Strange. There are currently many more countries asking to join the EU than those considering leaving (one).
And the one considering leaving has always had certain opt-outs (currency, open borders, etc.), and has negotiated all kinds of exceptions because it's an oddball in the way it produces money and imports goods, but a powerful oddball, and otherwise its membership would be unfair to it but the EU still want to keep it in.
And even in that one country... the polls are currently saying 50% of people are in, 50% of people want out. Which basically means nothing will happen at all, and people don't know what they want.
So far, I don't think a single country has ever left the EU historically, even places like Greece - not bad for something formed from the basic idea from just after WW2. (Greenland you say? Technically that's part of Denmark, which is still in).
Wikipedia, and also many news stories a few years ago that say exactly that - we no longer monitor analogue frequencies for bare-bones distress signals like Morse.
"Satellite processing from all 121.5 or 243 MHz locators has been discontinued.
Since February 1, 2009, the U.S. Coast Guard only monitors distress signals from emergency position indicating radio beacons that broadcast using digital 406 MHz signals.[2]
Digital 406 MHz models became the only ones approved for use in both commercial and recreational watercraft worldwide on January 1, 2007"
I have a new car. But it's one that has none of this auto-update junk on it.
Pretty much, update or compromise requires physical access to the internals of the car (game over already), or for the engine to be started (again, game over). There is no remote-start (was an option, removed), there is no over-the-air update (update via physical SD card placed in in-car slot when engine is first started with ignition keys), the attack surface is pretty damn low even for a high-tech car.
Hell, the in-car entertainment / bluetooth doesn't start until the engine is started from key, and the only other thing is the OBD port which is mandated but - hopefully, from what I've seen - almost entirely read-only except to "clear engine warning lights" which come back on if there's a fault anyway.
I don't get why you would WANT over-the-air-updates in a car, it just sounds dangerous. My car has in-car sat-nav. I take it to the dealer or buy an SD card from them and put it in myself. How hard is that, honestly?
We don't even listen out for SOS morse messages any more, and that was only around for a hundred years or so.
Any method of contacting an advanced civilisation isn't going to be listened for for more than a few generations before its obsolete and nobody's on the other end anyway. Like trying to send a fax will be in a few decades, or how pagers are all-but-dead, and how the first generation of mobile phones was largely incompatible with modern standardised SIMs, frequencies, codecs, etc.
I don't know what we're looking for, but chances are we aren't going to find it.
Any suspected terrorist stupid enough to be caught browsing HTTP (or even HTTPS) sites to co-ordinate their activities really ARE NOT the people we need to worry about.
And any "activity report" that just looks at DNS lookups for websites is really useless against the rest.
Honestly, even an SSH to a foreign remote server that does the actual lookup stuff for you would make it much harder to detect what you were looking up, and that's not even counting looking for it on a proper "darkweb" rather than just anything you could find in a normal web browser with no special software.
but if the logs show 100% acceleration, that just reflects the sensor value. Not that the user - or indeed anything else like a dropped handbag - actually pressed the pedal that far.
Although I'm always the one to shout "user error" first, and that's quite likely in this case, the logs alone are not sufficient to prove fault. Only to act like a flight recorder and say what the sensors recorded and what the machine did in response to that input.
How the sensor got that reading could still be manufacturing fault, cable fatigue, or a million and one other things not the fault of the driver.
An app is an application. It does something. It transforms and processes some kind of data.
Most of the time, you do NOT want an app to process or transform data, you just want it to send and receive data to a service, and most of the time you just want it to receive.
A website is therefore much better suited to this. And unless you intend to calculate your tax return on a smartphone, you really have little need for "apps" at all for government services. Given that browsers can upload video, camera images, microphone sound etc. nowadays if you really want, the usage of an actual app is rare.
An "app" is something like a game, or a web browser itself, or an office suite, or a calculator. It ISN'T a list of symptoms for NHS online healthchecks (or even a questionnaire), or information on how to renew your driving licence, or a list of laws and their effects. That's a not an app.
People have blurred the definition but the distinction still stands. All the "apps" that are really websites in fancy containers - even offline websites - aren't actually any good as "apps". An app actually DOES something on the client device. Creates documents, organises a raw database, syncs your files or lets you read your email.
No, here voting with your feet thus means "stop buying software reliant on Windows".
The home user scenario has been sorted for a long time, especially with cloud services for things like office suites.
But if your company hasn't learned in the last 25 years to stop tying themselves into Microsoft, they have only themselves to blame. Especially in the post-ActiveX era where you can just do everything in a web browser and the back-end hardly matters.
If you're still buying into that shite "because we have to have Microsoft", you cooked your own goose, nobody else. Maybe you should have looked into standardised APIs, cross-platform compatibility, and web-based services (even hosted in-house on Microsoft servers!) 10 years ago, when everyone else did.
You can use the sarcastic "finally" in the headline when you publish a single AAAA record, Slashdot, that "news for nerds" who can't be nerdy enough to turn on IPv6 themselves but are happy to report on it all the time.
You should have stayed on for the second year of law school. They would have told you that a contract cannot be automatically upgraded unless reasonable and the reasonable opportunity given to back out or otherwise not agree to the terms, that all contracts have to be reasonable anyway, that contracts are meetings of minds, and that unfair contracts will be interpreted in favour of the party that didn't draw them up (i.e. the user).
A EULA is also not specifically a contract, though it may form part of one, but a grant of licence to use a copyrighted work. If the terms to use that copyrighted work include, say, automatic control over your computer, upgrades, telemetry, etc. then it could easily be interpreted as overbearing for a copyright licence. It's also certainly not an automatically binding contract, and is override by basic statutory rights and contract law. Just because you agree to "give your firstborn" does not mean that's legal - even if you WANT to do that! And changing the goalposts later never goes down well in court.
And I agreed the Windows 7 EULA, not the Windows 10 one. What if I disagree with the Windows 10 one? Are they trying to trick me into agreeing by other methods (i.e. automatically upgrading me?), giving me no reasonable option, etc.? That's basically duress.
Personally, I think MS are on a hiding to nothing, and they'll "get away" with it for the most part. And then when Windows 10 becomes "pay only", and Windows 11 is treated the same way, they'll be a comeback that everyone else will have seen coming.
All its shown me is that MS hasn't changed one bit in its existence and all the posturing of recent years is just a trap to force you to upgrade. I certainly shan't be buying MS licences for my own use and, by extension, I avoid and recommend against their cloud services, office products, browsers, and even their consoles, phones, tablets and software services (though, let's be honest, you hardly need to avoid that shite).
Chromebooks are going down well with everyone asking me about "cheap laptops". Office compatibility for home use is barely an issue any more. Cloud services have plenty of alternatives. Most people have seen iPads and Macs and understand "they aren't Windows" and it doesn't stop people nowadays. I get just as many Apple Pages job applications as Microsoft Word (and when its for a techy position, I file those in the Deleted Items folder appropriately).
Here's hoping it's just a swansong for Microsoft, but if we can screw them to the floor with an EU parliament investigation or similar, maybe we can completely remove their influence more quickly.
They don't need to have had a breach, as such, for the software to have been compromised in some way. Even a protocol flaw, or a plain-text-password-sniff or all kinds of things. Even a virus on a machine that you've logged on FROM.
Though I agree with your sentiment, someone should tell Apple that they aren't targeting education. And the rest of the world that also believes that (because they are TOLD that).
I was once asked to gather EU data protection guarantees from various cloud companies. Basically, a new law came in that meant that we couldn't just take their word that they only stored and processed our data on EU datacentres, but an actual written guarantee. ISO 27001 was apart of that.
At the time, Apple were the only large cloud company completely unable / unwilling to supply one. I don't know if that's changed because, well... since then we've only ever supplied fake personal information and/or disabled iCloud on products that we use, and the decision was made that Google Apps would be the cloud services of choice because they complied and were free (for schools).
Hilarious that people point fingers at Google for privacy and data processing, and yet Apple was the one to fail hardest on this, for a period of many months, forcing our hand.
My five-year-old gaming laptop does everything from play 1000 games on Steam (including GTA V etc. at decent rates) to word-processing to virtual machines for development. All on one device, battery-powered, portable (LAN gaming anyone?), silent, plugs into any HDMI at friends houses, etc.
With an SSD (out of two 2.5" SATA devices that it has bays for) there aren't even any moving parts except a fan that only kicks in when on mains power and really slagging it. And I can alt-tab back and forth between web browser, documents, virtual machines and 3D games with barely a flicker.
I can also take it to work, take it on planes, plug it in in the car, and do all the above - as well as storing Terabytes of movies etc. - in a device no bigger than the screen I'm using.
People who diss gaming laptops obviously have money to piss away on all kinds of shit replicated across multiple devices, including bringing across all their settings, photos, cloud-sync, game folders, etc. where each device only does one job (gaming PC too powerful and noisy and impractical to transport to use at work, etc.).
To be honest, mine isn't even top-of-the-line. It was no more expensive than a decent laptop ever used to be (I think it was GBP 800 new about GBP 400 of upgrades since for SSD and RAM etc.). But it can run everything I own, and run multiple OS in background VM's too.
If you ever had to have a "do everything" machine, pretty much a gaming laptop is ideal. And rather than lots of specialised and individually expensive devices, I have one fairly-expensive device that doesn't change, doesn't need me to change working patterns all day long and which I can quickly load up a game to break from work and then go back to it with nothing more than an Alt-Tab.
Every cheapy wireless driver. Sometimes it's hard to get the right driver when you KNOW the model of computer it was in and it was supported for that version of Windows.
Every cheapy soundcard driver. Every cheapy webcam driver. Even things like card readers, fingerprint readers etc.
Honestly, have you TRIED to support any decent number of home / small business computers at any point in your life?
If the words "Realtek" or "HDAudio" next to a no-driver hardware in control panel don't make you immediately think "Oh, ffs", you can't have done.
It's not a question of what's technically possible. It's a question of Samsung buying a webcam model for a couple of quid (and that's ALL they can afford to spend given the other features and costs in a low-end laptop, for instance) and they get given a hacked driver that the manufacturer says will work on Windows 7 32-bit. Which they then bundle with their Windows 7 32-bit machines, pre-installed (because it probably doesn't even have a proper setup and/or conflicts with other devices and/or is unsigned).
Then five years after that model goes off the market, you want to get a Windows 10 64-bit driver for it? Good luck, whoever it involved.
We're not talking server hardware with 10/15-year life expectancy here. We're talking consumer hardware with cheap models and drivers specified for the "bundled" versions of Windows that work perfectly well until Windows 10 comes along years afterwards and doesn't have that EXACT driver for that one-off model of device in the list.
Anything organic? Pretty much no (trace amounts at best). Therefore petroleum, oils, etc. are out of the question.
Metals? Not really. Again, apart from iron, it's more energy to find, capture and refine than it's worth.
Useful gases? Chemicals? Apart from a couple of outliers, and again subject to discovering them in the mostly-vacuum of the solar system, not really.
Although technically silicon chips are "made of rocks", you can't just pick up these things. And they are hard to find, extremely hard to capture, even more difficult to alter the course of (especially in bulk) and almost impossible to "stop". Fuck, we can barely land ON island-size lumps of rock with missions that take decades to get in place to do so. Let alone shoving it to the right place with destroying everything, breaking it down and reusing some trace element inside it.
Raw materials are in SHORT supply up there. Pretty much the only ubiquitous thing is radiation of one form or another (i.e. energy, even if it's "light"). At, to be honest, we don't really have shortages of that when you consider the uranium in the planet (oh, look, an entire FUCKING PLANET and we barely have enough uranium to be bothered digging through it to get to it).
You've just increased their costs hundred-fold, even if manufacturing were "free", power were "free" and delivery back to Earth comes free courtesy of gravity.
It's costs millions to put a few hundred kilos into orbit. Let alone getting it somewhere useful. And capturing, refining and using material already in space is basically 100% unproven at the moment - we've literally never done it and have no idea of the associated costs.
They have preferred stocks in a company worth millions. The more they are hyped, the higher the price went, until it gets to the point just before the news breaks that they are worthless and pointless... and then they sell making money from - quite literally - investor's stupidity.
It's up to the investors to investigate about viability at the early stages (i.e. before they put a product to market or out for FDA approval, etc.) and they didn't bother because it's a game of hot-potato and if they get out, they win lots of money, and if they don't, they still have first bat at getting all their money back, plus ANY profit whatsoever.
If they are really, really wrong, the company collapses, they STILL get a shed-ton of money back (so little risk), they move on to the next venture.
Welcome to the world of corporate hot-potato roulette, where the options are "lose slightly, win big, win bigger".
Still no Windows 10 drivers after a year from release, for a cheap model of laptop they might have pushed out 5-7 years ago, which was only certified for Windows 7? Yeah, not really surprising.
There are a LOT of manufacturer's out there committing exactly that "crime". It's got nothing to do with laziness - hell, in that time the manufacturer could have gone bankrupt - but it's got everything to do with the manufacturer just saying "that's an old chipset, we don't have 10 drivers. But for $50k...." and Samsung telling them to stick it up their bottom.
20% in 4 days is rapid, sure, but fuck - an iPhone can change in price that much if there's enough demand, and it's still up in the air whether Bitcoin is a currency or a commodity like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Strange. There are currently many more countries asking to join the EU than those considering leaving (one).
And the one considering leaving has always had certain opt-outs (currency, open borders, etc.), and has negotiated all kinds of exceptions because it's an oddball in the way it produces money and imports goods, but a powerful oddball, and otherwise its membership would be unfair to it but the EU still want to keep it in.
And even in that one country... the polls are currently saying 50% of people are in, 50% of people want out. Which basically means nothing will happen at all, and people don't know what they want.
So far, I don't think a single country has ever left the EU historically, even places like Greece - not bad for something formed from the basic idea from just after WW2. (Greenland you say? Technically that's part of Denmark, which is still in).
Wikipedia, and also many news stories a few years ago that say exactly that - we no longer monitor analogue frequencies for bare-bones distress signals like Morse.
"Satellite processing from all 121.5 or 243 MHz locators has been discontinued.
Since February 1, 2009, the U.S. Coast Guard only monitors distress signals from emergency position indicating radio beacons that broadcast using digital 406 MHz signals.[2]
Digital 406 MHz models became the only ones approved for use in both commercial and recreational watercraft worldwide on January 1, 2007"
You still type in web addresses?
Welcome to the 90's which gave you bookmarks/favourites.
Yep.
I have a new car. But it's one that has none of this auto-update junk on it.
Pretty much, update or compromise requires physical access to the internals of the car (game over already), or for the engine to be started (again, game over). There is no remote-start (was an option, removed), there is no over-the-air update (update via physical SD card placed in in-car slot when engine is first started with ignition keys), the attack surface is pretty damn low even for a high-tech car.
Hell, the in-car entertainment / bluetooth doesn't start until the engine is started from key, and the only other thing is the OBD port which is mandated but - hopefully, from what I've seen - almost entirely read-only except to "clear engine warning lights" which come back on if there's a fault anyway.
I don't get why you would WANT over-the-air-updates in a car, it just sounds dangerous. My car has in-car sat-nav. I take it to the dealer or buy an SD card from them and put it in myself. How hard is that, honestly?
We don't even listen out for SOS morse messages any more, and that was only around for a hundred years or so.
Any method of contacting an advanced civilisation isn't going to be listened for for more than a few generations before its obsolete and nobody's on the other end anyway. Like trying to send a fax will be in a few decades, or how pagers are all-but-dead, and how the first generation of mobile phones was largely incompatible with modern standardised SIMs, frequencies, codecs, etc.
I don't know what we're looking for, but chances are we aren't going to find it.
Any suspected terrorist stupid enough to be caught browsing HTTP (or even HTTPS) sites to co-ordinate their activities really ARE NOT the people we need to worry about.
And any "activity report" that just looks at DNS lookups for websites is really useless against the rest.
Honestly, even an SSH to a foreign remote server that does the actual lookup stuff for you would make it much harder to detect what you were looking up, and that's not even counting looking for it on a proper "darkweb" rather than just anything you could find in a normal web browser with no special software.
Not being funny...
but if the logs show 100% acceleration, that just reflects the sensor value. Not that the user - or indeed anything else like a dropped handbag - actually pressed the pedal that far.
Although I'm always the one to shout "user error" first, and that's quite likely in this case, the logs alone are not sufficient to prove fault. Only to act like a flight recorder and say what the sensors recorded and what the machine did in response to that input.
How the sensor got that reading could still be manufacturing fault, cable fatigue, or a million and one other things not the fault of the driver.
An app is an application. It does something. It transforms and processes some kind of data.
Most of the time, you do NOT want an app to process or transform data, you just want it to send and receive data to a service, and most of the time you just want it to receive.
A website is therefore much better suited to this. And unless you intend to calculate your tax return on a smartphone, you really have little need for "apps" at all for government services. Given that browsers can upload video, camera images, microphone sound etc. nowadays if you really want, the usage of an actual app is rare.
An "app" is something like a game, or a web browser itself, or an office suite, or a calculator. It ISN'T a list of symptoms for NHS online healthchecks (or even a questionnaire), or information on how to renew your driving licence, or a list of laws and their effects. That's a not an app.
People have blurred the definition but the distinction still stands. All the "apps" that are really websites in fancy containers - even offline websites - aren't actually any good as "apps". An app actually DOES something on the client device. Creates documents, organises a raw database, syncs your files or lets you read your email.
No, here voting with your feet thus means "stop buying software reliant on Windows".
The home user scenario has been sorted for a long time, especially with cloud services for things like office suites.
But if your company hasn't learned in the last 25 years to stop tying themselves into Microsoft, they have only themselves to blame. Especially in the post-ActiveX era where you can just do everything in a web browser and the back-end hardly matters.
If you're still buying into that shite "because we have to have Microsoft", you cooked your own goose, nobody else. Maybe you should have looked into standardised APIs, cross-platform compatibility, and web-based services (even hosted in-house on Microsoft servers!) 10 years ago, when everyone else did.
You can use the sarcastic "finally" in the headline when you publish a single AAAA record, Slashdot, that "news for nerds" who can't be nerdy enough to turn on IPv6 themselves but are happy to report on it all the time.
You should have stayed on for the second year of law school. They would have told you that a contract cannot be automatically upgraded unless reasonable and the reasonable opportunity given to back out or otherwise not agree to the terms, that all contracts have to be reasonable anyway, that contracts are meetings of minds, and that unfair contracts will be interpreted in favour of the party that didn't draw them up (i.e. the user).
A EULA is also not specifically a contract, though it may form part of one, but a grant of licence to use a copyrighted work. If the terms to use that copyrighted work include, say, automatic control over your computer, upgrades, telemetry, etc. then it could easily be interpreted as overbearing for a copyright licence. It's also certainly not an automatically binding contract, and is override by basic statutory rights and contract law. Just because you agree to "give your firstborn" does not mean that's legal - even if you WANT to do that! And changing the goalposts later never goes down well in court.
And I agreed the Windows 7 EULA, not the Windows 10 one. What if I disagree with the Windows 10 one? Are they trying to trick me into agreeing by other methods (i.e. automatically upgrading me?), giving me no reasonable option, etc.? That's basically duress.
Personally, I think MS are on a hiding to nothing, and they'll "get away" with it for the most part. And then when Windows 10 becomes "pay only", and Windows 11 is treated the same way, they'll be a comeback that everyone else will have seen coming.
All its shown me is that MS hasn't changed one bit in its existence and all the posturing of recent years is just a trap to force you to upgrade. I certainly shan't be buying MS licences for my own use and, by extension, I avoid and recommend against their cloud services, office products, browsers, and even their consoles, phones, tablets and software services (though, let's be honest, you hardly need to avoid that shite).
Chromebooks are going down well with everyone asking me about "cheap laptops". Office compatibility for home use is barely an issue any more. Cloud services have plenty of alternatives. Most people have seen iPads and Macs and understand "they aren't Windows" and it doesn't stop people nowadays. I get just as many Apple Pages job applications as Microsoft Word (and when its for a techy position, I file those in the Deleted Items folder appropriately).
Here's hoping it's just a swansong for Microsoft, but if we can screw them to the floor with an EU parliament investigation or similar, maybe we can completely remove their influence more quickly.
Vote with feet.
Problem solved.
They don't need to have had a breach, as such, for the software to have been compromised in some way. Even a protocol flaw, or a plain-text-password-sniff or all kinds of things. Even a virus on a machine that you've logged on FROM.
iPads.
Education.
Though I agree with your sentiment, someone should tell Apple that they aren't targeting education. And the rest of the world that also believes that (because they are TOLD that).
I was once asked to gather EU data protection guarantees from various cloud companies. Basically, a new law came in that meant that we couldn't just take their word that they only stored and processed our data on EU datacentres, but an actual written guarantee. ISO 27001 was apart of that.
At the time, Apple were the only large cloud company completely unable / unwilling to supply one. I don't know if that's changed because, well... since then we've only ever supplied fake personal information and/or disabled iCloud on products that we use, and the decision was made that Google Apps would be the cloud services of choice because they complied and were free (for schools).
Hilarious that people point fingers at Google for privacy and data processing, and yet Apple was the one to fail hardest on this, for a period of many months, forcing our hand.
Ah.
Like Facebook.
When I constantly switch the fucker back to "Most Recent" and it keeps fucking forgetting.
Oh, well, another site to avoid because of a stupid change to how it works that wasn't thought through.
I call bollocks on your bullshit, mate.
Nvidia GeForce GT540M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Maybe it's not your cup of tea, having to dial down an option or two, but that's a five-year-old laptop. A modern gaming laptop just laughs at it.
P.S. Radeon? Really?
You do that.
My five-year-old gaming laptop does everything from play 1000 games on Steam (including GTA V etc. at decent rates) to word-processing to virtual machines for development. All on one device, battery-powered, portable (LAN gaming anyone?), silent, plugs into any HDMI at friends houses, etc.
With an SSD (out of two 2.5" SATA devices that it has bays for) there aren't even any moving parts except a fan that only kicks in when on mains power and really slagging it. And I can alt-tab back and forth between web browser, documents, virtual machines and 3D games with barely a flicker.
I can also take it to work, take it on planes, plug it in in the car, and do all the above - as well as storing Terabytes of movies etc. - in a device no bigger than the screen I'm using.
People who diss gaming laptops obviously have money to piss away on all kinds of shit replicated across multiple devices, including bringing across all their settings, photos, cloud-sync, game folders, etc. where each device only does one job (gaming PC too powerful and noisy and impractical to transport to use at work, etc.).
To be honest, mine isn't even top-of-the-line. It was no more expensive than a decent laptop ever used to be (I think it was GBP 800 new about GBP 400 of upgrades since for SSD and RAM etc.). But it can run everything I own, and run multiple OS in background VM's too.
If you ever had to have a "do everything" machine, pretty much a gaming laptop is ideal. And rather than lots of specialised and individually expensive devices, I have one fairly-expensive device that doesn't change, doesn't need me to change working patterns all day long and which I can quickly load up a game to break from work and then go back to it with nothing more than an Alt-Tab.
Every cheapy wireless driver. Sometimes it's hard to get the right driver when you KNOW the model of computer it was in and it was supported for that version of Windows.
Every cheapy soundcard driver.
Every cheapy webcam driver.
Even things like card readers, fingerprint readers etc.
Honestly, have you TRIED to support any decent number of home / small business computers at any point in your life?
If the words "Realtek" or "HDAudio" next to a no-driver hardware in control panel don't make you immediately think "Oh, ffs", you can't have done.
It's not a question of what's technically possible. It's a question of Samsung buying a webcam model for a couple of quid (and that's ALL they can afford to spend given the other features and costs in a low-end laptop, for instance) and they get given a hacked driver that the manufacturer says will work on Windows 7 32-bit. Which they then bundle with their Windows 7 32-bit machines, pre-installed (because it probably doesn't even have a proper setup and/or conflicts with other devices and/or is unsigned).
Then five years after that model goes off the market, you want to get a Windows 10 64-bit driver for it? Good luck, whoever it involved.
We're not talking server hardware with 10/15-year life expectancy here. We're talking consumer hardware with cheap models and drivers specified for the "bundled" versions of Windows that work perfectly well until Windows 10 comes along years afterwards and doesn't have that EXACT driver for that one-off model of device in the list.
Really? Littered?
Anything organic? Pretty much no (trace amounts at best).
Therefore petroleum, oils, etc. are out of the question.
Metals? Not really. Again, apart from iron, it's more energy to find, capture and refine than it's worth.
Useful gases? Chemicals? Apart from a couple of outliers, and again subject to discovering them in the mostly-vacuum of the solar system, not really.
Although technically silicon chips are "made of rocks", you can't just pick up these things. And they are hard to find, extremely hard to capture, even more difficult to alter the course of (especially in bulk) and almost impossible to "stop". Fuck, we can barely land ON island-size lumps of rock with missions that take decades to get in place to do so. Let alone shoving it to the right place with destroying everything, breaking it down and reusing some trace element inside it.
Raw materials are in SHORT supply up there. Pretty much the only ubiquitous thing is radiation of one form or another (i.e. energy, even if it's "light"). At, to be honest, we don't really have shortages of that when you consider the uranium in the planet (oh, look, an entire FUCKING PLANET and we barely have enough uranium to be bothered digging through it to get to it).
Raw materials.
You've just increased their costs hundred-fold, even if manufacturing were "free", power were "free" and delivery back to Earth comes free courtesy of gravity.
It's costs millions to put a few hundred kilos into orbit. Let alone getting it somewhere useful. And capturing, refining and using material already in space is basically 100% unproven at the moment - we've literally never done it and have no idea of the associated costs.
Nobody cared.
They have preferred stocks in a company worth millions. The more they are hyped, the higher the price went, until it gets to the point just before the news breaks that they are worthless and pointless... and then they sell making money from - quite literally - investor's stupidity.
It's up to the investors to investigate about viability at the early stages (i.e. before they put a product to market or out for FDA approval, etc.) and they didn't bother because it's a game of hot-potato and if they get out, they win lots of money, and if they don't, they still have first bat at getting all their money back, plus ANY profit whatsoever.
If they are really, really wrong, the company collapses, they STILL get a shed-ton of money back (so little risk), they move on to the next venture.
Welcome to the world of corporate hot-potato roulette, where the options are "lose slightly, win big, win bigger".
Still no Windows 10 drivers after a year from release, for a cheap model of laptop they might have pushed out 5-7 years ago, which was only certified for Windows 7? Yeah, not really surprising.
There are a LOT of manufacturer's out there committing exactly that "crime". It's got nothing to do with laziness - hell, in that time the manufacturer could have gone bankrupt - but it's got everything to do with the manufacturer just saying "that's an old chipset, we don't have 10 drivers. But for $50k...." and Samsung telling them to stick it up their bottom.
One of the beauties of Android?
You can just "turn off notifications" on a per-app basis. It's literally like one press-hold and one click from any notification you see.
USD against EUR changed 10% in the last 6 months, and nothing particularly unusual is changing in either currency at this moment.
https://www.oanda.com/solution...
20% in 4 days is rapid, sure, but fuck - an iPhone can change in price that much if there's enough demand, and it's still up in the air whether Bitcoin is a currency or a commodity like that.