I pity people who think they "need" to buy HD / 4K / 8K. I've literally never looked at a movie and thought "Oh, that needs more resolution". Not in 1980's VHS, not now.
Now, computer desktops may be different - that requires per-pixel accuracy in some cases - but you'll find that those people who do 4K desktops also have anti-aliasing and all kinds of other shit enabled too.
It's a pissing contest. I pity them if they honestly cannot watch SD without flinching. First, because it's just in their heads, second, it's because they're looking for flaws rather than watching the movie, third, because they are never going to be satisfied, fourth because it costs them more to get the same level of satisfaction as I get from SD.
SD. Stereo. 44Khz audio. 128Kbit MP3. Non-HDR. I'd be happy if we'd never gone past SVGA.
Think to yourself: When was the last time you had the VERY LATEST tech and said "Oh, that's still pixellated?" Never. So why would you then need to replace that technology a few years later for something "better"?
Because when you had SD it was an improvement over analogue video, when you got HD it was an improvement over SD, etc. etc... and you only cared if you sat there counting dots.
Headquarters is derived from head quarters (the quarters - living areas - of the people leading the organisation).
Quarters is the plural of quarter.
"The word is plural in construction and can take singular or plural verbs."
Thus "headquarters is" and "headquarters are" are both perfectly valid English (depending where you live) while the obvious plural (ending in 's') will tend to lead people to use it as a plural instead of singular.
There is not one "headquarter". Nobody uses that term except US English. There is one set of "headquarters". Though language evolves, the plural is the original, just as valid today, and more common worldwide.
Anything post v12 isn't "Opera". It's a Chrome-clone. Opera proper hasn't existed in a long while, and never had anything even remotely like Facebook integration.
You all laughed and rejected it when Opera was ad-based.
And, even then, that many years ago, Opera had a bucket more features and a ton more respect for the users.
Pity it got sidelined and turned into the shit-show it currently is (with the only "successor in interest" being nothing more than a Chrome clone with skins, that they have changed the icon for FOUR TIMES but not added most of the Opera features of old at all).
I've never seriously used Firefox or its derivatives.
So much Apple-love on Slashdot. I wonder what you all do for a living?
Personally, I have never, and probably will never, buy an Apple product. Because of the pricing, yes, but also because I've never found a single redeeming feature in any Apple product.
I manage *thousands* of the damn things, phones, Macs and iPads. But I honestly wouldn't ever buy one or use one myself. My "work" iPad sits doing CCTV all day (and falls over with alarming regularity - there is obviously no application controls and one program sucking up RAM can easily cause it to fall over and "restart" the entire iPad once every 24 hours at least. It also can't manage four simultaneous H264 HD-level streams as it runs out of RAM on the fourth and kills the app).
I finally convinced my employers to stop using them for anything when I proved that they're not compliant with UK consumer, company or data protection laws. By literally failing to get them to acknowledge a letter of complaint to their head office (Ireland), and then them refusing to do ANYTHING - even reply to questions requesting statutory complaint / data retention information. I strongly suspect that they are not GDPR compliant, as they weren't ever DPA compliant. They make noises to suggest such, but they have never given a statement to that effect, and refuse when asked.
(And that's because iCloud is nothing more than AWS, Azure etc. cloud instances in random regions... The Register published an article on it earlier this year).
I haven't found a single redeeming feature in any product, service, or business process that they use. Those people who have rejected my concerns have - to a person - gone back on their assertions that Apple are "so wonderful" within a matter of months, after whatever-I-predicted happened.
Honestly... what do you use Apple for that you couldn't use anyone else for, and do so cheaper?
Take an American Express card, go to the UK, see how far that argument gets you.
Or cheques.
Lots of things used to be ways-to-pay and are no longer accepted in the majority of shops. Cash is no different in this respect. Try spending a GBP50 note in a small-town store. Or using a Bank of Scotland ten pound note across the border. All are "money". But stores and individuals selling literally won't take them from you.
Because, especially with cash, the hassle of dealing with some forms of payment is worth losing the custom of a handful of vocal and stubborn customers. Cash-business pay a lot of money to handle it. From storing it, securing it, counting it, verifying it, checking it, collecting it, sorting it, banking it, etc.
Your attitude will work in a minority of places. And everyone else will go on conducting business in the most efficient way for them anyway.
I haven't carried cash for 20 years. It actually costs businesses NOT to accept card, in my experience. I've walked out of shops because they won't take a card, only cash... and even with them yelling that there's an ATM just across the road - sorry, guys, I'll find a place that doesn't inconvenience me.
Mug me, and all you get are a crappy old phone that's useless to you but tracking you, and a bunch of cards protected by codes, that I can cancel within minutes (and, with my card companies, re-activate if I do find them later).
Cash is on its way out and your refusal to accept that if it does won't change anything.
"What is the Airbnb Host Guarantee?" (text theirs, highlights mine)
The Airbnb Host Guarantee provides protection for ***up to*** $1,000,000 to a host for damages to covered property in the rare event of guest damages ***above the security deposit or if no security deposit is in place***.
The Host Guarantee Programme **doesn't cover cash and securities, collectibles, rare artwork, jewellery, pets or personal liability***. We recommend that hosts secure or remove valuables when renting their place. The programme also doesn't cover loss or damage to property due to wear and tear.
The Host Guarantee Programme ***isn't insurance and doesn't replace your homeowners or renters insurance***. Make sure you review and understand the terms of your insurance policy and what it covers and doesn't cover. ***Not all insurance will cover damage or loss to property caused by a guest renting your space.*** Filing a host guarantee request doesn't preclude a guest from financial responsibility for the damages claimed if Airbnb determines a guest was at fault.
Learn more about the Host Guarantee at: airbnb.com/guarantee.
It's a third-party contract, not insurance, and Airbnb can selectively enforce an awful lot of things in that "legal document" to basically pay out zero any time it feels it wants to.
He declares bankruptcy, because few people could ever be able to afford anything even approaching that over their lifetime, and then you lose it all anyway. And you can't seek any further remedy as you already have your "win" in court.
Agree that you should charge the perpetrator and seek further action against them, but he took Airbnb's offer so that's a no-go.
Public liability insurance exists because no one person could ever operate under such a system of fines. But neither the guy who rented, or the one renting out, had that, it seems. Airbnb's insurance no doubt paid out, but only on private terms outside of court.
Though I agree in principle, there are a reason for (most) such rules.
Your park one - the alternative is that even when you provide tons of homeless shelters at great expense, people still seek places away from authority. Fuck using a bathroom in a park late at night on my own when it's being used by homeless and those thrown out of the shelters.
Most countries have "the pedestrian has right-of-way" because pedestrians can't avoid a 60mph car, but a 60mph car can avoid a pedestrian. Daylight savings - agree, it's a nonsense. New Year's - no idea if that's the rule but if so it seems likely there's a reason for that. Catering bathrooms for 1,000,000 people on a one-off event is a big deal. Try it. Honestly. It's hard even for 1000 people, especially if there's an "event" where they all want the bathroom at the same time - seriously, marshal even a small-town event and see what happens. Just handling 1,000,000 people ANYWHERE doing ANYTHING is a nightmare. That's why there are rules about how and when that number of people can meet and organise such events.
It's nothing to do with people wanting to make up stupid rules. It's to do with people all wanting to do something "quite simple" for themselves, that actually has a huge number of serious knock-on consequences that they never have to consider, and they care only about the self.
"I let random strangers that I didn't know stay in my house unaccompanied and unsupervised and it got trashed".
News at 11.
Honestly, no matter WHAT the rules for Airbnb may or may not be, why on earth would you be stupid enough to do that? If someone "random" asked to borrow your car for one night, would you let them? Would you let them if it was a sportscar? But you'll let them do it with a house worth what? 10 times as much?
20-something pays a minimal fee to use your house for one night over New Year's... bad enough. With a single review? Just what the hell were you thinking?
This is nothing to do with Airbnb per se, it's just bog-standard stupidity. And I bet it's not covered under any of your home insurance policies - for good reason. Airbnb probably aren't even obliged to do anything either... they just choose to do so to as a goodwill gesture to limit the bad press.
Honestly, some people are so stupid it defies belief.
The whole idea of Airbnb is a stupid concept in the first place, though I'm sure profitable when it does work. When it goes wrong, seriously, what did you expect?
If nothing else, a ten second Google will show you things like people Airbnb'ing and turning places into brothels and drug-dens, by comparison a party is the low-end of the scale. Not to mention that they have access to your address for the period of time they are Airbnb'ing... they could be doing all sorts with that kind of access - I could destroy your credit rating in a week in my country by getting access to things addressed to me at your mail address.
I wouldn't even trust a 20-something who might be my own son to have a place "just for New Year's" without making sure they couldn't have a party without my knowledge. Let alone a random stranger.
You learned a lesson that most people never have to learn because they're just not that thick.
Either rent out your place, with a full rental agreement, deposit, month's-rent-in-advance, insurance and all the legal trimmings that come with that, or don't. Short-term rental based on an app EULA is the most ridiculous thing ever and you only need one bad incident to wipe out an entire lifetime's profit doing it.
UK high street is dead. Even the huge clothing stores are struggling or being sold off.
Other countries aren't far behind.
You can accept it, or you can adjust your life to suit.
Another 20 years, you'll have a few huge supermarkets offering virtually everything (usually after inviting big brands into their stores to gain custom and habitualising people to using them, then stripping them for their own in-store brand... Specsavers in your local ASDA? Give it a year), high streets sold off for housing, and everything online.
Feel grateful - you wouldn't have a public mail service (it'd be privatised as it is in some parts of London already by TNT), your high street is almost certainly filled with betting shops instead (the only people making money enough to pay the rent) and charity shops.
High street is dead. Get over it. You're several decades and several major retailers too late to do anything much about it. Order your physical media on a specialist site online. Amazon will almost certainly out-price them eventually but if they don't, you'll still get your goods. Just posted to you. Via Royal Mail which is only alive nowadays because of Amazon.
And sending up mission after mission that fails and just uses up all the resources and goodwill of the governments does nobody any favours.
When a multitude of robotic missions would establish much more clearly what's necessary and provide a head-start greater than anything a "pot-luck" manned mission could.
Getting a man to Mars is incredibly expensive. We have absolutely no idea if it's sustainable or not. En-masse, it certainly ISN'T at the moment. We just don't have the technology.
But if you could build a case to governments that X is a good place, has good resources, isn't just shadows on a radar, but has everything we need, and that it could sustain a significant population (which I would call 10+... because keeping 10+ people alive is a lot harder than you think when you have zero chance of any Earth backup being even months away).
Going to the Moon cost so much it put everybody off manned spaceflight for 50 years hence... it's alluded to by every astronaut that ever spoke about their experiences... Apollo was killed off because the cost was prohibitive.
Mars is 142 times further away than the Moon. It's a huge unknown. And it's more hostile than the Moon which, in itself, has never sustained human life for more than a handful of days.
It's not a question of "we have to go". You have politics, real-world scientific issues, and a complete absence of funding for something that's gonna be 100+ times more costly than the Apollo missions ever were... to do... what? Potentially die within months because you'll be 100% reliant on technology to do simple things like eat (which the Apollo astronauts NEVER were) and breathe.
Mars is orders-of-magnitude more stupid than the Moon was. And nobody's been back to even the Moon in 50 years. It's a huge undertaking that you have to get right first time. For a planet that we still have no clue what's a few feet under the soil, that's a pretty stupendous leap of faith.
You can get past a googol (10^100) with factorials of a 3 digit number. Factorials are thus "using" such numbers. Calculate the odds of N things chosen out of M and the numbers explode quickly.
Just because a number isn't representative of a practical physical quantity doesn't mean it's useless. Want an example? Encryption. I doubt you will ever exprienve having 2^4096 "anythings"... but the fact such a number exists, can be proven to be prime, and for which the mathematics applies is still incredibly useful.
But my property is no longer my property upon my death.
If I manage to own something for 95 years and I'm still around to claim it, then it should be mine. If Walt was still alive (or whoever actually drew those characters) you could argue that their property still being their property for the length of their lives would be sensible.
But companies don't die. Nintendo is how old? 129 years? There are banks and industries WAY older than that. It's ridiculous to assign "intellectual" property to an entity that has no intellect of its own.
It's about corporations being seen as entities which "must" exist and continue to own everything they've ever owned, into perpetuity. That's not what copyrights or patents were made for. Trademarks, you could argue, that suits. But not the other two.
However, you can be damn sure that if I died tomorrow, all of my property isn't mine, most doesn't get passed down to kids, and some of it disappears entirely (e.g. all my "intellectual" property rights mean naught once I'm dead and I can't pass my copyright licences to, say, software, onto my estate).
The question that needs to be asked legally is: Do you want a corporation to be able to exclusively own an idea for as long as it exists, even if it exists only to own that idea?
I can't see how that is for the public benefit in any way, shape or form, even if you consider taxing that idea into oblivion (it's then still people who weren't even born when the idea was "invented" that have to pay for it).
This is what you get when a company - under sworn oath in front of a court of law - tells you that their "premium" products are only designed to have a lifetime of one year.
Pay your Apple luxury tax, or stop complaining.
Honestly have yet to find a single redeeming feature in any Apple product or service.
No worse than the bank cash-marking dyes, which literally explode with coloured and very sticky dye if the security box carrying the money to/from the bank or the ATM is stolen or broken into.
I doubt a judge would look sympathetically on any such case, even to a third-party. The guy stealing the stuff is the trigger - no different to stealing a toy that makes a noise unexpectedly and puts him off his driving.
Anaphylactic shock? That's a shame. Maybe the guy shouldn't go around stealing stuff he shouldn't be allergic to.
I'm not one of the "serves him right, fair game, anything goes" crowd, but on this kind of level? Yeah, not a problem. It would be laughed out of court and the blame firmly put on the person nicking things that aren't his and driving off at speed.
Could have been a box of live bees (perfectly legal to post in my country!). Same thing. If he hadn't stolen something that wasn't his, he'd know what it could or couldn't do and compensated accordingly.
I uploaded an image of me in front of a flat background, taken by a professional photographer. I'm a white guy, wearing a black suit, against a orange-brown background.
It included a huge section of the background in part of my ear. My plain-black-suit jacked gained curly horns of random background elements. My other ear sloped down to my lower jaw with background.
It's about what I'd expect from a dumb tool. Gimme JASC Paint Shop Pro 10 Anniversary Edition (from, what, 10 years ago?) or any modern equivalent and I'd do a better job in ten seconds and a lasso tool vaguely guided by a freehand mouse movement.
The story misses out the nice bit: Literally 100% of the people stopped this year so far by facial recognition were false-positives and released without charge.
Presumption of innocence only affects the courts. Arrest is a mechanism to detain people until you can ascertain if a crime occurred. Even *arrest* isn't subject to a presumption of innocence (you wouldn't slap cuffs on a presumed-innocent person).
Certainly "you look like a guy we are after" (in whatever form - identity parade, cop thinking he recognises you from a poster, targeted facial recognition, etc.) isn't subject to a presumption of innocence in the manner you're referring to. It has nothing to do with the UK, specifically, either.
Fact is, their facial recognition is useless (as is most facial recognition), so if anything all they're EVER doing with it is bothering "innocent" people and showing how useless their own tech is.
*A cop needs to be able to stop you. Presumption of innocence cannot play a part in that. Yes, they can stop you for almost no reason (you look like the guy, or you have the same colour car). It's what they do AFTER that that matters. In the UK, that means they quickly look you up, realise you're not the guy on the database and you walk off. Or you refuse and walk off (they could arrest you but then they could be subject to a lot of problems regarding insufficient cause for arrest).
One of the questions the dickheads that "advise" you what to say to a cop include is "Am I free to go?" It's not a bad question. It's about the only one that an innocent person is likely to ask (all that other refusing-to-co-operate shit is just going to get you arrested, even if that's "wrong").
Arrest is detaining you until the situation is clear. A charge is alleging that you performed a particular and specific named criminal act. A conviction is when a judge agrees with the latter.
Arrest may be a pain in the arse, but it's a tool that needs to be used. They have made literally zero proper arrests with this facial recognition stuff. They stopped a few people, confirmed their ID, let them go. They would get better results by just sticking a cop in a market and saying "Do you recognise anyone?"... likely they'll catch at least one person subject to a public-banning order, commonly arrested for shoplifting, or some known driving offence (getting into a car when the cop knows they are banned, etc.).
I tend to find that oddball intermediate layers like this die off rather quickly. In terms of "when I'd heard of it" to "when its death is proposed", this one is really quite quick.
I'm surprised that x86 is still supported, let alone an oddball "64-bit processor with 32-bit pointers" hybrid setup. Surely even x86 is only more for legacy and embedded chipsets, nowadays, where I can't imagine that x32 would help at all.
Either your chip is 64-bit capable, or not. If it is, even if there are minor advantages to running it in 32-bit mode, when there is COMPLETE and total support for 64-bit mode, it seems a nonsense not to use it. If it's not, then the question is moot anyway.
It's not like ARM or Intel of old where all the previous chips used 32-bit, then they supported 64-bit but people didn't get on board with it for a while. It's people with full-64-bit support, that can run either full 64-bit or full 32-bit, but choose to use an oddball and barely-supported middle ground because... well.. they don't want to use 64-bit pointers and use a little more memory.
It's like running your 80386 in 8086 mode. It may have been useful for a short period of time in the transition when the new hardware was expensive but the old software was more expensive to replace, but it'll die off and you'll never use it again. Except, in this case, it's wanting to use the 80386 chip features in a machine, but in such a way that it can only address 1Mb of RAM. Not even "use the 80386 as an 8086" but literally "I want to use the extra processor registers but not the full 4Gb of RAM, just the first Mb".
And in an era where 64-bit hardware has been the norm for nearly 2 decades now.
"Do they think consumers are too unsophisticated to understand a simple number like "this OLED TV achieves a fairly average 66 percent AdobeRGB coverage?""
Er.... yes?
I had someone ask me what HD was, I've had people watching an SD channel on an HDTV and not realising that it's not "automatically" HD (the HD version of the same channel was higher up in the list), I've had people not understand that the remote control has to point at the TV (increasingly common again as a youth accustomed to Bluetooth are thrown back into an IR world).
Hell, I had one 18-year-old at work bring me their aerial and say "I found this in my room, I dunno what it is do you want it back?" and only correlated this with his lack of TV reception when it was pointed out that it was in fact still necessary to receive digital TV over the air (but they didn't care because they streamed everything).
I couldn't give a shit about sRGB etc. and I'd have to read up on what they even meant without this summary. You can be damn sure that most consumers don't even know what HDR is (they'll think it's something to do with HD!), let alone care about an arbitrary standard to do with it.
"Can I see it from an angle?" will be a question asked a million times more than anything to do with colour calibrations, nits, or anything else.
There was an old DOS TSR (that I have never been able to find since) that was a packet driver that operated over either a parallel port or serial port daisy-chain from one machine to the next. Wasn't fast, but it was fast enough. Better than serial alone as you could have several machines connected and it was faster. And everyone had parallel ports - I have no idea if EPP or whatever was an option that long ago, but it was faster than the available serial. And you had several of serial/parallel most likely so you had the ports to daisy-chain.
Back when nobody had network-cards in their machines and kid's budgets didn't run to even 10Base2 to play their games - Oh, but dad! - we improvised. I don't even remember how we found it (no Internet for us back then), or what it was called, but we used that little TSR for an awful lot of things that weren't otherwise possible without a proper network card.
The only bit we bought was an ever-increasing daisy-chain of serial and parallel cables using whatever people had discarded or we could find. To this day, I could literally make any combination of 9/25pin M/F to 9/25pin M/F cable for tens of meters of length just from those old cables in my bits box.
I remember it was a faff with whatever the packet driver was, and then having to load some (Novell?) TSR to allow IPX etc. all in a DOS boot config (we had DOS 5, I think, and 4DOS utilities and a bunch of PC Magazine freeware - AMENU - to make a menu just to load up that config and play networked).
Hell, I even remember playing Quake over the same link, but that was only temporarily as only our friend had another machine powerful enough to run that, and then we upgraded to 10Base2 and then 10BaseT not long after.
But I have gamed IPX over parallel port via DOS. People always thing I got it wrong whenever I say that.
You want to pay proportionally by usage, so as to not unfairly hit low users, or encourage high users who will use what they can extra "because they've already paid".
You want to base that usage on not just pollution, but damage to the road. So doing it based on time would be daft (people would speed to cost themselves less). You'd have to do it on distance to be fair. You could set up tolls everywhere, but they are expensive to build and maintain and you'd have to maintain the roads too. They are also a big hassle, can cause congestion (even automated ones) and require significant infrastructure (e.g. ANPR etc. wired into all the major roads).
You'd want to encourage low-emissions and smaller, more efficient engines, which burn proportionally less fuel for the job at hand, so you'd have to charge based on the type / size / unnecessariness of the vehicle.
What you want is to charge on ENERGY usage, because that meters everything out nicely for you. The more you use, the longer you drive, the faster you accelerate, etc. the more energy you need to consume, so it's the only sensible thing to tax (you can have standing taxes on things like "owning a car" but they have to be very minor in comparison or people just don't pay them).
You can't rely on anything where the CAR tells you what it's done (e.g. mileometers, GPS, etc.) as they are open to abuse.
What you basically end up at is a fuel-tax, whatever that fuel happens to be. Used to be petrol, in a few decades (maybe), it'll be electricity.
But you can't just tax "vehicle" electricity. You'd have to tax it all. So all that solar and stuff just got really expensive again. And, unlike with fossil fuels, people WILL find a way to avoid paying it - they'll literally buy generators and burn petrol if it's cheaper than your taxed electricity! Or go off-grid, so at best you get small one-off taxes on their purchases rather than a blanket tax on usage.
And believe me, if you tax electricity harshly, people will start to generate their own, store it overnight, etc. to avoid those taxes. That might save your green credentials but it won't help you pay for the roads.
It's a dilemma with no easy solution that doesn't also raise unassociated costs (e.g. costs of heating your home), or involve EVEN MORE infrastructure that needs to be paid for.
When it costs you pennies to travel hundreds of miles, rather than thousands of pennies as it does now, tax is hard to come by.
What will most likely happen is per-road tolls and taxation, which will push all the congestion into side-streets, raise the cost of getting to work for everyone (so why use a electric car anyway?), massively increase infrastructure costs, piss everyone off (ever travelled through France on the motorways?), and still not generate enough to maintain even the taxed roads, let alone all those others that you no longer care about.
To be honest, the most sensible alternative is to just forget it and charge more tax elsewhere (so everyone pays more council/state tax, and part of that goes to maintaining the roads). Then the incentive is "I'm paying to drive anyway, I may as well pay as little as possible" so you hope they'll choose electric, if you keep it cheap enough.
Adjusted for inflation, fuel and road taxes are paying less and less, and only 20-ish% actually go on the roads. It's really not worth worrying about, given that it's a relatively small figure compared to everything else, and fixing it just makes everything very visibly more expensive even for non-drivers.
Stick it into council and business taxes and forget about it, basically. You can make a big fuss announcing how you've cut it out, and then slowly creep up the taxes to compensate until people notice.
And means people can get to your businesses without having to pay for fuel and parking.
And means that when your car breaks down you can still get to work without having to worry about it.
The point of things like mass transit is that you SPEND MONEY on them as a basic service that everyone is able to use, in order that you save lots of money elsewhere.
It's in a country's best interests to ensure that workers can get to work, reliably, on-time, and by an efficient means of transport. Because that means more productive (and therefore taxable) work and less congestion and pollution (and all major cities/countries can get fined for having bad pollution).
I have never understood why the London Underground isn't free. Or more reliable. I'd happily have it free in its current state, or more reliable and I have to pay what I do to use it. (P.S. it beats Luxembourg on most of those "amazing advances" already).
But public transport being "free" is no different to things like health services being "free"... for many basic services that keep your workforce happy, productive, and moving, they actually save more than you could spend on them.
This is why America's arguments against healthcare are always absolute bunk by the way. Failing to provide basic healthcare, no matter how much you tax private healthcare, will never make up for the 50+ years of lost productivity of a worker dying early, or the years of lost productivity of a worker who is ill, injured, scared to seek treatment, etc.
It doesn't work for everything, but healthcare and public transport it definitely works for. At worst you should heavily subsidise them.
Same way that my council collects my rubbish "for free" because if you charged me specifically to take my rubbish away, all those people who can't afford things will sacrifice rubbish collection and turn all the poor areas of the city into unofficial municipal rubbish tips in seconds.
And, of course, "for free" means "via your tax that you ahve to pay". Because everyone paying en-masse means that people who don't have much rubbish, or healthcare problems or use public transport much are subsidising those who do because they need to.
Socialism isn't about "things being free". It's about "why should people have to pay to go to work or receive basic healthcare" - when lack of those EXACT things are exactly the cause of why they can't afford to pay for them in the first place. It's about breaking the cycle, not offering freebies to millionaires. And some countries get that very wrong.
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I pity people who think they "need" to buy HD / 4K / 8K. I've literally never looked at a movie and thought "Oh, that needs more resolution". Not in 1980's VHS, not now.
Now, computer desktops may be different - that requires per-pixel accuracy in some cases - but you'll find that those people who do 4K desktops also have anti-aliasing and all kinds of other shit enabled too.
It's a pissing contest. I pity them if they honestly cannot watch SD without flinching. First, because it's just in their heads, second, it's because they're looking for flaws rather than watching the movie, third, because they are never going to be satisfied, fourth because it costs them more to get the same level of satisfaction as I get from SD.
SD. Stereo. 44Khz audio. 128Kbit MP3. Non-HDR. I'd be happy if we'd never gone past SVGA.
Think to yourself: When was the last time you had the VERY LATEST tech and said "Oh, that's still pixellated?" Never. So why would you then need to replace that technology a few years later for something "better"?
Because when you had SD it was an improvement over analogue video, when you got HD it was an improvement over SD, etc. etc... and you only cared if you sat there counting dots.
You're not.
Headquarters is derived from head quarters (the quarters - living areas - of the people leading the organisation).
Quarters is the plural of quarter.
"The word is plural in construction and can take singular or plural verbs."
Thus "headquarters is" and "headquarters are" are both perfectly valid English (depending where you live) while the obvious plural (ending in 's') will tend to lead people to use it as a plural instead of singular.
There is not one "headquarter". Nobody uses that term except US English. There is one set of "headquarters". Though language evolves, the plural is the original, just as valid today, and more common worldwide.
Anything post v12 isn't "Opera". It's a Chrome-clone. Opera proper hasn't existed in a long while, and never had anything even remotely like Facebook integration.
You all laughed and rejected it when Opera was ad-based.
And, even then, that many years ago, Opera had a bucket more features and a ton more respect for the users.
Pity it got sidelined and turned into the shit-show it currently is (with the only "successor in interest" being nothing more than a Chrome clone with skins, that they have changed the icon for FOUR TIMES but not added most of the Opera features of old at all).
I've never seriously used Firefox or its derivatives.
So much Apple-love on Slashdot. I wonder what you all do for a living?
Personally, I have never, and probably will never, buy an Apple product. Because of the pricing, yes, but also because I've never found a single redeeming feature in any Apple product.
I manage *thousands* of the damn things, phones, Macs and iPads. But I honestly wouldn't ever buy one or use one myself. My "work" iPad sits doing CCTV all day (and falls over with alarming regularity - there is obviously no application controls and one program sucking up RAM can easily cause it to fall over and "restart" the entire iPad once every 24 hours at least. It also can't manage four simultaneous H264 HD-level streams as it runs out of RAM on the fourth and kills the app).
I finally convinced my employers to stop using them for anything when I proved that they're not compliant with UK consumer, company or data protection laws. By literally failing to get them to acknowledge a letter of complaint to their head office (Ireland), and then them refusing to do ANYTHING - even reply to questions requesting statutory complaint / data retention information. I strongly suspect that they are not GDPR compliant, as they weren't ever DPA compliant. They make noises to suggest such, but they have never given a statement to that effect, and refuse when asked.
(And that's because iCloud is nothing more than AWS, Azure etc. cloud instances in random regions... The Register published an article on it earlier this year).
I haven't found a single redeeming feature in any product, service, or business process that they use. Those people who have rejected my concerns have - to a person - gone back on their assertions that Apple are "so wonderful" within a matter of months, after whatever-I-predicted happened.
Honestly... what do you use Apple for that you couldn't use anyone else for, and do so cheaper?
Take an American Express card, go to the UK, see how far that argument gets you.
Or cheques.
Lots of things used to be ways-to-pay and are no longer accepted in the majority of shops. Cash is no different in this respect. Try spending a GBP50 note in a small-town store. Or using a Bank of Scotland ten pound note across the border. All are "money". But stores and individuals selling literally won't take them from you.
Because, especially with cash, the hassle of dealing with some forms of payment is worth losing the custom of a handful of vocal and stubborn customers. Cash-business pay a lot of money to handle it. From storing it, securing it, counting it, verifying it, checking it, collecting it, sorting it, banking it, etc.
Your attitude will work in a minority of places. And everyone else will go on conducting business in the most efficient way for them anyway.
I haven't carried cash for 20 years. It actually costs businesses NOT to accept card, in my experience. I've walked out of shops because they won't take a card, only cash... and even with them yelling that there's an ATM just across the road - sorry, guys, I'll find a place that doesn't inconvenience me.
Mug me, and all you get are a crappy old phone that's useless to you but tracking you, and a bunch of cards protected by codes, that I can cancel within minutes (and, with my card companies, re-activate if I do find them later).
Cash is on its way out and your refusal to accept that if it does won't change anything.
"What is the Airbnb Host Guarantee?" (text theirs, highlights mine)
The Airbnb Host Guarantee provides protection for ***up to*** $1,000,000 to a host for damages to covered property in the rare event of guest damages ***above the security deposit or if no security deposit is in place***.
The Host Guarantee Programme **doesn't cover cash and securities, collectibles, rare artwork, jewellery, pets or personal liability***. We recommend that hosts secure or remove valuables when renting their place. The programme also doesn't cover loss or damage to property due to wear and tear.
The Host Guarantee Programme ***isn't insurance and doesn't replace your homeowners or renters insurance***. Make sure you review and understand the terms of your insurance policy and what it covers and doesn't cover. ***Not all insurance will cover damage or loss to property caused by a guest renting your space.*** Filing a host guarantee request doesn't preclude a guest from financial responsibility for the damages claimed if Airbnb determines a guest was at fault.
Learn more about the Host Guarantee at: airbnb.com/guarantee.
It's a third-party contract, not insurance, and Airbnb can selectively enforce an awful lot of things in that "legal document" to basically pay out zero any time it feels it wants to.
Millions of people.. sending a small TCP packet... containing a couple of hundred characters...
Wow. Gosh. The infrastructure that must take to handle...
Like... a couple of servers in a rack and a few gigabits of uplink at worst.
Honestly, has modern technology come to this?
One single YouTube video probably has more bandwidth, more data transferred, more CPU usage and less latency.
He declares bankruptcy, because few people could ever be able to afford anything even approaching that over their lifetime, and then you lose it all anyway. And you can't seek any further remedy as you already have your "win" in court.
Agree that you should charge the perpetrator and seek further action against them, but he took Airbnb's offer so that's a no-go.
Public liability insurance exists because no one person could ever operate under such a system of fines. But neither the guy who rented, or the one renting out, had that, it seems. Airbnb's insurance no doubt paid out, but only on private terms outside of court.
Though I agree in principle, there are a reason for (most) such rules.
Your park one - the alternative is that even when you provide tons of homeless shelters at great expense, people still seek places away from authority. Fuck using a bathroom in a park late at night on my own when it's being used by homeless and those thrown out of the shelters.
Most countries have "the pedestrian has right-of-way" because pedestrians can't avoid a 60mph car, but a 60mph car can avoid a pedestrian. Daylight savings - agree, it's a nonsense. New Year's - no idea if that's the rule but if so it seems likely there's a reason for that. Catering bathrooms for 1,000,000 people on a one-off event is a big deal. Try it. Honestly. It's hard even for 1000 people, especially if there's an "event" where they all want the bathroom at the same time - seriously, marshal even a small-town event and see what happens. Just handling 1,000,000 people ANYWHERE doing ANYTHING is a nightmare. That's why there are rules about how and when that number of people can meet and organise such events.
It's nothing to do with people wanting to make up stupid rules. It's to do with people all wanting to do something "quite simple" for themselves, that actually has a huge number of serious knock-on consequences that they never have to consider, and they care only about the self.
"I let random strangers that I didn't know stay in my house unaccompanied and unsupervised and it got trashed".
News at 11.
Honestly, no matter WHAT the rules for Airbnb may or may not be, why on earth would you be stupid enough to do that? If someone "random" asked to borrow your car for one night, would you let them? Would you let them if it was a sportscar? But you'll let them do it with a house worth what? 10 times as much?
20-something pays a minimal fee to use your house for one night over New Year's... bad enough. With a single review? Just what the hell were you thinking?
This is nothing to do with Airbnb per se, it's just bog-standard stupidity. And I bet it's not covered under any of your home insurance policies - for good reason. Airbnb probably aren't even obliged to do anything either... they just choose to do so to as a goodwill gesture to limit the bad press.
Honestly, some people are so stupid it defies belief.
The whole idea of Airbnb is a stupid concept in the first place, though I'm sure profitable when it does work. When it goes wrong, seriously, what did you expect?
If nothing else, a ten second Google will show you things like people Airbnb'ing and turning places into brothels and drug-dens, by comparison a party is the low-end of the scale. Not to mention that they have access to your address for the period of time they are Airbnb'ing... they could be doing all sorts with that kind of access - I could destroy your credit rating in a week in my country by getting access to things addressed to me at your mail address.
I wouldn't even trust a 20-something who might be my own son to have a place "just for New Year's" without making sure they couldn't have a party without my knowledge. Let alone a random stranger.
You learned a lesson that most people never have to learn because they're just not that thick.
Either rent out your place, with a full rental agreement, deposit, month's-rent-in-advance, insurance and all the legal trimmings that come with that, or don't. Short-term rental based on an app EULA is the most ridiculous thing ever and you only need one bad incident to wipe out an entire lifetime's profit doing it.
UK high street is dead. Even the huge clothing stores are struggling or being sold off.
Other countries aren't far behind.
You can accept it, or you can adjust your life to suit.
Another 20 years, you'll have a few huge supermarkets offering virtually everything (usually after inviting big brands into their stores to gain custom and habitualising people to using them, then stripping them for their own in-store brand... Specsavers in your local ASDA? Give it a year), high streets sold off for housing, and everything online.
Feel grateful - you wouldn't have a public mail service (it'd be privatised as it is in some parts of London already by TNT), your high street is almost certainly filled with betting shops instead (the only people making money enough to pay the rent) and charity shops.
High street is dead. Get over it. You're several decades and several major retailers too late to do anything much about it. Order your physical media on a specialist site online. Amazon will almost certainly out-price them eventually but if they don't, you'll still get your goods. Just posted to you. Via Royal Mail which is only alive nowadays because of Amazon.
And sending up mission after mission that fails and just uses up all the resources and goodwill of the governments does nobody any favours.
When a multitude of robotic missions would establish much more clearly what's necessary and provide a head-start greater than anything a "pot-luck" manned mission could.
Getting a man to Mars is incredibly expensive. We have absolutely no idea if it's sustainable or not. En-masse, it certainly ISN'T at the moment. We just don't have the technology.
But if you could build a case to governments that X is a good place, has good resources, isn't just shadows on a radar, but has everything we need, and that it could sustain a significant population (which I would call 10+... because keeping 10+ people alive is a lot harder than you think when you have zero chance of any Earth backup being even months away).
Going to the Moon cost so much it put everybody off manned spaceflight for 50 years hence... it's alluded to by every astronaut that ever spoke about their experiences... Apollo was killed off because the cost was prohibitive.
Mars is 142 times further away than the Moon. It's a huge unknown. And it's more hostile than the Moon which, in itself, has never sustained human life for more than a handful of days.
It's not a question of "we have to go". You have politics, real-world scientific issues, and a complete absence of funding for something that's gonna be 100+ times more costly than the Apollo missions ever were... to do... what? Potentially die within months because you'll be 100% reliant on technology to do simple things like eat (which the Apollo astronauts NEVER were) and breathe.
Mars is orders-of-magnitude more stupid than the Moon was. And nobody's been back to even the Moon in 50 years. It's a huge undertaking that you have to get right first time. For a planet that we still have no clue what's a few feet under the soil, that's a pretty stupendous leap of faith.
Sigh.
You can get past a googol (10^100) with factorials of a 3 digit number. Factorials are thus "using" such numbers. Calculate the odds of N things chosen out of M and the numbers explode quickly.
Just because a number isn't representative of a practical physical quantity doesn't mean it's useless. Want an example? Encryption. I doubt you will ever exprienve having 2^4096 "anythings"... but the fact such a number exists, can be proven to be prime, and for which the mathematics applies is still incredibly useful.
But my property is no longer my property upon my death.
If I manage to own something for 95 years and I'm still around to claim it, then it should be mine. If Walt was still alive (or whoever actually drew those characters) you could argue that their property still being their property for the length of their lives would be sensible.
But companies don't die. Nintendo is how old? 129 years? There are banks and industries WAY older than that. It's ridiculous to assign "intellectual" property to an entity that has no intellect of its own.
It's about corporations being seen as entities which "must" exist and continue to own everything they've ever owned, into perpetuity. That's not what copyrights or patents were made for. Trademarks, you could argue, that suits. But not the other two.
However, you can be damn sure that if I died tomorrow, all of my property isn't mine, most doesn't get passed down to kids, and some of it disappears entirely (e.g. all my "intellectual" property rights mean naught once I'm dead and I can't pass my copyright licences to, say, software, onto my estate).
The question that needs to be asked legally is: Do you want a corporation to be able to exclusively own an idea for as long as it exists, even if it exists only to own that idea?
I can't see how that is for the public benefit in any way, shape or form, even if you consider taxing that idea into oblivion (it's then still people who weren't even born when the idea was "invented" that have to pay for it).
This is what you get when a company - under sworn oath in front of a court of law - tells you that their "premium" products are only designed to have a lifetime of one year.
Pay your Apple luxury tax, or stop complaining.
Honestly have yet to find a single redeeming feature in any Apple product or service.
No worse than the bank cash-marking dyes, which literally explode with coloured and very sticky dye if the security box carrying the money to/from the bank or the ATM is stolen or broken into.
I doubt a judge would look sympathetically on any such case, even to a third-party. The guy stealing the stuff is the trigger - no different to stealing a toy that makes a noise unexpectedly and puts him off his driving.
Anaphylactic shock? That's a shame. Maybe the guy shouldn't go around stealing stuff he shouldn't be allergic to.
I'm not one of the "serves him right, fair game, anything goes" crowd, but on this kind of level? Yeah, not a problem. It would be laughed out of court and the blame firmly put on the person nicking things that aren't his and driving off at speed.
Could have been a box of live bees (perfectly legal to post in my country!). Same thing. If he hadn't stolen something that wasn't his, he'd know what it could or couldn't do and compensated accordingly.
I uploaded an image of me in front of a flat background, taken by a professional photographer. I'm a white guy, wearing a black suit, against a orange-brown background.
It included a huge section of the background in part of my ear. My plain-black-suit jacked gained curly horns of random background elements. My other ear sloped down to my lower jaw with background.
It's about what I'd expect from a dumb tool. Gimme JASC Paint Shop Pro 10 Anniversary Edition (from, what, 10 years ago?) or any modern equivalent and I'd do a better job in ten seconds and a lasso tool vaguely guided by a freehand mouse movement.
"AI" strikes again.
The story misses out the nice bit: Literally 100% of the people stopped this year so far by facial recognition were false-positives and released without charge.
Presumption of innocence only affects the courts. Arrest is a mechanism to detain people until you can ascertain if a crime occurred. Even *arrest* isn't subject to a presumption of innocence (you wouldn't slap cuffs on a presumed-innocent person).
Certainly "you look like a guy we are after" (in whatever form - identity parade, cop thinking he recognises you from a poster, targeted facial recognition, etc.) isn't subject to a presumption of innocence in the manner you're referring to. It has nothing to do with the UK, specifically, either.
Fact is, their facial recognition is useless (as is most facial recognition), so if anything all they're EVER doing with it is bothering "innocent" people and showing how useless their own tech is.
*A cop needs to be able to stop you. Presumption of innocence cannot play a part in that. Yes, they can stop you for almost no reason (you look like the guy, or you have the same colour car). It's what they do AFTER that that matters. In the UK, that means they quickly look you up, realise you're not the guy on the database and you walk off. Or you refuse and walk off (they could arrest you but then they could be subject to a lot of problems regarding insufficient cause for arrest).
One of the questions the dickheads that "advise" you what to say to a cop include is "Am I free to go?" It's not a bad question. It's about the only one that an innocent person is likely to ask (all that other refusing-to-co-operate shit is just going to get you arrested, even if that's "wrong").
Arrest is detaining you until the situation is clear.
A charge is alleging that you performed a particular and specific named criminal act.
A conviction is when a judge agrees with the latter.
Arrest may be a pain in the arse, but it's a tool that needs to be used. They have made literally zero proper arrests with this facial recognition stuff. They stopped a few people, confirmed their ID, let them go. They would get better results by just sticking a cop in a market and saying "Do you recognise anyone?"... likely they'll catch at least one person subject to a public-banning order, commonly arrested for shoplifting, or some known driving offence (getting into a car when the cop knows they are banned, etc.).
I tend to find that oddball intermediate layers like this die off rather quickly. In terms of "when I'd heard of it" to "when its death is proposed", this one is really quite quick.
I'm surprised that x86 is still supported, let alone an oddball "64-bit processor with 32-bit pointers" hybrid setup. Surely even x86 is only more for legacy and embedded chipsets, nowadays, where I can't imagine that x32 would help at all.
Either your chip is 64-bit capable, or not. If it is, even if there are minor advantages to running it in 32-bit mode, when there is COMPLETE and total support for 64-bit mode, it seems a nonsense not to use it. If it's not, then the question is moot anyway.
It's not like ARM or Intel of old where all the previous chips used 32-bit, then they supported 64-bit but people didn't get on board with it for a while. It's people with full-64-bit support, that can run either full 64-bit or full 32-bit, but choose to use an oddball and barely-supported middle ground because... well.. they don't want to use 64-bit pointers and use a little more memory.
It's like running your 80386 in 8086 mode. It may have been useful for a short period of time in the transition when the new hardware was expensive but the old software was more expensive to replace, but it'll die off and you'll never use it again. Except, in this case, it's wanting to use the 80386 chip features in a machine, but in such a way that it can only address 1Mb of RAM. Not even "use the 80386 as an 8086" but literally "I want to use the extra processor registers but not the full 4Gb of RAM, just the first Mb".
And in an era where 64-bit hardware has been the norm for nearly 2 decades now.
"Do they think consumers are too unsophisticated to understand a simple number like "this OLED TV achieves a fairly average 66 percent AdobeRGB coverage?""
Er.... yes?
I had someone ask me what HD was, I've had people watching an SD channel on an HDTV and not realising that it's not "automatically" HD (the HD version of the same channel was higher up in the list), I've had people not understand that the remote control has to point at the TV (increasingly common again as a youth accustomed to Bluetooth are thrown back into an IR world).
Hell, I had one 18-year-old at work bring me their aerial and say "I found this in my room, I dunno what it is do you want it back?" and only correlated this with his lack of TV reception when it was pointed out that it was in fact still necessary to receive digital TV over the air (but they didn't care because they streamed everything).
I couldn't give a shit about sRGB etc. and I'd have to read up on what they even meant without this summary. You can be damn sure that most consumers don't even know what HDR is (they'll think it's something to do with HD!), let alone care about an arbitrary standard to do with it.
"Can I see it from an angle?" will be a question asked a million times more than anything to do with colour calibrations, nits, or anything else.
Played it.
Over IPX.
With multiple players.
Over a parallel port cable.
I kid you not.
There was an old DOS TSR (that I have never been able to find since) that was a packet driver that operated over either a parallel port or serial port daisy-chain from one machine to the next. Wasn't fast, but it was fast enough. Better than serial alone as you could have several machines connected and it was faster. And everyone had parallel ports - I have no idea if EPP or whatever was an option that long ago, but it was faster than the available serial. And you had several of serial/parallel most likely so you had the ports to daisy-chain.
Back when nobody had network-cards in their machines and kid's budgets didn't run to even 10Base2 to play their games - Oh, but dad! - we improvised. I don't even remember how we found it (no Internet for us back then), or what it was called, but we used that little TSR for an awful lot of things that weren't otherwise possible without a proper network card.
The only bit we bought was an ever-increasing daisy-chain of serial and parallel cables using whatever people had discarded or we could find. To this day, I could literally make any combination of 9/25pin M/F to 9/25pin M/F cable for tens of meters of length just from those old cables in my bits box.
I remember it was a faff with whatever the packet driver was, and then having to load some (Novell?) TSR to allow IPX etc. all in a DOS boot config (we had DOS 5, I think, and 4DOS utilities and a bunch of PC Magazine freeware - AMENU - to make a menu just to load up that config and play networked).
Hell, I even remember playing Quake over the same link, but that was only temporarily as only our friend had another machine powerful enough to run that, and then we upgraded to 10Base2 and then 10BaseT not long after.
But I have gamed IPX over parallel port via DOS. People always thing I got it wrong whenever I say that.
What would you suggest?
You want to pay proportionally by usage, so as to not unfairly hit low users, or encourage high users who will use what they can extra "because they've already paid".
You want to base that usage on not just pollution, but damage to the road. So doing it based on time would be daft (people would speed to cost themselves less). You'd have to do it on distance to be fair. You could set up tolls everywhere, but they are expensive to build and maintain and you'd have to maintain the roads too. They are also a big hassle, can cause congestion (even automated ones) and require significant infrastructure (e.g. ANPR etc. wired into all the major roads).
You'd want to encourage low-emissions and smaller, more efficient engines, which burn proportionally less fuel for the job at hand, so you'd have to charge based on the type / size / unnecessariness of the vehicle.
What you want is to charge on ENERGY usage, because that meters everything out nicely for you. The more you use, the longer you drive, the faster you accelerate, etc. the more energy you need to consume, so it's the only sensible thing to tax (you can have standing taxes on things like "owning a car" but they have to be very minor in comparison or people just don't pay them).
You can't rely on anything where the CAR tells you what it's done (e.g. mileometers, GPS, etc.) as they are open to abuse.
What you basically end up at is a fuel-tax, whatever that fuel happens to be. Used to be petrol, in a few decades (maybe), it'll be electricity.
But you can't just tax "vehicle" electricity. You'd have to tax it all. So all that solar and stuff just got really expensive again. And, unlike with fossil fuels, people WILL find a way to avoid paying it - they'll literally buy generators and burn petrol if it's cheaper than your taxed electricity! Or go off-grid, so at best you get small one-off taxes on their purchases rather than a blanket tax on usage.
And believe me, if you tax electricity harshly, people will start to generate their own, store it overnight, etc. to avoid those taxes. That might save your green credentials but it won't help you pay for the roads.
It's a dilemma with no easy solution that doesn't also raise unassociated costs (e.g. costs of heating your home), or involve EVEN MORE infrastructure that needs to be paid for.
When it costs you pennies to travel hundreds of miles, rather than thousands of pennies as it does now, tax is hard to come by.
What will most likely happen is per-road tolls and taxation, which will push all the congestion into side-streets, raise the cost of getting to work for everyone (so why use a electric car anyway?), massively increase infrastructure costs, piss everyone off (ever travelled through France on the motorways?), and still not generate enough to maintain even the taxed roads, let alone all those others that you no longer care about.
To be honest, the most sensible alternative is to just forget it and charge more tax elsewhere (so everyone pays more council/state tax, and part of that goes to maintaining the roads). Then the incentive is "I'm paying to drive anyway, I may as well pay as little as possible" so you hope they'll choose electric, if you keep it cheap enough.
Look at the UK situation:
https://www.racfoundation.org/...
Adjusted for inflation, fuel and road taxes are paying less and less, and only 20-ish% actually go on the roads. It's really not worth worrying about, given that it's a relatively small figure compared to everything else, and fixing it just makes everything very visibly more expensive even for non-drivers.
Stick it into council and business taxes and forget about it, basically. You can make a big fuss announcing how you've cut it out, and then slowly creep up the taxes to compensate until people notice.
So, for every sale since 2010, they've sold as many EV's in California as are sold in a few days by any of the big-name vehicle manufacturers.
Even if you multiply that up by 50 states and then 200+ countries, they're still a drop in the ocean.
"Months of strong U.S. sales in 2018, preceded by a strong 2017, are starting to show a trend: electric vehicles are selling well,"
If that's "strong" and "selling well", then someone needs to go look at the numbers.
And means you don't have to buy a car yourself.
And reduces pollution.
And means people can get to your businesses without having to pay for fuel and parking.
And means that when your car breaks down you can still get to work without having to worry about it.
The point of things like mass transit is that you SPEND MONEY on them as a basic service that everyone is able to use, in order that you save lots of money elsewhere.
It's in a country's best interests to ensure that workers can get to work, reliably, on-time, and by an efficient means of transport. Because that means more productive (and therefore taxable) work and less congestion and pollution (and all major cities/countries can get fined for having bad pollution).
I have never understood why the London Underground isn't free. Or more reliable. I'd happily have it free in its current state, or more reliable and I have to pay what I do to use it. (P.S. it beats Luxembourg on most of those "amazing advances" already).
But public transport being "free" is no different to things like health services being "free"... for many basic services that keep your workforce happy, productive, and moving, they actually save more than you could spend on them.
This is why America's arguments against healthcare are always absolute bunk by the way. Failing to provide basic healthcare, no matter how much you tax private healthcare, will never make up for the 50+ years of lost productivity of a worker dying early, or the years of lost productivity of a worker who is ill, injured, scared to seek treatment, etc.
It doesn't work for everything, but healthcare and public transport it definitely works for. At worst you should heavily subsidise them.
Same way that my council collects my rubbish "for free" because if you charged me specifically to take my rubbish away, all those people who can't afford things will sacrifice rubbish collection and turn all the poor areas of the city into unofficial municipal rubbish tips in seconds.
And, of course, "for free" means "via your tax that you ahve to pay". Because everyone paying en-masse means that people who don't have much rubbish, or healthcare problems or use public transport much are subsidising those who do because they need to.
Socialism isn't about "things being free". It's about "why should people have to pay to go to work or receive basic healthcare" - when lack of those EXACT things are exactly the cause of why they can't afford to pay for them in the first place. It's about breaking the cycle, not offering freebies to millionaires. And some countries get that very wrong.