User-Agent headers, and browser fingerprinting in general, are the worst idea ever made for the web.
Seriously, put up standardised content. If it doesn't display, either you code is not-to-standard, or their device is. Guess who suffers? The party who skimped on their implementation (i.e. you because your website doesn't work for your customers, or them because they can't get on standard websites that others can).
The second we said "Okay, so what are you accessing it on, so I can fix my rubbish site to take account of your particular quirks", we lost the point of the web.
I can read other people's C. Sure, if they're DELIBERATELY being obscure, than it's game over in any language. But C is pretty fixable.
C++, however, I just find the worst language I've ever seen for understanding the context of random code, and the more "modern C++" constructs you use, the worse it gets.
It went too far, too abstract, too convoluted, too obscure.
"C with classes" isn't a bad idea. But "C with better, safer constructs, while still allowing direct hardware access" is what I want. Rust ain't it. Notice, though, how lots of other languages are C-with-knobs-on, in effect.
Every week in the UK news, some other long-established store has gone bankrupt.
Retail is dying, and going online, and even the big boys can't keep up.
We had Toys R Us in the UK too, their adverts are famously linked to Christmas as children - for the last 30+ years. And the same company went bust here at the same time.
Physical stores are dying except for supermarkets, and even then if they weren't all onboard the click-and-collect or home-delivery after ordering online, Amazon would own their market too.
There's demand for TOYS. Not for a toy store. Hell, councils are introducing parking charges in all the big towns in my country, if anything they are putting people OFF going to them. And most local town centres are dying, so they can be knocked down and turned into ordinary housing.
Demand for a product is not the same as demand for an old-fashioned toy-shop.
People DO and HAVE talked like that for decades, in major movies, and nobody blinked an eyelid.
It's got nothing to do with political correctness either, before you start down that road. Some people, especially in the US, just refer to that time of year as "this holiday", "the holidays", "the holiday season".
That's the practicalities of the prototype systems.
The answer is immediate. O(1). Not O(n) or worse as in any classical system.
It might take a day to set up the machine. The answer is immediate. It might take a day to set up for the next calculation. But the answer is immediate.
The practicalities of feeding the data and receiving the answer are irrelevant compared to a billion years of intensive conventional computation to factor a huge prime, for example.
QC is limited only by the size of a stable system that you can build. But the stable systems you can build give you any/all/every answers IMMEDIATELY. That's unprecedented in standard computing. The bigger the system you can stabilise, the bigger the questions you can answer immediately (i.e. factorise this 2048-bit number), and you can answer ALL such questions in that same timeframe (so once you can break one 2048-bit key instantly, you can break them all instantly).
That's getting some SERIOUS funding from military sources, not to mention all the other questions that it can answer. Investors won't go away until the horse has been proven dead and flogged for decades, but we still just keep advancing (sure, it's not super fast, but when computing was brand new, one transistor was the size of an apple and very limited... 40 years later, we had GHz microprocessors on the head of a pin).
However, classical processors have hit size limits (too large and the signals have to be asynchronous to propagate at the speed of light and stay consistent, but we haven't even got those kinds of chips yet), speed limits (same problem with speed-of-light), thermal limits, etc. and haven't significantly advanced in years. There's a reason that every desktop is still only "2Ghz" or so (maybe 3/4 in short bursts but not sustained performance), and the fastest mainframes in the world are still in that order of magnitude. I had a 2GHz machine in 2000-something. 18 years hasn't made that much of a difference to classical processor speeds in consumer kit at room-temperature! Sure, we have multiple cores, but that's just making the processing harder, and the processor hotter, and we KNOW that now everything you want to do scales in parallel.
Classical will never make QC irrelevant, it's an entirely different kettle of fish. If anything QC will render traditional computing entirely insecure overnight. We are already having to make QC-safe algorithms now, we're so worried about what might happen if someone builds a decent-size one.
The first nation to perfect QC is going to be a world leader... it'll be bigger than the space race and the nuclear race combined. Not just from a military point of view, but also from the sheer number of problems that your physicists and mathematicians and engineers can just say "Solve this, I've reworded it in QC language" (which we're already preparing and were before physical QC machines even existed!), and they literally get the answer as soon as they press Go. You will literally advance science overnight just by having a single QC machine large enough (enough qubits) to run a decent-size QC algorithm on... it will answer questions that we currently can't answer with a billion years of traditional computation, overnight. 1000 qubits is all you need to change the world, most likely. Given that the record is beat every year, that's not far off.
As of today, there isn't a single certified self-driving car on the planet available to a consumer. From any manufacturer.
They are ALL still just driver-assist. If that car kills a toddler by squishing them in that garage... STILL ALL YOUR FAULT. You go to jail. If that car hits another while pulling out of the garage. If it trashes your garage. If it doesn't stop and just drives into the road and trundles off to work on its own while you stand by the kerb baffled what happened? STILL ALL YOUR FAULT. You'll be charged for driving without due care, because you're not in charge of the vehicle.
There is no such thing as a self-driving car, because NOBODY is taking responsibility for their driving, not even the manufacturers themselves, whether by certifying them, insuring them, or putting in waivers that they'll represent you in court. Which means they have zero confidence in their ability to actually self-drive.
Such "self-driving" cars in this manner have been around since the days of filming the A-Team and driving a dummy car up a ramp and into a barrel of explosives. They are no different. The only personal responsible is the person controlling it, and even if they control it or trust it, they are fully legally liable and can get themselves jailed just by LETTING it self-drive (the guy who sat in the passenger seat while the Tesla "drove", etc.).
The irony? We could have self-driving cars as you state. We could have had 20, 30, 40 years ago. Just isolate them from "real" traffic and they can be properly self-driving, there's little enough risk to others that you can just insure against hitting another automated vehicle (rather than pedestrians, cyclists unpredictable unautomated vehicles etc.), We have self-driving (as in properly automated) trains, self-driving cars is just a train without a rail. It's actually easier to JUST PUT IN RAILS to limit disaster potential than it is to try to interpret the world via AI and other nonsense.
Of course we'll get them at some point. There are entire MINES in some countries where every vehicle and robot is fully self-driving and controlled. There have been for 20 years. But you know what? I wonder why we didn't have self-driving golf carts, self-driving in-site delivery trucks, self-driving kiddies rides around Disneyworld (not on rails, but through the normal pedestrian / vehicle routes) first. Because that's EASIER. It's cheaper. It's legally much simpler. You could prototype so much better. It's safer. It's lower speed (nowhere near as demanding) and in a controlled environment.
But, we never did. Tesla are jumping straight into on-road vehicles and then selling them as self-driving (they're technically not but look at the wording "this car has no driver", etc. - they're saying it's self-driving without actually being allowed to say the words). If they'd proven themselves first, I'd agree. But we're already picking up deaths because of self-driving modes that aren't.
P.S. Even Tesla themselves admit that they can only "self-drive" in any fashion on a freeway/motorway-like environment with clear lane markings where confusing hotspots are tracked and even then they still have "whoops, didn't see that HUGE CONCRETE DIVIDER" instantaneous deaths.
Not saying this stuff isn't POSSIBLE. It's out there. There are open mines that are entirely automated with HUGE 100-ton automated trucks moving around. What we're saying it that this stuff isn't READY, especially the consumer stuff, especially fighting against humans (the mines are generally no-go-zones for humans while in operation), especially while they CANNOT gain certification as "self-driving" from any country in the world.
But, most especially, while the manufacturers push all the liability to YOU, the driver. Until someone says "We'll pay all legal bills related to any accident deemed to be due to the error of our vehicle" then they have no confidence in their own system.
You do what I said. No court will ever tell you that you were wrong to do so, that they were reasonable in not acting upon your letter, or that they can do that.
Imagine if they said "Oh, we can only accept cancellation requests if they are faxed to an international premium number between 00:01 and 00:02am on a full moon", you think a court would let that stand either?
This isn't even consumer law. This is just basics of legal service and communication. You DO NOT ignore a recorded-delivery letter and EVERYTHING can be done via one. It doesn't matter what they say. Because what happens if they just said "Yeah, okay, we'll cancel" but actually don't? You'd have zero recourse but to just keep trying that. That's just not true.
You know how I know? I've had that argument. Several times. Even "Oh, you have to talk to this department only, and we have to read out a big long spiel first, and then you have to do this and that on the website"... NO. This is your notification of cancellation of a contract, (whether express or implied contract). I've now put it in writing. It's been served to you. I can prove receipt. Hence I am cancelling the payment because you're too stupid to enact basic consumer requests. Sue me if you are hurt by this, and I'll just show this receipt in court with a copy of the letter.
There's a phrase "This does not affect your statutory rights". You know why they say that? I've never fathomed it. Because NOTHING affects your statutory rights. It really doesn't matter what their contract says or whether you agreed to it. Cancellations of contracts have law of their own that takes precedence, as does an awful lot of consumer law, especially over whatever nonsense a company might slip into their terms post-signing.
If you truly think you can only cancel - even "unofficially" - by following their exact instructions, you're really disillusioned.
I have any number of letters confirming just that from company lawyers if you'd like to check. It's not even "Oh, right, well, in this case, we'll make an exception because you're unhappy". No. They're REQUIRED to, whether they say so or not.
I have seen four movies in the last ten years in the cinema, all "new releases" at the time.
One was free (deal via my mobile provider). One was literally 50p (half a GBP) (again, deal via my mobile provider) One was the movie I'd absolutely wanted to see forever and was taken to (The Imitation Game). I paid full price for that. One was with my daughter in a rural cinema (it cost 5GBP, and I upgraded to a private box with food brought to us for another 5GBP. It would normally cost three times that just for a basic pair of tickets in my normal cinema).
I had to sit through loads of adverts, but the cinemas were almost entirely empty. The only movie I'd watch again (in any format) is the one I was already looking forward to.
So that - in total - I can only imagine is a complete loss to the cinema and everyone involved but me from all I can see. It costs them that much to have shown me the movies in question in the cinema they did, they certainly can't be profiting.
In comparison, I've paid a regular subscription to several online streaming services. I do that, and watch mostly stuff I already know that I like. Often I trial whatever movie they are trying to push and will cut it in the first five minutes if it's just no good. Out of everything that's been in the cinema over the last... year, let's say. I would sit down and watch about... 4-5% if it was just there for me to watch. In terms of paying for it specifically? Nothing.
People need to learn that when the product isn't good and can't be delivered to you in the manner you would like, then you need to stop consuming it. For all things. Movies, TV, videogames, pizza, groceries, appliances, gadgets, etc. etc. etc.
Because if the actual product (a movie) is ruined by its delivery method, we only need to fix the delivery method. But if the product itself is also ruined, then it doesn't matter if you telepathically insert it into people's minds. Once they are wise, they will just stop paying for anything like that. The quicker we can make people implement that, the quicker studios can move back to making good product.
Delivery of such products these days is amazing. I don't need the cinema, thanks. I can stream it to my house and project it on the wall and then pause the movie to have a pee. It's a solved problem.
But the reason that Amazon, Netflix, etc are making their own products is not really just lock-in (after an exclusivity period, they sell them to others). It's because, as complete amateurs to that game, they can make stuff just as good as the 100-year-old studios who have never done anything but and have unlimited budgets to do so - and do a just as good, if not better, job.
Stop paying for products/services that are only available in that fashion.
Literally say "Nope, sorry, won't touch that series even though I love it."
Wait a year, buy the physical media, or wait for it to come over to the services you do want to see. Or not buy it at all.
While "but I must see it now" is the driver, you can never escape those kind of lock-ins and they know it.
Hint: Spend a year without any media at all. Bin the TV. You won't miss it at all after the initial shock. Then, from that point on, you're always "a year behind". You can cherry-pick those things that are actually good, be pre-warned of those things that aren't worth the money, and pick up all your media for much cheaper and/or free and still have it be "new" to you.
It's like people complaining about the price of the latest football (soccer) kits, which change every year. Then... stop buying them. Support your team in other ways.
In the UK this is countered, believe it or not, by the police force.
They have discretion, common sense, just want to get the job done, aren't interested in pursuing every little spat at gunpoint, but also aren't disinterested if they can see you're worried or have a genuine grievance.
Most of these will be ignored. Some will result in a little letter saying "We've had a report that... " with zero enforcability. The serious ones will result in a case just as they should.
But if you haven't lived in the UK, you may not get that. Police will often come out. Nod. Agree. And then says that there's not much that can be done / that they'd be willing to do. Not because they couldn't if they had to. Not because they want such things to propogate. But because they take a reasoned approach where bearing down on someone because they cut lanes a bit isn't worth their time and hassle to deal with.
There's a difference between "poor" driving and "dangerous" driving.
Sure, poor can be dangerous, but it's not automatic.
Dangerous infers a deliberate, considered action where you know the risk to yourself and others in increased for no good reason.
My dashcam captures THOUSANDS of incidences of poor driving, everything from not indicating to insufficient braking distance to speeding. And although they are "dangerous" as actions, they are not *legally* "dangerous driving". That's another thing entirely. The number of things in my footage valid for that would be, maybe two-three incidents a year.
There's a big difference between "he's a bit close" and "WHAT THE HELL IS HE DOING?! MORON!" and the latter is the better test for if something is "dangerous driving".
If it's inconvenient or you keep being passed to "retentions" against your will, hang up. The words "No, I'm cancelling. No I don't need to sit through any advert. I'm cancelling. This is me cancelling. This is my notification that I've canceled. Am I cancelled now?" are how you do it.
If they don't listen, you then hang up and write them a letter. State your request to cancel. Demand proof of receipt.
On the deadline date in your letter, cancel the credit card / bank payment if they do not respond. They'll write back if you have made an error in your calculations or if you have to give X months notice, etc.
Almost nothing in the world exists for an ordinary consumer that can't be solved with a single recorded-delivery letter.
And in the list I include things like "Insurance company retro-actively cancels my insurance in a post-dated letter (so technically IMPOSSIBLE for me to have been notified in time) because of non-payment, when my bank has record of payment and I hold a letter that says "Your account is up to date" dated the same day as the one that say "We're cancelling your insurance" - and still threatens me with lawsuits, to report me for being uninsured, non-payment, etc. etc.
One recorded-delivery letter later, and they were grovelling on the floor for me not to report them to their industry ombudsman, offering compensation,...
As soon as it's more difficult to cancel than writing a letter and putting a stamp on it, hang up.
Known-plain-text attacks tend to be impractical against any modern secured encryption scheme. If it's important, it would be on an encrypted website. Then you can literally sniff every packet, and know the entire plain-text and it won't help you decrypt the rest of the session at all.
Recycling is a con. Most of the UK recycling ends up in foreign landfill. That recycling that can be done easily costs us millions of pounds, on top of council tax, often to a "declared interest" of a senior figure in local government who cherry-pick the easy (paper, metal) and landfill the rest. They may even "get the right documentation" from the people in question, but several tracking projects have proven this stuff just ends up in landfill.
It only works because you're spending YOUR time, energy, water, etc. on cleaning and separating so that they don't have to. Even then, it's not profitable for most things, except the cherry-pick items they want you to recycle because it's profitable for them.
It's easy to hide the cost of washing, sorting, collecting (in my area three separate diesel lorries at slow-speed, during rush-hours, down every road, with four guys throwing tons of rubbish in the back, then driving back to a processing plant somewhere), etc. when the populous are doing it for you. Then the energy / labour involved in sorting / recycling again is quite high. There are contaminations and losses and processing to do and bleaching and all kinds of things. And then you re-sell something that took all that, in the same format that you can buy that stuff brand-new, and expect it to cost less? It's not really going to work out very well at all except for things we've ALWAYS recycled (metal, glass, paper).
I'm sure you *can* do it, but it's a cost, not a profit. And the cost has been spread out over council tax, specific waste-collection tax (and severe restrictions on waste collected in recent years, e.g. number of bins, etc.), and people's own enforced investment (washing out your own stuff, at your own expense).
Because it's a cost, it's hard to make profit. Because it's hard to make profit, it costs more, and fewer places do it. And then it costs something like GBP80 to landfill a ton of waste and you think "why are we bothering" (there are reasons, of course, but they aren't compatible with profit). They can make it more difficult for you so that you have to do more work for them, and they have to do less work, and that's the increasing trend.
My local council provide only one bin for "garden waste" (the most easily recycled of all, basically it recycles itself into compost, you just leave it lying around in a heap and maybe water it a bit). They *charge* if you throw away more than that or want more than fortnightly collection. And that's the EASY one. The others you can't ask for more collections unless you hire a private company to do the job.
They literally don't WANT your recycling, or your unrecycled waste, or even your garden waste. There's no money in it. Only "green credentials" at enormous cost.
"will likely help nudge Instagram revenue past $10 billion over the next 12 months... and is on track to exceed 2 billion users within the next five years"
So you're telling me that you make $5 a user a year? How? Where? Doing what? Who's paying that? Why are they paying that? What are they getting back for that $5?
Yep. Anything radio is an untrusted medium. Hell, people use VPNs over leased lines, sure as hell you want a VPN over anything wireless purely for convenience (site-to-site interlinks, it goes without saying that you want VPN).
Plus, it just gives you that double-layer. Sure, you might crack WPA but you've still then got to break through AES or whatever. And sure, AES might get a flaw but if you've got to be nearby and break the WPA to see that you're even using it, that's another layer of protection. The chances of both being so easily flawed simultaneously are miniscule, and gives you time to test and deploy updates that could potentially make the problem worse if you desperately need to shove them out because your only layer of protection was removed.
For ten years, I gamed and ran CS servers... and my home connection was only ever a cheap wifi point with a VPN to the laptop run over local network, and everyone used to accuse me of having the advantage because my ping was so low, despite the server I ran being in another country. Latency was more than acceptable but I never once had to worry about something getting online, even with fake SSIDs cropping up and all kinds of attacks.
There's no reason not to VPN over your Wifi and tell your software firewalls and anything else that it's an untrusted network and only the VPN is a trusted one. It also helps you secure yourself should you take a laptop to a cafe with open wifi. You idiots can all share a wifi session with a shared key, I'll just use it to VPN to my external server that I know only *I* have a key for, and that I can identify any MITM attack attempted on such a connection (i.e. the VPN won't be able to connect because the endpoints won't recognise each other).
I've seen people pay WAY more than that to fit a "after-market spoiler" to a car that's not even capable of generating any kind of air-flow which would produce such an effect, nor any kind of aerodynamic effect to utilise them.
Don't even get me started on twin-exhausts and all kinds of other shite.
I agree, those people shouldn't be allowed to drive themselves, just through sheer stupidity and misunderstanding of how their car works, but I would posit that "owning a Tesla" is a much higher risk category for being a twat that anything else.
Is it just me that find Star Wars tedious, badly-written shite?
I mean, I wasn't around when the first came out. Maybe I missed the cult-train on that, but it was never anything more than a poor sci-fi movie to me. Not even "comparing the technology", it still had tons more CGI etc. in it than anything else for years afterwards, but I never found anything about the movie compelling. The "classic" sequels were just more of the same dross. People in teddy-bear costumes. It was like a very bad episode of Star Trek, after the budget had run out, but then tacked on with expensive CGI.
Then a lapse in time, in which possibly the "best parts" of the whole thing came out - the video games. The old DOS X-Wing / Tie-Fighter games were great. Because it was the cool bit of the films put into your hands with the sound effects.
I literally haven't even seen any of the "prequels" all the way through. I couldn't stand them. It was more of the same but with some decent-quality camera work and costuming, but stuck alongside the old dross.
I honestly can't fathom what's interesting about the storyline at all. It's a Star-Trek episode at best, in terms of concept. The early films remind me of poor 80's things like Flash Gordon. Fabulous and cultish but if you watch with anything approaching a modern critical eye, they are utter trash with a soundtrack
And it died off. In the 90's, Star Wars died and was just history, and became unpopular. Then it revamped and everyone went mad for it again.
I'm a geek and I'm often assumed to be both a Trekkie and a Star Wars guy and I honestly can't stand either. I can suffer watching an episode but I'm smirking to myself the whole time (and Patrick Stewart face-palming too).
I honestly don't get why. The acting is poor. The CGI is ruined by the crap (whether that's CGI characters or the complete lack of consistency by using CGI and bear-suits in the same scene). The storyline is quite literally "good versus evil". The dialogue is either twee or literally so dull I switch off (reminds me of parts of the Matrix sequels).
I don't get what's there to make a multi-million-dollar franchise. I certainly don't get what's in the plotline to actually get upset about.
The vast majority of people just can't tell the difference at any reasonable working distance.
There's little point paying out for a 4K monitor.
The software dpi etc. settings can be overcome by scaling the interface on any modern OS, but you're still filling four times as many pixels - which hits performance of the graphics - no matter what.
I had a 17" laptop on my lap. I literally can't see a pixel even in the most basic of sans serif fonts. It's almost impossible to focus on the dot of an i or a period. Increasing my resolution won't benefit me in any way, will cost a ton of money, and will severely increase the demands on the graphics cards for any non-trivial purpose.
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Who cares? It's an awful movie once you strip away the special effects.
Literally no plot, huge long, boring scenes. It's awful.
If you were to remove the soundtrack as well, you'd see how damn boring some of those space-scenes are.
The ending was always quite obvious in intent, but terrible in execution.
User-Agent headers, and browser fingerprinting in general, are the worst idea ever made for the web.
Seriously, put up standardised content. If it doesn't display, either you code is not-to-standard, or their device is. Guess who suffers? The party who skimped on their implementation (i.e. you because your website doesn't work for your customers, or them because they can't get on standard websites that others can).
The second we said "Okay, so what are you accessing it on, so I can fix my rubbish site to take account of your particular quirks", we lost the point of the web.
I can read other people's C. Sure, if they're DELIBERATELY being obscure, than it's game over in any language. But C is pretty fixable.
C++, however, I just find the worst language I've ever seen for understanding the context of random code, and the more "modern C++" constructs you use, the worse it gets.
Yep, I want C-with-knobs-on, not C++.
It went too far, too abstract, too convoluted, too obscure.
"C with classes" isn't a bad idea. But "C with better, safer constructs, while still allowing direct hardware access" is what I want. Rust ain't it. Notice, though, how lots of other languages are C-with-knobs-on, in effect.
Retail stores are dying the world over.
Every week in the UK news, some other long-established store has gone bankrupt.
Retail is dying, and going online, and even the big boys can't keep up.
We had Toys R Us in the UK too, their adverts are famously linked to Christmas as children - for the last 30+ years. And the same company went bust here at the same time.
Physical stores are dying except for supermarkets, and even then if they weren't all onboard the click-and-collect or home-delivery after ordering online, Amazon would own their market too.
There's demand for TOYS. Not for a toy store. Hell, councils are introducing parking charges in all the big towns in my country, if anything they are putting people OFF going to them. And most local town centres are dying, so they can be knocked down and turned into ordinary housing.
Demand for a product is not the same as demand for an old-fashioned toy-shop.
Sorry, but it springs to mind a movie quote:
"Coming to IBC this holiday season...."
From... Scrooged. Filmed in 1988.
People DO and HAVE talked like that for decades, in major movies, and nobody blinked an eyelid.
It's got nothing to do with political correctness either, before you start down that road. Some people, especially in the US, just refer to that time of year as "this holiday", "the holidays", "the holiday season".
Sigh.
That's the practicalities of the prototype systems.
The answer is immediate. O(1). Not O(n) or worse as in any classical system.
It might take a day to set up the machine. The answer is immediate. It might take a day to set up for the next calculation. But the answer is immediate.
The practicalities of feeding the data and receiving the answer are irrelevant compared to a billion years of intensive conventional computation to factor a huge prime, for example.
I think you have no idea what QC actually is.
QC is limited only by the size of a stable system that you can build. But the stable systems you can build give you any/all/every answers IMMEDIATELY. That's unprecedented in standard computing. The bigger the system you can stabilise, the bigger the questions you can answer immediately (i.e. factorise this 2048-bit number), and you can answer ALL such questions in that same timeframe (so once you can break one 2048-bit key instantly, you can break them all instantly).
That's getting some SERIOUS funding from military sources, not to mention all the other questions that it can answer. Investors won't go away until the horse has been proven dead and flogged for decades, but we still just keep advancing (sure, it's not super fast, but when computing was brand new, one transistor was the size of an apple and very limited... 40 years later, we had GHz microprocessors on the head of a pin).
However, classical processors have hit size limits (too large and the signals have to be asynchronous to propagate at the speed of light and stay consistent, but we haven't even got those kinds of chips yet), speed limits (same problem with speed-of-light), thermal limits, etc. and haven't significantly advanced in years. There's a reason that every desktop is still only "2Ghz" or so (maybe 3/4 in short bursts but not sustained performance), and the fastest mainframes in the world are still in that order of magnitude. I had a 2GHz machine in 2000-something. 18 years hasn't made that much of a difference to classical processor speeds in consumer kit at room-temperature! Sure, we have multiple cores, but that's just making the processing harder, and the processor hotter, and we KNOW that now everything you want to do scales in parallel.
Classical will never make QC irrelevant, it's an entirely different kettle of fish. If anything QC will render traditional computing entirely insecure overnight. We are already having to make QC-safe algorithms now, we're so worried about what might happen if someone builds a decent-size one.
The first nation to perfect QC is going to be a world leader... it'll be bigger than the space race and the nuclear race combined. Not just from a military point of view, but also from the sheer number of problems that your physicists and mathematicians and engineers can just say "Solve this, I've reworded it in QC language" (which we're already preparing and were before physical QC machines even existed!), and they literally get the answer as soon as they press Go. You will literally advance science overnight just by having a single QC machine large enough (enough qubits) to run a decent-size QC algorithm on... it will answer questions that we currently can't answer with a billion years of traditional computation, overnight. 1000 qubits is all you need to change the world, most likely. Given that the record is beat every year, that's not far off.
As of today, there isn't a single certified self-driving car on the planet available to a consumer. From any manufacturer.
They are ALL still just driver-assist. If that car kills a toddler by squishing them in that garage... STILL ALL YOUR FAULT. You go to jail. If that car hits another while pulling out of the garage. If it trashes your garage. If it doesn't stop and just drives into the road and trundles off to work on its own while you stand by the kerb baffled what happened? STILL ALL YOUR FAULT. You'll be charged for driving without due care, because you're not in charge of the vehicle.
There is no such thing as a self-driving car, because NOBODY is taking responsibility for their driving, not even the manufacturers themselves, whether by certifying them, insuring them, or putting in waivers that they'll represent you in court. Which means they have zero confidence in their ability to actually self-drive.
Such "self-driving" cars in this manner have been around since the days of filming the A-Team and driving a dummy car up a ramp and into a barrel of explosives. They are no different. The only personal responsible is the person controlling it, and even if they control it or trust it, they are fully legally liable and can get themselves jailed just by LETTING it self-drive (the guy who sat in the passenger seat while the Tesla "drove", etc.).
The irony? We could have self-driving cars as you state. We could have had 20, 30, 40 years ago. Just isolate them from "real" traffic and they can be properly self-driving, there's little enough risk to others that you can just insure against hitting another automated vehicle (rather than pedestrians, cyclists unpredictable unautomated vehicles etc.), We have self-driving (as in properly automated) trains, self-driving cars is just a train without a rail. It's actually easier to JUST PUT IN RAILS to limit disaster potential than it is to try to interpret the world via AI and other nonsense.
Of course we'll get them at some point. There are entire MINES in some countries where every vehicle and robot is fully self-driving and controlled. There have been for 20 years. But you know what? I wonder why we didn't have self-driving golf carts, self-driving in-site delivery trucks, self-driving kiddies rides around Disneyworld (not on rails, but through the normal pedestrian / vehicle routes) first. Because that's EASIER. It's cheaper. It's legally much simpler. You could prototype so much better. It's safer. It's lower speed (nowhere near as demanding) and in a controlled environment.
But, we never did. Tesla are jumping straight into on-road vehicles and then selling them as self-driving (they're technically not but look at the wording "this car has no driver", etc. - they're saying it's self-driving without actually being allowed to say the words). If they'd proven themselves first, I'd agree. But we're already picking up deaths because of self-driving modes that aren't.
P.S. Even Tesla themselves admit that they can only "self-drive" in any fashion on a freeway/motorway-like environment with clear lane markings where confusing hotspots are tracked and even then they still have "whoops, didn't see that HUGE CONCRETE DIVIDER" instantaneous deaths.
Not saying this stuff isn't POSSIBLE. It's out there. There are open mines that are entirely automated with HUGE 100-ton automated trucks moving around. What we're saying it that this stuff isn't READY, especially the consumer stuff, especially fighting against humans (the mines are generally no-go-zones for humans while in operation), especially while they CANNOT gain certification as "self-driving" from any country in the world.
But, most especially, while the manufacturers push all the liability to YOU, the driver. Until someone says "We'll pay all legal bills related to any accident deemed to be due to the error of our vehicle" then they have no confidence in their own system.
It DOESN'T MATTER.
You do what I said. No court will ever tell you that you were wrong to do so, that they were reasonable in not acting upon your letter, or that they can do that.
Imagine if they said "Oh, we can only accept cancellation requests if they are faxed to an international premium number between 00:01 and 00:02am on a full moon", you think a court would let that stand either?
This isn't even consumer law. This is just basics of legal service and communication. You DO NOT ignore a recorded-delivery letter and EVERYTHING can be done via one. It doesn't matter what they say. Because what happens if they just said "Yeah, okay, we'll cancel" but actually don't? You'd have zero recourse but to just keep trying that. That's just not true.
You know how I know? I've had that argument. Several times. Even "Oh, you have to talk to this department only, and we have to read out a big long spiel first, and then you have to do this and that on the website"... NO. This is your notification of cancellation of a contract, (whether express or implied contract). I've now put it in writing. It's been served to you. I can prove receipt. Hence I am cancelling the payment because you're too stupid to enact basic consumer requests. Sue me if you are hurt by this, and I'll just show this receipt in court with a copy of the letter.
There's a phrase "This does not affect your statutory rights". You know why they say that? I've never fathomed it. Because NOTHING affects your statutory rights. It really doesn't matter what their contract says or whether you agreed to it. Cancellations of contracts have law of their own that takes precedence, as does an awful lot of consumer law, especially over whatever nonsense a company might slip into their terms post-signing.
If you truly think you can only cancel - even "unofficially" - by following their exact instructions, you're really disillusioned.
I have any number of letters confirming just that from company lawyers if you'd like to check. It's not even "Oh, right, well, in this case, we'll make an exception because you're unhappy". No. They're REQUIRED to, whether they say so or not.
Then stop watching.
I have seen four movies in the last ten years in the cinema, all "new releases" at the time.
One was free (deal via my mobile provider).
One was literally 50p (half a GBP) (again, deal via my mobile provider)
One was the movie I'd absolutely wanted to see forever and was taken to (The Imitation Game). I paid full price for that.
One was with my daughter in a rural cinema (it cost 5GBP, and I upgraded to a private box with food brought to us for another 5GBP. It would normally cost three times that just for a basic pair of tickets in my normal cinema).
I had to sit through loads of adverts, but the cinemas were almost entirely empty. The only movie I'd watch again (in any format) is the one I was already looking forward to.
So that - in total - I can only imagine is a complete loss to the cinema and everyone involved but me from all I can see. It costs them that much to have shown me the movies in question in the cinema they did, they certainly can't be profiting.
In comparison, I've paid a regular subscription to several online streaming services. I do that, and watch mostly stuff I already know that I like. Often I trial whatever movie they are trying to push and will cut it in the first five minutes if it's just no good. Out of everything that's been in the cinema over the last... year, let's say. I would sit down and watch about... 4-5% if it was just there for me to watch. In terms of paying for it specifically? Nothing.
People need to learn that when the product isn't good and can't be delivered to you in the manner you would like, then you need to stop consuming it. For all things. Movies, TV, videogames, pizza, groceries, appliances, gadgets, etc. etc. etc.
Because if the actual product (a movie) is ruined by its delivery method, we only need to fix the delivery method. But if the product itself is also ruined, then it doesn't matter if you telepathically insert it into people's minds. Once they are wise, they will just stop paying for anything like that. The quicker we can make people implement that, the quicker studios can move back to making good product.
Delivery of such products these days is amazing. I don't need the cinema, thanks. I can stream it to my house and project it on the wall and then pause the movie to have a pee. It's a solved problem.
But the reason that Amazon, Netflix, etc are making their own products is not really just lock-in (after an exclusivity period, they sell them to others). It's because, as complete amateurs to that game, they can make stuff just as good as the 100-year-old studios who have never done anything but and have unlimited budgets to do so - and do a just as good, if not better, job.
Hint:
Stop paying for products/services that are only available in that fashion.
Literally say "Nope, sorry, won't touch that series even though I love it."
Wait a year, buy the physical media, or wait for it to come over to the services you do want to see. Or not buy it at all.
While "but I must see it now" is the driver, you can never escape those kind of lock-ins and they know it.
Hint: Spend a year without any media at all. Bin the TV. You won't miss it at all after the initial shock. Then, from that point on, you're always "a year behind". You can cherry-pick those things that are actually good, be pre-warned of those things that aren't worth the money, and pick up all your media for much cheaper and/or free and still have it be "new" to you.
It's like people complaining about the price of the latest football (soccer) kits, which change every year. Then... stop buying them. Support your team in other ways.
In the UK this is countered, believe it or not, by the police force.
They have discretion, common sense, just want to get the job done, aren't interested in pursuing every little spat at gunpoint, but also aren't disinterested if they can see you're worried or have a genuine grievance.
Most of these will be ignored. Some will result in a little letter saying "We've had a report that... " with zero enforcability. The serious ones will result in a case just as they should.
But if you haven't lived in the UK, you may not get that. Police will often come out. Nod. Agree. And then says that there's not much that can be done / that they'd be willing to do. Not because they couldn't if they had to. Not because they want such things to propogate. But because they take a reasoned approach where bearing down on someone because they cut lanes a bit isn't worth their time and hassle to deal with.
P.S. Try Germany one day.
I once made an entire car of Germans scream in terror because I did a slow, careful, U-turn in an empty road where it was perfectly permitted.
Apparently that's not "how it should be done".
There's a difference between "poor" driving and "dangerous" driving.
Sure, poor can be dangerous, but it's not automatic.
Dangerous infers a deliberate, considered action where you know the risk to yourself and others in increased for no good reason.
My dashcam captures THOUSANDS of incidences of poor driving, everything from not indicating to insufficient braking distance to speeding. And although they are "dangerous" as actions, they are not *legally* "dangerous driving". That's another thing entirely. The number of things in my footage valid for that would be, maybe two-three incidents a year.
There's a big difference between "he's a bit close" and "WHAT THE HELL IS HE DOING?! MORON!" and the latter is the better test for if something is "dangerous driving".
Try the normal way.
If it's inconvenient or you keep being passed to "retentions" against your will, hang up. The words "No, I'm cancelling. No I don't need to sit through any advert. I'm cancelling. This is me cancelling. This is my notification that I've canceled. Am I cancelled now?" are how you do it.
If they don't listen, you then hang up and write them a letter. State your request to cancel. Demand proof of receipt.
On the deadline date in your letter, cancel the credit card / bank payment if they do not respond. They'll write back if you have made an error in your calculations or if you have to give X months notice, etc.
Almost nothing in the world exists for an ordinary consumer that can't be solved with a single recorded-delivery letter.
And in the list I include things like "Insurance company retro-actively cancels my insurance in a post-dated letter (so technically IMPOSSIBLE for me to have been notified in time) because of non-payment, when my bank has record of payment and I hold a letter that says "Your account is up to date" dated the same day as the one that say "We're cancelling your insurance" - and still threatens me with lawsuits, to report me for being uninsured, non-payment, etc. etc.
One recorded-delivery letter later, and they were grovelling on the floor for me not to report them to their industry ombudsman, offering compensation,...
As soon as it's more difficult to cancel than writing a letter and putting a stamp on it, hang up.
Known-plain-text attacks tend to be impractical against any modern secured encryption scheme. If it's important, it would be on an encrypted website. Then you can literally sniff every packet, and know the entire plain-text and it won't help you decrypt the rest of the session at all.
It's quite simple.
Recycling is a con. Most of the UK recycling ends up in foreign landfill. That recycling that can be done easily costs us millions of pounds, on top of council tax, often to a "declared interest" of a senior figure in local government who cherry-pick the easy (paper, metal) and landfill the rest. They may even "get the right documentation" from the people in question, but several tracking projects have proven this stuff just ends up in landfill.
It only works because you're spending YOUR time, energy, water, etc. on cleaning and separating so that they don't have to. Even then, it's not profitable for most things, except the cherry-pick items they want you to recycle because it's profitable for them.
It's easy to hide the cost of washing, sorting, collecting (in my area three separate diesel lorries at slow-speed, during rush-hours, down every road, with four guys throwing tons of rubbish in the back, then driving back to a processing plant somewhere), etc. when the populous are doing it for you. Then the energy / labour involved in sorting / recycling again is quite high. There are contaminations and losses and processing to do and bleaching and all kinds of things. And then you re-sell something that took all that, in the same format that you can buy that stuff brand-new, and expect it to cost less? It's not really going to work out very well at all except for things we've ALWAYS recycled (metal, glass, paper).
I'm sure you *can* do it, but it's a cost, not a profit. And the cost has been spread out over council tax, specific waste-collection tax (and severe restrictions on waste collected in recent years, e.g. number of bins, etc.), and people's own enforced investment (washing out your own stuff, at your own expense).
Because it's a cost, it's hard to make profit. Because it's hard to make profit, it costs more, and fewer places do it. And then it costs something like GBP80 to landfill a ton of waste and you think "why are we bothering" (there are reasons, of course, but they aren't compatible with profit). They can make it more difficult for you so that you have to do more work for them, and they have to do less work, and that's the increasing trend.
My local council provide only one bin for "garden waste" (the most easily recycled of all, basically it recycles itself into compost, you just leave it lying around in a heap and maybe water it a bit). They *charge* if you throw away more than that or want more than fortnightly collection. And that's the EASY one. The others you can't ask for more collections unless you hire a private company to do the job.
They literally don't WANT your recycling, or your unrecycled waste, or even your garden waste. There's no money in it. Only "green credentials" at enormous cost.
"will likely help nudge Instagram revenue past $10 billion over the next 12 months... and is on track to exceed 2 billion users within the next five years"
So you're telling me that you make $5 a user a year? How? Where? Doing what? Who's paying that? Why are they paying that? What are they getting back for that $5?
Advertisers really are a special kind of insane.
Yep. Anything radio is an untrusted medium. Hell, people use VPNs over leased lines, sure as hell you want a VPN over anything wireless purely for convenience (site-to-site interlinks, it goes without saying that you want VPN).
Plus, it just gives you that double-layer. Sure, you might crack WPA but you've still then got to break through AES or whatever. And sure, AES might get a flaw but if you've got to be nearby and break the WPA to see that you're even using it, that's another layer of protection. The chances of both being so easily flawed simultaneously are miniscule, and gives you time to test and deploy updates that could potentially make the problem worse if you desperately need to shove them out because your only layer of protection was removed.
For ten years, I gamed and ran CS servers... and my home connection was only ever a cheap wifi point with a VPN to the laptop run over local network, and everyone used to accuse me of having the advantage because my ping was so low, despite the server I ran being in another country. Latency was more than acceptable but I never once had to worry about something getting online, even with fake SSIDs cropping up and all kinds of attacks.
There's no reason not to VPN over your Wifi and tell your software firewalls and anything else that it's an untrusted network and only the VPN is a trusted one. It also helps you secure yourself should you take a laptop to a cafe with open wifi. You idiots can all share a wifi session with a shared key, I'll just use it to VPN to my external server that I know only *I* have a key for, and that I can identify any MITM attack attempted on such a connection (i.e. the VPN won't be able to connect because the endpoints won't recognise each other).
Maybe it's not "CGI", let's say "special effects".
Didn't they have the light sabres in the first one?
Was not ILM basically BORN for the original Star Wars movie?
Does your car have a spoiler?
I've seen people pay WAY more than that to fit a "after-market spoiler" to a car that's not even capable of generating any kind of air-flow which would produce such an effect, nor any kind of aerodynamic effect to utilise them.
Don't even get me started on twin-exhausts and all kinds of other shite.
I agree, those people shouldn't be allowed to drive themselves, just through sheer stupidity and misunderstanding of how their car works, but I would posit that "owning a Tesla" is a much higher risk category for being a twat that anything else.
Is it just me that find Star Wars tedious, badly-written shite?
I mean, I wasn't around when the first came out. Maybe I missed the cult-train on that, but it was never anything more than a poor sci-fi movie to me. Not even "comparing the technology", it still had tons more CGI etc. in it than anything else for years afterwards, but I never found anything about the movie compelling. The "classic" sequels were just more of the same dross. People in teddy-bear costumes. It was like a very bad episode of Star Trek, after the budget had run out, but then tacked on with expensive CGI.
Then a lapse in time, in which possibly the "best parts" of the whole thing came out - the video games. The old DOS X-Wing / Tie-Fighter games were great. Because it was the cool bit of the films put into your hands with the sound effects.
I literally haven't even seen any of the "prequels" all the way through. I couldn't stand them. It was more of the same but with some decent-quality camera work and costuming, but stuck alongside the old dross.
I honestly can't fathom what's interesting about the storyline at all. It's a Star-Trek episode at best, in terms of concept. The early films remind me of poor 80's things like Flash Gordon. Fabulous and cultish but if you watch with anything approaching a modern critical eye, they are utter trash with a soundtrack
And it died off. In the 90's, Star Wars died and was just history, and became unpopular. Then it revamped and everyone went mad for it again.
I'm a geek and I'm often assumed to be both a Trekkie and a Star Wars guy and I honestly can't stand either. I can suffer watching an episode but I'm smirking to myself the whole time (and Patrick Stewart face-palming too).
I honestly don't get why. The acting is poor. The CGI is ruined by the crap (whether that's CGI characters or the complete lack of consistency by using CGI and bear-suits in the same scene). The storyline is quite literally "good versus evil". The dialogue is either twee or literally so dull I switch off (reminds me of parts of the Matrix sequels).
I don't get what's there to make a multi-million-dollar franchise. I certainly don't get what's in the plotline to actually get upset about.
I would honestly rather watch Spaceballs on loop.
Like the MP3 vs uncompressed debacle:
The vast majority of people just can't tell the difference at any reasonable working distance.
There's little point paying out for a 4K monitor.
The software dpi etc. settings can be overcome by scaling the interface on any modern OS, but you're still filling four times as many pixels - which hits performance of the graphics - no matter what.
I had a 17" laptop on my lap. I literally can't see a pixel even in the most basic of sans serif fonts. It's almost impossible to focus on the dot of an i or a period. Increasing my resolution won't benefit me in any way, will cost a ton of money, and will severely increase the demands on the graphics cards for any non-trivial purpose.
The people who built it almost certainly were more driven by religious reasons, but it's unknown.
The *person* (or handful of people) who designed it probably weren't.
In fact, they probably did it on commission on one religious leader who had no clue.
There's no reason in history to suggest such a pattern has ever changed.
The people who built the pyramids were much more likely to be religious than they were to be architects.