If they've had to change a lot of the content then a diff patch is going to be larger than the content you want to diff (diff patches generally have to contain some element of the original file for matching, plus what you want to change that to... sure, you can do it with indexes and offsets but that assumes that the entire world has one base version that you can refer to, and if you get it wrong you corrupt *everyone's* game).
How do you diff, say, a megatexture atlas which you've tweaked some of the dimensions to remove an unused image and repack the rest? Basically the diff for that is going to be as big, if not larger than, the file.
The executable is barely part of the size - likely it doesn't even make up a percentage of the game. But media, resources, models, textures do and they don't diff well at all (executables don't really, either, but at least they tend to be small enough to be practical).
Steam does have differential updating. But I still see gigabyte+ updates on a regular basis. Sometimes the impact of changing even a small thing (i.e. changing the compression on the textures to improve performance or avoid a licensing cost, which means changing the code, plus all of the texture atlases, plus re-optimising/recompressing everything) means it's easier to just put out the whole thing again.
We're not in Windows Update territory here, where someone issues a 500Mb update that includes a setup routine that installs an MSI then runs a.NET Framework update of every file, etc. etc. when they could just patch a single condition in a DLL... games are huge... 90Gb of which 89Gb is going to be content, media, video, models, textures, etc. etc. etc.
"This guy *used* to work as a nurse but doesn't any more, so taking away his nurse card is just spite?"
1) The domains aren't your property. 2) The domains have conditions attached to their ownership, including that you have to be in the EU. 3) If you were a true EU entity (not just someone who only trades in the UK), you would be unaffected because you'd still have a European base somewhere. If not, you should have bought the.uk and not the.eu. 4) All you need do to maintain registration is have an EU address. So there will be a bunch of places offering proxy registration, I imagine, subject to the usual "until someone finds out" that all such proxy registrations have.
It's like saying that the US should be able to pull out of NATO but still say they are a NATO member and still maintain a US section on the NATO website.
(P.S. I'm English. I can't help but agreeing with them in this regard, as if it was the other way around, e.g. Germany leaving, we'd be saying EXACTLY the same.)
(P.P.S. I'm still hopeful that people realise Brexit was a ridiculously stupid idea that should never have been posited, much less put to a public vote. If we hadn't been given the opportunity to vote, basically nobody would have given a shit and life would have carried on with absolutely minimal protest. It's like asking people if they "want" to give millions in aid to African states. If you ask, the answer will definitely be no. You don't do things like that because they are popular, you do things like that because they make sense. It's like a state "voting itself" out of the US... you'd have to have a REALLY, REALLY good reason to do that, not just "we asked people and they said they wanted it". And you then wouldn't be eligible to register a.us domain in that state... see the pattern?)
Letting developers bypass normal network management procedure is a real dumb idea.
The core blame is not that of the product, but of the lack of respect given to its deployment. A developer shouldn't BE ABLE to just create an database instance and expose it to the entire Internet, of anything that you run on a huge service like that.
Testing should be internal and isolated. Production should go through the normal channels of approval. And a network management team should be making sure they aren't reliant on a MongoDB instance, publicly visible, without a password.
I don't expect developers to do that side. I don't believe that *they* honestly suspect that system should have gone live like that. Developers aren't there to protect your network, database managers aren't there to configure your firewall, and network managers aren't to patch your code when it doesn't compile.
The failing here is not in the choice of database, or developer laziness, but a complete, absolute 100% disregard for any kind of data protection, network management, deployment strategy or testing. On what's supposed to be a pay-for service, on a large company, with some kind of integrity and verification services being offered.
The developer who did that is probably LONG gone. That it wasn't noticed, fixed, caught in testing / deployment, etc. is the problem.
You can run a major website off SQLite if you like. It barely matters if only you are ever intending to see that, and deal with the consequences of that decision. What you can't do is then just leave the underlying database live on the web for all to see.
- I work full-time. - I pay full taxes. - One of the things my taxes cover is waste collection and recycling (there's a specific line on a specific tax).
However, for some reason, *I* then have to clean (hot water, scrubbing, soap) and sort (time, effort) my rubbish. I'm all for "community spirit" but I'm also for "I'm *paying* you to do that... either make me do it, or make me pay you to do it, not both".
Then some company gets paid to run ANOTHER set of truck full of rubbish around every house in the city... pick up that stuff separately... take to a separate place... sort it again... to heat it up... to generate a poorer-quality recycled plastic, etc.
(Ironically, there's then a *third* truck that comes on *yet another day* to put up "compostable" rubbish... leaves, food, etc. but not meat, and no eggshells, and no wrapping, no branches or bits of wood, and make sure you bag it in only in authorised compostable bags that you can buy from the council website here...)
Oh, I can get fined / my rubbish punitively NOT collected / etc. if I don't do it properly.
Plus - as the US in this story here - even then, most of the stuff we do that for *does not* get recycled. It gets shipped abroad, to a country that doesn't care and landfilled (but just with a lie on the paperwork). People have been putting GPS trackers in garbage for years now, and it mostly ends up in landfill abroad.
In terms of green credentials, we're really making things *worse*. Not just running three times as many trucks, but cleaning everything twice, sorting only to lump together and then re-sort, and then it ending up in landfill.
I know why. I know exactly why. I got into my local paper for knowing why. The councillor in charge of waste disposal... just happens to OWN the waste disposal / recycling companies. It's a "declared interest". So he actually profits... not just from selling us little silly bags but by having the council pay his companies to do his bidding. Anything good he gets to cherry-pick and recycle (i.e. get paid to give it to a company that actually recycles it). Anything else, he pays to landfill and charges the council, which we pay for from our local taxes.
Check the arrangements in your area, it's surprisingly common. It's a money-making exercise that DECREASES the environmentally friendliness of the whole exercise, without substantially changing the amount that goes into landfill at all.
If we were smart, we'd collect it and burn it. Like the Swedes do. Or is it the Finns? One of them. They have to IMPORT rubbish to burn to fuel their homes because their process is so good that it's cheaper to burn most random rubbish and clean the air that comes out than it is to try to recycle it properly (once you've cherry-picked the easy stuff, which I believe they still do).
If we were really smart, we'd *TAX* products based on how much packaging they contain, while giving *credit* to those places that actually make something out of rubbish that *isn't* just landfilled. If you did it right, one would pay for the other. We'd all pay no more. It would be much more green. Our usage of plastic entirely would drop. And we'd come up with new and innovative ways of using basic packing materials.
You used to have to have parallel and serial and PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports on your computer.
Now you can run almost anything - even direct hard drives, network adaptors, displays, telephones, modem, Wifi, 4G, etc. all of the same USB bus. To the point that machines can easily be supplied with nothing more than power and USB and still be fully functional. That's pretty "universal" to me.
The problem comes when people come up with competing standards - like Thunderbolt - which aren't part of the spec where your only option is to fold it into USB and basically have it be "Thunderbolt over USB". Fact is... it's universal enough that they can do that.
USB is pretty amazing. USB2 was just - to the amateur eye - faster versions of USB.
I can still plug in a mouse from the 1990's into a modern laptop and it "just works". It's only the oddball devices (which a universal specification allows - someone can easily make all kinds of nutty things that rely on OS-specific drivers, etc.) that don't and usually only because of issues unrelated to the USB transport itself.
USB is pretty damn good for what it is, and underappreciated nowadays.
Maybe you're lucky. Maybe 5 hours a night is enough for you.
Now, I'm quite lucky too, but I have a very different situation. If I did as you do, I would happily sleep 16 hours and not even notice. That's just not compatible with a working life.
Hence I *have* to wake myself up. Now, I can operate on zero sleep (48 hours without sleep). I've done it quite a bit and it works fine. I can operate on 6-7 hours sleep, no problem, for a long and regular basis.
But I can easily imagine that if you were someone like me, that 5 hours might not be enough and/or that you don't *get* 5 hours sleep.
The study I'd be interested in is plaques in (former) junior doctors. They literally don't get anywhere near enough sleep. They are counter to all their own advice. Therefore, presumably, they should be a good study (and easy to get hold of!).
"Not enough" is a subjective term in itself, there may be a recommendation but for sure it's too much or too little for many people.
I think the gist of it is - deliberately abusing your sleep isn't a good thing. It's not a harmless action. You can't "make it up" on the weekend. It doesn't work like that. That's the point.
The people who are abusing their bodies and ignoring such natural responses are - in small and subtle ways - setting themselves up to risk of damage later, even if they feel fine just a day or two later.
P.S. SpaceX, if you haven't realised, is burning through money and nearly gone bankrupt several times. So has Tesla.
Elon relies on having a huge personal stash of money to burn. And governments, etc. let him because then they get cheap space launches (at risk, but cheap) because he and his investors are basically subsidising the launches and taking the heat for any mistakes.
Both companies have been around for - what? 15-20 years? Musk is rich - he got rich off Paypal but it wasn't his, and certainly wasn't *solely* his. Since then, everything he's done is with his money at his risk. He can afford to burn hundreds of millions a year. He can probably afford to continue doing similar until the day he dies.
The reason that other companies haven't emulated his "success" is that they don't want to sit and just burn their money. They want to make a decent profit. So they let him break the new ground, burn through what they themselves invest as a small percentage of their profits in R&D every year, let him take the risk, and then if anything is successful they can leap on it.
Note that car manufacturer's aren't scrambling to sell you their electric cars. They have an electric model. All of them. But they don't really care about it. They don't push it heavily. It's a niche market still. They sell a thousand times more cars that aren't electric. He can own that market for decades, they won't even notice a dint in their profits. But when the tide turns and electric cars start being required, they can out-spend, out-produce, out-perform and out-sell his companies in a matter of days (they literally make as many cars in a few days as he sells all year long).
They're using him. He's the public face of all those movements. He's digging tunnels that would cost other people billions. Of *course* they let him do that. They get a cheap tunnel dug. And once the tunnel is there, it pretty much doesn't matter what happens to his company. They use his throw-away toy projects to achieve things on the cheap.
The train thing - you don't see other train companies scrambling to emulate it. Hell, even Samsung/Apple are constantly playing catch-up with each other in the most ridiculous ways. Nobody's even trying to play catch-up with SpaceX, Tesla, the hyperloop, or the tunnelling company. They won't compete because they can't because they don't want to - it's unprofitable for them to do so.
Musk doesn't have much to do with Tesla any more either - he can't make public statements, he's not in charge any more, it's yet-another-company that he's been thrown out of, effectively.
Now watch as it starts to "return" to a normal business. Sure, the paper will show they're not doing as much now he's gone. Because now all the things he did that *weren't* compatible with being a profitable business will disappear. Because he's not a sugar-daddy over there any more yelling to have that stuff done.
All the companies he's ever been involved with are the same... Paypal is a brilliant example. They bought his company. Made him rich. Then he shouted his mouth off. They sacked him. And the company *then* became the defacto payment method online.
Musk is a loudmouth investor. The companies he runs, he runs by shouting and doing things that no other company in the world would emulate, because they are not conducive to making profit. He'll burn through his money. People will get *really* great, cheap cars, etc. Of course they will. In time. And then that will disappear, and not much will have changed.
Musk has pet-projects that he funds / gets investment to the tune of hundreds of millions. They're hobbies to him. He runs them like hobbies. He's the rich version of the guy in a garage somewhere who makes an amazing, one-off beautiful car and engine from raw metal during his spare time/retirement, at his own expense. A labour of love. I'm s
No, the real mystery is why people travel thousands of miles to look at a couple of stones from a great distance, and at great expense.
I literally know someone from the US who come to the UK as part of an organised tour of the EU. They got off at Heathrow. Got on a coach. Travelled to Stonehenge. Looked at Stonehenge. Got back on the coach. Went back to Heathrow. Got on another plane to somewhere else.
And they were *pleased* about that - they kept saying how they'd seen the UK.
Stonehenge is no doubt an interesting archaeological dig. But it is far from an interesting visitor attraction, especially when you can't get within any reasonable distance of it any more. Given away by the fact that it was there for thousands of years and everyone forgot about it.
By the way, you can drive to just about any part of the UK and find stone-circles. Not as impressive, I'll grant you, but everything you can see of Stonehenge you can see from the long fast road that passes by it at 60mph (particularly pretty at sunset, I'd like to add).
And that should be the tourism tagline: "Best viewed at 60mph on the way to somewhere else".
I want to buy Aliens:Special Edition in a way that I can play it any time I want to, as it's my favourite movie.
- If I buy online, it's literally impossible to buy legitimately. None of the stores have the special edition. Only the ordinary. I've sat and compared running times for all the big box-sets as well, in case it was hiding in one of those. Nope. I just can't buy it in the UK online, whether from Google Play, Amazon, Netflix or anyone else. - If I buy it on Blu-Ray it comes wrapped up in a shitty menu that takes me ten minutes to navigate in order to start the movie. I can't play that on anything other than a Blu-Ray player, and it seems to want to go on the Internet. It's also "DVD-resolution" no matter what the box says (and I'm not even into HD, let alone a resolution-nerd)... it's blocky, grainy and horrible - especially in the dark scenes, which kinda ruins the movie. No good for, say, taking on a long plane journey which is where I would be most likely to want to watch my favourite movie to pass the time. I can't copy it to the laptop, I can't even play it sometimes as the copy protection has decided to just spin that disk forever on that laptop several times. - If I buy it on DVD, I have similar problems. It would literally be the only movie I have that I need to turn on another device for in order to watch (yes... I rebought all my movies to stream online via official services... what a horrible person I am!).
However: - The movie is shown on TV all the time, meaning I'm one-click away from a perfect DVB recording of it, minus the adverts, stored in a standard format, that plays everywhere, for free. - I can download it in *minutes* from a Google search from people donating their bandwidth and time and effort in order to let me watch my favourite movie.
Now... I don't pirate. I've been firmly of the opinion for the last twenty years that if I have to break the law to consume a product, then I just won't consume it. As such, the only copy of my favourite movie that I have is a VHS (and I don't own any VHS players any more), an ancient DVD someone bought me and a Blu-Ray boxset that I bought at a bootsale. Meaning that "the TV/movie industry" has seen precisely zip from me for that movie for over 20 years.
Since then, I have put way more hours into trying to GIVE SOMEONE MONEY for the damn thing legitimately than the entire series of movies would have cost me if it were available.
It was after several such instances (Aliens: Special Edition, the British TV sitcoms The Two of Us, Just Good Friends and The Good Life - the latter is available up to series 2 on Amazon, it was available on the BBC store at one point but that closed down and removed all their content. JGF is available only on DVD but is played on UK channels ALL THE TIME. The Two of Us published one series on DVD and the other series has been "coming soon" for the last ten years. It's played on UK TV all the time) that I decided that I need to stop bothering. They've had their chance and obviously don't want my money.
The BBC archives are all digital now... I understand that there are rights issues with some things but literally two of these above are BBC works, one of those is ITV (which is still broadcasting it and runs online streaming TV channels!): Honestly, just work out how much you'd have to pay people to air the show, put it online, charge that. If people want it at that price, they'll get it, if they don't, they won't. By contrast Channel 4 (the next biggest UK TV broadcaster) put every single episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway (the original UK version from the 80's/90's) online, for free on a streaming service and on YouTube.
I know for certain - because someone did it once to prove the point - that ten minutes online, on any torrent site, or on Kodi plugins that search for illegal online content will get me all the above, in a format that "just plays" forever.
I consider it extremely rude and stupid that a genuine, paying customer, who only wants to
If they failed to reasonably provide their provision of the contract, notify them as per the contract (or in any reasonable manner) and say so. Say that you don't consider the contract fulfilled, and will be terminating based on their failure to fulfil it.
Give them a reasonable time, etc. Keep telling them. Keep telling them it's not adequate.
Then... cancel the contract. If the contract was never fulfilled, then it's as if it never existed, thus any "agreed" cancellation fee never was agreed at all. They didn't hold up their side, so you don't need to hold up yours at that point.
However, you have to have notified them (just because the contract says a certain way doesn't mean it *has* to be that way, but it's best to play their game... imagine if you went to court and had to explain how you did things... "Not only did I go through their cancellation forms online, your honour, but I also wrote them a registered-delivery letter which I have proof they received, got no reply, joined into a web-chat which I have provided a transcript of, telephoned them for 45 minutes which I have the phone bill here to prove, and still I was unable to cancel the contract".
You don't *need* to go to court... it's far too petty for that. But you act as if you were gathering evidence for a court. Any court will take steps to side with the party that was being reasonable, expressing their concerns, trying to do things properly, trying to make sure they didn't get into trouble, trying to give the other side a decent chance to rectify.
And because you operate like that, the right people at the company - when it gets escalated to the very-real threat of a court case (i.e. a summons to court) - they will look at how you have been doing things, realise that they stand no chance, and likely settle.
Even before that, though, most senior people in a complaints department have an ear for things like that... they can tell the ones who *are* prepared and are keeping every correspondence and will more likely pay to keep those people away while batting away all the "I'LL SUE YOU! GIVE ME MY PRODUCT FOR FREE AND A YEAR'S CREDIT OR I'LL SUE YOU!" idiots.
If they haven't provided a reasonable interpretation of the product/service they said they would, and haven't rectified that despite being given more than enough chance, then you notify and cancel. They'll say you can't, and all kinds of things. But, fact is, if they haven't reasonably complied with their end of the contract, the contract is null and void. Not only that, if it's *never* been fulfilled, you can most likely get all the money back that you've ever paid them. Even "non-returnable deposits" and things like that.
No delivery, no contract. No contract, no cancellation charge. No cancellation charge, no debt to them.
Seek advice if you're not good at these things.
[[I've never needed to and though I don't do stuff 100% official, I'm sure, I research and I always get a decent outcome and have variously been threatened with court (dozens of times), bailiffs, and all kinds - and yet never once had any of those things even started, and in fact had people pay me "not to take it to court, right?" because they were so far in the wrong they didn't even realise until I presented the evidence to them. Insurance companies, telecommunications providers, landlords, letting agents, banks,... all kinds of companies have come unstuck when they just go through the "standard procedure" and I actually have a genuine grievance that they don't handle.
I've had money for an entire contract term forcibly ripped back out of their accounts going back months (have to love UK Direct Debit law... I got a very polite phone call literally two minutes later...), I've had insurance companies mess up so bad they begged for me to not take them to court, I've turned "We're going to take you to court" into "Oh.... sorry... no, that's absolutely our mistake, here's a cheque" (often a few days after I say "No problem, I have copies of
The science-based comic written by a scientist who worked building robots for NASA?
Yup.
Just because the media is considered "childish", the facts behind it are undoubtedly quite accurate (if not perfect). Also, there are entire books about visualisation of data that don't come close to what XKCD manages with its radiation chart and similar visualisations.
"Do you anticipate suddenly your 5 year old phone will need a massive boost in available bandwidth to continue doing what it is already doing?"
Yes. The data I used 5 years ago isn't comparable to what I use today. There wasn't even a package available back then to cover what I have on my package now.
"Do you anticipate your phone company will just toss LTE on the trash-heap in 5 years?"
No. I anticipate that they'll move all their kit to 5G to "sell" 5G, and in the process never deploy 4G to its maximum capability (which is already stupendous). You'll never see this gigabit-4G actually in the wild in the US or Europe, even though it could technically exist.
They'll pay billions for 5G licences, upgrade all their kit and - in the same way that we still don't utilise 3G's capacity even today - 4G will become a second-class citizen.
Now 4G might be "enough", but that state of affairs won't last forever. I loaded the front page of Facebook the other day and it was over 12Mbyte of content. Even at 4G speeds, that means that it takes several seconds to actually show anything at all.
Is that the company owned by one of the guys (Janko Mrsic-Flogel) related to the Retro Computers Limited / ZX Vega thing on IndieGoGo that shipped about 100 crappy protoype units and then disappeared from existence?
Certainly if he wasn't solely *responsible* for the Vega thing, he was one of the guy that caused the company to wind up (https://www.thegazette.co.uk/notice/3193686), owed money to the company directors and had to have a court order against him (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/23/retro_computers_ltd_directors_ordered_pay_3k_legal_costs/), and certainly played a part in knowing what state the device was actually in, but gushing about it all over the place to try to get people's money knowing it was a turkey.
Whether or not the Gemini is any good (to be honest, I've seen better devices), I wouldn't do business with any of these people. And I wouldn't TOUCH IndieGoGo with a bargepole now as, despite explicit promises to try to reclaim their backer's money, they have done literally nothing and don't even answer queries now.
Fortunately, I've never backed any of their projects - this guy or any of the other directors or IndieGoGo - because it's much more important to me for them to do business correctly. Same as the OpenPandora thing many years ago. Lots of people losing LOTS of money.
It really comes to something when a Korean company that I'd never heard of until I picked up one of their devices (GamePark Holdings) does better business than people in my own country (the UK) making similar devices. All the UK-based "successors" to that device have been cons or ending in disaster.
It's like someone said "Please list everything you would never want in a phone" and then priced it at "Please tell me what you would never pay for it".
The problem with offering such subsidised-elsewhere products is that unless you have 100% exclusivity, someone else came come along and offer just the bit that you don't want them to.
No different to any loss-leader product. The objective word there is "loss". Don't be surprised if someone works out how to cause you that loss and not actually give you the profitable part elsewhere (e.g. Cuecats).
Are they selling the same products as the big stores, but at a cheaper price?
Or are they selling something that big stores aren't selling?
Because, either way, simple business analysis tells you that you have a problem if that's the case and it's hardly "their" fault that they are undercutting you and giving people things they want.
I feel so sad for those multi-million dollar store chains that can't over-charge people for basic goods and services because of a dollar-store (or pound shop in my country) down the road.
Compete, or get the fuck out of the market. Trying to shut down the opposition that's filling the niches you aren't - without even trying to fill those same niches - is just being arseholes.
If only they weren't 100% compliant with all applicable laws, and there was an obvious way to change those laws to mean that they do have to pay tax!
I mean... who'd ever live in such a world!
So much better to let them - or anyone else - do it, completely legitimately, then try to invoke ire that they decided it was a good thing to do, not pay any tax that they weren't required to.
I tell you now, if the taxman gave me an option to not pay any tax, completely legitimately, with no comeback, I'd damn well exercise it. So I don't see why Amazon should be singled out for having done so.
The problem is... how did they manage this, and why aren't the taxation authorities and law doing anything to close whatever "loophole" (read: crappily written law) they utilised.
The UK and EU have been cracking down on this, ever since Apple paid some pathetic percentage in Ireland and tried to claim that covered ALL their EU tax. Even *Ireland* protested and basically fought Apple's corner for Apple NOT to pay more tax to Ireland... Ireland literally talked themselves out of billions in tax that the EU *FORCED* Apple to pay them - because they knew they their little backhanders and "favours" were supposed to happen in lieu of Apple paying tax, so Apple would get pissed off and move out of Ireland if they were made to pay *the actual amount they should have owed*.
Amazon used an antique tax law in Guernsey (Channel Islands, sorta-belongs to the UK) to ship DVDs without paying VAT... that law was designed to cover tulip shipments to make the Guersney flower industry thrive. It got misused such that Amazon posted ALL their DVDs and CD from Guernsey for nearly a decade.
Because not one fool thought "Maybe that tax exception should only apply to the flowers we don't want to tax, not every single thing under the sun of a similar value"
So they have those factored into the price already (or else the entire flight makes them a loss). Let's say that they literally don't save a single penny. It hasn't cost them a penny more than him flying, either. It's a fixed price. Whether or not the guy takes the flight.
Contract law etc. is not as clear cut as you make out. Just writing something in a contract and having someone sign it does *not* necessarily mean it's legally binding, especially if it's ever considered "unreasonable". A court may well consider it unreasonable to charge someone more for something they've already paid in full for but didn't exercise.
Or else they wouldn't have found in his favour, would they? If the airline were at all out of pocket, they would have a cast-iron case for recompensation of those costs. But... they didn't get that. The court didn't give them that. Probably because they *cannot* prove any damages or losses caused by such an action. And not just one airline in one court, as the summary says.
Again - if he's not boarded because he's late to the flight, missed it, falls over and breaks his leg, gets pulled in by security for an extended check, whatever... the exact same "costs" would presumably apply at the destination, no? They don't chase him for them in those instances. Why should they just because he did it voluntarily?
"This means the airline agrees to pick up all costs associated with that travel, this is built into the ticket price you agreed upon." And thus... it doesn't matter if those losses happen or not. And if they do happen often enough, you raise the price of such tickets, right? Rather than get thrown out of court twice for trying it on.
Basic consumer law has nothing to do with it. It's contract law. Contracts have an element of reasonableness. It's not reasonable to charge people less to use more flights than would otherwise be required - the costs don't stack up. As the courts found. Twice. Just in the US, but probably a lot of other places elsewhere.
If this is hurting them, they need to raise their prices on such flights to factor that in. To fail to do so is a basic business failing. To offer a product that's cheaper for people to BUY MORE AND THROW SOME AWAY than to just buy the original item alone is really, really bad business. Not to mention suing your own paying customers who paid in full.
There is no mythical fine they have to pay for not having a passenger onboard - if he told them he wasn't going to be on the flight (either by absence of a necessary boarding procedure, or explicit notification). Maybe a small admin cost, at worse. And then you'll find that even "all the flights, plus the reasonable admin cost for skipping one" will be less than the cost of "less flights to the same destinations" and people will still do it.
It's a stupid company that sues its own customers for exercising a completely legitimate operation that means they save lots of money at no further expense to the airline and doesn't a) take steps to prevent that or b) utilise that information and adjust pricing accordingly.
The courts agreed. Because the consumer rights of reasonableness trump any "company was being stupid and was just out to charge me more" right.
You have a kernel of an idea, but I can't help but think that you're coming from a bias.
Certainly it's possible that "some unidentified, or thought irrelevant, deficiency could contribute to ill health later in life" is certainly possible.
However, all food is "natural", using such wording makes me doubt the origin of your viewpoint. All food is natural. There's no such thing as synthetic food, in essence. Just processed or unprocessed.
Thus it's a question of whether that process affects the food negatively or not. Unfortunately the study stands alone in a sea of other studies that find that the benefits of processed food (i.e. no bugs, no diseases, food safety standards, wide range of foods available in the shops year round) basically outweigh any processing downsides so long as the consumer is sensible. It's much more a "consumer habit makes them get sick" than anything else, rather than laying the blame at processed foods in themselves.
However, the study (which is based on web-reporting of people's food habits, and some of those people barely contributed at all) also finds that the deaths are cancer and cardiovascular disease. Cancers are basically what you die of if you die of nothing else. They are inherent, ever-present, virtually inevitable (unless you're a certain species of lobster, etc.), etc.
Omega-3, in particular, is another snake-oil term from the "health" food industry. Like fibre, vitamin C and many other things, including oxygen - being DEFICIENT in it isn't good for you. But consuming more of it doesn't make you healthier. There are more studies concluding "Dietary supplementation with omegaâ'3 fatty acids does not appear to affect the risk of death, cancer or heart disease." than anything to the contrary, for instance. The EU's official line is "contributes to the normal function of the heart" (which appears a lot in our health adverts as they aren't allowed to claim things that can't be proven - if you read that sentence carefully it basically means "Yeah, you need some, that's about it")
There were many hypotheses saying that Omega-3 is what caused us to evolve from wading animals to super-brain predators, but that's nowhere near true either. Probably it helped, having access to sea-food, but it's not an automatic "makes your brain better" food or else blue whales and sharks would be the cleverest things on Earth - all that fresh Omega-3!
Again - necessary, but not super-boosting just because you eat more.
The basic rule of any health nutrient is "the difference between 'normal' and what happens if you don't have it doesn't mean it'll give you those benefits again ON TOP of normal by having it". More fibre isn't better than normal amounts. More sugar isn't better than normal amounts. Similarly no-sugar isn't better than normal amounts. And "normal amounts" are widely publicised, heavily tested, and also subject to millions of years of evolutionary selection - we call it hunger.
The reason your manufacturer no longer makes "Omega-3 chocolate truffles"? They were a processed food that likely eliminated most of the Omega-3 in their production (like any processed food), and then the hype around Omega-3 died off and nobody bought them.
Honestly, if you haven't read up on this stuff, you shouldn't be offering nutritional advice (I'm not offering nutritional advice either - I'm asking people to exercise caution and, ironically, take every health-fad with a pinch of salt).
The recommended diets are there, heavily researched and tested down to every individual component. They don't mention extremes of Omega-3 or anything else like that, nor do they say "don't eat any processed food". That's your current science. Any parroting of something that sounds like something a "health food shop" checkout girl would tell you is likely to be proven nonsense after the fad has worn off.
But your original line - that's probably right. It's not much use to us, however, if people just don't eat the right diet in the first place.
I've yet to ever see a plane delayed for the benefit of a passenger, especially one with no luggage in the hold.
Precisely because it happens all the time and the cost of delaying even 5 minutes is way more than any single passenger ticket (except possibly first class, but even then it's not worth the trade-off that they'll come in 10 rather than 5 minutes).
Also - do you not have to "check-in" to a flight? Without that, they wouldn't be expecting him at the gate at all. Like millions of passengers every year who don't check in because their taxi didn't arrive on time, family emergencies, their connecting flight was late, they didn't make it through security, etc. etc. etc.
If it's cheaper to NOT TAKE A FLIGHT for the customer, what the hell are you selling? You have literally saved money - the customer paid, didn't use part of their trip, didn't cost you fuel and loading time, and if you had half a brain they would have been able to do that AND tell you that the last seat would be unoccupied, which you could then legitimately sell on to a last minute customer and make EVEN MORE money.
It's like a customer buying a 3-for-the-price-of-2 offer, binning the 3rd free item because they only needed two, and then you trying to sue them to use that third item.
It's not like they gave it away. It's not like someone else turned up expecting to sit in that seat and couldn't. It's not like they committed fraud by having someone else come along and take their place on the final leg. Your prices literally make it more viable to NOT utilise a part of the service that they could do so, for "free" (after they'd paid all the bits they did use), and you save some small amount of money in the process (and someone else gets an empty seat to enjoy on the flight).
Use your brains, change your pricing structure and/or allow people to flag such seats as "unused even though I got it as part of the deal" and then you could make a killing selling just that seat on to someone else as per your normal booking system.
Much easier is to just not price that way. It's not like that passenger not coming onto that flight (i.e. not saying they will board at all, so you're not even looking for them) has cost you any money in any way, shape or form by not appearing - so you've basically given them a flight they didn't want, for free, and then complained they didn't use it.
That there isn't a mainstream, popular, memory-safe language that is suitable for writing an OS (to the point that *anyone* from the entire tech industry has written an OS in it that's mainstream/popular in itself?) is a strawman?
No, that's my exact point.
Any language is an expression of your intention. If your intentions are poorly thought out, planned, described and executed, that's a fault common to all languages and little can fix that (expecting the "grammar" or "vocabulary" of a particular language to save you in that instance is not sensible).
C is used for many reasons. It's not "safe" because "safe" is hard anyway. It is quick because quick is hard in many languages that are safe.
Rust is no more difficult than C but if want to do anything vaguely OS-like or interesting, you have to utilise it's "unsafe" settings and you're back to square one.
All things aside - trusting SOFTWARE to enforce security is a nonsense. When software wants to access out-of-bounds, it only has to change a number.
We need to design *hardware* to enforce memory security. Things like "per-process/page encryption" are starting to do that for us - Intel's next round of chips features a way to have a different memory key for each part of memory. It's a start. But what's needed is a literal way to ensure that you *can't* access outside of bounds anyway. We fudge this with flags and DEP and things at the moment, but that still allows huge scope for error and attack.
If we lacked a method for one process to, in any way, access the memory of another process, no matter what address it was tricked into trying to access, and everything had to be done through message-passing and hardware bounds, then you could start to make a more secure system.
Intel are bolting security on piecemeal that should have been in there decades ago. And the hardware needs to do the job. Then it's simply not possible to express "Access this piece of memory that's part of another process", by accident or by design.
In most civilised countries, it's always been illegal to suggest you cure something when you have absolutely no proof of that, and even if you have proof, medical claims have to be backed up by studies, not your spurious claim made on the basis on one participant.
The best our supplement adverts have ever been able to say is things like "Helps support natural bone growth" (i.e. it doesn't make your bones snap in two, so it must be good). Same for any kind of faith healing nonsense.
You also can't advertise psychic services without a disclaimer that it's for "entertainment purposes only". Yep, even a seance, or a fortune-telling, or a psychic night in a pub.
How do I know? It's a hobby of mine to report the little slips-of-paper-through-the-door style of advertising when they "forget" to include such things or make such spurious claims. I've had quite a few fined for it. It's the best form of policing - society gets its censors, the idiots learn not to run such adverts, and I get to fill a quiet afternoon giggling to myself.
There's an Indian restaurant near me whose front window is splattered with quotes from various places suggesting how curry "could help" with things like cancer. Unfortunately, they skirt just the right side of the law, I think, so I'm always waiting for them to trip up, but one day when it's quiet and I'm in need of entertainment, I'll write a snotty email.
But anything claiming medical cures in any way, shape or form is illegal - there's even a specific law for claiming to cure cancer, and case-law specifically against claiming vaccines cause autism (the UK was the country that had the rubbish "doctor" who first posited that, and he did so *so* ineptly, and so without any evidence whatsoever, that they struck him off and took him to court).
Strange then that the various rewrites of Windows and the kernel, and device drivers etc. don't use a memory-safe language. Or that I'm really pushed to name an OS that *wasn't* written in C / C++ and might be something that anyone's heard of except on a tech forum.
Maybe something to do with the fact that - despite what's claimed - memory-safe languages tend to be slower and/or consume more resources in the first place. That's the problem you need to fix - push the memory safety into hardware, so it doesn't need to be in the language. That means a complete architecture change.
Name memory-safe languages in mainstream use and you end up with:
- Python - Java - C# (which just makes me think ".Net Framework") - JavaScript - Rust and Go are in the middle ground - they can be memory safe but they often aren't.
Not sure I really want an operating system written in any of those languages. Or even written by the people who wrote those languages (Google may have written Go and use an OS of their own, but didn't exactly make Android or ChromeOS now, did they? And they are both based on what kernel, written in what language?)
Until we solve that performance problem of memory-safety, and a memory-unsafe OS underpinning the whole thing, nobody's going to bother with a memory-safe language.
Slashdot Mirror
If they've had to change a lot of the content then a diff patch is going to be larger than the content you want to diff (diff patches generally have to contain some element of the original file for matching, plus what you want to change that to... sure, you can do it with indexes and offsets but that assumes that the entire world has one base version that you can refer to, and if you get it wrong you corrupt *everyone's* game).
How do you diff, say, a megatexture atlas which you've tweaked some of the dimensions to remove an unused image and repack the rest? Basically the diff for that is going to be as big, if not larger than, the file.
The executable is barely part of the size - likely it doesn't even make up a percentage of the game. But media, resources, models, textures do and they don't diff well at all (executables don't really, either, but at least they tend to be small enough to be practical).
Steam does have differential updating. But I still see gigabyte+ updates on a regular basis. Sometimes the impact of changing even a small thing (i.e. changing the compression on the textures to improve performance or avoid a licensing cost, which means changing the code, plus all of the texture atlases, plus re-optimising/recompressing everything) means it's easier to just put out the whole thing again.
We're not in Windows Update territory here, where someone issues a 500Mb update that includes a setup routine that installs an MSI then runs a .NET Framework update of every file, etc. etc. when they could just patch a single condition in a DLL... games are huge... 90Gb of which 89Gb is going to be content, media, video, models, textures, etc. etc. etc.
Like:
"This guy *used* to work as a nurse but doesn't any more, so taking away his nurse card is just spite?"
1) The domains aren't your property. .uk and not the .eu.
2) The domains have conditions attached to their ownership, including that you have to be in the EU.
3) If you were a true EU entity (not just someone who only trades in the UK), you would be unaffected because you'd still have a European base somewhere. If not, you should have bought the
4) All you need do to maintain registration is have an EU address. So there will be a bunch of places offering proxy registration, I imagine, subject to the usual "until someone finds out" that all such proxy registrations have.
It's like saying that the US should be able to pull out of NATO but still say they are a NATO member and still maintain a US section on the NATO website.
(P.S. I'm English. I can't help but agreeing with them in this regard, as if it was the other way around, e.g. Germany leaving, we'd be saying EXACTLY the same.)
(P.P.S. I'm still hopeful that people realise Brexit was a ridiculously stupid idea that should never have been posited, much less put to a public vote. If we hadn't been given the opportunity to vote, basically nobody would have given a shit and life would have carried on with absolutely minimal protest. It's like asking people if they "want" to give millions in aid to African states. If you ask, the answer will definitely be no. You don't do things like that because they are popular, you do things like that because they make sense. It's like a state "voting itself" out of the US... you'd have to have a REALLY, REALLY good reason to do that, not just "we asked people and they said they wanted it". And you then wouldn't be eligible to register a .us domain in that state... see the pattern?)
Letting developers bypass normal network management procedure is a real dumb idea.
The core blame is not that of the product, but of the lack of respect given to its deployment. A developer shouldn't BE ABLE to just create an database instance and expose it to the entire Internet, of anything that you run on a huge service like that.
Testing should be internal and isolated. Production should go through the normal channels of approval. And a network management team should be making sure they aren't reliant on a MongoDB instance, publicly visible, without a password.
I don't expect developers to do that side. I don't believe that *they* honestly suspect that system should have gone live like that. Developers aren't there to protect your network, database managers aren't there to configure your firewall, and network managers aren't to patch your code when it doesn't compile.
The failing here is not in the choice of database, or developer laziness, but a complete, absolute 100% disregard for any kind of data protection, network management, deployment strategy or testing. On what's supposed to be a pay-for service, on a large company, with some kind of integrity and verification services being offered.
The developer who did that is probably LONG gone. That it wasn't noticed, fixed, caught in testing / deployment, etc. is the problem.
You can run a major website off SQLite if you like. It barely matters if only you are ever intending to see that, and deal with the consequences of that decision. What you can't do is then just leave the underlying database live on the web for all to see.
For me the problem is much more:
- I work full-time.
- I pay full taxes.
- One of the things my taxes cover is waste collection and recycling (there's a specific line on a specific tax).
However, for some reason, *I* then have to clean (hot water, scrubbing, soap) and sort (time, effort) my rubbish. I'm all for "community spirit" but I'm also for "I'm *paying* you to do that... either make me do it, or make me pay you to do it, not both".
Then some company gets paid to run ANOTHER set of truck full of rubbish around every house in the city... pick up that stuff separately... take to a separate place... sort it again... to heat it up... to generate a poorer-quality recycled plastic, etc.
(Ironically, there's then a *third* truck that comes on *yet another day* to put up "compostable" rubbish... leaves, food, etc. but not meat, and no eggshells, and no wrapping, no branches or bits of wood, and make sure you bag it in only in authorised compostable bags that you can buy from the council website here...)
Oh, I can get fined / my rubbish punitively NOT collected / etc. if I don't do it properly.
Plus - as the US in this story here - even then, most of the stuff we do that for *does not* get recycled. It gets shipped abroad, to a country that doesn't care and landfilled (but just with a lie on the paperwork). People have been putting GPS trackers in garbage for years now, and it mostly ends up in landfill abroad.
In terms of green credentials, we're really making things *worse*. Not just running three times as many trucks, but cleaning everything twice, sorting only to lump together and then re-sort, and then it ending up in landfill.
I know why. I know exactly why. I got into my local paper for knowing why. The councillor in charge of waste disposal... just happens to OWN the waste disposal / recycling companies. It's a "declared interest". So he actually profits... not just from selling us little silly bags but by having the council pay his companies to do his bidding. Anything good he gets to cherry-pick and recycle (i.e. get paid to give it to a company that actually recycles it). Anything else, he pays to landfill and charges the council, which we pay for from our local taxes.
Check the arrangements in your area, it's surprisingly common. It's a money-making exercise that DECREASES the environmentally friendliness of the whole exercise, without substantially changing the amount that goes into landfill at all.
If we were smart, we'd collect it and burn it. Like the Swedes do. Or is it the Finns? One of them. They have to IMPORT rubbish to burn to fuel their homes because their process is so good that it's cheaper to burn most random rubbish and clean the air that comes out than it is to try to recycle it properly (once you've cherry-picked the easy stuff, which I believe they still do).
If we were really smart, we'd *TAX* products based on how much packaging they contain, while giving *credit* to those places that actually make something out of rubbish that *isn't* just landfilled. If you did it right, one would pay for the other. We'd all pay no more. It would be much more green. Our usage of plastic entirely would drop. And we'd come up with new and innovative ways of using basic packing materials.
I don't think the "universal" is undeserved.
You used to have to have parallel and serial and PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports on your computer.
Now you can run almost anything - even direct hard drives, network adaptors, displays, telephones, modem, Wifi, 4G, etc. all of the same USB bus. To the point that machines can easily be supplied with nothing more than power and USB and still be fully functional. That's pretty "universal" to me.
The problem comes when people come up with competing standards - like Thunderbolt - which aren't part of the spec where your only option is to fold it into USB and basically have it be "Thunderbolt over USB". Fact is... it's universal enough that they can do that.
USB is pretty amazing. USB2 was just - to the amateur eye - faster versions of USB.
I can still plug in a mouse from the 1990's into a modern laptop and it "just works". It's only the oddball devices (which a universal specification allows - someone can easily make all kinds of nutty things that rely on OS-specific drivers, etc.) that don't and usually only because of issues unrelated to the USB transport itself.
USB is pretty damn good for what it is, and underappreciated nowadays.
Maybe you're lucky. Maybe 5 hours a night is enough for you.
Now, I'm quite lucky too, but I have a very different situation. If I did as you do, I would happily sleep 16 hours and not even notice. That's just not compatible with a working life.
Hence I *have* to wake myself up. Now, I can operate on zero sleep (48 hours without sleep). I've done it quite a bit and it works fine. I can operate on 6-7 hours sleep, no problem, for a long and regular basis.
But I can easily imagine that if you were someone like me, that 5 hours might not be enough and/or that you don't *get* 5 hours sleep.
The study I'd be interested in is plaques in (former) junior doctors. They literally don't get anywhere near enough sleep. They are counter to all their own advice. Therefore, presumably, they should be a good study (and easy to get hold of!).
"Not enough" is a subjective term in itself, there may be a recommendation but for sure it's too much or too little for many people.
I think the gist of it is - deliberately abusing your sleep isn't a good thing. It's not a harmless action. You can't "make it up" on the weekend. It doesn't work like that. That's the point.
The people who are abusing their bodies and ignoring such natural responses are - in small and subtle ways - setting themselves up to risk of damage later, even if they feel fine just a day or two later.
P.S. SpaceX, if you haven't realised, is burning through money and nearly gone bankrupt several times. So has Tesla.
Elon relies on having a huge personal stash of money to burn. And governments, etc. let him because then they get cheap space launches (at risk, but cheap) because he and his investors are basically subsidising the launches and taking the heat for any mistakes.
https://seekingalpha.com/artic...
Both companies have been around for - what? 15-20 years? Musk is rich - he got rich off Paypal but it wasn't his, and certainly wasn't *solely* his. Since then, everything he's done is with his money at his risk. He can afford to burn hundreds of millions a year. He can probably afford to continue doing similar until the day he dies.
The reason that other companies haven't emulated his "success" is that they don't want to sit and just burn their money. They want to make a decent profit. So they let him break the new ground, burn through what they themselves invest as a small percentage of their profits in R&D every year, let him take the risk, and then if anything is successful they can leap on it.
Note that car manufacturer's aren't scrambling to sell you their electric cars. They have an electric model. All of them. But they don't really care about it. They don't push it heavily. It's a niche market still. They sell a thousand times more cars that aren't electric. He can own that market for decades, they won't even notice a dint in their profits. But when the tide turns and electric cars start being required, they can out-spend, out-produce, out-perform and out-sell his companies in a matter of days (they literally make as many cars in a few days as he sells all year long).
They're using him. He's the public face of all those movements. He's digging tunnels that would cost other people billions. Of *course* they let him do that. They get a cheap tunnel dug. And once the tunnel is there, it pretty much doesn't matter what happens to his company. They use his throw-away toy projects to achieve things on the cheap.
The train thing - you don't see other train companies scrambling to emulate it. Hell, even Samsung/Apple are constantly playing catch-up with each other in the most ridiculous ways. Nobody's even trying to play catch-up with SpaceX, Tesla, the hyperloop, or the tunnelling company. They won't compete because they can't because they don't want to - it's unprofitable for them to do so.
Musk doesn't have much to do with Tesla any more either - he can't make public statements, he's not in charge any more, it's yet-another-company that he's been thrown out of, effectively.
Now watch as it starts to "return" to a normal business. Sure, the paper will show they're not doing as much now he's gone. Because now all the things he did that *weren't* compatible with being a profitable business will disappear. Because he's not a sugar-daddy over there any more yelling to have that stuff done.
All the companies he's ever been involved with are the same... Paypal is a brilliant example. They bought his company. Made him rich. Then he shouted his mouth off. They sacked him. And the company *then* became the defacto payment method online.
Musk is a loudmouth investor. The companies he runs, he runs by shouting and doing things that no other company in the world would emulate, because they are not conducive to making profit. He'll burn through his money. People will get *really* great, cheap cars, etc. Of course they will. In time. And then that will disappear, and not much will have changed.
Musk has pet-projects that he funds / gets investment to the tune of hundreds of millions. They're hobbies to him. He runs them like hobbies. He's the rich version of the guy in a garage somewhere who makes an amazing, one-off beautiful car and engine from raw metal during his spare time/retirement, at his own expense. A labour of love. I'm s
No, the real mystery is why people travel thousands of miles to look at a couple of stones from a great distance, and at great expense.
I literally know someone from the US who come to the UK as part of an organised tour of the EU. They got off at Heathrow. Got on a coach. Travelled to Stonehenge. Looked at Stonehenge. Got back on the coach. Went back to Heathrow. Got on another plane to somewhere else.
And they were *pleased* about that - they kept saying how they'd seen the UK.
Stonehenge is no doubt an interesting archaeological dig. But it is far from an interesting visitor attraction, especially when you can't get within any reasonable distance of it any more. Given away by the fact that it was there for thousands of years and everyone forgot about it.
By the way, you can drive to just about any part of the UK and find stone-circles. Not as impressive, I'll grant you, but everything you can see of Stonehenge you can see from the long fast road that passes by it at 60mph (particularly pretty at sunset, I'd like to add).
And that should be the tourism tagline: "Best viewed at 60mph on the way to somewhere else".
I want to buy Aliens:Special Edition in a way that I can play it any time I want to, as it's my favourite movie.
- If I buy online, it's literally impossible to buy legitimately. None of the stores have the special edition. Only the ordinary. I've sat and compared running times for all the big box-sets as well, in case it was hiding in one of those. Nope. I just can't buy it in the UK online, whether from Google Play, Amazon, Netflix or anyone else.
- If I buy it on Blu-Ray it comes wrapped up in a shitty menu that takes me ten minutes to navigate in order to start the movie. I can't play that on anything other than a Blu-Ray player, and it seems to want to go on the Internet. It's also "DVD-resolution" no matter what the box says (and I'm not even into HD, let alone a resolution-nerd)... it's blocky, grainy and horrible - especially in the dark scenes, which kinda ruins the movie.
No good for, say, taking on a long plane journey which is where I would be most likely to want to watch my favourite movie to pass the time. I can't copy it to the laptop, I can't even play it sometimes as the copy protection has decided to just spin that disk forever on that laptop several times.
- If I buy it on DVD, I have similar problems. It would literally be the only movie I have that I need to turn on another device for in order to watch (yes... I rebought all my movies to stream online via official services... what a horrible person I am!).
However:
- The movie is shown on TV all the time, meaning I'm one-click away from a perfect DVB recording of it, minus the adverts, stored in a standard format, that plays everywhere, for free.
- I can download it in *minutes* from a Google search from people donating their bandwidth and time and effort in order to let me watch my favourite movie.
Now... I don't pirate. I've been firmly of the opinion for the last twenty years that if I have to break the law to consume a product, then I just won't consume it. As such, the only copy of my favourite movie that I have is a VHS (and I don't own any VHS players any more), an ancient DVD someone bought me and a Blu-Ray boxset that I bought at a bootsale. Meaning that "the TV/movie industry" has seen precisely zip from me for that movie for over 20 years.
Since then, I have put way more hours into trying to GIVE SOMEONE MONEY for the damn thing legitimately than the entire series of movies would have cost me if it were available.
It was after several such instances (Aliens: Special Edition, the British TV sitcoms The Two of Us, Just Good Friends and The Good Life - the latter is available up to series 2 on Amazon, it was available on the BBC store at one point but that closed down and removed all their content. JGF is available only on DVD but is played on UK channels ALL THE TIME. The Two of Us published one series on DVD and the other series has been "coming soon" for the last ten years. It's played on UK TV all the time) that I decided that I need to stop bothering. They've had their chance and obviously don't want my money.
The BBC archives are all digital now... I understand that there are rights issues with some things but literally two of these above are BBC works, one of those is ITV (which is still broadcasting it and runs online streaming TV channels!): Honestly, just work out how much you'd have to pay people to air the show, put it online, charge that. If people want it at that price, they'll get it, if they don't, they won't. By contrast Channel 4 (the next biggest UK TV broadcaster) put every single episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway (the original UK version from the 80's/90's) online, for free on a streaming service and on YouTube.
I know for certain - because someone did it once to prove the point - that ten minutes online, on any torrent site, or on Kodi plugins that search for illegal online content will get me all the above, in a format that "just plays" forever.
I consider it extremely rude and stupid that a genuine, paying customer, who only wants to
If they failed to reasonably provide their provision of the contract, notify them as per the contract (or in any reasonable manner) and say so. Say that you don't consider the contract fulfilled, and will be terminating based on their failure to fulfil it.
Give them a reasonable time, etc. Keep telling them. Keep telling them it's not adequate.
Then... cancel the contract. If the contract was never fulfilled, then it's as if it never existed, thus any "agreed" cancellation fee never was agreed at all. They didn't hold up their side, so you don't need to hold up yours at that point.
However, you have to have notified them (just because the contract says a certain way doesn't mean it *has* to be that way, but it's best to play their game... imagine if you went to court and had to explain how you did things... "Not only did I go through their cancellation forms online, your honour, but I also wrote them a registered-delivery letter which I have proof they received, got no reply, joined into a web-chat which I have provided a transcript of, telephoned them for 45 minutes which I have the phone bill here to prove, and still I was unable to cancel the contract".
You don't *need* to go to court... it's far too petty for that. But you act as if you were gathering evidence for a court. Any court will take steps to side with the party that was being reasonable, expressing their concerns, trying to do things properly, trying to make sure they didn't get into trouble, trying to give the other side a decent chance to rectify.
And because you operate like that, the right people at the company - when it gets escalated to the very-real threat of a court case (i.e. a summons to court) - they will look at how you have been doing things, realise that they stand no chance, and likely settle.
Even before that, though, most senior people in a complaints department have an ear for things like that... they can tell the ones who *are* prepared and are keeping every correspondence and will more likely pay to keep those people away while batting away all the "I'LL SUE YOU! GIVE ME MY PRODUCT FOR FREE AND A YEAR'S CREDIT OR I'LL SUE YOU!" idiots.
If they haven't provided a reasonable interpretation of the product/service they said they would, and haven't rectified that despite being given more than enough chance, then you notify and cancel. They'll say you can't, and all kinds of things. But, fact is, if they haven't reasonably complied with their end of the contract, the contract is null and void. Not only that, if it's *never* been fulfilled, you can most likely get all the money back that you've ever paid them. Even "non-returnable deposits" and things like that.
No delivery, no contract. No contract, no cancellation charge. No cancellation charge, no debt to them.
Seek advice if you're not good at these things.
[[I've never needed to and though I don't do stuff 100% official, I'm sure, I research and I always get a decent outcome and have variously been threatened with court (dozens of times), bailiffs, and all kinds - and yet never once had any of those things even started, and in fact had people pay me "not to take it to court, right?" because they were so far in the wrong they didn't even realise until I presented the evidence to them. Insurance companies, telecommunications providers, landlords, letting agents, banks, ... all kinds of companies have come unstuck when they just go through the "standard procedure" and I actually have a genuine grievance that they don't handle.
I've had money for an entire contract term forcibly ripped back out of their accounts going back months (have to love UK Direct Debit law... I got a very polite phone call literally two minutes later...), I've had insurance companies mess up so bad they begged for me to not take them to court, I've turned "We're going to take you to court" into "Oh.... sorry... no, that's absolutely our mistake, here's a cheque" (often a few days after I say "No problem, I have copies of
The science-based comic written by a scientist who worked building robots for NASA?
Yup.
Just because the media is considered "childish", the facts behind it are undoubtedly quite accurate (if not perfect). Also, there are entire books about visualisation of data that don't come close to what XKCD manages with its radiation chart and similar visualisations.
Not the OP but:
"Do you anticipate suddenly your 5 year old phone will need a massive boost in available bandwidth to continue doing what it is already doing?"
Yes. The data I used 5 years ago isn't comparable to what I use today. There wasn't even a package available back then to cover what I have on my package now.
"Do you anticipate your phone company will just toss LTE on the trash-heap in 5 years?"
No. I anticipate that they'll move all their kit to 5G to "sell" 5G, and in the process never deploy 4G to its maximum capability (which is already stupendous). You'll never see this gigabit-4G actually in the wild in the US or Europe, even though it could technically exist.
They'll pay billions for 5G licences, upgrade all their kit and - in the same way that we still don't utilise 3G's capacity even today - 4G will become a second-class citizen.
Now 4G might be "enough", but that state of affairs won't last forever. I loaded the front page of Facebook the other day and it was over 12Mbyte of content. Even at 4G speeds, that means that it takes several seconds to actually show anything at all.
Is that the company owned by one of the guys (Janko Mrsic-Flogel) related to the Retro Computers Limited / ZX Vega thing on IndieGoGo that shipped about 100 crappy protoype units and then disappeared from existence?
Certainly if he wasn't solely *responsible* for the Vega thing, he was one of the guy that caused the company to wind up (https://www.thegazette.co.uk/notice/3193686), owed money to the company directors and had to have a court order against him (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/23/retro_computers_ltd_directors_ordered_pay_3k_legal_costs/), and certainly played a part in knowing what state the device was actually in, but gushing about it all over the place to try to get people's money knowing it was a turkey.
Whether or not the Gemini is any good (to be honest, I've seen better devices), I wouldn't do business with any of these people. And I wouldn't TOUCH IndieGoGo with a bargepole now as, despite explicit promises to try to reclaim their backer's money, they have done literally nothing and don't even answer queries now.
Fortunately, I've never backed any of their projects - this guy or any of the other directors or IndieGoGo - because it's much more important to me for them to do business correctly. Same as the OpenPandora thing many years ago. Lots of people losing LOTS of money.
It really comes to something when a Korean company that I'd never heard of until I picked up one of their devices (GamePark Holdings) does better business than people in my own country (the UK) making similar devices. All the UK-based "successors" to that device have been cons or ending in disaster.
It's like someone said "Please list everything you would never want in a phone" and then priced it at "Please tell me what you would never pay for it".
So, my first option.
The problem with offering such subsidised-elsewhere products is that unless you have 100% exclusivity, someone else came come along and offer just the bit that you don't want them to.
No different to any loss-leader product. The objective word there is "loss". Don't be surprised if someone works out how to cause you that loss and not actually give you the profitable part elsewhere (e.g. Cuecats).
Chapter hyperlinks and search.
Hell, hyperlinks in the index.
So...
Are they selling the same products as the big stores, but at a cheaper price?
Or are they selling something that big stores aren't selling?
Because, either way, simple business analysis tells you that you have a problem if that's the case and it's hardly "their" fault that they are undercutting you and giving people things they want.
I feel so sad for those multi-million dollar store chains that can't over-charge people for basic goods and services because of a dollar-store (or pound shop in my country) down the road.
Compete, or get the fuck out of the market. Trying to shut down the opposition that's filling the niches you aren't - without even trying to fill those same niches - is just being arseholes.
If only they weren't 100% compliant with all applicable laws, and there was an obvious way to change those laws to mean that they do have to pay tax!
I mean... who'd ever live in such a world!
So much better to let them - or anyone else - do it, completely legitimately, then try to invoke ire that they decided it was a good thing to do, not pay any tax that they weren't required to.
I tell you now, if the taxman gave me an option to not pay any tax, completely legitimately, with no comeback, I'd damn well exercise it. So I don't see why Amazon should be singled out for having done so.
The problem is... how did they manage this, and why aren't the taxation authorities and law doing anything to close whatever "loophole" (read: crappily written law) they utilised.
The UK and EU have been cracking down on this, ever since Apple paid some pathetic percentage in Ireland and tried to claim that covered ALL their EU tax. Even *Ireland* protested and basically fought Apple's corner for Apple NOT to pay more tax to Ireland... Ireland literally talked themselves out of billions in tax that the EU *FORCED* Apple to pay them - because they knew they their little backhanders and "favours" were supposed to happen in lieu of Apple paying tax, so Apple would get pissed off and move out of Ireland if they were made to pay *the actual amount they should have owed*.
Amazon used an antique tax law in Guernsey (Channel Islands, sorta-belongs to the UK) to ship DVDs without paying VAT... that law was designed to cover tulip shipments to make the Guersney flower industry thrive. It got misused such that Amazon posted ALL their DVDs and CD from Guernsey for nearly a decade.
Because not one fool thought "Maybe that tax exception should only apply to the flowers we don't want to tax, not every single thing under the sun of a similar value"
Okay.
So they have those factored into the price already (or else the entire flight makes them a loss). Let's say that they literally don't save a single penny. It hasn't cost them a penny more than him flying, either. It's a fixed price. Whether or not the guy takes the flight.
Contract law etc. is not as clear cut as you make out. Just writing something in a contract and having someone sign it does *not* necessarily mean it's legally binding, especially if it's ever considered "unreasonable". A court may well consider it unreasonable to charge someone more for something they've already paid in full for but didn't exercise.
Or else they wouldn't have found in his favour, would they? If the airline were at all out of pocket, they would have a cast-iron case for recompensation of those costs. But... they didn't get that. The court didn't give them that. Probably because they *cannot* prove any damages or losses caused by such an action. And not just one airline in one court, as the summary says.
Again - if he's not boarded because he's late to the flight, missed it, falls over and breaks his leg, gets pulled in by security for an extended check, whatever... the exact same "costs" would presumably apply at the destination, no? They don't chase him for them in those instances. Why should they just because he did it voluntarily?
"This means the airline agrees to pick up all costs associated with that travel, this is built into the ticket price you agreed upon." And thus... it doesn't matter if those losses happen or not. And if they do happen often enough, you raise the price of such tickets, right? Rather than get thrown out of court twice for trying it on.
Basic consumer law has nothing to do with it. It's contract law. Contracts have an element of reasonableness. It's not reasonable to charge people less to use more flights than would otherwise be required - the costs don't stack up. As the courts found. Twice. Just in the US, but probably a lot of other places elsewhere.
If this is hurting them, they need to raise their prices on such flights to factor that in. To fail to do so is a basic business failing. To offer a product that's cheaper for people to BUY MORE AND THROW SOME AWAY than to just buy the original item alone is really, really bad business. Not to mention suing your own paying customers who paid in full.
There is no mythical fine they have to pay for not having a passenger onboard - if he told them he wasn't going to be on the flight (either by absence of a necessary boarding procedure, or explicit notification). Maybe a small admin cost, at worse. And then you'll find that even "all the flights, plus the reasonable admin cost for skipping one" will be less than the cost of "less flights to the same destinations" and people will still do it.
It's a stupid company that sues its own customers for exercising a completely legitimate operation that means they save lots of money at no further expense to the airline and doesn't a) take steps to prevent that or b) utilise that information and adjust pricing accordingly.
The courts agreed. Because the consumer rights of reasonableness trump any "company was being stupid and was just out to charge me more" right.
You have a kernel of an idea, but I can't help but think that you're coming from a bias.
Certainly it's possible that "some unidentified, or thought irrelevant, deficiency could contribute to ill health later in life" is certainly possible.
However, all food is "natural", using such wording makes me doubt the origin of your viewpoint. All food is natural. There's no such thing as synthetic food, in essence. Just processed or unprocessed.
Thus it's a question of whether that process affects the food negatively or not. Unfortunately the study stands alone in a sea of other studies that find that the benefits of processed food (i.e. no bugs, no diseases, food safety standards, wide range of foods available in the shops year round) basically outweigh any processing downsides so long as the consumer is sensible. It's much more a "consumer habit makes them get sick" than anything else, rather than laying the blame at processed foods in themselves.
However, the study (which is based on web-reporting of people's food habits, and some of those people barely contributed at all) also finds that the deaths are cancer and cardiovascular disease. Cancers are basically what you die of if you die of nothing else. They are inherent, ever-present, virtually inevitable (unless you're a certain species of lobster, etc.), etc.
Omega-3, in particular, is another snake-oil term from the "health" food industry. Like fibre, vitamin C and many other things, including oxygen - being DEFICIENT in it isn't good for you. But consuming more of it doesn't make you healthier. There are more studies concluding "Dietary supplementation with omegaâ'3 fatty acids does not appear to affect the risk of death, cancer or heart disease." than anything to the contrary, for instance. The EU's official line is "contributes to the normal function of the heart" (which appears a lot in our health adverts as they aren't allowed to claim things that can't be proven - if you read that sentence carefully it basically means "Yeah, you need some, that's about it")
There were many hypotheses saying that Omega-3 is what caused us to evolve from wading animals to super-brain predators, but that's nowhere near true either. Probably it helped, having access to sea-food, but it's not an automatic "makes your brain better" food or else blue whales and sharks would be the cleverest things on Earth - all that fresh Omega-3!
Again - necessary, but not super-boosting just because you eat more.
The basic rule of any health nutrient is "the difference between 'normal' and what happens if you don't have it doesn't mean it'll give you those benefits again ON TOP of normal by having it". More fibre isn't better than normal amounts. More sugar isn't better than normal amounts. Similarly no-sugar isn't better than normal amounts. And "normal amounts" are widely publicised, heavily tested, and also subject to millions of years of evolutionary selection - we call it hunger.
The reason your manufacturer no longer makes "Omega-3 chocolate truffles"? They were a processed food that likely eliminated most of the Omega-3 in their production (like any processed food), and then the hype around Omega-3 died off and nobody bought them.
Honestly, if you haven't read up on this stuff, you shouldn't be offering nutritional advice (I'm not offering nutritional advice either - I'm asking people to exercise caution and, ironically, take every health-fad with a pinch of salt).
The recommended diets are there, heavily researched and tested down to every individual component. They don't mention extremes of Omega-3 or anything else like that, nor do they say "don't eat any processed food". That's your current science. Any parroting of something that sounds like something a "health food shop" checkout girl would tell you is likely to be proven nonsense after the fad has worn off.
But your original line - that's probably right. It's not much use to us, however, if people just don't eat the right diet in the first place.
I've yet to ever see a plane delayed for the benefit of a passenger, especially one with no luggage in the hold.
Precisely because it happens all the time and the cost of delaying even 5 minutes is way more than any single passenger ticket (except possibly first class, but even then it's not worth the trade-off that they'll come in 10 rather than 5 minutes).
Also - do you not have to "check-in" to a flight? Without that, they wouldn't be expecting him at the gate at all. Like millions of passengers every year who don't check in because their taxi didn't arrive on time, family emergencies, their connecting flight was late, they didn't make it through security, etc. etc. etc.
If it's cheaper to NOT TAKE A FLIGHT for the customer, what the hell are you selling? You have literally saved money - the customer paid, didn't use part of their trip, didn't cost you fuel and loading time, and if you had half a brain they would have been able to do that AND tell you that the last seat would be unoccupied, which you could then legitimately sell on to a last minute customer and make EVEN MORE money.
It's like a customer buying a 3-for-the-price-of-2 offer, binning the 3rd free item because they only needed two, and then you trying to sue them to use that third item.
It's not like they gave it away. It's not like someone else turned up expecting to sit in that seat and couldn't. It's not like they committed fraud by having someone else come along and take their place on the final leg. Your prices literally make it more viable to NOT utilise a part of the service that they could do so, for "free" (after they'd paid all the bits they did use), and you save some small amount of money in the process (and someone else gets an empty seat to enjoy on the flight).
Use your brains, change your pricing structure and/or allow people to flag such seats as "unused even though I got it as part of the deal" and then you could make a killing selling just that seat on to someone else as per your normal booking system.
Much easier is to just not price that way. It's not like that passenger not coming onto that flight (i.e. not saying they will board at all, so you're not even looking for them) has cost you any money in any way, shape or form by not appearing - so you've basically given them a flight they didn't want, for free, and then complained they didn't use it.
That there isn't a mainstream, popular, memory-safe language that is suitable for writing an OS (to the point that *anyone* from the entire tech industry has written an OS in it that's mainstream/popular in itself?) is a strawman?
No, that's my exact point.
Any language is an expression of your intention. If your intentions are poorly thought out, planned, described and executed, that's a fault common to all languages and little can fix that (expecting the "grammar" or "vocabulary" of a particular language to save you in that instance is not sensible).
C is used for many reasons. It's not "safe" because "safe" is hard anyway. It is quick because quick is hard in many languages that are safe.
Rust is no more difficult than C but if want to do anything vaguely OS-like or interesting, you have to utilise it's "unsafe" settings and you're back to square one.
All things aside - trusting SOFTWARE to enforce security is a nonsense. When software wants to access out-of-bounds, it only has to change a number.
We need to design *hardware* to enforce memory security. Things like "per-process/page encryption" are starting to do that for us - Intel's next round of chips features a way to have a different memory key for each part of memory. It's a start. But what's needed is a literal way to ensure that you *can't* access outside of bounds anyway. We fudge this with flags and DEP and things at the moment, but that still allows huge scope for error and attack.
If we lacked a method for one process to, in any way, access the memory of another process, no matter what address it was tricked into trying to access, and everything had to be done through message-passing and hardware bounds, then you could start to make a more secure system.
Intel are bolting security on piecemeal that should have been in there decades ago. And the hardware needs to do the job. Then it's simply not possible to express "Access this piece of memory that's part of another process", by accident or by design.
Welcome to the 21st Century.
In most civilised countries, it's always been illegal to suggest you cure something when you have absolutely no proof of that, and even if you have proof, medical claims have to be backed up by studies, not your spurious claim made on the basis on one participant.
The best our supplement adverts have ever been able to say is things like "Helps support natural bone growth" (i.e. it doesn't make your bones snap in two, so it must be good). Same for any kind of faith healing nonsense.
You also can't advertise psychic services without a disclaimer that it's for "entertainment purposes only". Yep, even a seance, or a fortune-telling, or a psychic night in a pub.
How do I know? It's a hobby of mine to report the little slips-of-paper-through-the-door style of advertising when they "forget" to include such things or make such spurious claims. I've had quite a few fined for it. It's the best form of policing - society gets its censors, the idiots learn not to run such adverts, and I get to fill a quiet afternoon giggling to myself.
There's an Indian restaurant near me whose front window is splattered with quotes from various places suggesting how curry "could help" with things like cancer. Unfortunately, they skirt just the right side of the law, I think, so I'm always waiting for them to trip up, but one day when it's quiet and I'm in need of entertainment, I'll write a snotty email.
But anything claiming medical cures in any way, shape or form is illegal - there's even a specific law for claiming to cure cancer, and case-law specifically against claiming vaccines cause autism (the UK was the country that had the rubbish "doctor" who first posited that, and he did so *so* ineptly, and so without any evidence whatsoever, that they struck him off and took him to court).
Strange then that the various rewrites of Windows and the kernel, and device drivers etc. don't use a memory-safe language. Or that I'm really pushed to name an OS that *wasn't* written in C / C++ and might be something that anyone's heard of except on a tech forum.
Maybe something to do with the fact that - despite what's claimed - memory-safe languages tend to be slower and/or consume more resources in the first place. That's the problem you need to fix - push the memory safety into hardware, so it doesn't need to be in the language. That means a complete architecture change.
Name memory-safe languages in mainstream use and you end up with:
- Python
- Java
- C# (which just makes me think ".Net Framework")
- JavaScript
- Rust and Go are in the middle ground - they can be memory safe but they often aren't.
Not sure I really want an operating system written in any of those languages. Or even written by the people who wrote those languages (Google may have written Go and use an OS of their own, but didn't exactly make Android or ChromeOS now, did they? And they are both based on what kernel, written in what language?)
Until we solve that performance problem of memory-safety, and a memory-unsafe OS underpinning the whole thing, nobody's going to bother with a memory-safe language.