Good luck finding advertisers willing to pay all the millions necessary to make such an alternative viable when you have a "no holds barred" policy on what you show.
I think you miss... the advertisers will be the ones asking for this, not YouTube themselves, or other viewers, or politicians. Pretty much all those categories are routinely ignored by YouTube.
But if the advertisers feel they can't be seen to be paying this guy (which is what they're doing), they are going to pull out really quickly and maybe threaten to take large chunks of their business with them.
There's a reason, for instance, that if you see adverts on a porn site they are only ever for more porn and related items. No other ad network would bother to try, as their advertisers would quickly disappear from under them if they were found to be doing that. Nobody selling an ordinary consumer product is going to want to be associated with an idiot like this guy who's in the news taking a huge backlash for the stupid things he's done.
"This guy's a douche... oh look, he's sponsored by Cadbury's..."
I'm happy to assume we're right about human-created global warming based on CO2 etc. emissions. Let's take that as a given and run it to the logical conclusion.
The important thing is: If we were to stop ALL emissions today, immediately, completely, globally... what happens? Does the situation fix itself? Over how long? What's the impact on, say, sea-level rises or whatever in even the BEST case scenario?
Because if those BEST POSSIBLE impact is, say, displace a million people, but the impact of cutting emissions to those amounts is people dying of... what? Starvation, energy shortage for heating, increased taxation, etc etc. then we can use that as a baseline to decide if we even SHOULD be cutting emissions or whether we're too far gone.
It's quite possible, still, today, that the best course of action - even if ALL the accepted science is not only right but under/over-stating the problem, that we still should let it happen and deal with the consequences rather than the actions we'd need to take to fix it (i.e. somehow find the energy and technology to clean gigatons of air quickly).
Everybody seems to still be working on the scare-mongering and the "just cut back" mantras without actually looking at where the trade-off of actual effects lies. Are you honestly telling me that if we cut all CO2 emissions tomorrow, put all our spare energy into cleaning the air, that somehow all the predictions of doom would never come to fruition? I can't say that I buy that line without some evidence of that. And that evidence - past the point where people actually perform all these actions, globally, co-operatively, perfectly and immediately - is severely lacking.
There's not even any suggestion that we could "fix" anything properly, more than just "limit the amount of further damage". It may well even be that we've already reached a point of no return, which means... well... does it matter what we do? We don't seem to have the models extending past that point to work out "is the cure worse than the disease" (and, yes, WE were the disease).
It's not that I don't believe their predictions are true, but they don't go far enough into the contrary side to look at what that means in terms of trade-off. We're just told to stop CO2 etc. and things will magically be better, but there's no evidence of that versus "not quite making it as bad as it would otherwise be".
Heading towards the precipice at 1000mph, it doesn't really matter if you ditch a bit of dead-weight en-route or not, it's still gonna hurt when you impact. Maybe not technically quite so much as if you had that extra weight, but it's really not even worth the effort to bail it out.
I'm honestly concerned that we'll sink billions into trying to fix an already runaway problem, and have nothing prepared for the real consequences, which will basically have the same dire impact as the worst of predictions anyway but we're still sitting there trying to limit people's energy use etc., which will - overall - have a worse impact than if we'd just ploughed through and used the money to deal with the inevitable consequences.
I'm not saying that is WHAT will happen, but I don't see that anyone has ever eliminated that as a possibility, or even classed it as unlikely, with any kind of rigour that approaches the science that warns of the dire consequences in the first place.
I'd honestly like to be proven wrong... but everything I've ever seen, read, heard about all say "Do 'this'... Because we say... Don't worry, it'll fix everything... but nobody has checked that's actually true... and nobody has weighed the cost of 'this' against the cost of what would have gone wrong anyway". That may be because it's too uncertain, of course, which only makes me wonder even more if we should actually be changing course if we don't know where we're headed anyway.
Actually a splashscreen was quite a sensible human-interface decision. It's feedback to the user.
"Yes, we are running, we're doing something now" - in something that takes a couple of lines of code to display, and then you can leave on the screen to start up.
Before, and now still, programs could be executed and on a slugger of a machine churn for 10 minutes without ANY indication that anything was happening, in the taskbar or anywhere else. Even Chrome can still not show a taskbar icon while consuming 100% CPU in some circumstances. It's there, it's running, but nobody can tell without going into task manager.
This makes users RUN IT AGAIN. And again. Thinking that it's not loaded at all. Which adds to the load, etc.
It's a small sensible decision in a world where a program can run without ANY visual indication. How many programs are you running now? How many appear in your taskbar? The answers aren't the same.
It's got little to do with bloat, because the load times are STILL the same with or without a splashscreen. It takes literally milliseconds to execute a PNG-load from disk and blit-to-screen.
Not every workplace provides Office for home use. Not every home user works in an office (and hence probably wouldn't have it provided) Not every Office user is a professional (far from it).
Maybe people just want to send letters, open documents from their governments, banks, etc. without having to pay a monthly rental to Microsoft for the privilege (even if they don't use a Microsoft OS on their computer).
P.S. The Office OOXML file formats are an absolute farce. Basically, it just shovels the binary formats of old into an XML file with little to no interpretation or explanation. New documents tend to open just fine. But anything complicated, legacy, upgraded from older Word etc. has a shed-ton of undocumented (and Microsoft basically admit undocumentable) crap.
The EU took them to took where they had to provide a specification for the format and TONS of it is literally just binary shite from old Word formats shoved into a tag. It was complained about in court too. Even getting that far took DECADES.
The file format is opaque, ugly, and not easily transferable / interoperable, which is precisely why we need another office suite that can open it because what's the point of an open format that only one (paid-for) program can actually open?
What LibreOffice does do is get better every iteration.
Home users? They can live off LibreOffice for at least the last two versions. Power users? Same, but they may need to tweak some small things. Office users? Same, so long as their developers are aware of the use of both suites.
It's far from a waste of time.
I ran a school's IT. From a Windows laptop, With Libreoffice. If anything I could open more things than those with Word because it handled obscure and old formats that Word couldn't. It was never a problem. A school isn't exactly on the power-user end of fancy macros and DDE links etc. that don't transfer across nicely (because of undocumented / poorly documented Microsoft shite), so it could easily run off LibreOffice (like many schools now run from Google Docs entirely, which has EVEN LESS features).
P.S. I work for a huge school - we do not provide Office to staff, we do not provide Office to students, we do not use Office online. We use Google Docs, offline Office on the premises, and at home people use whatever they buy themselves. We are far from alone in this. As such, Libreoffice is more than useful for those people.
Hell, I get just as many Libreoffice documents as Apple Pages documents coming in from the parents / kids. MS Office can't even start opening the Pages ones properly and chooses "different standards" for showing the OpenXML ones. But Libreoffice will open 99% of what comes through our inboxes (millions of emails a year, and 1 million shared documents on Google Apps, to give you an idea of scale).
You will have to fit a charging box to your house to do that, huge infrastructure costs abound.
Gosh, I wonder what we could tax that's necessary for those electric cars to charge?
Tax high-draw electric units / capacity makes perfect sense because otherwise the grids WILL struggle to cope. And the feedback from cars to the grid is largely theoretical on such a scale at the moment. Sure, they could do it. But the losses involved are huge.
Seriously - a station full of dozens of 100A+ chargers, in constant 24 hours use, is a HUGE hit on the local grid.
There is nothing to suggest that Apple are any different to Google, their terms and conditions are the same (and Google offer, in writing, EU-data promises that Apple simply don't... I know, I had to research it for work).
The only difference is that YOU DON'T KNOW who they're selling your data to. Because they don't tell you.
Also, they're quite happy to take billions to have Google as your default search on Apple devices:
But most people can't afford a new car anyway, and most of the cars on the road are 5-10 years old minimum.
Also, less than 1% of NEW CAR SALES are electric today (worldwide, unless you live in Norway). Literally 99 petrol cars to every 1 electric sold, even today (taken worldwide). How long is it going to take, even assuming some kind of exponential sales growth, before a significant portion of the on-the-road vehicles are electric?
To make a dent in the existing market is going to take a decade minimum, and even then most people will still be driving a fuelled car instead of electric.
Whether it pays for itself or not, it really doesn't matter if you can't afford it, people aren't buying it, production isn't there, and there'll be a glut of cheap petrol cars even when they do start taking over.
Traditional cars are going to be being made and sold for a LONG time yet. You aren't going to be able to change that. And a car that Mazda designs now will be sold in 5-or-so-years time, most probably, which means they can sell it for 5-or-more years. It's not stretching a sunk investment, it's just ordinary business-as-usual.
I'm sure they have some R&D in electric cars and will start producing more electric models, but they will be funded by traditional sales for another decade at least. And it will be maybe another decade after that before those cars disappear from the roads.
And the point at which electric cars are suddenly a significant portion of the market? They will attract all the normal taxes that loss of traditional cars will cause - in the UK, that means heavy taxes on petrol, road taxes, congestion charges, etc. that electric cars are currently avoiding or exempt from. What will happen is that electrical use will be taxed, maybe even just car-charging-use (e.g. at stations, or home units drawing more than a certain amount).
The countries lose a LOT of tax if electric cars become prevalent, and they're currently subsidised, in effect. That will rapidly switch as they become available in such numbers that momentum drives sales. To make up that lost tax, be prepared for HEAVY high-energy-use taxation, or more toll-charging, or even paid road-usage-tracking to charge per mile. Sure they'll also raise tax on traditional cars too (to "penalise" the pollution that they are being fined for by international agreements) but that's short-lived.
And they'll be justified in raising energy tax - someone has to put in place enough infrastructure to charge all those things which is going to REALLY whack peak load and maybe even change the timing of peak usage entirely.
Every single time an Apple user tells me how great their phone is, I realise that they just didn't understand that ALL phones do that, that there are easier ways, that there's no need to pay through the nose to do those things, or that they didn't realise certain things were even possible because "Apple doesn't have that".
I have personally never found a selling point for an Apple device over their competitors, certainly not one that justifies the price difference. But people are happy to live in ignorance because they don't actually buy the device to do those things, they buy the device to go on YouTube occasionally or order their shopping or stick the kids on a game. And there, pretty much, you don't require any particular specialities and everything else is just a "toy" to play with.
Apple is a designer brand sold on the fact that "I've heard Apple are better". I've yet to find that to be true, however, but most people spend a lot of money on an Apple device, use it for everything they were ever going to anyway (i.e. not very much) and are happy that it does that. Fair play to them. But in terms of VALUE for money, I can't even begin to justify that over any other device.
Well... I'm sure that it gets looked at but it's nowhere near the accepted medical advice yet. If *you* claim it, you don't get sued for the next 50 years for the damage of you being wrong, but they do. Of course they move slower, but that's because they test it first.
That said, I basically live off sugar... enormous amounts, and carbs through the roof.
I once bought myself a blood glucose meter (not a cheap one, the proper diabetes-user ones) because I had a few odd symptoms (and ANY symptom is an odd symptom with me as I basically have no health problems at all) and I didn't want to waste my doctor's time if I could pre-empt some of what they would ask me to do.
I followed the instructions to the letter, learned how to use it properly, tested regularly, even to the point of taking it into work to test throughout the day. I can tell you now... my blood glucose was smack-bang in the normal range every time I tried it. Fasting, after eating, hours later, middle of the night, whenever I tried it. It varied by pitiful amounts, and no matter what limit certain countries use to diagnose blood glucose abnormalities, I was miles away from them (your 4.0 rings a bell, because I think that's mostly what I scored, but whatever it was, it was always firmly in the "normal" range and didn't even vary when I ate).
I think it's far too deep a topic and specific to the patient to assume that one entry "for" (you) and one "against" (me) are right, and you can only resolve it statistically, which means a whole lot more study to prove we're not just outliers who are more likely to recount their experiences that people who are just "normal"/"average".
But I have to say... I have zero medical symptoms and I eat nothing but sugar and carbs all day long. I wouldn't dream to recommend that others follow my suit, nor that I'm somehow "right", nor that all the doctors are wrong for disagreeing.
(P.S. A few weeks later, my tiny symptoms went away without any changes to diet whatsoever, or I confirmed them to be quite normal).
"Well known" versus proven is a very different thing.
The number of well conducted, long-term, dietary-monitoring studies of people with such conditions is vanishingly small.
Though, indeed, we suspect such conditions to be almost "diabetes of the brain", that's a relatively recent development in terms of anything but absolute conjecture.
Using that information also doesn't necessarily help anyone - by the time you have symptoms, it's almost certainly too late to do much about it.
But that the mechanism is somewhat sugar-dependent is only recently proven (and proven is a big word here, which is probably not appropriate yet), and that doesn't mean it's anything more than a side-effect of the condition, not necessarily a pre-requisite or cause.
It's an interesting area... but it needs decades of study to do anything useful with it.
If you offer a good at a certain price, predictably, in writing, with prices that rarely fluctuate much but that you control...
And people take you up on that offer. And then you can't deliver.
Is that THEIR fault? Or yours?
If electricity were free and in short supply, sure, people using it for strange non-essential purposes would indeed be a bit immoral. But those people who want that electricity are paying for it.
If the money you're charging for electricity can't put in place infrastructure to deliver that electricity in the right places and at the right times, is it really the consumer's problem? Or the people promising electricity at those prices?
If you can't deliver it at that price, raise your prices. If the infrastructure needs to change to cope, or you need new technology or you have to pay to change the way you operate the supply... then you raise prices to compensate.
But complaining about people USING electricity, at the advertised prices? That's a bit stupid. If anything they are actually CONTRIBUTING to investing in the electrical network. It's all the energy-saving nutters who turn off every switch that's drawing 0.1W for a fraction of a second before they do so - those are the people literally taking the bare minimum they need and investing back the bare minimum to get it.
This is why getting energy companies to push green tech, energy saving bulbs, efficient appliances etc. is really, really, really stupid. To use a US analogy that's like gun manufacturers being forced to say that you should be buying less bullets. Or a washing machine company telling you to wash your clothes less often.
If you can't deliver for the price you advertise, pick a better price or get out of the market. That there's a glut of people who WANT to pay the price your offering for the product you're delivering? You really shouldn't be complaining - that's almost unheard of in business.
Hint: If that's causing shortages, change the charging structures so that you penalise heavy, instantaneous uses as well as peak load. Then you'll make more money from those uses, which you can use to cure that problem. It's almost like a tax - tax the things you don't want to happen, and then use those taxes to stop those things being a problem.
Are you going to repair a one-use $2 greetings card? Likely not. It would be considered disposable.
Are you going to consider a $700 iPhone disposable? Likely not.
As such, the definition would be quite simple to lay down.
However, every gadget I buy seems to have a replaceable battery. Huawei 4G Wifi Router? Check. $20 GPS tracker for my car? Check. $20 in-car dashcam? Check. $10 Blueooth keyboard/trackpad? Check. XBox controllers? Check.
Pretty much if it has a battery, I can replace it. Even my phones (because I'm not an idiot and didn't want to buy one without a replaceable battery having bought replacement batteries for all the phones I've ever owned, and which ALL still work).
In fact, all of them even seem to use standardised batteries, which is even nicer. They're all just bog-standard phone batteries.
In fact, even in single-use disposable cards, I can't imagine why you wouldn't make the battery replaceable. Almost all the ones I've ever seen have a tiny button or coin cell in there. It's easy and cheaper than soldering the things in place.
So long as he didn't hurt anyone else along the way, I'd be happy with one less drunk driver in the world.
Chances are that, without pressing the power when he passed out, it would be a bumper-stop, fender-bender or he'd have hit a small solid object rather than hurt anyone.
Er... no we don't. Don't believe the hype - an "automated" Tesla car went straight under a lorry without even detecting it. That's nowhere NEAR being able to self-drive. Just because the stats are low at the moment doesn't mean it's representative of what would happen if you classed them as fully automated and let them all loose on the road en-masse.
And liability.
If the system was truly automated, liability would NOT be with the driver at all. It would be with the insurers and the manufacturers. They would have to pay the full costs of every dent, bump, accident and fatality. They don't want that. The reason they don't want that is that they know it's not ready for that yet.
Simply put: We don't have the technology. If you think we do, the manufacturers and insurers don't. That should tell you something.
Also, there are... what? Maybe 250,000 Tesla's on the road, worldwide? There are 1bn cars on the road. That's about 0.025% of cars out there. If all the automated cars models were put together, you'd be lucky to hit 0.05%. Extrapolating from what 0.05% of cars do, when they are sold as driver-responsible, driver-assistance cars and not automated cars (so most people DON'T just use them as automated cars), and then applying that to say we could have fully automated cars "safely" is more than a little misleading.
P.S. in this case, the car decided to block the entire road. Maybe that was "safe" for the driver, but extrapolate that to millions of automated cars with the same kind of handling and watch as the road system collapses because two joining automated cars don't cede to each other proper and neither proceed "for safety" at a point that nobody can pass them.
And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.
Trying to do it to win $20m in today's money (which wouldn't even cover 0.3% of the cost of how we did it back then) is a bit more difficult. Hell, just the fuel alone could cost that, or the insurance for if it happens to explode on the launchpad.
Not viable. Especially if you are only fronting that money in the hope of winning the prize.
The reason the Moon landings were so incredible to some people, is because of the sheer huge amounts of money spent on them - hundreds of billions. You could do an awful lot more with the money than say "we stepped on the Moon". And in today's money it's even more than you might think.
More surprisingly is that they were ever authorised at all, not that the sheer volume of money thrown at them actually resulted in success.
If it did, it would be in breach of most of the data protection laws in the EU.
They are either data processors (which would be very difficult to organise legally across international boundaries) or not (in which case they shouldn't have access to the unencrypted data at all).
EU laws are much more strict in this, and I can't process any data for my employer outside the EU. Hence things like SurveyMonkey, etc. are off-limits as they are hosted in the US.
Pretty much, even allowing the CAPABILITY for non-EU personnel to access EU data is an offence, which is why the EU side of Microsoft (an entirely different legal entity) cannot allow it to happen without an EU court order, cannot provide credentials that could make it happen, and cannot be seen to assist in any way, shape or form.
And technically, because the Microsoft US entity doesn't have control of that data, they are then unable to do anything about getting sued into oblivion because what they are being ordered to do is impossible for them to do anything about and the only place that can do anything would be breaking their own laws.
You want this data, you get the EU courts to order it. Good luck!
You just need to ensure that you treat speculative loads in a way such that they can't reveal information. Say, another cache just for speculative loads. This would also mean you don't clutter up the normal cache with the non-used results, and for the brief moment that you're executing down a path you're using already-cached results, just from another cache. No reason that can't then send a hint or even directly transfer to the main cache.
The problem is really: Is fixing it worth while compared to just turning it off? Given that there are chips that are capable of doing speculative loads without hitting such problems (because they do proper permissions checks and/or have the caching in the right places), it's perfectly feasible that we'll be fixing the problem in the future rather than just avoiding it.
The problem is already in every production processor anyway, so it's already going to be a mess. But there's no reason you can't fix it.
Intel's problem was patenting a certain technique unique to themselves... everyone else avoided at least some of the problem by doing things differently, and yet was still able to compete.
Another couple of years, and processors will be advertising speculative caches or whatever the solution is, in their feature bits.
He's saying that you shouldn't have to "opt-in" to the security that everybody expects when you boot up your processor.
At the moment, the processor just says "Hey, if you flip some magic bits when I boot I'll slow myself down and try to apply a fix".
The processor should instead say "Hey, I'm one of the fixed models, don't bother trying to fix me again".
It's a marketing / legal tactic so they can say the processor runs at such-a-speed (but insecurely) whereas anyone who actually cares about using the processor has to - every boot - flips lots of magic bits to make it secure and kill its performance. If you forget, insecure. If you do it wrong, insecure. If your OS doesn't support it, insecure.
What Linus wants, and I can't disagree with, is a flag to this "this processor isn't vulnerable, so you don't need to do anything." which, if it's not present, they know that they have to apply as many protections as they can but can say "Hey, you have an insecure processor, we'll do our best" in the syslogs.
Wait six months. Buy some cheap Chinese knockoff that has / supports them all.
A guy in my workplace came to me last year with some stupendously expensive headphones his wife had bought him. I didn't know what they were but, as I took them, I mentioned that I'd just bought a couple of pairs of something similar.
Over-the-ear headphones. Large amounts of sound insulation on the ear-cushions, so you were deaf to the world when they were on. Rechargeable wireless (with plain USB cable) Bluetooth. SD-Card. FM radio. And a 3.5mm socket. That you could use to either play music through the headphones when the bluetooth/battery wasn't on, or that you could pull the signal OUT of into another set of headphones for a friend if you were playing something on the FM/SD/Bluetooth.
Mine not only outclassed his, out-sounded his and out-featured his, they lasted much longer than his, and they were ridiculously CHEAP rather than ridiculously expensive.
To be honest, you don't need every connector. That headphone is fine. 3.5mm for "retro" stuff. Bluetooth for everything else. If your phone/laptop can't do Bluetooth but has anything else, adaptors are literally pence nowadays.
Same as when I bought a DVD player (cheap one was region free, played everything, had every output on it, just works, expensive models from famous brands wouldn't even play a US DVD once locked to EU region and only had a handful of outputs), a Blu-Ray player (same), MP3 player, etc.
To be honest, I've deliberately not upgraded my smartphone because they get rid of the ports, the battery slots, the SD-card slots etc. Fuck off. I don't want that, so I won't buy it.
And I wouldn't buy headphones with a recognisable brand on if you gave me 50% off. They won't be any better than anything else, will still be over-priced, and likely won't have anything I want on them.
Pretty sure that they have some advanced stuff, which they wouldn't be bragging about if they had any clue about military intelligence.
But I doubt they have anything particularly amazing. The 60's was an era of spacecraft and firsts, compared to the best spyplane the Apollo launch moved much faster (escape velocity is Mach 33?). What was happening in public was infinitely more impressive than what was happening behind closed doors.
However, I'm sure they have some neat stuff.
But... the whole "terrorists running from LEO satellites?" I don't buy it one bit. First, those orbits are public knowledge, you just have to have the first inkling about looking for that information. Secondly, they can change immediately and rapidly. If they want to catch you out, they easily can. Thirdly... those satellites can image some vast portion of the Earth wherever they are... they don't have to only look straight down. They can literally see whole continents without having to do more than rotate an internal mirror. Fourthly, if anyone wants a surveillance network, they would launch enough to ensure overlap - about 5 or 6 identical should be fine to image any part of the globe, 24/7, any time they like, in whatever detail they like.
It's not like the old days where you could duck-and-hide for a few minutes as the only spy sat in the sky went overhead. They can see anything they like, whenever they like, and all kinds of countries have their own global systems too.
So... that bit? That's entirely nonsense. Which means that the use of a spy-plane like that for anything you could do from a satellite is just pointless and expensive. It's either doing something else entirely... or it's not got a purpose.
I've had several Chromecasts, of the different generations.
All connected.
Never had a problem.
That said, I see no reason for a device on my wireless network to be connected all the time so they were off a lot. Also, I see no reason for the Chromecast to be able to swamp my wifi, so it was QoS'd and band-width limited (i.e. it could only "guarantee" 5-10Mbps, the rest was "if it's there and not being used).
I can't say that I ever saw a single similar problem whatsoever.
Now my Chromecast is connected to a 4G Wifi box (the size of a matchbox, with a SIM in it and not much else. It's battery powered (but constantly plugged into USB), low-power, pocket-sized, portable, not really designed to be "the entire house network" but does an admirable job and the Chromecast connects straight to it along with 9 other devices. Can't say I've seen a problem, and we use it all the time.
Over Christmas, it was casting friend's YouTube videos periodically while a crowd of people used it to play Jackbox games online while all the laptops and tablets and smartphones were turned on. Hell, it had a PS4 connected to it for downloading updates.
Sorry, but Chromecast's *shouldn't* do this, agreed, but if your hardware can't handle a few thousand packets in a stream of 400Mbps devices connecting to them, then they really aren't fit for purpose anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Good luck finding advertisers willing to pay all the millions necessary to make such an alternative viable when you have a "no holds barred" policy on what you show.
I think you miss... the advertisers will be the ones asking for this, not YouTube themselves, or other viewers, or politicians. Pretty much all those categories are routinely ignored by YouTube.
But if the advertisers feel they can't be seen to be paying this guy (which is what they're doing), they are going to pull out really quickly and maybe threaten to take large chunks of their business with them.
There's a reason, for instance, that if you see adverts on a porn site they are only ever for more porn and related items. No other ad network would bother to try, as their advertisers would quickly disappear from under them if they were found to be doing that. Nobody selling an ordinary consumer product is going to want to be associated with an idiot like this guy who's in the news taking a huge backlash for the stupid things he's done.
"This guy's a douche... oh look, he's sponsored by Cadbury's..."
First blindness lawsuit filed in 3.... 2... 1...
For the millionth time:
I'm happy to assume we're right about human-created global warming based on CO2 etc. emissions. Let's take that as a given and run it to the logical conclusion.
The important thing is: If we were to stop ALL emissions today, immediately, completely, globally... what happens? Does the situation fix itself? Over how long? What's the impact on, say, sea-level rises or whatever in even the BEST case scenario?
Because if those BEST POSSIBLE impact is, say, displace a million people, but the impact of cutting emissions to those amounts is people dying of... what? Starvation, energy shortage for heating, increased taxation, etc etc. then we can use that as a baseline to decide if we even SHOULD be cutting emissions or whether we're too far gone.
It's quite possible, still, today, that the best course of action - even if ALL the accepted science is not only right but under/over-stating the problem, that we still should let it happen and deal with the consequences rather than the actions we'd need to take to fix it (i.e. somehow find the energy and technology to clean gigatons of air quickly).
Everybody seems to still be working on the scare-mongering and the "just cut back" mantras without actually looking at where the trade-off of actual effects lies. Are you honestly telling me that if we cut all CO2 emissions tomorrow, put all our spare energy into cleaning the air, that somehow all the predictions of doom would never come to fruition? I can't say that I buy that line without some evidence of that. And that evidence - past the point where people actually perform all these actions, globally, co-operatively, perfectly and immediately - is severely lacking.
There's not even any suggestion that we could "fix" anything properly, more than just "limit the amount of further damage". It may well even be that we've already reached a point of no return, which means... well... does it matter what we do? We don't seem to have the models extending past that point to work out "is the cure worse than the disease" (and, yes, WE were the disease).
It's not that I don't believe their predictions are true, but they don't go far enough into the contrary side to look at what that means in terms of trade-off. We're just told to stop CO2 etc. and things will magically be better, but there's no evidence of that versus "not quite making it as bad as it would otherwise be".
Heading towards the precipice at 1000mph, it doesn't really matter if you ditch a bit of dead-weight en-route or not, it's still gonna hurt when you impact. Maybe not technically quite so much as if you had that extra weight, but it's really not even worth the effort to bail it out.
I'm honestly concerned that we'll sink billions into trying to fix an already runaway problem, and have nothing prepared for the real consequences, which will basically have the same dire impact as the worst of predictions anyway but we're still sitting there trying to limit people's energy use etc., which will - overall - have a worse impact than if we'd just ploughed through and used the money to deal with the inevitable consequences.
I'm not saying that is WHAT will happen, but I don't see that anyone has ever eliminated that as a possibility, or even classed it as unlikely, with any kind of rigour that approaches the science that warns of the dire consequences in the first place.
I'd honestly like to be proven wrong... but everything I've ever seen, read, heard about all say "Do 'this'... Because we say... Don't worry, it'll fix everything... but nobody has checked that's actually true... and nobody has weighed the cost of 'this' against the cost of what would have gone wrong anyway". That may be because it's too uncertain, of course, which only makes me wonder even more if we should actually be changing course if we don't know where we're headed anyway.
Actually a splashscreen was quite a sensible human-interface decision. It's feedback to the user.
"Yes, we are running, we're doing something now" - in something that takes a couple of lines of code to display, and then you can leave on the screen to start up.
Before, and now still, programs could be executed and on a slugger of a machine churn for 10 minutes without ANY indication that anything was happening, in the taskbar or anywhere else. Even Chrome can still not show a taskbar icon while consuming 100% CPU in some circumstances. It's there, it's running, but nobody can tell without going into task manager.
This makes users RUN IT AGAIN. And again. Thinking that it's not loaded at all. Which adds to the load, etc.
It's a small sensible decision in a world where a program can run without ANY visual indication. How many programs are you running now? How many appear in your taskbar? The answers aren't the same.
It's got little to do with bloat, because the load times are STILL the same with or without a splashscreen. It takes literally milliseconds to execute a PNG-load from disk and blit-to-screen.
Wow. Ignorance.
Not every workplace provides Office for home use.
Not every home user works in an office (and hence probably wouldn't have it provided)
Not every Office user is a professional (far from it).
Maybe people just want to send letters, open documents from their governments, banks, etc. without having to pay a monthly rental to Microsoft for the privilege (even if they don't use a Microsoft OS on their computer).
P.S. The Office OOXML file formats are an absolute farce. Basically, it just shovels the binary formats of old into an XML file with little to no interpretation or explanation. New documents tend to open just fine. But anything complicated, legacy, upgraded from older Word etc. has a shed-ton of undocumented (and Microsoft basically admit undocumentable) crap.
The EU took them to took where they had to provide a specification for the format and TONS of it is literally just binary shite from old Word formats shoved into a tag. It was complained about in court too. Even getting that far took DECADES.
The file format is opaque, ugly, and not easily transferable / interoperable, which is precisely why we need another office suite that can open it because what's the point of an open format that only one (paid-for) program can actually open?
What LibreOffice does do is get better every iteration.
Home users? They can live off LibreOffice for at least the last two versions.
Power users? Same, but they may need to tweak some small things.
Office users? Same, so long as their developers are aware of the use of both suites.
It's far from a waste of time.
I ran a school's IT. From a Windows laptop, With Libreoffice. If anything I could open more things than those with Word because it handled obscure and old formats that Word couldn't. It was never a problem. A school isn't exactly on the power-user end of fancy macros and DDE links etc. that don't transfer across nicely (because of undocumented / poorly documented Microsoft shite), so it could easily run off LibreOffice (like many schools now run from Google Docs entirely, which has EVEN LESS features).
P.S. I work for a huge school - we do not provide Office to staff, we do not provide Office to students, we do not use Office online. We use Google Docs, offline Office on the premises, and at home people use whatever they buy themselves. We are far from alone in this. As such, Libreoffice is more than useful for those people.
Hell, I get just as many Libreoffice documents as Apple Pages documents coming in from the parents / kids. MS Office can't even start opening the Pages ones properly and chooses "different standards" for showing the OpenXML ones. But Libreoffice will open 99% of what comes through our inboxes (millions of emails a year, and 1 million shared documents on Google Apps, to give you an idea of scale).
God, yeah, like no software has a splash screen nowadays.
Except...
The latest versions of Office.
You will have to fit a charging box to your house to do that, huge infrastructure costs abound.
Gosh, I wonder what we could tax that's necessary for those electric cars to charge?
Tax high-draw electric units / capacity makes perfect sense because otherwise the grids WILL struggle to cope. And the feedback from cars to the grid is largely theoretical on such a scale at the moment. Sure, they could do it. But the losses involved are huge.
Seriously - a station full of dozens of 100A+ chargers, in constant 24 hours use, is a HUGE hit on the local grid.
And that assumes that NOBODY ever sells a new petrol car again.
Otherwise your maths is out.
You've applied "exponential" to the market share, not sales.
There is nothing to suggest that Apple are any different to Google, their terms and conditions are the same (and Google offer, in writing, EU-data promises that Apple simply don't... I know, I had to research it for work).
The only difference is that YOU DON'T KNOW who they're selling your data to. Because they don't tell you.
Also, they're quite happy to take billions to have Google as your default search on Apple devices:
http://bgr.com/2017/08/14/goog...
How averse to selling your data do you think they actually are?
All very nice.
But most people can't afford a new car anyway, and most of the cars on the road are 5-10 years old minimum.
Also, less than 1% of NEW CAR SALES are electric today (worldwide, unless you live in Norway). Literally 99 petrol cars to every 1 electric sold, even today (taken worldwide). How long is it going to take, even assuming some kind of exponential sales growth, before a significant portion of the on-the-road vehicles are electric?
To make a dent in the existing market is going to take a decade minimum, and even then most people will still be driving a fuelled car instead of electric.
Whether it pays for itself or not, it really doesn't matter if you can't afford it, people aren't buying it, production isn't there, and there'll be a glut of cheap petrol cars even when they do start taking over.
Traditional cars are going to be being made and sold for a LONG time yet. You aren't going to be able to change that. And a car that Mazda designs now will be sold in 5-or-so-years time, most probably, which means they can sell it for 5-or-more years. It's not stretching a sunk investment, it's just ordinary business-as-usual.
I'm sure they have some R&D in electric cars and will start producing more electric models, but they will be funded by traditional sales for another decade at least. And it will be maybe another decade after that before those cars disappear from the roads.
And the point at which electric cars are suddenly a significant portion of the market? They will attract all the normal taxes that loss of traditional cars will cause - in the UK, that means heavy taxes on petrol, road taxes, congestion charges, etc. that electric cars are currently avoiding or exempt from. What will happen is that electrical use will be taxed, maybe even just car-charging-use (e.g. at stations, or home units drawing more than a certain amount).
The countries lose a LOT of tax if electric cars become prevalent, and they're currently subsidised, in effect. That will rapidly switch as they become available in such numbers that momentum drives sales. To make up that lost tax, be prepared for HEAVY high-energy-use taxation, or more toll-charging, or even paid road-usage-tracking to charge per mile. Sure they'll also raise tax on traditional cars too (to "penalise" the pollution that they are being fined for by international agreements) but that's short-lived.
And they'll be justified in raising energy tax - someone has to put in place enough infrastructure to charge all those things which is going to REALLY whack peak load and maybe even change the timing of peak usage entirely.
Every single time an Apple user tells me how great their phone is, I realise that they just didn't understand that ALL phones do that, that there are easier ways, that there's no need to pay through the nose to do those things, or that they didn't realise certain things were even possible because "Apple doesn't have that".
I have personally never found a selling point for an Apple device over their competitors, certainly not one that justifies the price difference. But people are happy to live in ignorance because they don't actually buy the device to do those things, they buy the device to go on YouTube occasionally or order their shopping or stick the kids on a game. And there, pretty much, you don't require any particular specialities and everything else is just a "toy" to play with.
Apple is a designer brand sold on the fact that "I've heard Apple are better". I've yet to find that to be true, however, but most people spend a lot of money on an Apple device, use it for everything they were ever going to anyway (i.e. not very much) and are happy that it does that. Fair play to them. But in terms of VALUE for money, I can't even begin to justify that over any other device.
Well... I'm sure that it gets looked at but it's nowhere near the accepted medical advice yet. If *you* claim it, you don't get sued for the next 50 years for the damage of you being wrong, but they do. Of course they move slower, but that's because they test it first.
That said, I basically live off sugar... enormous amounts, and carbs through the roof.
I once bought myself a blood glucose meter (not a cheap one, the proper diabetes-user ones) because I had a few odd symptoms (and ANY symptom is an odd symptom with me as I basically have no health problems at all) and I didn't want to waste my doctor's time if I could pre-empt some of what they would ask me to do.
I followed the instructions to the letter, learned how to use it properly, tested regularly, even to the point of taking it into work to test throughout the day. I can tell you now... my blood glucose was smack-bang in the normal range every time I tried it. Fasting, after eating, hours later, middle of the night, whenever I tried it. It varied by pitiful amounts, and no matter what limit certain countries use to diagnose blood glucose abnormalities, I was miles away from them (your 4.0 rings a bell, because I think that's mostly what I scored, but whatever it was, it was always firmly in the "normal" range and didn't even vary when I ate).
I think it's far too deep a topic and specific to the patient to assume that one entry "for" (you) and one "against" (me) are right, and you can only resolve it statistically, which means a whole lot more study to prove we're not just outliers who are more likely to recount their experiences that people who are just "normal"/"average".
But I have to say... I have zero medical symptoms and I eat nothing but sugar and carbs all day long. I wouldn't dream to recommend that others follow my suit, nor that I'm somehow "right", nor that all the doctors are wrong for disagreeing.
(P.S. A few weeks later, my tiny symptoms went away without any changes to diet whatsoever, or I confirmed them to be quite normal).
"Well known" versus proven is a very different thing.
The number of well conducted, long-term, dietary-monitoring studies of people with such conditions is vanishingly small.
Though, indeed, we suspect such conditions to be almost "diabetes of the brain", that's a relatively recent development in terms of anything but absolute conjecture.
Using that information also doesn't necessarily help anyone - by the time you have symptoms, it's almost certainly too late to do much about it.
But that the mechanism is somewhat sugar-dependent is only recently proven (and proven is a big word here, which is probably not appropriate yet), and that doesn't mean it's anything more than a side-effect of the condition, not necessarily a pre-requisite or cause.
It's an interesting area... but it needs decades of study to do anything useful with it.
Question:
If you offer a good at a certain price, predictably, in writing, with prices that rarely fluctuate much but that you control...
And people take you up on that offer.
And then you can't deliver.
Is that THEIR fault? Or yours?
If electricity were free and in short supply, sure, people using it for strange non-essential purposes would indeed be a bit immoral. But those people who want that electricity are paying for it.
If the money you're charging for electricity can't put in place infrastructure to deliver that electricity in the right places and at the right times, is it really the consumer's problem? Or the people promising electricity at those prices?
If you can't deliver it at that price, raise your prices. If the infrastructure needs to change to cope, or you need new technology or you have to pay to change the way you operate the supply... then you raise prices to compensate.
But complaining about people USING electricity, at the advertised prices? That's a bit stupid. If anything they are actually CONTRIBUTING to investing in the electrical network. It's all the energy-saving nutters who turn off every switch that's drawing 0.1W for a fraction of a second before they do so - those are the people literally taking the bare minimum they need and investing back the bare minimum to get it.
This is why getting energy companies to push green tech, energy saving bulbs, efficient appliances etc. is really, really, really stupid. To use a US analogy that's like gun manufacturers being forced to say that you should be buying less bullets. Or a washing machine company telling you to wash your clothes less often.
If you can't deliver for the price you advertise, pick a better price or get out of the market. That there's a glut of people who WANT to pay the price your offering for the product you're delivering? You really shouldn't be complaining - that's almost unheard of in business.
Hint: If that's causing shortages, change the charging structures so that you penalise heavy, instantaneous uses as well as peak load. Then you'll make more money from those uses, which you can use to cure that problem. It's almost like a tax - tax the things you don't want to happen, and then use those taxes to stop those things being a problem.
Are you going to repair a one-use $2 greetings card? Likely not. It would be considered disposable.
Are you going to consider a $700 iPhone disposable? Likely not.
As such, the definition would be quite simple to lay down.
However, every gadget I buy seems to have a replaceable battery. Huawei 4G Wifi Router? Check. $20 GPS tracker for my car? Check. $20 in-car dashcam? Check. $10 Blueooth keyboard/trackpad? Check. XBox controllers? Check.
Pretty much if it has a battery, I can replace it. Even my phones (because I'm not an idiot and didn't want to buy one without a replaceable battery having bought replacement batteries for all the phones I've ever owned, and which ALL still work).
In fact, all of them even seem to use standardised batteries, which is even nicer. They're all just bog-standard phone batteries.
In fact, even in single-use disposable cards, I can't imagine why you wouldn't make the battery replaceable. Almost all the ones I've ever seen have a tiny button or coin cell in there. It's easy and cheaper than soldering the things in place.
So long as he didn't hurt anyone else along the way, I'd be happy with one less drunk driver in the world.
Chances are that, without pressing the power when he passed out, it would be a bumper-stop, fender-bender or he'd have hit a small solid object rather than hurt anyone.
Er... no we don't. Don't believe the hype - an "automated" Tesla car went straight under a lorry without even detecting it. That's nowhere NEAR being able to self-drive. Just because the stats are low at the moment doesn't mean it's representative of what would happen if you classed them as fully automated and let them all loose on the road en-masse.
And liability.
If the system was truly automated, liability would NOT be with the driver at all. It would be with the insurers and the manufacturers. They would have to pay the full costs of every dent, bump, accident and fatality. They don't want that. The reason they don't want that is that they know it's not ready for that yet.
Simply put: We don't have the technology. If you think we do, the manufacturers and insurers don't. That should tell you something.
Also, there are... what? Maybe 250,000 Tesla's on the road, worldwide? There are 1bn cars on the road. That's about 0.025% of cars out there. If all the automated cars models were put together, you'd be lucky to hit 0.05%. Extrapolating from what 0.05% of cars do, when they are sold as driver-responsible, driver-assistance cars and not automated cars (so most people DON'T just use them as automated cars), and then applying that to say we could have fully automated cars "safely" is more than a little misleading.
P.S. in this case, the car decided to block the entire road. Maybe that was "safe" for the driver, but extrapolate that to millions of automated cars with the same kind of handling and watch as the road system collapses because two joining automated cars don't cede to each other proper and neither proceed "for safety" at a point that nobody can pass them.
Yup.
And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.
Trying to do it to win $20m in today's money (which wouldn't even cover 0.3% of the cost of how we did it back then) is a bit more difficult. Hell, just the fuel alone could cost that, or the insurance for if it happens to explode on the launchpad.
Not viable. Especially if you are only fronting that money in the hope of winning the prize.
The reason the Moon landings were so incredible to some people, is because of the sheer huge amounts of money spent on them - hundreds of billions. You could do an awful lot more with the money than say "we stepped on the Moon". And in today's money it's even more than you might think.
More surprisingly is that they were ever authorised at all, not that the sheer volume of money thrown at them actually resulted in success.
If it did, it would be in breach of most of the data protection laws in the EU.
They are either data processors (which would be very difficult to organise legally across international boundaries) or not (in which case they shouldn't have access to the unencrypted data at all).
EU laws are much more strict in this, and I can't process any data for my employer outside the EU. Hence things like SurveyMonkey, etc. are off-limits as they are hosted in the US.
Fail to comply: Get sued in the US.
Comply: Get sued by all the other countries.
There's a reason that we have jurisdictions.
Pretty much, even allowing the CAPABILITY for non-EU personnel to access EU data is an offence, which is why the EU side of Microsoft (an entirely different legal entity) cannot allow it to happen without an EU court order, cannot provide credentials that could make it happen, and cannot be seen to assist in any way, shape or form.
And technically, because the Microsoft US entity doesn't have control of that data, they are then unable to do anything about getting sued into oblivion because what they are being ordered to do is impossible for them to do anything about and the only place that can do anything would be breaking their own laws.
You want this data, you get the EU courts to order it. Good luck!
You can fix it.
You just need to ensure that you treat speculative loads in a way such that they can't reveal information. Say, another cache just for speculative loads. This would also mean you don't clutter up the normal cache with the non-used results, and for the brief moment that you're executing down a path you're using already-cached results, just from another cache. No reason that can't then send a hint or even directly transfer to the main cache.
The problem is really: Is fixing it worth while compared to just turning it off? Given that there are chips that are capable of doing speculative loads without hitting such problems (because they do proper permissions checks and/or have the caching in the right places), it's perfectly feasible that we'll be fixing the problem in the future rather than just avoiding it.
The problem is already in every production processor anyway, so it's already going to be a mess. But there's no reason you can't fix it.
Intel's problem was patenting a certain technique unique to themselves... everyone else avoided at least some of the problem by doing things differently, and yet was still able to compete.
Another couple of years, and processors will be advertising speculative caches or whatever the solution is, in their feature bits.
He's saying that you shouldn't have to "opt-in" to the security that everybody expects when you boot up your processor.
At the moment, the processor just says "Hey, if you flip some magic bits when I boot I'll slow myself down and try to apply a fix".
The processor should instead say "Hey, I'm one of the fixed models, don't bother trying to fix me again".
It's a marketing / legal tactic so they can say the processor runs at such-a-speed (but insecurely) whereas anyone who actually cares about using the processor has to - every boot - flips lots of magic bits to make it secure and kill its performance. If you forget, insecure. If you do it wrong, insecure. If your OS doesn't support it, insecure.
What Linus wants, and I can't disagree with, is a flag to this "this processor isn't vulnerable, so you don't need to do anything." which, if it's not present, they know that they have to apply as many protections as they can but can say "Hey, you have an insecure processor, we'll do our best" in the syslogs.
Sigh.
Do what always turns out best.
Wait six months. Buy some cheap Chinese knockoff that has / supports them all.
A guy in my workplace came to me last year with some stupendously expensive headphones his wife had bought him. I didn't know what they were but, as I took them, I mentioned that I'd just bought a couple of pairs of something similar.
Over-the-ear headphones.
Large amounts of sound insulation on the ear-cushions, so you were deaf to the world when they were on.
Rechargeable wireless (with plain USB cable)
Bluetooth.
SD-Card.
FM radio.
And a 3.5mm socket. That you could use to either play music through the headphones when the bluetooth/battery wasn't on, or that you could pull the signal OUT of into another set of headphones for a friend if you were playing something on the FM/SD/Bluetooth.
Mine not only outclassed his, out-sounded his and out-featured his, they lasted much longer than his, and they were ridiculously CHEAP rather than ridiculously expensive.
To be honest, you don't need every connector. That headphone is fine. 3.5mm for "retro" stuff. Bluetooth for everything else. If your phone/laptop can't do Bluetooth but has anything else, adaptors are literally pence nowadays.
Same as when I bought a DVD player (cheap one was region free, played everything, had every output on it, just works, expensive models from famous brands wouldn't even play a US DVD once locked to EU region and only had a handful of outputs), a Blu-Ray player (same), MP3 player, etc.
To be honest, I've deliberately not upgraded my smartphone because they get rid of the ports, the battery slots, the SD-card slots etc. Fuck off. I don't want that, so I won't buy it.
And I wouldn't buy headphones with a recognisable brand on if you gave me 50% off. They won't be any better than anything else, will still be over-priced, and likely won't have anything I want on them.
I'm kinda with you, kinda not.
Pretty sure that they have some advanced stuff, which they wouldn't be bragging about if they had any clue about military intelligence.
But I doubt they have anything particularly amazing. The 60's was an era of spacecraft and firsts, compared to the best spyplane the Apollo launch moved much faster (escape velocity is Mach 33?). What was happening in public was infinitely more impressive than what was happening behind closed doors.
However, I'm sure they have some neat stuff.
But... the whole "terrorists running from LEO satellites?" I don't buy it one bit. First, those orbits are public knowledge, you just have to have the first inkling about looking for that information. Secondly, they can change immediately and rapidly. If they want to catch you out, they easily can. Thirdly... those satellites can image some vast portion of the Earth wherever they are... they don't have to only look straight down. They can literally see whole continents without having to do more than rotate an internal mirror. Fourthly, if anyone wants a surveillance network, they would launch enough to ensure overlap - about 5 or 6 identical should be fine to image any part of the globe, 24/7, any time they like, in whatever detail they like.
It's not like the old days where you could duck-and-hide for a few minutes as the only spy sat in the sky went overhead. They can see anything they like, whenever they like, and all kinds of countries have their own global systems too.
So... that bit? That's entirely nonsense. Which means that the use of a spy-plane like that for anything you could do from a satellite is just pointless and expensive. It's either doing something else entirely... or it's not got a purpose.
I've had several Chromecasts, of the different generations.
All connected.
Never had a problem.
That said, I see no reason for a device on my wireless network to be connected all the time so they were off a lot. Also, I see no reason for the Chromecast to be able to swamp my wifi, so it was QoS'd and band-width limited (i.e. it could only "guarantee" 5-10Mbps, the rest was "if it's there and not being used).
I can't say that I ever saw a single similar problem whatsoever.
Now my Chromecast is connected to a 4G Wifi box (the size of a matchbox, with a SIM in it and not much else. It's battery powered (but constantly plugged into USB), low-power, pocket-sized, portable, not really designed to be "the entire house network" but does an admirable job and the Chromecast connects straight to it along with 9 other devices. Can't say I've seen a problem, and we use it all the time.
Over Christmas, it was casting friend's YouTube videos periodically while a crowd of people used it to play Jackbox games online while all the laptops and tablets and smartphones were turned on. Hell, it had a PS4 connected to it for downloading updates.
Sorry, but Chromecast's *shouldn't* do this, agreed, but if your hardware can't handle a few thousand packets in a stream of 400Mbps devices connecting to them, then they really aren't fit for purpose anyway.