Not being allowed to and not being able to are two separate things. It's already illegal to crash an airplane into the ground to kill yourself and everyone on board. So I don't think these suicidal pilots are too worried that they are also breaking FAA regulations by flipping off a switch to disable the transponder.
It's pretty clear that it should not be possible to disable these transponders / beacons during flight by anyone on board the plane. Or if it is possible then it requires some kind of confirmation and approval from the ground.
Sounds good, except.... Half of these 10 years later pics are now memes. Good luck filtering them out. I've only seen a few that were actually 10 years. Most are more like 7-8 years. You don't know the actual time span. People are selectively choosing what pictures to compare. There's a lot of bias in what is being chosen. Filters, filters, filters. 10 years ago they weren't as common, or they were simple instragram-like color filters. Now they are actively distorting the geometry of people's faces, smoothing blemishes, making their eyes subtly larger, etc.
In other words is a bunch of crap data that is totally uncontrolled. Not exactly what you want to be training algorithms on.
I would have preferred it if Duckduckgo had worked with Openstreetmap.
OSM provides the data, however they do not provide hosting of tilesets. From OSM's terms:
OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. Heavy use of OSM tiles adversely affects people’s ability to edit the map, and is an abuse of the individual donations and sponsorship which provide hardware and bandwidth. As a result, we require that users of the tiles abide by this tile usage policy.
OpenStreetMap data is free for everyone to use. Our tile servers are not.
Emphasis theirs. That is why DuckDuckGo was using MapBox. MapBox hosts tilesets generated from Open Street Map data (plus they have some really sweet interactive map styling tools and can provide tiles in your own styles), however MapBox gets expensive if the volume is high, and certainly DuckDuckGo's volume is extremely high.
Also, MapBox uses tracking just like Google to generate traffic layers for their maps. Apps that have MapBox embedded in them are contributing their location data and motion for MapBox to generate live traffic maps, exactly like Google Maps.
So it's likely that DuckDuckGo is no worse off using Apple for their maps, from a privacy and data sharing perspective.
A four-year-long study of 1,113 people in Nambour, Queensland, found no difference in vitamin D levels between sunscreen users and sunscreen avoiders.
I wonder how they controlled external sources of Vitamin D. Everything from milk to cheese, breakfast cereal, orange juice, etc, as been fortified with Vitamin D. People in developed countries do not need sunlight for their Vitamin D. I don't think anyone would expect a person using sunscreen would have lower than normal vitamin D levels. If the study was not properly controlled, all it may have proven is that non-sunscreen users don't have elevated vitamin D levels.
This isn't an "old school" arcade, judging by the pictures. I know of many arcades with modern video games of that style. Myrtle Beach has several arcades (including one with dozens of 1957 Williams baseball style pinball machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ). The closest mall to me has an arcade. Pigeon Forge has a number of arcades. Most any tourist destination type area have them and they're doing well.
I'm not sure how unique the one is in TFA, besides being in a vastly overpriced real estate market.
I came here to say just this. When you overstate something in these kinds of terms - the word hear has a very specific meaning not applicable in this case - you immediately lose credibility to those of us that are scientifically minded. Like the guy who builds those wind sculpture things that move under wind power, and talks about them as living creatures with nerves and muscles and such. Loose analogy is not a good form of scientific description to talk about something you've observed.
We already know that many plants have very significant and diverse reactions to sunlight / darkness. Some open and close flowers, some open and close leaves, others literally bend and rotate to the follow the sun. I wouldn't describe that by stating that plants observe the sun.
It should be no surprise that sound waves could also illicit a physical or chemical reaction in plants, and I wouldn't describe that as plants hearing sounds. Just like I wouldn't say that plants commit suicide when they are scared by really loud sounds (like the shock wave from a C4 explosion a meter away).
According to TFA, this was caused by stolen devices being in areas without a cell signal, and falling back on WiFi access point geolocation. Further, the area in question has very few access points, so phones can potentially pick up these residential access points from thousands of feet away. Then they are geolocated to the exact position of the access point.
A solution is to disable SSID on your home router(s) so that these data-grabbing sniffers won't see it and try to geolocate off of it.
I remember microtubule structures in the brain making the news around 20 years ago. At the time there was some speculation that they might provide some other mechanism in which information transfer could occur, and if I remember correctly, it was through sympathetic resonance.
He's right and wrong. He is correct that much of the "advancements" in AI has been because of processing power (and dataset size). Most of what I learned in AI in college a quarter century ago forms the foundation of today's AI (and most of what I learned had been developed decades earlier). The reason we have things like Siri isn't because AI is smarter. It's because processing power is so fast and cheap, and because data storage and ram is so large and cheap, that an absolutely massive data set can be crunched to do speaker agnostic recognition to determine what I said. In fact, Apple can run my voice audio through dozens of speech models (male, female, accents, etc) in parallel to find the best result. So he is right - processing power has enabled AI to become far more useful of late.
However, where he is wrong is in the parallelism and scalability. In my above example, many different nodes (maybe located in entirely different datacenters) are doing that processing to find the best match.
AI doesn't need to exist on one processor, and it doesn't need to execute at any particular speed. If we're talking "turing" type AI, and I were to ask it "How are you feeling today?" and the AI takes 5 hours to reply "I feel the same as I always do.", well it is still just as intelligent as if it were responding in real-time. When we have reached that point in AI intelligence then we can throw more processing power at it in many different ways to allow it to process faster. The point is that the intelligence is not bound by the processing speed. Sure, for Siri to be viable commercially and useful to Joe Blow it needs to be fast, but as far as research and advancing the field of AI, that is independent of the processing speed.
And having said all that, AI has not advanced significantly beyond the full realization and expansion of things like neural nets with massive processing power and data sets to be useful in identifying, say, a tree in a photograph. We could have been doing that in 1980 given the processing power and storage capacity we have now.
Self driving electric cars are going to make most of this moot before long. Especially when we're talking about the time frames in the comparison between, say NYC Subway (started 110 years ago) and Seattle's more modern transportation system.
Self driving cars, when fully realized (IE 100% of the vehicles on a roadway are self driving), will be a sight to behold. The density that can be achieved with a networked system of vehicles that communicate one with another is extremely high - they can practically be touching each other. Vehicles can travel faster, merging in and out will be seamless with no slowing of traffic. All vehicles at a traffic light could begin moving at the same moment when the light turns green. The efficiency compared to human drivers will be many times higher. This solves most of the traffic volume issues we see now.
Vehicles can drop off and pick up passengers, then go park themselves (or give other people rides) in the meantime. That greatly improves the parking situation.
Elon Musk is working on longer range transportation (hyper loop) that will transport people in the vehicles they are already in at high speed over longer distances. This is more efficient then taking a taxi to a bus stop and a bus to a subway stop, and vice versa. (and please don't claim the solution is to only live and work next to subway or bus stops).
All of this is more desirable than fixed public transportation (either due to physical limits, like railroad tracks, or routes, like buses).
Good point. I'm surprised this is going on in California of all places. Then again, maybe CA gives out debit cards to low-income residents (they're already trying to figure out how to fund free cell service).
This is just businesses (IE the corporate level that makes decisions) being lazy and cheap. If you don't accept cash...
You don't have to worry about your employees stealing it, so you don't have to audit it to make sure tills balance out and that deposits match sales receipts. You don't have to train your managers to make sure they have proper cash and change on hand when the business opens daily. You don't have to pay employees for the overhead time of counting cash when shifts start or end. You don't have to pay managers for making trips to banks to get change or make deposits (yes, I know, many businesses already don't pay them for their time while doing this). You don't have to have a special safe or procedures in place for when too much cash accumulates. You don't have to have local bank accounts for deposit. You no longer have to make sure your employees can count or do simple math. Insurance is likely cheaper since cash doesn't have to be insured and the risk of robbery is decreased.
None of this has anything to do with what the customers want, or what is convenient to them. It is about saving money and reducing the responsibility you entrust to managers and employees and consolidating control.
I'm not sure why the part about Facebook inflating ad display numbers is included here. That was not because of bot activity. The majority of FB traffic is consumed through their mobile apps (95% of it), and you can be sure that is not bot type activity. Facebook has gone to great lengths to prevent scraping of their website, and it is extremely unlikely that the scraping of the site would involve scrolling through a newsfeed so that an ad became visible, began autoplaying and was streamed to a bot.
Facebook misrepresented the amount of time a user sat watching an ad before they scrolled on past it, plain and simple. More than likely they were counting things like a small portion of the video still being visible on the screen as being "watched". For the difference, even by Facebook's own admission, to be off by 60-80% shows this was a misrepresentation of what it meant for a user to watch a video ad on a very large scale (including in the app on mobile platforms).
Anecdotally, it has been the same for me as it has been for years. Shipping was timely right up through Christmas. The fact that Prime has been "diluted" to offer even more things to its members is, anecdotally speaking, a good thing. Using your terminology, a "concentration" of Prime that removes features, like music streaming or unlimited picture storage, would be a good thing then to you? Anecdotally of course.
Maybe you're using and relying on Prime more, and thus you are more sensitive to any and every hiccup you see and that gets you all worked up?
I live in a rural area, and in places like this the dollar stores are built to fill in the gaps between the Walmarts. They are geographically dispersed roughly every 10-15 miles where there is any kind of "populated area". Here, at least, where it is rural, they are providing a needed service.
Walmarts and the big gas stations along the interstates have killed off most of the independent gas stations and country stores that used to serve the small (1000 people) populated areas. You used to go to these stores for the basic stuff - bread, milk, candy bars, snack stuff. Most also had a small variety of hardware, fishing and hunting related stuff, and sometimes a small deli or grill. These are pretty much all gone. They used to be along state routes every several miles, and they enjoyed enough traffic to do well. The interstates took a great deal of volume (especially through traffic) off those roads and condensed them into major arteries. Those arteries have extremely limited points of access, and the land at each exit is so incredibly expensive that only huge chains can afford to have a business presence there.
So, most of these small stores have gone out of business. Now if you needed to run to the store because your propane lighter ran out of fuel and you couldn't light your grill, or the kids were pestering for batteries for their game controller, you had to travel 25-30 minutes to the regional Walmart. Dollar stores are filling those empty holes. They didn't cause them (well, certainly they have run some mom and pop places out of business, but the majority of the damage was already done a decade or more ago). Around here in the boonies, it's a welcome sight having a store like this within a few minutes of home.
In this area, they have popped up in the very rural country areas in the last 2-3 years. The local stores went out of business well before that.
First, it's scary the amount of imagery a person can find with a little googling, including the inside of a residence and inside of specific vehicles.
Second, an outdated looking, run-down, smallish three bedroom house costs $450k there??? I just don't get it. Do you really get paid three times more there than in the "normal" parts of the country? Maybe I'm just a country hick when it comes down to it.
Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cant help but wonder if we'd see this kind of engineering output if he was still around. This sounds like the type of thing he was a perfectionist about and would have went off over.
The tariffs aren't to try and fix any economic problems for the US. They are to punish China for their unfair practices such as impeding imports in various ways, government subsidizing production of goods at a loss, and manipulating their currency. Reducing the US defense spending would correct those imbalances with China exactly how?
They usually flood the navigation history with many bogus entries, so you'd have to click Back a hundred times to actually go back. That would be easy to detect. If they are more intelligent and just use a single bogus history entry, and when it is navigated to always create another, well that is easy to detect too.
Another way to solve this is to only allow as many navigation history events to be added as there are user interactions. So if the user doesn't interact at all, no navigation history events can be added, thus hitting the back button gets you straight out of there.
I can't think of any legitimate reasons to be adding anything to the back history as soon as you visit a web page.
I don't understand. When you have a company like Facebook, making BILLIONS of dollars from aboveboard, legit, standard advertising, why are they stooping so low to totally thrash user privacy for.... what? Another fraction of a percent additional revenue? This hints at some god-complex thing going on in the upper echelons of Facebook for these kinds of LARGE decisions to be made with other big corporations. My hunch this is for status symbol / power demonstration to show off to other multimillionaire executives the power you wield.
You're understating things just a bit. It's over a multimedia video element, not "regulat content" (sic) or an image (to try and block context menus). Sure, to the layperson it's all just "regulat content", but from a technical perspective there is a vast difference between a static image or rendered HTML and a bitstream of billions of pixels being drawn per second.
When there is nothing to render over top of a video viewport you can easily invoke hardware level rendering, which is already integrated within the OS's windowing system to make sure windows appear on top of one another as they should. The latter is relatively easy with a window type UI because each window is well defined and rectangular, so tracking what is on top of what isn't too difficult. When you get into the mess that is HTML that sort of thing becomes extremely difficult. Are you going to give that div its own rendering context at the hardware level so that it renders over top of the video layer properly? But then what if there are 20 divs over top of that video? You'll run out of GPU memory quickly on lower end machines.
Yes, it was a bit of a kludge that Edge uses hardware rendering only for a totally unobstructed video element, but it was a simple solution for a specific use case that worked well in almost all cases and resulted in better battery life and better rendering quality because the GPU is designed to efficiently do that decoding / rendering.
It was definitely a jerk thing for Google to do. The timing of this story is a bit ironic as I set up a friend on Google Docs yesterday on a lower end HP Stream laptop. Google Sheets just wouldn't function right in Edge in a nearly empty, newly created document. Simply inserting a column resulted in it grinding away for minutes. I installed Chrome and it worked flawlessly. That kind of thing doesn't just happen by accident with these modern browsers. Google is being a monopolistic-minded jerk.
Slashdot Mirror
Not being allowed to and not being able to are two separate things. It's already illegal to crash an airplane into the ground to kill yourself and everyone on board. So I don't think these suicidal pilots are too worried that they are also breaking FAA regulations by flipping off a switch to disable the transponder.
It's pretty clear that it should not be possible to disable these transponders / beacons during flight by anyone on board the plane. Or if it is possible then it requires some kind of confirmation and approval from the ground.
Sounds good, except....
Half of these 10 years later pics are now memes. Good luck filtering them out.
I've only seen a few that were actually 10 years. Most are more like 7-8 years. You don't know the actual time span.
People are selectively choosing what pictures to compare. There's a lot of bias in what is being chosen.
Filters, filters, filters. 10 years ago they weren't as common, or they were simple instragram-like color filters. Now they are actively distorting the geometry of people's faces, smoothing blemishes, making their eyes subtly larger, etc.
In other words is a bunch of crap data that is totally uncontrolled. Not exactly what you want to be training algorithms on.
I would have preferred it if Duckduckgo had worked with Openstreetmap.
OSM provides the data, however they do not provide hosting of tilesets. From OSM's terms:
OpenStreetMap’s own servers are run entirely on donated resources. They have strictly limited capacity. Heavy use of OSM tiles adversely affects people’s ability to edit the map, and is an abuse of the individual donations and sponsorship which provide hardware and bandwidth. As a result, we require that users of the tiles abide by this tile usage policy.
OpenStreetMap data is free for everyone to use. Our tile servers are not.
Emphasis theirs. That is why DuckDuckGo was using MapBox. MapBox hosts tilesets generated from Open Street Map data (plus they have some really sweet interactive map styling tools and can provide tiles in your own styles), however MapBox gets expensive if the volume is high, and certainly DuckDuckGo's volume is extremely high.
Also, MapBox uses tracking just like Google to generate traffic layers for their maps. Apps that have MapBox embedded in them are contributing their location data and motion for MapBox to generate live traffic maps, exactly like Google Maps.
So it's likely that DuckDuckGo is no worse off using Apple for their maps, from a privacy and data sharing perspective.
A four-year-long study of 1,113 people in Nambour, Queensland, found no difference in vitamin D levels between sunscreen users and sunscreen avoiders.
I wonder how they controlled external sources of Vitamin D. Everything from milk to cheese, breakfast cereal, orange juice, etc, as been fortified with Vitamin D. People in developed countries do not need sunlight for their Vitamin D. I don't think anyone would expect a person using sunscreen would have lower than normal vitamin D levels. If the study was not properly controlled, all it may have proven is that non-sunscreen users don't have elevated vitamin D levels.
This isn't an "old school" arcade, judging by the pictures. I know of many arcades with modern video games of that style. Myrtle Beach has several arcades (including one with dozens of 1957 Williams baseball style pinball machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ). The closest mall to me has an arcade. Pigeon Forge has a number of arcades. Most any tourist destination type area have them and they're doing well.
I'm not sure how unique the one is in TFA, besides being in a vastly overpriced real estate market.
I came here to say just this. When you overstate something in these kinds of terms - the word hear has a very specific meaning not applicable in this case - you immediately lose credibility to those of us that are scientifically minded. Like the guy who builds those wind sculpture things that move under wind power, and talks about them as living creatures with nerves and muscles and such. Loose analogy is not a good form of scientific description to talk about something you've observed.
We already know that many plants have very significant and diverse reactions to sunlight / darkness. Some open and close flowers, some open and close leaves, others literally bend and rotate to the follow the sun. I wouldn't describe that by stating that plants observe the sun.
It should be no surprise that sound waves could also illicit a physical or chemical reaction in plants, and I wouldn't describe that as plants hearing sounds. Just like I wouldn't say that plants commit suicide when they are scared by really loud sounds (like the shock wave from a C4 explosion a meter away).
To clarify, I mean to disable "SSID Broadcast" specifically.
According to TFA, this was caused by stolen devices being in areas without a cell signal, and falling back on WiFi access point geolocation. Further, the area in question has very few access points, so phones can potentially pick up these residential access points from thousands of feet away. Then they are geolocated to the exact position of the access point.
A solution is to disable SSID on your home router(s) so that these data-grabbing sniffers won't see it and try to geolocate off of it.
I remember microtubule structures in the brain making the news around 20 years ago. At the time there was some speculation that they might provide some other mechanism in which information transfer could occur, and if I remember correctly, it was through sympathetic resonance.
He's right and wrong. He is correct that much of the "advancements" in AI has been because of processing power (and dataset size). Most of what I learned in AI in college a quarter century ago forms the foundation of today's AI (and most of what I learned had been developed decades earlier). The reason we have things like Siri isn't because AI is smarter. It's because processing power is so fast and cheap, and because data storage and ram is so large and cheap, that an absolutely massive data set can be crunched to do speaker agnostic recognition to determine what I said. In fact, Apple can run my voice audio through dozens of speech models (male, female, accents, etc) in parallel to find the best result. So he is right - processing power has enabled AI to become far more useful of late.
However, where he is wrong is in the parallelism and scalability. In my above example, many different nodes (maybe located in entirely different datacenters) are doing that processing to find the best match.
AI doesn't need to exist on one processor, and it doesn't need to execute at any particular speed. If we're talking "turing" type AI, and I were to ask it "How are you feeling today?" and the AI takes 5 hours to reply "I feel the same as I always do.", well it is still just as intelligent as if it were responding in real-time. When we have reached that point in AI intelligence then we can throw more processing power at it in many different ways to allow it to process faster. The point is that the intelligence is not bound by the processing speed. Sure, for Siri to be viable commercially and useful to Joe Blow it needs to be fast, but as far as research and advancing the field of AI, that is independent of the processing speed.
And having said all that, AI has not advanced significantly beyond the full realization and expansion of things like neural nets with massive processing power and data sets to be useful in identifying, say, a tree in a photograph. We could have been doing that in 1980 given the processing power and storage capacity we have now.
Self driving electric cars are going to make most of this moot before long. Especially when we're talking about the time frames in the comparison between, say NYC Subway (started 110 years ago) and Seattle's more modern transportation system.
Self driving cars, when fully realized (IE 100% of the vehicles on a roadway are self driving), will be a sight to behold. The density that can be achieved with a networked system of vehicles that communicate one with another is extremely high - they can practically be touching each other. Vehicles can travel faster, merging in and out will be seamless with no slowing of traffic. All vehicles at a traffic light could begin moving at the same moment when the light turns green. The efficiency compared to human drivers will be many times higher. This solves most of the traffic volume issues we see now.
Vehicles can drop off and pick up passengers, then go park themselves (or give other people rides) in the meantime. That greatly improves the parking situation.
Elon Musk is working on longer range transportation (hyper loop) that will transport people in the vehicles they are already in at high speed over longer distances. This is more efficient then taking a taxi to a bus stop and a bus to a subway stop, and vice versa. (and please don't claim the solution is to only live and work next to subway or bus stops).
All of this is more desirable than fixed public transportation (either due to physical limits, like railroad tracks, or routes, like buses).
Dupe from a couple days ago:
As China Option Fades, Bill Gates Urges US To Take the Lead in Nuclear Power, For the Good of the Planet
CC To Suspend Most Operations Thursday
And given the current FCC leadership, nothing of value was lost.
Good point. I'm surprised this is going on in California of all places. Then again, maybe CA gives out debit cards to low-income residents (they're already trying to figure out how to fund free cell service).
This is just businesses (IE the corporate level that makes decisions) being lazy and cheap. If you don't accept cash...
You don't have to worry about your employees stealing it, so you don't have to audit it to make sure tills balance out and that deposits match sales receipts.
You don't have to train your managers to make sure they have proper cash and change on hand when the business opens daily.
You don't have to pay employees for the overhead time of counting cash when shifts start or end.
You don't have to pay managers for making trips to banks to get change or make deposits (yes, I know, many businesses already don't pay them for their time while doing this).
You don't have to have a special safe or procedures in place for when too much cash accumulates.
You don't have to have local bank accounts for deposit.
You no longer have to make sure your employees can count or do simple math.
Insurance is likely cheaper since cash doesn't have to be insured and the risk of robbery is decreased.
None of this has anything to do with what the customers want, or what is convenient to them. It is about saving money and reducing the responsibility you entrust to managers and employees and consolidating control.
I'm not sure why the part about Facebook inflating ad display numbers is included here. That was not because of bot activity. The majority of FB traffic is consumed through their mobile apps (95% of it), and you can be sure that is not bot type activity. Facebook has gone to great lengths to prevent scraping of their website, and it is extremely unlikely that the scraping of the site would involve scrolling through a newsfeed so that an ad became visible, began autoplaying and was streamed to a bot.
Facebook misrepresented the amount of time a user sat watching an ad before they scrolled on past it, plain and simple. More than likely they were counting things like a small portion of the video still being visible on the screen as being "watched". For the difference, even by Facebook's own admission, to be off by 60-80% shows this was a misrepresentation of what it meant for a user to watch a video ad on a very large scale (including in the app on mobile platforms).
Anecdotally, it has been the same for me as it has been for years. Shipping was timely right up through Christmas. The fact that Prime has been "diluted" to offer even more things to its members is, anecdotally speaking, a good thing. Using your terminology, a "concentration" of Prime that removes features, like music streaming or unlimited picture storage, would be a good thing then to you? Anecdotally of course.
Maybe you're using and relying on Prime more, and thus you are more sensitive to any and every hiccup you see and that gets you all worked up?
I live in a rural area, and in places like this the dollar stores are built to fill in the gaps between the Walmarts. They are geographically dispersed roughly every 10-15 miles where there is any kind of "populated area". Here, at least, where it is rural, they are providing a needed service.
Walmarts and the big gas stations along the interstates have killed off most of the independent gas stations and country stores that used to serve the small (1000 people) populated areas. You used to go to these stores for the basic stuff - bread, milk, candy bars, snack stuff. Most also had a small variety of hardware, fishing and hunting related stuff, and sometimes a small deli or grill. These are pretty much all gone. They used to be along state routes every several miles, and they enjoyed enough traffic to do well. The interstates took a great deal of volume (especially through traffic) off those roads and condensed them into major arteries. Those arteries have extremely limited points of access, and the land at each exit is so incredibly expensive that only huge chains can afford to have a business presence there.
So, most of these small stores have gone out of business. Now if you needed to run to the store because your propane lighter ran out of fuel and you couldn't light your grill, or the kids were pestering for batteries for their game controller, you had to travel 25-30 minutes to the regional Walmart. Dollar stores are filling those empty holes. They didn't cause them (well, certainly they have run some mom and pop places out of business, but the majority of the damage was already done a decade or more ago). Around here in the boonies, it's a welcome sight having a store like this within a few minutes of home.
In this area, they have popped up in the very rural country areas in the last 2-3 years. The local stores went out of business well before that.
I have two takeaways from this.
First, it's scary the amount of imagery a person can find with a little googling, including the inside of a residence and inside of specific vehicles.
Second, an outdated looking, run-down, smallish three bedroom house costs $450k there??? I just don't get it. Do you really get paid three times more there than in the "normal" parts of the country? Maybe I'm just a country hick when it comes down to it.
Steve Jobs was a jerk, but I cant help but wonder if we'd see this kind of engineering output if he was still around. This sounds like the type of thing he was a perfectionist about and would have went off over.
Someone likes oxymorons.
The tariffs aren't to try and fix any economic problems for the US. They are to punish China for their unfair practices such as impeding imports in various ways, government subsidizing production of goods at a loss, and manipulating their currency. Reducing the US defense spending would correct those imbalances with China exactly how?
They usually flood the navigation history with many bogus entries, so you'd have to click Back a hundred times to actually go back. That would be easy to detect.
If they are more intelligent and just use a single bogus history entry, and when it is navigated to always create another, well that is easy to detect too.
Another way to solve this is to only allow as many navigation history events to be added as there are user interactions. So if the user doesn't interact at all, no navigation history events can be added, thus hitting the back button gets you straight out of there.
I can't think of any legitimate reasons to be adding anything to the back history as soon as you visit a web page.
I don't understand. When you have a company like Facebook, making BILLIONS of dollars from aboveboard, legit, standard advertising, why are they stooping so low to totally thrash user privacy for.... what? Another fraction of a percent additional revenue? This hints at some god-complex thing going on in the upper echelons of Facebook for these kinds of LARGE decisions to be made with other big corporations. My hunch this is for status symbol / power demonstration to show off to other multimillionaire executives the power you wield.
You're understating things just a bit. It's over a multimedia video element, not "regulat content" (sic) or an image (to try and block context menus). Sure, to the layperson it's all just "regulat content", but from a technical perspective there is a vast difference between a static image or rendered HTML and a bitstream of billions of pixels being drawn per second.
When there is nothing to render over top of a video viewport you can easily invoke hardware level rendering, which is already integrated within the OS's windowing system to make sure windows appear on top of one another as they should. The latter is relatively easy with a window type UI because each window is well defined and rectangular, so tracking what is on top of what isn't too difficult. When you get into the mess that is HTML that sort of thing becomes extremely difficult. Are you going to give that div its own rendering context at the hardware level so that it renders over top of the video layer properly? But then what if there are 20 divs over top of that video? You'll run out of GPU memory quickly on lower end machines.
Yes, it was a bit of a kludge that Edge uses hardware rendering only for a totally unobstructed video element, but it was a simple solution for a specific use case that worked well in almost all cases and resulted in better battery life and better rendering quality because the GPU is designed to efficiently do that decoding / rendering.
It was definitely a jerk thing for Google to do. The timing of this story is a bit ironic as I set up a friend on Google Docs yesterday on a lower end HP Stream laptop. Google Sheets just wouldn't function right in Edge in a nearly empty, newly created document. Simply inserting a column resulted in it grinding away for minutes. I installed Chrome and it worked flawlessly. That kind of thing doesn't just happen by accident with these modern browsers. Google is being a monopolistic-minded jerk.