get to the admin panel and configure it there.
Yes, it's subscription and it sucks. But out IT guy likes it a lot - it was far more featureful than the ASA we had, and when we started configuring a regular firewall appliance and service plans, the price didn't come out all much cheaper.
For some IT setups, the traditional model doesn't work - Meraki works great if the remote locations won't have dedicatee IT teams. Think things like retail stores where you might have an internet connection - a head office can send them a Meraki firewall, wifi and phone system and the store employees only needs to plug it in - the gear automatically gets the latest configuration files and auto-provisions itself.
Most private labels are owned by the store in question, but they contract out its production to generally well known brands to produce - almost no one produces private label stuff in house.
Costco's Kirkland brand (named after well, the city of Kirkland in Washington, where they started I believe) is basically specially packaged brand name stuff. As typical for Costco, it's usually of very high quality - Costco buys it in huge bulk orders that the brand name holding companies just do special runs for Costco. Costco also does special runs of other products, but doesn't label them under Kirkland - everyone knows about Costco specific models of products. Again, because they're large and can order in such large quantities that manufacturers will do custom requests.
But many other private labels are the same brand name stuff inside too. Unfortunately, everyone keeps it hush-hush as to who makes what and what is directly equivalent. The only way you find out is often during a recall where a name brand and a private label get simultaneously recalled (same product), or someone happens to leak it out.
I don't know about AmazonBasics, but I do know their stuff is OK. For someone who keeps losing USB cables on a monthly basis, I wouldn't bother with anyone but AmazonBasics. It's good enough. Ditto batteries - I use so little of them that we just buy a box and it sits there for a couple of years. If the remotes last a month shorter, no one's noticed.
The spreadsheet was arguably the first killer app for a personal computer (not using PC because I don't want to refer to IBM PCs). VisiCalc was the app, and your computer was useless unless it had a copy of VisiCalc for it. And yes, all the major 8-bit PCs of the era had VisiCalc.
It was the reason anyone needed a PC - a business owner could justify getting a PC for VisiCalc because of its flexibility, and more importantly, its "what if" features. Update a projection on a spreadsheet and the program will recalculate it all, saving hours of tedious manual computation. You could use this to determine how to price a product, what the input costs would be (which change depending on quantity), how much profit and how many sales you'd need and then the spreadsheet would calculate it all.
Modern spreadsheets have added so much more functionality since then. It's effectively a huge simulation tool now. And some people have done interesting things with it. An accountant turned Excel into an RPG, which given what an RPG is, isn't too surprising.
The problem with wind and solar energy is it's intermittent, or in technical terms, "non-dispatchable". What this means is simply, you may turn on the lights, and nothing comes - the supply may not be able to meet the demand. It's why they make giant turbine farms where they do - but there's always a risk that it could be in the middle of summer and people turn on the AC and nothing happen because as part of the baking heat, the winds stop blowing. You hope solar can take up the slack, but then it's an arid night and... you bake.
That's non-dispatchable electricity - you're really beholden to the environment to have the energy when you need it.
A hydroelectric dam is dispatchable. Because of the reservoir behind it, it can supply power when you need it - in essence it's a giant battery. So it can be a hot, windless night, and you can still have your air conditioners running because while the wind and solar farms aren't generating power, a hydroelectric dam can generate power. Other forms of dispatchable power include nuclear, coal, natural gas. Granted, it takes time to get them up and running from stopped, but they are available and ready. (and of all of those, the hydroelectric dam is a renewable energy source, not consuming anything after initial construction).
So while everyone tries to make "modern renewable" (solar, wind, run-of-the-river hydro) energy dispatchable, the unfortunate reality is, it isn't. It's why we have talk about grid-scale batteries - because none of those sources are constant and able to rapidly shift production capacity as needed.
It's still why people still talk about a base load - you need dispatchable power to make up for the times when the wind stops blowing (or, blows too hard) and the sun stops shining. Else one will have to start living... intermittently. That's what makes the real market value of dispatchable electricity almost 10 times more than that of non-dispatchable sources. When you need power, and the cheap wind/solar isn't available, you need the big guys who can ramp up production.
of course, people don't like hydroelectric dams because they do consume a lot of land and there's a bit of greenhouse gases released because of it, but it's one of the few dispatchable sources that are entirely renewable, and doesn't produce greenhouse gases to operate. It's clean, but it's old-school, which is why modern energy peddlers hate it.
I wouldn't call it an addiction, but I would call it playing into human weakness.
Humans are naturally attracted to bright glowing rectangles that have things that move on them. It doesn't have to be a smartphone screen, it could be a TV screen, or computer monitor. Or even airplane avionics.
When the old steam gauges of the past were replaced with the modern glass panels of the future, the attractiveness of such screen was noticable - your eyes are just drawn to them. Not really a big problem when the only planes to have them were airliners and military jets, but when they started appearing in GA aircraft, pilot distraction was noticed, especially on VFR flights where most of the flying is done by looking outside the aircraft (few to none flights are done VFR for commercial and military flights)
So I wouldn't call it addiction (unless you get withdrawal symptoms when it's taken away), but more of human nature - a glowing box with stuff on it is far more inviting to the eyes than anything around you, including the outside. Smartphones are just another instance of the glowing rectangle.
I think OP really meant that these "gaming" or "gambling" apps really aren't transparent. I mean, let's say we do American roulette. The house advantage is the 0 and 00 spaces on the wheel, but the wheel is generally fairly balanced and the ball is generally going to land in any of the spots with equal frequency.
But who's to say the electronic version is going to be as fair? Perhaps because you bid on Black, it tilts the odds in favor of Red just a bit more? Instead of just under 50% (because 0 and 00 don't count) perhaps the odds of it landing on black have shifted to 35%.
The goal is of course, to give the house a rather large benefit.
Even a typical slot machine in Vegas typically pays 97-99 cents on the dollar (except the special fancy machines, which pay a lot less because of the novelty factor). Who knows what the app version pays out. It may say 99 cents on the dollar payout, but internally it can pay out far less.
There's really too many ways to cheat on an app to tilt the favor way towards the house. There's a reason why Nevada regulates gaming heavily
I don't get to see why the codec issue is such a mess. Before everything was h.264, there were huge codec fights as well. Do we not remember VC-1, VP8/webm, MPEG4 ASP (aka DivX/XviD), MPEG2, and probably a few others that all fought for supremacy. And for a long time, it was thought that DivX/XviD would be the victor, having had massive adoption everywhere?
Just because we're having h.265, VP9, AV1, etc, doesn't mean diddly squat other than for a few years we're going to have a small mess on our hands, and one will get crowned the winner in a couple of years. For a time, Google wanted to switch everyone to VP8/webm and people were embedded VP8 decoders in hardware.
AV1 is in an interesting position - given it's not out yet, and the others are matured to the point they can be used. AV1 had better be bulletproof from the get-go or it will be ignored until it's more mature, at which point h.265 or VP9 could establish themselves as the standard.
Oh yeah, there's also the huge installed base of h.264, too.
Why is the central service not doling out and approving money?
If you get a dollar, or gold, or credit, it should be because the server handed it to you.- for doing whatever you did to earn it.
This sort of thing is supposed to be moderated by the server. If you do 10HP damage to an enemy, the server should tell you that you did 10HP damage and account for it properly. If the client said it did 100HP damage instead, the server ignores it and says 10HP damage was done. If the client says it has 18T gold, but the server says you have 10, then the server behaves like you have 10. Debuggers can do whatever the heck they want, but the truth is contained in the server.
If you're trusting the client, you're hacked, period. There's no fixing stupid.
Except, e-commerce is easy to do. Without spending more than a few minutes of time, you can be set up and ready to accept credit card payments - Paypal makes it easy. Yes, it involves dealing with Paypal, but it's super-easy to accept credit cards without all the PCI crap. And you can quickly make up product pages on a web site and have Paypal manage a cart, too.
If you want to go fancy, there are online store sites as well like Shopify and Yahoo Shops - here these are more full service arrangements where you create product pages and they handle everything but shipping the product. You pay a monthly fee and they take a percentage of the payment, but you don't have to deal with Paypal, and they host and take all the payment and you just sit back. And yes, security issues are their problem, too.
Then there's also eBay if you really must.
There are many sellers who do all of them - they do Amazon, eBay and have their own e-commerce site. Sometimes it pays to check it out since their own site might actually be cheaper as they're not paying Amazon or eBay fees.
This part of the internet at least is amenable to the "little guy". Even big established companies may not run their own e-commerce site, but use Shopify as well - eliminates a lot of hassle but provides people a way to quickly order stuff. Nothing's more discouraging that trying to buy a product and ending up at "please call to talk to a distributor".
You mean "Audiophools" right?
The best way with them is to say the more money you spend (not the more broke you are - there's a difference), the better anything sounds. That's all that matters - money spent.
If you can't spend a dollar now on something, then you really should've and you're missing out. And you'll be missing out until you spend that dollar on the gizmo. After which we have gizmo B which you also need, but you're missing out because you don't have the money.