Hardware is very different and only useful as an analogy, especially when it comes to patents.
There are a vast number of pin-compatible chips that are not licensed, nor do they need to be. And in Google v Oracle, it was already established that such reimplementation was allowed, it was just a question of whether that was "fair use" of the copyrights (and even the argument that they are subject to copyright at all was tenuous). But if you were to say "our chip pinout is copyright", that only protects that expression of it (i.e. you couldn't photocopy your competitor's datasheet).
The actual information on it would be required to be duplicated to make a pin-out compatible chip, and the courts had already said that MAKING such a "pin-out-compatible chip" for Java was absolutely fine.
For "code", read "lines from header files to ensure that their strlen() function - or whatever - took the same parameters in the same order as our one, when they were trying to make an independent, but compatible, reimplementation".
It's like Intel saying "They copied our circuit diagram, hundreds of pins on a layout and what they do" when someone's making, say, a chip compatible with an x86 motherboard. Nobody's suggesting that the chip they made wasn't developed entirely independently, they're saying they "own" the fact that pin 1 is 5v, pin 2 is GND, pin 3 is DATA1, etc.
Because paying for cards for every machine in the word, and mandating their use for every transaction from any machine, plus avoiding that device being compromised by a government entity, or turned into a TPM module is difficult enough.
Seriously, imagine if your bank's said, to comply with PCI DSS standards, you had to install this special card in your server.
1) That's enforced server downtime. 2) Most servers are virtual nowadays and not actually physical (and thus you can't guarantee that that "PCI card" your computer sees is even a real PCI card) 3) Are you going to trust a random piece of government- or even bank-mandated hardware in your machine reading the entire memory bus?
Nobody would touch it, even in the server-arena, let alone "every client in the world".
There are already lots of "random number generator" hardwares, everything from white-noise microphones to random instructions inside chips based on quantum noise (now obsolete and nobody really used them, except VIA chips). Nobody touched them. Where it matters, hardware exists to make it happen. Few use it.
Mandating it to every client or even every SSL-using server? Good luck. It just doesn't provide an advantage. Even those places with SSL accelerators (that just offload SSL transactions kind of like a reverse proxy) don't use them.
And the fact is that almost every weakness so far is not in the choice of random numbers but in the way those random numbers are handled later on. Except for embedded boards and no-permanent-state devices (which you should realise shouldn't be used for this kind of thing), filling up the entropy pool on any modern, network connected machine is pretty trivial.
Other countries have brought in minimum wages much higher without issue from places like McDonald's. UK current minimum wage for over 21's is GBP 6.70 which is about $9.86, for over 25's is GBP 7.20 ($10.59), and it's legally prescribed to rise every year. But even here there are campaigns for a "living wage" higher. There's not really any great fuss from places like McDonald's or other "minimum wage" employees.
The robots, however, just keep getting cheaper. My bank has gone - in my lifetime - from a whole row of manned desks to one "real" counter, a line full of automated stations and a minimum wage employee asking you to use them. Soon that employee won't be necessary. Then the counter. Then the bank itself.
I can't see how a basic service industry, one that doesn't need a bucket of talented human input to operate, really has a future in that kind of place. Banks are salesmen of money, and yet they have no salesmen. McDonald's going "no-chef"? Not unimaginable in my lifetime, I think, even if it means a couple of guys out front to service the machines and help you press the right buttons for a few years.
These machines pay for themselves not in wages (it probably costs that to maintain it) but in time savings, processing, pensions, working envrionments, etc.
I've long said that if I won the lottery, I'd buy a restaurant and automate it. Still have a "waitress" and people going back and forth to a kitchen, but why can't I just have a menu on a screen in the table. Walk in, tap-tap, see the ingredients, swipe a card, wait for it to arrive. Want more, swipe it. No mistakes by the waitress or ordering something that's not in stock. Automated bill splitting ("I'm off, what did I have? Here... swipe... that's mine paid"). No waiting to catch the waiter's eye. No checking of allergens and going over the menu ten times. And, as someone with an Italian girlfriend who often has family over, no having to translate the menu for everyone. Moving table? Press the options and swipe the same card at a new table. Want to cancel something because Fred isn't coming? Do so. Want that thing you have every week? Suggested for you as you sign onto the table.
Quicker, smarter, easier. I'd put it in the table, and have waitresses deliver it but... let's be honest... you can easily automated that kind of thing from kitchen to service to ordering without even trying. The bigger problem is really that you employ a (very bored) human to make sure nobody smashes up the place or smears crap over the tables.
I'm sure it hits McDonald's bottom line but it's nothing that their competitors don't suffer equally, and it's nothing they can't lose in an extra 10c on your burger price. Let's face it, even if the prices doubled, you're unlikely to go elsewhere, are you? And if all the fast food double their prices to compensate, it really makes no difference to where you go. That's not what they're worried about.
But what they're saying is that having a human in the loop - at any price - is actually worse than just having a dumb machine. Imagine the training, food hygiene, pension, staffroom, etc. costs. Personnel is almost always one of the largest expenses in any business whatsoever.
Payoff of automated services is well within its lifetime and doesn't do away with humans entirely anyway. In fact, it means you need a few skilled, more expensive humans (one qualified and trained field service engineer probably earns what a entire restaurant of "you want fries with that" kids costs). But if you can replace even a couple of humans with an automated, smartphone-connected, NFC payment kiosks, your queue at lunchtime goes down dramatically and your sales go up. It's a no-brainer.
I think the only thing stopping them is "being first" in the field and worrying about some kind of Luddite "sabotage" (look up the origins of the word) backlash.
A piece of plastic doesn't stop them listening to your calls if you've given permission. Still everything you NEED to say and have your phone hear (i.e. the content of every conversation) will be accessible to apps with those permissions.
The trick is: Don't use those apps that have those permissions. Why does Facebook EVER need your mic? And why is Facebook running except for when you're in the Facebook app itself? Don't allocate those permissions (we really need a third option "Allow, Deny, Emulate" so the app even THINKS it has the mic access but just gets silence sent to it) and it's never a problem.
And it's not at all difficult for manufacturers or even Google to put in a widget on the lock screen that shows WHAT features are being used by what apps. Facebook - little mic symbol, little camera symbol, for instance. And then you KNOW what it's doing.
But faffing about with bits of plastic and switches is secondary to this problem. The problem is that you've given Facebook access to the mic. Maybe that was "necessary" to allow it to install on older Android? Then don't install it. That's the real problem. People will just click it anyway. It's Windows UAC all over again - give the users information and control and they just press OK the same as ever because "I need Facebook".
Anything with "SD card access" or "camera" and "Internet connectivity" can upload what the hell it likes from your phone to the cloud. The problem is not the cloud functionality, nor the lack of a firewall, it's that you granted those apps permissions that, when combined, allow that kind of thing to happen.
The permission model of most modern mobile devices is just fine. It's that nobody cares that's the problem. Until all their private pics end up on some rogue app's public image gallery.
You'd be an idiot to try to carry off a carbon-copy terrorist attack, purely because it wouldn't cause as much terror as doing something else.
It would be just so much easier to do something entirely different, unexpected and whose knee-jerk reaction would ban, say, cars being allowed in tunnels, or fire alarm evacuations at an airport terminal pushing everyone out onto the grass or whatever.
The more things the terrorists can make us ban, control, inspect, etc. the more it costs us (in terms of money and freedom) and the more press it generates for them. And a terrorist is, at the end of the day, looking for press.
I'm the fucking user. It's my fucking computer. When you upgrade my OS to a new major version, that may not work at all, that may not even boot and may then be unfixable (think Windows 8-based tablets, etc.), there are no amount of confirmation dialogs that are enough to get me to tell you that I WANT to install. Seriously, it should literally be a CAPTCHA of some kind for something like that.
You shouldn't have to second-guess already-scheduled updates that you didn't authorise, that you can't back out of without answering SOMETHING (what if I'm in the middle of something when that pops up? Fuck off, Red Cross, and then it takes that as "continue unchanged"?).
It's not medic overblown, it's Microsoft vastly overstepping the mark. Fuck, we complained about UAC and all that did was pop up a few times when programs were installing. This thing pops up once, then next reboot installs a whole new OS.
I don't have Windows Updates turned on, never do, because of shite like that. In work, we WSUS so it's not an issue. But still, just from work colleagues, etc. thinking they HAVE to upgrade because of the way the dialog leads them down that garden path I have:
- One user who wiped out all their documents, basically a factory restore to 10 (no, we're not sure how they managed that either) - One user who's perfectly-working computer then rebooted and crashed in explorer.exe every 10 seconds while they were in the middle of writing their Masters thesis (we found out purely by chance that getting a run dialog and quickly installing Classic Shell stopped the crashing enough to get into the OS to get files off it, because fuck all else worked). - One user who it upgraded and broke their main program because it wasn't 10 compatible, and now they can't go back (restore doesn't work and just reboots back into 10). - FIVE users who it upgrades, then the AMD display drivers go into a blue-screen loop even on safe mode and it's almost impossible to get back in without moving the drive to another machine, uninstalling the 10 AMD drivers and installing an old version from the AMD website, then putting it back.
This is not the kind of shit you should be foisting on users without explicit consent because I guarantee there are more problems than that and people just rolled back and wasted several hours or don't have an IT team in work to take it to. You can't run a fucking ActiveX control without jumping through hoops nowadays but downloading 3.6Gb and then auto-installing a new OS is just fine? No.
Roll on 10 being a paid update and then the worst they can do is nag you to pay for it.
There are no set number of meals that are correct. We're hunter-gatherers. We eat when we're hungry, that's it. Everything about "three square meals" is bollocks that originated in Victorian times (along with "no elbows on the tables" - also bollocks, and not 'rude', even the Queen does it).
Same for any categorisation of foods into groups of any numbers. Nutrition experts are paid to tell you about nutrition. Unless you die from malnutrition or throw up everywhere, it's hard to prove them wrong.
But the number of people who don't eat when they are hungry, drink when they are thirsty, sleep when they are tired and wake when they are awake, and adjust accordingly to any problems they know they have, is fucking amazing.
Honestly, people, ignore all the crap and just get on with your lives.
VB4 / 3 - Actually, that would be quite fun. The days of a single simple toolbar, an MDI layout (wasn't MDI, but multi-window, but it was pretty usefully laid out), stupendously fast form creation and prototyping, simple language not cluttered with class-based junk, and a simple runtime.
Those early versions of VB were great. Especially when I was younger. You could get results faster than any other language (let's not get into "BASIC programmers are shite", because when you're a kid you're not interested in perfect syntax anyway).
It was literally a WYSIWYG environment inside the first major desktop GUI's that you could arrange a form in seconds, and then double-clicking any element and you could program quickly against it. It wasn't fast, it wasn't fabulous, it wasn't state-of-the-art, but boy did it teach you how to get things going quickly. And the event-driven auto-created subroutine stuff was the quickest, most useful way to get things interacting with the user. (I think that's it, actually - it was programmed with the focus on the user (the forms they see, the layout of controls, what happens when they touch them) rather than the programmer.)
BASIC was designed for one thing - to be able to learn it fast. Working in schools, I guarantee you that it does just that. Python etc. can't come close, even with prep school kids. Maybe Python etc. are more modern, better represent modern programming, have syntax that tends towards "better" programming, etc. but BASIC you can pick up in an afternoon. I know, I've got kids to do just that. Python, you're lucky if they can get the compiler/interpreter working at home in that time.
VB3 / 4 was my prototyping even as a kid. I was already doing Z80 and x86 assembler, C on the side and a myriad languages as I was exposed to them. But VB3 / 4 would let me knock up something to show someone the viability in a couple of hours, if not minutes. My friends were trying to write games for their A-Level projects, they couldn't work out how to lay them out. We did it in VB3 in minutes, including the game code which I quickly knocked up, and they saw the best way without wasting time re-writing all their code.
People really knock VB3/4 but it was the first mass-market rapid prototyping tool, which is why a lot of business apps ended up in it. Literally, ODBC integration was "drop a database control on the form". I'm sure big, expensive tools that could do that pre-dated it, but most people never saw them. VB was sold in computer stores next to business apps made with it, though.
I would love - just for "Look, this is how it would work" purposes - a VB3 / 4 that runs on modern windows, even if it didn't "compile" or anything like that. Just a quick language that you have a syntax you can use to open up the controls and make them interact. Also my first intro to in-execution debugging. The VB debugger looked like magic when it first came out, because we couldn't previously afford tools like that.
And a manual that reminded me of those early computer manuals that told you EVERY SINGLE COMMAND in the language, full syntax, restrictions, examples, etc. It was great just reading through it and thinking "Woah, I can use that".
People knock VB a lot. I'm sure it's not great for production use. But in terms of a language that entices you in and makes it easy enough for you to WANT to learn it, it's probably the last one I saw.
But this proves that you can't have such systems under human control without massive amounts of auditing and external supervision. 30 years ago, we weren't in the dark ages of even health and safety legislation. Yet someone was still able to press a button, dump shit into the atmosphere, and get away with it - if this story is true. Not just get away with it, in fact, but never have anybody notice and have them push the blame to Russia and Chernobyl.
That's a dangerous, and untenable, situation. What we need to prove - if nuclear already has a bad reputation and people are using this to make it seem worse - is that that CAN'T happen nowadays, not just "Oh, that was a long time ago".
Are releases from nuclear plants monitored nowadays? I couldn't say yes or no as a layman. Does authorising a release require multiple confirmations and/or log to a central authority? Would an unauthorised / accidental / emergency release be caught and could we trace who was responsible for it?
These kinds of questions DO matter if you're going to change people's opinions. You need to be able to have countered them BEFORE they are asked, to provide any kind of confidence. Literally "We've had systems in place for 30 years that allay that fear for you". Not just "Oh, that wouldn't happen today, we use different kinds of reactor." Any idiot can read between the lines on the latter (i.e. "I guess someone's taken account of the new designs but I can't point at any actual process, procedure, or accountability").
It matters internationally too. Deaths and illness have been blamed on Chernobyl and compensation sought. If that wasn't entirely true, but people just used the situation as the perfect time to harm their own citizens, there's going to be a lot of pissed-off families, diplomats, and lawyers.
So if you wanted a copy of a book, so long as it wasn't YOU that photocopied it, but you just took a photocopy of the entire book from a pile (whether you pay or not complicates matters, let's assume not but with the permission of the person who photocopied), would you expect to not get into trouble?
What about if someone copied an artwork without permission and you just happened to buy a copy? Under the law, it's all the same. In art we call it a forgery. Even if you're not the forger, and even though it's not illegal to own in some circumstances, it's still illegal to get the copy KNOWING that you're not paying the artists or doing it with their permission.
In music and movies, it's called piracy. In literature, it's plagiarism at best, and unauthorised reproduction. It's all pretty much the same thing. Nobody is "taking" the book from someone who owns it, but they are making unauthorised copies of the works under copyright. That's the actual offence. Not redistribution. Unauthorised copies.
Photocopy a musical score and the songwriter will be on your back looking for a) royalties b) damages if you passed it on without permission or you did it en masse or deliberately.
As such, downloading a file - WHETHER OR NOT YOU WERE THE SOURCE OF THAT FILE - that you know is a copy of copyright material that's been made without the permission of the copyright holder, is an offence. Proving that a) you knew, or should have suspected, b) that it was unauthorised, c) that was your intention - that's the difficult part if you're only the downloader. The uploader is, by definition of the act they perform, breaking the law. The downloader is, unless they genuinely didn't realise or suspect infringement, also breaking the law but it's harder to prove.
Fake Nike's are confiscated and destroyed. Fake cigarettes are burned.
And fake books, movies, music, etc. (i.e. copies of existing works, even if perfect, but made without the permission of the original creator) will be confiscated, destroyed and legislated against.
Vaccines do not cause learning disabilities. Asthma has increased in correlation but it's not causative - working in schools I can assure you that asthma and allergies are on the rise because of LACK OF EXPOSURE to things like grass, pollen, nuts, etc. No asthma in unvaccinated? Bollocks. Healthier? Bollocks. Disease resistance? Bollocks. Safety studies, stop making up criteria that they don't meet because that's BOLLOCKS.
The Dr you quote thought that Vitamin C cured lots of things that it doesn't. The guy published only in the 70's and 80's, things have moved on.
Though I'm not in the "YOU MUST HAVE YOUR CHILDREN VACCINATED OR YOU'RE EVIL AND KILLING THE WHOLE WORLD" camp, I disagree with almost everything you quoted here even more.
Vaccination, like ANY MEDICAL PROCEDURE, it not without statistical outliers, mistakes, and risks. Nothing medical is risk-free. 99.9999% of all medicine is working out if what you take and might end up with is better than what you already have. Drug interactions are difficult and people work differently.
Like the HIV story at the moment - a patient, of their own accord, formed an antibody that stopped HIV. Now scientists are taking that antibody and hopefully forming a vaccine or kinds. But HIV is different in every person and evolution relies on something, completely by chance, working differently in one animal to every other animal of the same species. That's how it works, and that's why vaccines cannot be "safe".
But, as a mathematician, the overwhelming, massively tested, calculated, verified and best odds are that vaccination will help an individual, and a population, more than they will harm it. Nobody can guarantee that for any individual, because we're playing biology roulette. But we're making sure we're playing on a table with only one tiny "you die" against a myriad "you never get the disease, or die from it" slots.
Stop being an idiot, Dr. M.D. PhD means nothing. Ask my geneticist girlfriend who's qualified to tell half of London if they have cancer, or if their unborn child is likely to have a crippling genetic disease or not and works with lots of wackos, or my multiple-Dr PhD father-in-law who has PhD's in everything from chemistry to physics to sports science. One wacko Dr doesn't make everything he said 30 years ago true just because he has letters on his name.
The overwhelming, peer-reviewed, best-guess of established science nowadays is that people should be vaccinated. And, in fact, one British doctor with a similar amount of letters was SO WRONG in his autism/vaccination link that he went to jail for it. Not just a slap on a wrist. Not just "Oh, his science is poor". But "Your assessment and scaremongering was so damn incorrect, and you knew it, and you faked results and made up numbers, and you went so public and scared so many people incorrectly, that it was criminal."
I can find a wacko PhD in any field, from astrophysics to maths (so many claimed to have proven Fermat's Last Theorem etc. and ALL of them were wrong until the 1990's and that took nearly 10 years to prove right even though it actually LOOKED right for a change), biology to environmental studies. A sound-bite from a wacko is not science.
Meanwhile, in civilised countries, asking people to take drug tests for employment purposes is virtually unheard of unless it's critical to their employment (e.g. addiction counsellor possibly?).
Seriously, have never done it, have never known anyone who's done it (and know lots of PhD's who work in medical labs), have never even discussed it outside of "things those crazy foreigners do".
Yet people call the UK a big-brother police state.
For a long time, I've thought that the movie industry was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Endless sequels and unheard-of shite.
Now it seems we've moved to making movies of anything that anyone has ever heard of, no matter how related to an actual movie they could actually be.
And I haven't bought a cinema ticket in years, purchased a DVD in years (except second-hand), bought a Blu-Ray at all, and if it isn't on Amazon Prime or Google Play Movies, pretty much I can't be bothered with it and the things I've bought on there are with promotional credit, huge discounts, and movies that I know I already love.
Honestly, there's times when you just look at things and think "Where the fuck did all that good stuff I enjoyed go to?".
Apart from The Imitation Game (story of my hero), The Martian (that was a big mistake), I can't think of anything I've bought since... years ago. And with shite like this getting the money, it's hardly a surprise.
Okay, applying your suggestions to other places not involved with the TSA.
London Stansted airport.
1) People spend seconds checking each passport. There are 30-something aisles with people, plus 10-20 automated biometric scanners lanes. Still, the longest part of my getting through an airport is getting through passport control. I have a biometric-passport. The biometric scanners so far have a 100% failure rate for me. I'm then diverted to the manual lines. So much so, that I ignore the people pushing me towards the biometric lines and just queue up in the manual lines anyway. The manual lines queue for 30 minutes plus guaranteed, and the guy at the end just sticks my passport in his scanner, looks up at me, maybe asks me where I've come from today. That's it.
2) Baggage handling for carry-on? Same issue. 30-60 minutes of queueing to get to one of 30-40 lines. Sure, they pick up on things that are left in people's bags around me but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Also, that I have to separate laptops etc. suggests to me that if you have a suitably convoluted packing, something would be able to slip through anyway. Generally, I observe 95% pass-through rate in those around me, but all the pissing about separating shit and then recombining and re-clothing is what costs the time. Baggage handling for drop-off you never see anyway, so it's not a delay that you're aware of.
3) Pretty much, the rate of re-scan doesn't really affect this, because it just gets put back into the line. Each re-scan is no more than an extra passenger at worst, and to be honest, if you have another X-Ray terminal that has to be manned, you could push another N passengers through that too, quite easily. You're arguing for sacrificing a few hundred passengers per hour scanning for a reduction in the 5% or less "bounce" rate.
So I don't think it really has anything to do with the above.
The problem? The system is stupid and inefficient. Turn up a desk to check in baggage, get asked security questions. Baggage (eventually) goes off to a line where it's scanned again and then (after a LONG time moving around or just sitting still) is loaded onto a plane.
Then go - in your own time - to security where your passport is scanned to let you into the queue. Then queue to get to the hand-baggage scanners, where you have to unpack so much stuff and undress partially, and then have your person scanned, and then get to put it all back on to get to the next queue and so on.
And then, when you re-enter, you land, then queue to passport control, then get asked where you've come from etc. because they've mixed a dozen flights into the same security line and think that this will somehow "catch you out" (I assume they are looking for something COMPLETELY different to be honest, at least I hope they are), then queue to get your luggage, which lands in a queue, then go through customs channels, and then you're back into the place you were standing to get in in the first place.
What you have is complete lack of flow. How about this:
You get into the airport and all you have access to is check-in. You won't linger here. Your check-in consists of an airport rep doing the paperwork after you've walked through an airport-security scanner, your hand-luggage being scanned (and ready to pick up on the other side of the check-in for your airport rep's queue), and the pat-down, electronic arches, etc..
The security guy can't be given a different story to the check-in rep, and he's perfectly aware if you're travelling with X, Y or Z who's also on the flight. No more "they split up in the airport" crap to track. If there's a problem, they can pull you out of the entire flight and everything else immediately, and no more bollocks about having to turn up so early or missing your flight - you're either checked in or not and no 1+ hour delay in security potentially hindering your flight (I feel sorry for anyone who has to transfer at an airport, fuck that).
Wikipedia isn't a software project. It's a data project. By that measure, it probably isn't even the largest of those, except by contributer numbers possibly (but then you could say that Facebook was the same kind of thing - people contributing to a collection of data).
MediaWiki is the software project behind Wikipedia. And it has nowhere near the same number of contributors, testers, etc. If we stretch the definition so that every possible user of it, etc. comes into the statistics, than you can easily say that Wordpress etc. probably outnumber it too.
Think of it as "software development" - people actually writing code intended to be executed by others. Most people on Wikipedia DON'T actually write code at all, and what they do is markup (and entirely different thing - using Microsoft Word's "Bold" button does not count as "coding"!). But the software underlying that is MediaWiki, a relatively unheard-of (by Wikipedia users) CMS.
To burn stuff, deal with the exhaust gases and particulates, and scrape out the ashes takes an awful lot of extra cost than just buying - as you state - a "special" incinerator. A long, ongoing cost.
Then separation, recomposition, and selling off - it still has to be CHEAPER at the end than just buying new material or nobody is going to use it. You can have a block of pure steel for a thousand dollars, or a squadge of slightly impure, recycled steel for two thousand (or have that purified back to the same level for three thousand), or whatever.
Sticking stuff in mines in case you might need them in future also isn't cheap and doesn't work out well - the stuff tends to stay down there forever because it never becomes cost-effective to get it back up, or the ongoing maintenance of it becomes far more expensive than just leaving it down there and sealing the place up.
Recycling works for certain things, but the separate-tracks to recycle stuff are becoming silly now. My local council, funded from my council tax, has this arrangement:
- a tiny black bin that takes "food waste". This cannot contain garden waste of any kind. Honestly, how hard is it to make use of old rotten food? - a large brown bin for garden waste that they CHARGE ME EXTRA to take away. You can fit a couple of chopped up branches or maybe a small lawn's worth of cut grass in it. Anything food in there, they call it "contaminated" and charge me again. - a large blue bin for "recyclables". Pretty much plastics, glass and papers. Nothing else. Anything else, or any food residue, and they charge me again. This is sorted by hand afterwards and it's expected to be all washed at my expense. Oh. No cardboard. - a large green bin for "everything else", collected half as often as any of the above (this is where your cardboard is supposed to go - imagine what happens at Christmas!)
And then this happens:
- Every week, the black bin is collected. A van drives round, three guys jump out, pour the waste food into a van, drive off. - Every week, the brown bin is collected. A different van drives round, three guys jump out, pout the waste grass etc. into a van, drive off. - Every week, the blue bin is collected. A different van drives round, three guys jump out, sort through the bin, sort "glass, paper, etc." into small boxes on the side of the van, leave everything else, drive off. - Every other week, the green bin is collected. A different van drives round, three guys jump out, put the bin on the lifer and pour it into the back. Drive off.
None of these vans are the same. They visit different streets at different parts of the month, so they are - all four - driving around different places at low speed with three guys on them constantly every day. Then they all drive back to the municipal tip (I think the garden waste might be composted directly, but that's paid-for separately now) and "something" happens. Quite why the food waste needs to come out of the garden waste, I'm not sure - for years it wasn't a problem, suddenly it is?
And how do we pay for all these? Every company involved is owned by or linked to the councillor for waste recycling. Strange that, how they got the contract. And strange that they are being paid by my tax, and then sometimes specifically by me too.
Now, are we seriously suggesting that the cost of four tanks of diesel, 12 guys, lots of processing and organisation, lots of regulation, particulate and exhaust cleansing, and administration of the entire operation is paid for by a bin of paper, or a handful of bottles being filtered, hand-picked, cut up, washed down, bleached or cleaned, reconstituted (maybe with heat etc.) and then reformed and sold on to suppliers at or below bulk trade prices? Or is it just tax-payer funded jobs-for-the-boys that can't profit otherwise, and can't profit if there's the slightest contamination or lack of separation of the items?
The same was found for UK WEEE waste. Someone in China or India will happily sign anything you like if they can become your "recycling partner", and then just throw the stuff into their local (unregulated) landfill.
I do a lot of WEEE disposal (if you throw out over a ton of waste electrical equipment a year, you're required to track it with paperwork, below that, not!). The guys who email me about offering that service all claim to be WEEE registered. One of them, many years ago when the scheme was only a year or two old, took my old CRT's and told me exactly what happens to them: They drive them to Heathrow in a big lorry, where someone pays 1GBP each for them, which pays the petrol for the journey. Those people load them on a plane, signs the official "we will dispose of them properly" paperwork (so the first company are covered and so am I), and then nobody's quite sure what happens there on...
But I can't see that a lorry full of old CRT's are worth even 1GBP each in metals and materials, certainly not 1GBP + staff wages + disposal of the dangerous stuff + international transport via cargo plane + sitting and recycling the potentially useful stuff.
Unofficially, the guy was told it just goes into landfill abroad - but because the paperwork DOESN'T say that, everyone is covered. And if the company in India that signed that declaration is found to be dumping the waste? Well, there are lots of others and you can "start" another company quite quickly.
And previous tracking projects like this (I've seen at least three or four from local news to nationwide research) confirm to me that, pretty much, that's what happens whether it's supposed to or not. I imagine the easy-pickings (the still-working old Dell computers, etc.) are sold on locally, the large blocks of metal (e.g. rack units and anything that can be removed as a lump of metal etc.) are melted down by the local scrapyard, and anything hazardous is shipped out because it's such a cost to deal with and someone in a third-world country will happily take it off a plane, take the time to weed out the gold etc. without care for their staff, dump the rest for you, and then sign anything you want so long as it's accompanied by a few quid.
And because it's gone out of the EU and has "legal" documents, the originating countries don't really care.
Actually, they'll get one tick (successfully sent to server) but not the second tick (successfully read by recipient) on their message - and it will be a slightly different colour. They might not even get the first tick if WhatsApp know that number isn't a WhatsApp one.
Then we started to turn the clouds sulphuric and potentially initiated runaway greenhouse effects which started to turn it into an inhospitable barren desert with un-survivable atmospheric heat.
Slashdot Mirror
Fuck off, you racist twat.
From a Brit with a traditional British name.
Hardware is very different and only useful as an analogy, especially when it comes to patents.
There are a vast number of pin-compatible chips that are not licensed, nor do they need to be. And in Google v Oracle, it was already established that such reimplementation was allowed, it was just a question of whether that was "fair use" of the copyrights (and even the argument that they are subject to copyright at all was tenuous). But if you were to say "our chip pinout is copyright", that only protects that expression of it (i.e. you couldn't photocopy your competitor's datasheet).
The actual information on it would be required to be duplicated to make a pin-out compatible chip, and the courts had already said that MAKING such a "pin-out-compatible chip" for Java was absolutely fine.
For "code", read "lines from header files to ensure that their strlen() function - or whatever - took the same parameters in the same order as our one, when they were trying to make an independent, but compatible, reimplementation".
It's like Intel saying "They copied our circuit diagram, hundreds of pins on a layout and what they do" when someone's making, say, a chip compatible with an x86 motherboard. Nobody's suggesting that the chip they made wasn't developed entirely independently, they're saying they "own" the fact that pin 1 is 5v, pin 2 is GND, pin 3 is DATA1, etc.
Because paying for cards for every machine in the word, and mandating their use for every transaction from any machine, plus avoiding that device being compromised by a government entity, or turned into a TPM module is difficult enough.
Seriously, imagine if your bank's said, to comply with PCI DSS standards, you had to install this special card in your server.
1) That's enforced server downtime.
2) Most servers are virtual nowadays and not actually physical (and thus you can't guarantee that that "PCI card" your computer sees is even a real PCI card)
3) Are you going to trust a random piece of government- or even bank-mandated hardware in your machine reading the entire memory bus?
Nobody would touch it, even in the server-arena, let alone "every client in the world".
There are already lots of "random number generator" hardwares, everything from white-noise microphones to random instructions inside chips based on quantum noise (now obsolete and nobody really used them, except VIA chips). Nobody touched them. Where it matters, hardware exists to make it happen. Few use it.
Mandating it to every client or even every SSL-using server? Good luck. It just doesn't provide an advantage. Even those places with SSL accelerators (that just offload SSL transactions kind of like a reverse proxy) don't use them.
And the fact is that almost every weakness so far is not in the choice of random numbers but in the way those random numbers are handled later on. Except for embedded boards and no-permanent-state devices (which you should realise shouldn't be used for this kind of thing), filling up the entropy pool on any modern, network connected machine is pretty trivial.
Is it?
Other countries have brought in minimum wages much higher without issue from places like McDonald's. UK current minimum wage for over 21's is GBP 6.70 which is about $9.86, for over 25's is GBP 7.20 ($10.59), and it's legally prescribed to rise every year. But even here there are campaigns for a "living wage" higher. There's not really any great fuss from places like McDonald's or other "minimum wage" employees.
The robots, however, just keep getting cheaper. My bank has gone - in my lifetime - from a whole row of manned desks to one "real" counter, a line full of automated stations and a minimum wage employee asking you to use them. Soon that employee won't be necessary. Then the counter. Then the bank itself.
I can't see how a basic service industry, one that doesn't need a bucket of talented human input to operate, really has a future in that kind of place. Banks are salesmen of money, and yet they have no salesmen. McDonald's going "no-chef"? Not unimaginable in my lifetime, I think, even if it means a couple of guys out front to service the machines and help you press the right buttons for a few years.
These machines pay for themselves not in wages (it probably costs that to maintain it) but in time savings, processing, pensions, working envrionments, etc.
I've long said that if I won the lottery, I'd buy a restaurant and automate it. Still have a "waitress" and people going back and forth to a kitchen, but why can't I just have a menu on a screen in the table. Walk in, tap-tap, see the ingredients, swipe a card, wait for it to arrive. Want more, swipe it. No mistakes by the waitress or ordering something that's not in stock. Automated bill splitting ("I'm off, what did I have? Here... swipe... that's mine paid"). No waiting to catch the waiter's eye. No checking of allergens and going over the menu ten times. And, as someone with an Italian girlfriend who often has family over, no having to translate the menu for everyone. Moving table? Press the options and swipe the same card at a new table. Want to cancel something because Fred isn't coming? Do so. Want that thing you have every week? Suggested for you as you sign onto the table.
Quicker, smarter, easier. I'd put it in the table, and have waitresses deliver it but... let's be honest... you can easily automated that kind of thing from kitchen to service to ordering without even trying. The bigger problem is really that you employ a (very bored) human to make sure nobody smashes up the place or smears crap over the tables.
I'm sure it hits McDonald's bottom line but it's nothing that their competitors don't suffer equally, and it's nothing they can't lose in an extra 10c on your burger price. Let's face it, even if the prices doubled, you're unlikely to go elsewhere, are you? And if all the fast food double their prices to compensate, it really makes no difference to where you go. That's not what they're worried about.
But what they're saying is that having a human in the loop - at any price - is actually worse than just having a dumb machine. Imagine the training, food hygiene, pension, staffroom, etc. costs. Personnel is almost always one of the largest expenses in any business whatsoever.
Payoff of automated services is well within its lifetime and doesn't do away with humans entirely anyway. In fact, it means you need a few skilled, more expensive humans (one qualified and trained field service engineer probably earns what a entire restaurant of "you want fries with that" kids costs). But if you can replace even a couple of humans with an automated, smartphone-connected, NFC payment kiosks, your queue at lunchtime goes down dramatically and your sales go up. It's a no-brainer.
I think the only thing stopping them is "being first" in the field and worrying about some kind of Luddite "sabotage" (look up the origins of the word) backlash.
A piece of plastic doesn't stop them listening to your calls if you've given permission. Still everything you NEED to say and have your phone hear (i.e. the content of every conversation) will be accessible to apps with those permissions.
The trick is: Don't use those apps that have those permissions. Why does Facebook EVER need your mic? And why is Facebook running except for when you're in the Facebook app itself? Don't allocate those permissions (we really need a third option "Allow, Deny, Emulate" so the app even THINKS it has the mic access but just gets silence sent to it) and it's never a problem.
And it's not at all difficult for manufacturers or even Google to put in a widget on the lock screen that shows WHAT features are being used by what apps. Facebook - little mic symbol, little camera symbol, for instance. And then you KNOW what it's doing.
But faffing about with bits of plastic and switches is secondary to this problem. The problem is that you've given Facebook access to the mic. Maybe that was "necessary" to allow it to install on older Android? Then don't install it. That's the real problem. People will just click it anyway. It's Windows UAC all over again - give the users information and control and they just press OK the same as ever because "I need Facebook".
Anything with "SD card access" or "camera" and "Internet connectivity" can upload what the hell it likes from your phone to the cloud. The problem is not the cloud functionality, nor the lack of a firewall, it's that you granted those apps permissions that, when combined, allow that kind of thing to happen.
The permission model of most modern mobile devices is just fine. It's that nobody cares that's the problem. Until all their private pics end up on some rogue app's public image gallery.
You'd be an idiot to try to carry off a carbon-copy terrorist attack, purely because it wouldn't cause as much terror as doing something else.
It would be just so much easier to do something entirely different, unexpected and whose knee-jerk reaction would ban, say, cars being allowed in tunnels, or fire alarm evacuations at an airport terminal pushing everyone out onto the grass or whatever.
The more things the terrorists can make us ban, control, inspect, etc. the more it costs us (in terms of money and freedom) and the more press it generates for them. And a terrorist is, at the end of the day, looking for press.
I'm the fucking user.
It's my fucking computer.
When you upgrade my OS to a new major version, that may not work at all, that may not even boot and may then be unfixable (think Windows 8-based tablets, etc.), there are no amount of confirmation dialogs that are enough to get me to tell you that I WANT to install. Seriously, it should literally be a CAPTCHA of some kind for something like that.
You shouldn't have to second-guess already-scheduled updates that you didn't authorise, that you can't back out of without answering SOMETHING (what if I'm in the middle of something when that pops up? Fuck off, Red Cross, and then it takes that as "continue unchanged"?).
It's not medic overblown, it's Microsoft vastly overstepping the mark. Fuck, we complained about UAC and all that did was pop up a few times when programs were installing. This thing pops up once, then next reboot installs a whole new OS.
I don't have Windows Updates turned on, never do, because of shite like that. In work, we WSUS so it's not an issue. But still, just from work colleagues, etc. thinking they HAVE to upgrade because of the way the dialog leads them down that garden path I have:
- One user who wiped out all their documents, basically a factory restore to 10 (no, we're not sure how they managed that either)
- One user who's perfectly-working computer then rebooted and crashed in explorer.exe every 10 seconds while they were in the middle of writing their Masters thesis (we found out purely by chance that getting a run dialog and quickly installing Classic Shell stopped the crashing enough to get into the OS to get files off it, because fuck all else worked).
- One user who it upgraded and broke their main program because it wasn't 10 compatible, and now they can't go back (restore doesn't work and just reboots back into 10).
- FIVE users who it upgrades, then the AMD display drivers go into a blue-screen loop even on safe mode and it's almost impossible to get back in without moving the drive to another machine, uninstalling the 10 AMD drivers and installing an old version from the AMD website, then putting it back.
This is not the kind of shit you should be foisting on users without explicit consent because I guarantee there are more problems than that and people just rolled back and wasted several hours or don't have an IT team in work to take it to. You can't run a fucking ActiveX control without jumping through hoops nowadays but downloading 3.6Gb and then auto-installing a new OS is just fine? No.
Roll on 10 being a paid update and then the worst they can do is nag you to pay for it.
There are no set number of meals that are correct. We're hunter-gatherers. We eat when we're hungry, that's it. Everything about "three square meals" is bollocks that originated in Victorian times (along with "no elbows on the tables" - also bollocks, and not 'rude', even the Queen does it).
Same for any categorisation of foods into groups of any numbers. Nutrition experts are paid to tell you about nutrition. Unless you die from malnutrition or throw up everywhere, it's hard to prove them wrong.
But the number of people who don't eat when they are hungry, drink when they are thirsty, sleep when they are tired and wake when they are awake, and adjust accordingly to any problems they know they have, is fucking amazing.
Honestly, people, ignore all the crap and just get on with your lives.
Those are all bug / technical limitations. There's no reason they couldn't be fixed quite quickly, in fact.
VB4 fixed many of the 16/32 bit problems, for instance, before the VB5 OO-injection.
VB6? Nah.
VB5? Nah.
VB4 / 3 - Actually, that would be quite fun. The days of a single simple toolbar, an MDI layout (wasn't MDI, but multi-window, but it was pretty usefully laid out), stupendously fast form creation and prototyping, simple language not cluttered with class-based junk, and a simple runtime.
Those early versions of VB were great. Especially when I was younger. You could get results faster than any other language (let's not get into "BASIC programmers are shite", because when you're a kid you're not interested in perfect syntax anyway).
It was literally a WYSIWYG environment inside the first major desktop GUI's that you could arrange a form in seconds, and then double-clicking any element and you could program quickly against it. It wasn't fast, it wasn't fabulous, it wasn't state-of-the-art, but boy did it teach you how to get things going quickly. And the event-driven auto-created subroutine stuff was the quickest, most useful way to get things interacting with the user. (I think that's it, actually - it was programmed with the focus on the user (the forms they see, the layout of controls, what happens when they touch them) rather than the programmer.)
BASIC was designed for one thing - to be able to learn it fast. Working in schools, I guarantee you that it does just that. Python etc. can't come close, even with prep school kids. Maybe Python etc. are more modern, better represent modern programming, have syntax that tends towards "better" programming, etc. but BASIC you can pick up in an afternoon. I know, I've got kids to do just that. Python, you're lucky if they can get the compiler/interpreter working at home in that time.
VB3 / 4 was my prototyping even as a kid. I was already doing Z80 and x86 assembler, C on the side and a myriad languages as I was exposed to them. But VB3 / 4 would let me knock up something to show someone the viability in a couple of hours, if not minutes. My friends were trying to write games for their A-Level projects, they couldn't work out how to lay them out. We did it in VB3 in minutes, including the game code which I quickly knocked up, and they saw the best way without wasting time re-writing all their code.
People really knock VB3/4 but it was the first mass-market rapid prototyping tool, which is why a lot of business apps ended up in it. Literally, ODBC integration was "drop a database control on the form". I'm sure big, expensive tools that could do that pre-dated it, but most people never saw them. VB was sold in computer stores next to business apps made with it, though.
I would love - just for "Look, this is how it would work" purposes - a VB3 / 4 that runs on modern windows, even if it didn't "compile" or anything like that. Just a quick language that you have a syntax you can use to open up the controls and make them interact. Also my first intro to in-execution debugging. The VB debugger looked like magic when it first came out, because we couldn't previously afford tools like that.
And a manual that reminded me of those early computer manuals that told you EVERY SINGLE COMMAND in the language, full syntax, restrictions, examples, etc. It was great just reading through it and thinking "Woah, I can use that".
People knock VB a lot. I'm sure it's not great for production use. But in terms of a language that entices you in and makes it easy enough for you to WANT to learn it, it's probably the last one I saw.
I'm not anti-nuclear. Far from it.
But this proves that you can't have such systems under human control without massive amounts of auditing and external supervision. 30 years ago, we weren't in the dark ages of even health and safety legislation. Yet someone was still able to press a button, dump shit into the atmosphere, and get away with it - if this story is true. Not just get away with it, in fact, but never have anybody notice and have them push the blame to Russia and Chernobyl.
That's a dangerous, and untenable, situation. What we need to prove - if nuclear already has a bad reputation and people are using this to make it seem worse - is that that CAN'T happen nowadays, not just "Oh, that was a long time ago".
Are releases from nuclear plants monitored nowadays? I couldn't say yes or no as a layman. Does authorising a release require multiple confirmations and/or log to a central authority? Would an unauthorised / accidental / emergency release be caught and could we trace who was responsible for it?
These kinds of questions DO matter if you're going to change people's opinions. You need to be able to have countered them BEFORE they are asked, to provide any kind of confidence. Literally "We've had systems in place for 30 years that allay that fear for you". Not just "Oh, that wouldn't happen today, we use different kinds of reactor." Any idiot can read between the lines on the latter (i.e. "I guess someone's taken account of the new designs but I can't point at any actual process, procedure, or accountability").
It matters internationally too. Deaths and illness have been blamed on Chernobyl and compensation sought. If that wasn't entirely true, but people just used the situation as the perfect time to harm their own citizens, there's going to be a lot of pissed-off families, diplomats, and lawyers.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
But yet a Chinese IP "attacking" their systems is grounds enough to start a war with China.
Strange world you Americans live in.
So if you wanted a copy of a book, so long as it wasn't YOU that photocopied it, but you just took a photocopy of the entire book from a pile (whether you pay or not complicates matters, let's assume not but with the permission of the person who photocopied), would you expect to not get into trouble?
What about if someone copied an artwork without permission and you just happened to buy a copy? Under the law, it's all the same. In art we call it a forgery. Even if you're not the forger, and even though it's not illegal to own in some circumstances, it's still illegal to get the copy KNOWING that you're not paying the artists or doing it with their permission.
In music and movies, it's called piracy. In literature, it's plagiarism at best, and unauthorised reproduction. It's all pretty much the same thing. Nobody is "taking" the book from someone who owns it, but they are making unauthorised copies of the works under copyright. That's the actual offence. Not redistribution. Unauthorised copies.
Photocopy a musical score and the songwriter will be on your back looking for a) royalties b) damages if you passed it on without permission or you did it en masse or deliberately.
As such, downloading a file - WHETHER OR NOT YOU WERE THE SOURCE OF THAT FILE - that you know is a copy of copyright material that's been made without the permission of the copyright holder, is an offence. Proving that a) you knew, or should have suspected, b) that it was unauthorised, c) that was your intention - that's the difficult part if you're only the downloader. The uploader is, by definition of the act they perform, breaking the law. The downloader is, unless they genuinely didn't realise or suspect infringement, also breaking the law but it's harder to prove.
Submit a forgery to the Chagall Institute. It will be destroyed: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ente...
Fake Nike's are confiscated and destroyed.
Fake cigarettes are burned.
And fake books, movies, music, etc. (i.e. copies of existing works, even if perfect, but made without the permission of the original creator) will be confiscated, destroyed and legislated against.
You're an idiot.
Vaccines do not cause learning disabilities. Asthma has increased in correlation but it's not causative - working in schools I can assure you that asthma and allergies are on the rise because of LACK OF EXPOSURE to things like grass, pollen, nuts, etc. No asthma in unvaccinated? Bollocks. Healthier? Bollocks. Disease resistance? Bollocks. Safety studies, stop making up criteria that they don't meet because that's BOLLOCKS.
The Dr you quote thought that Vitamin C cured lots of things that it doesn't. The guy published only in the 70's and 80's, things have moved on.
Though I'm not in the "YOU MUST HAVE YOUR CHILDREN VACCINATED OR YOU'RE EVIL AND KILLING THE WHOLE WORLD" camp, I disagree with almost everything you quoted here even more.
Vaccination, like ANY MEDICAL PROCEDURE, it not without statistical outliers, mistakes, and risks. Nothing medical is risk-free. 99.9999% of all medicine is working out if what you take and might end up with is better than what you already have. Drug interactions are difficult and people work differently.
Like the HIV story at the moment - a patient, of their own accord, formed an antibody that stopped HIV. Now scientists are taking that antibody and hopefully forming a vaccine or kinds. But HIV is different in every person and evolution relies on something, completely by chance, working differently in one animal to every other animal of the same species. That's how it works, and that's why vaccines cannot be "safe".
But, as a mathematician, the overwhelming, massively tested, calculated, verified and best odds are that vaccination will help an individual, and a population, more than they will harm it. Nobody can guarantee that for any individual, because we're playing biology roulette. But we're making sure we're playing on a table with only one tiny "you die" against a myriad "you never get the disease, or die from it" slots.
Stop being an idiot, Dr. M.D. PhD means nothing. Ask my geneticist girlfriend who's qualified to tell half of London if they have cancer, or if their unborn child is likely to have a crippling genetic disease or not and works with lots of wackos, or my multiple-Dr PhD father-in-law who has PhD's in everything from chemistry to physics to sports science. One wacko Dr doesn't make everything he said 30 years ago true just because he has letters on his name.
The overwhelming, peer-reviewed, best-guess of established science nowadays is that people should be vaccinated. And, in fact, one British doctor with a similar amount of letters was SO WRONG in his autism/vaccination link that he went to jail for it. Not just a slap on a wrist. Not just "Oh, his science is poor". But "Your assessment and scaremongering was so damn incorrect, and you knew it, and you faked results and made up numbers, and you went so public and scared so many people incorrectly, that it was criminal."
I can find a wacko PhD in any field, from astrophysics to maths (so many claimed to have proven Fermat's Last Theorem etc. and ALL of them were wrong until the 1990's and that took nearly 10 years to prove right even though it actually LOOKED right for a change), biology to environmental studies. A sound-bite from a wacko is not science.
Meanwhile, in civilised countries, asking people to take drug tests for employment purposes is virtually unheard of unless it's critical to their employment (e.g. addiction counsellor possibly?).
Seriously, have never done it, have never known anyone who's done it (and know lots of PhD's who work in medical labs), have never even discussed it outside of "things those crazy foreigners do".
Yet people call the UK a big-brother police state.
For a long time, I've thought that the movie industry was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Endless sequels and unheard-of shite.
Now it seems we've moved to making movies of anything that anyone has ever heard of, no matter how related to an actual movie they could actually be.
And I haven't bought a cinema ticket in years, purchased a DVD in years (except second-hand), bought a Blu-Ray at all, and if it isn't on Amazon Prime or Google Play Movies, pretty much I can't be bothered with it and the things I've bought on there are with promotional credit, huge discounts, and movies that I know I already love.
Honestly, there's times when you just look at things and think "Where the fuck did all that good stuff I enjoyed go to?".
Apart from The Imitation Game (story of my hero), The Martian (that was a big mistake), I can't think of anything I've bought since... years ago. And with shite like this getting the money, it's hardly a surprise.
Okay, applying your suggestions to other places not involved with the TSA.
London Stansted airport.
1) People spend seconds checking each passport. There are 30-something aisles with people, plus 10-20 automated biometric scanners lanes. Still, the longest part of my getting through an airport is getting through passport control. I have a biometric-passport. The biometric scanners so far have a 100% failure rate for me. I'm then diverted to the manual lines. So much so, that I ignore the people pushing me towards the biometric lines and just queue up in the manual lines anyway. The manual lines queue for 30 minutes plus guaranteed, and the guy at the end just sticks my passport in his scanner, looks up at me, maybe asks me where I've come from today. That's it.
2) Baggage handling for carry-on? Same issue. 30-60 minutes of queueing to get to one of 30-40 lines. Sure, they pick up on things that are left in people's bags around me but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Also, that I have to separate laptops etc. suggests to me that if you have a suitably convoluted packing, something would be able to slip through anyway. Generally, I observe 95% pass-through rate in those around me, but all the pissing about separating shit and then recombining and re-clothing is what costs the time. Baggage handling for drop-off you never see anyway, so it's not a delay that you're aware of.
3) Pretty much, the rate of re-scan doesn't really affect this, because it just gets put back into the line. Each re-scan is no more than an extra passenger at worst, and to be honest, if you have another X-Ray terminal that has to be manned, you could push another N passengers through that too, quite easily. You're arguing for sacrificing a few hundred passengers per hour scanning for a reduction in the 5% or less "bounce" rate.
So I don't think it really has anything to do with the above.
The problem? The system is stupid and inefficient. Turn up a desk to check in baggage, get asked security questions. Baggage (eventually) goes off to a line where it's scanned again and then (after a LONG time moving around or just sitting still) is loaded onto a plane.
Then go - in your own time - to security where your passport is scanned to let you into the queue. Then queue to get to the hand-baggage scanners, where you have to unpack so much stuff and undress partially, and then have your person scanned, and then get to put it all back on to get to the next queue and so on.
And then, when you re-enter, you land, then queue to passport control, then get asked where you've come from etc. because they've mixed a dozen flights into the same security line and think that this will somehow "catch you out" (I assume they are looking for something COMPLETELY different to be honest, at least I hope they are), then queue to get your luggage, which lands in a queue, then go through customs channels, and then you're back into the place you were standing to get in in the first place.
What you have is complete lack of flow. How about this:
You get into the airport and all you have access to is check-in. You won't linger here. Your check-in consists of an airport rep doing the paperwork after you've walked through an airport-security scanner, your hand-luggage being scanned (and ready to pick up on the other side of the check-in for your airport rep's queue), and the pat-down, electronic arches, etc..
The security guy can't be given a different story to the check-in rep, and he's perfectly aware if you're travelling with X, Y or Z who's also on the flight. No more "they split up in the airport" crap to track. If there's a problem, they can pull you out of the entire flight and everything else immediately, and no more bollocks about having to turn up so early or missing your flight - you're either checked in or not and no 1+ hour delay in security potentially hindering your flight (I feel sorry for anyone who has to transfer at an airport, fuck that).
Your hand-baggage and your
Wikipedia isn't a software project. It's a data project. By that measure, it probably isn't even the largest of those, except by contributer numbers possibly (but then you could say that Facebook was the same kind of thing - people contributing to a collection of data).
MediaWiki is the software project behind Wikipedia. And it has nowhere near the same number of contributors, testers, etc. If we stretch the definition so that every possible user of it, etc. comes into the statistics, than you can easily say that Wordpress etc. probably outnumber it too.
Think of it as "software development" - people actually writing code intended to be executed by others. Most people on Wikipedia DON'T actually write code at all, and what they do is markup (and entirely different thing - using Microsoft Word's "Bold" button does not count as "coding"!). But the software underlying that is MediaWiki, a relatively unheard-of (by Wikipedia users) CMS.
They are USING software, not writing it.
The question is really cost.
To burn stuff, deal with the exhaust gases and particulates, and scrape out the ashes takes an awful lot of extra cost than just buying - as you state - a "special" incinerator. A long, ongoing cost.
Then separation, recomposition, and selling off - it still has to be CHEAPER at the end than just buying new material or nobody is going to use it. You can have a block of pure steel for a thousand dollars, or a squadge of slightly impure, recycled steel for two thousand (or have that purified back to the same level for three thousand), or whatever.
Sticking stuff in mines in case you might need them in future also isn't cheap and doesn't work out well - the stuff tends to stay down there forever because it never becomes cost-effective to get it back up, or the ongoing maintenance of it becomes far more expensive than just leaving it down there and sealing the place up.
Recycling works for certain things, but the separate-tracks to recycle stuff are becoming silly now. My local council, funded from my council tax, has this arrangement:
- a tiny black bin that takes "food waste". This cannot contain garden waste of any kind. Honestly, how hard is it to make use of old rotten food?
- a large brown bin for garden waste that they CHARGE ME EXTRA to take away. You can fit a couple of chopped up branches or maybe a small lawn's worth of cut grass in it. Anything food in there, they call it "contaminated" and charge me again.
- a large blue bin for "recyclables". Pretty much plastics, glass and papers. Nothing else. Anything else, or any food residue, and they charge me again. This is sorted by hand afterwards and it's expected to be all washed at my expense. Oh. No cardboard.
- a large green bin for "everything else", collected half as often as any of the above (this is where your cardboard is supposed to go - imagine what happens at Christmas!)
And then this happens:
- Every week, the black bin is collected. A van drives round, three guys jump out, pour the waste food into a van, drive off.
- Every week, the brown bin is collected. A different van drives round, three guys jump out, pout the waste grass etc. into a van, drive off.
- Every week, the blue bin is collected. A different van drives round, three guys jump out, sort through the bin, sort "glass, paper, etc." into small boxes on the side of the van, leave everything else, drive off.
- Every other week, the green bin is collected. A different van drives round, three guys jump out, put the bin on the lifer and pour it into the back. Drive off.
None of these vans are the same. They visit different streets at different parts of the month, so they are - all four - driving around different places at low speed with three guys on them constantly every day. Then they all drive back to the municipal tip (I think the garden waste might be composted directly, but that's paid-for separately now) and "something" happens. Quite why the food waste needs to come out of the garden waste, I'm not sure - for years it wasn't a problem, suddenly it is?
And how do we pay for all these? Every company involved is owned by or linked to the councillor for waste recycling. Strange that, how they got the contract. And strange that they are being paid by my tax, and then sometimes specifically by me too.
Now, are we seriously suggesting that the cost of four tanks of diesel, 12 guys, lots of processing and organisation, lots of regulation, particulate and exhaust cleansing, and administration of the entire operation is paid for by a bin of paper, or a handful of bottles being filtered, hand-picked, cut up, washed down, bleached or cleaned, reconstituted (maybe with heat etc.) and then reformed and sold on to suppliers at or below bulk trade prices? Or is it just tax-payer funded jobs-for-the-boys that can't profit otherwise, and can't profit if there's the slightest contamination or lack of separation of the items?
Not a surprise.
The same was found for UK WEEE waste. Someone in China or India will happily sign anything you like if they can become your "recycling partner", and then just throw the stuff into their local (unregulated) landfill.
I do a lot of WEEE disposal (if you throw out over a ton of waste electrical equipment a year, you're required to track it with paperwork, below that, not!). The guys who email me about offering that service all claim to be WEEE registered. One of them, many years ago when the scheme was only a year or two old, took my old CRT's and told me exactly what happens to them: They drive them to Heathrow in a big lorry, where someone pays 1GBP each for them, which pays the petrol for the journey. Those people load them on a plane, signs the official "we will dispose of them properly" paperwork (so the first company are covered and so am I), and then nobody's quite sure what happens there on...
But I can't see that a lorry full of old CRT's are worth even 1GBP each in metals and materials, certainly not 1GBP + staff wages + disposal of the dangerous stuff + international transport via cargo plane + sitting and recycling the potentially useful stuff.
Unofficially, the guy was told it just goes into landfill abroad - but because the paperwork DOESN'T say that, everyone is covered. And if the company in India that signed that declaration is found to be dumping the waste? Well, there are lots of others and you can "start" another company quite quickly.
And previous tracking projects like this (I've seen at least three or four from local news to nationwide research) confirm to me that, pretty much, that's what happens whether it's supposed to or not. I imagine the easy-pickings (the still-working old Dell computers, etc.) are sold on locally, the large blocks of metal (e.g. rack units and anything that can be removed as a lump of metal etc.) are melted down by the local scrapyard, and anything hazardous is shipped out because it's such a cost to deal with and someone in a third-world country will happily take it off a plane, take the time to weed out the gold etc. without care for their staff, dump the rest for you, and then sign anything you want so long as it's accompanied by a few quid.
And because it's gone out of the EU and has "legal" documents, the originating countries don't really care.
Actually, they'll get one tick (successfully sent to server) but not the second tick (successfully read by recipient) on their message - and it will be a slightly different colour. They might not even get the first tick if WhatsApp know that number isn't a WhatsApp one.
"WhatsApp isn't very popular in the United States and E"uropean countries"
You're kidding right? Over half my contacts are on WhatsApp - it's basically free texting, including internationally.
Anyone, especially who travels in Europe, who isn't using it already is just one friend away from being invited to it.
More people I know use WhatsApp than Facetime, or Skype.
There was.
Then we started to turn the clouds sulphuric and potentially initiated runaway greenhouse effects which started to turn it into an inhospitable barren desert with un-survivable atmospheric heat.
Or was that Venus again, I forget?