Netflix can't even manage to work out what kind of movies I like from a bunch of things created in the 80's, with a huge list of "thumbs up/down" ratings from me on other movies, and a complete record of my viewing history down to which second I turn the movie off.
Literally, it has NO IDEA what I like. Top picks "for me" today include: Cradle 2 The Grave (no idea what that even is), Transformers (never watched such a movie in my life), Gotham (never watched the Batman stuff), Oblivion (hate Tom Cruise), Peppa Pig (I don't have a child on my account and don't watch cartoons for 5-year-olds), and a film about the Vietnam War (I honestly wouldn't watch it if you paid me). The only thing even vaguely close is one right at the end - the original Jumanji. Something I've actually watched before on Netflix, when Robin Williams died. Every other one is basically like somebody was TRYING to make a list of movies that I actually wouldn't like.
If, quite literally, we can't get a movie recommendation correct, how the hell are we going to have anything gauging our personal preferences for an ending for a movie?
Same price you could just rent a VPS or even a really cheap dedi (I have a dedicated server for 10GBP a month - about $12) and do the same.
What makes you think you need cloud for that? Or Amazon being the "trusted endpoint" of all your computing?
Either way, I don't care about the VPN service. I care that they can't make money making a browser (what happened to all the money from Google to be the default engine?), so they try to monetise users with vaguely-related services instead.
I've never liked Firefox, not because of the browser (it's not the best but it's serviceable) but the culture behind it. I just want something that browses the web and doesn't get in my way, and there's not really much left that does that. From forcibly becoming the default browser, to being unextendable, to being full of pay-for bolt-ons, I just want a browser that's a browser.
What happens when thereâ(TM)s low humidity in the air? When the humidity is low, all air to water machines are challenged. Skywater machines are not designed for dry or cold climates and are not marketed there.
The bigger ones have 30KW diesel generators in them.
This isn't "water for free, forever", this is "a pittance of water at ongoing costs, fuelled by oil or wood or similar burning".
Sure, you can slap some solar panels and maybe you'd get your 4.2KW out of them... but then the purchase cost is going to be prohibitive and the running costs are going to be non-zero even then (water tanks and solar aren't the kind of things you can just leave unmaintained in a desert forever). It also makes it a target ripe for theft.
I would hazard that if you put a 30KW diesel generator, plus fuel, or 4KW of solar panels, etc. in a place where people can't afford/obtain water, it won't be long before bits "go missing" and end up on the black market in exchange for... well... some water, eventually, most likely.
That's not infeasible. It's just incredibly inefficient, that's all.
1500 times 67.6 cu m is just over 100,000 cubic metres.
I just pulled up a building-site fan - Clarke CAM110 30â Drum Electric Fan (110V) - 350W
Max air flow 200m3/min.
So it would take 500 minutes to pull through that much air, which is just 8 1/3 hours. So just a bog-standard, low-power building-site fan on the side, ducted to pull fresh air in, circulate it through the system, and then blow it out, would be able to do three times that in a day. I'm sure a lower power solution would exist to do just what the system can take and no more.
Take into account the halved humidity and it's still viable.
The question is really whether or not after pumping 100,000 cubic metres of outside air through it the water is contaminated with all kinds of crap, not to mention having to clean and change filters constantly. That kind of fan would build up a layer of dust-strands, hairs, etc. with in days even in a relatively clean air, then you're blowing that through a system trying to collect water from it, and having to filter it. Things like airborne dust etc. are going to need lots of filters in the path of both the air, and the water collection.
That's not to say it's completely ridiculous. It would, indeed, be able to make water out of thin air. I would just posit that it's probably easier and cheaper to ship a few bottles, or dig a well.
Especially if you consider that to be self-powered, it probably needs an entire roof of solar - anywhere people are desperate for water, shipping an entire container of very expensive (and valuable, which is different) electronics and metals out there probably is going to be subject to short-sighted selfishness, otherwise known as theft. Solar panels and refrigeration equipment like that is going to be worth a fortune in such a place.
Though it could probably "profit" after a number of years of flawless operation without maintenance costs, I could easily imagine that production costs, transport, maintenance, etc. would make it less viable than just shipping some Evian or a well-borer.
And it has zero value in any place that's not literally desert... nobody's going to buy an incredibly expensive box in order to get a few thousand litres out of it if there's a river even within a hundred miles. Thus the market is really quite tiny.
It's the kind of thing you'll see in a science museum in 50 years, just sitting them offering a free cup of water to visitors.
No. Have you? My time is worth more than a Slashdot comment pays.
Tell me, do you have the same kind of evidence to the contrary? Or even anything that hints at that? Because something so pervasive (no dispute there) and damaging as you claim would show up, no?
I don't need to do your homework for you to hypothesise that this is a for-eyeballs article which - although probably true in the extent of microplastic invasion - is completely misleading... like the "you've breathed a molecule from Caesar's dying breathe" kinda thing.
There is zero evidence, for example, that such microplastic presence, even in a human body, has any significant statistical correlation whatsoever to anything. And it would be quite easy to test, and check historical data for that. It would show, I would hypothesise, in coastal populations, especially those who swim or drink seawater (refined or not) compared to those who drink from frreshwater sources, and increase rapidly from the 1950's onwards as plastics became mainstream.
Unfortunately for you, the rate for a decent scientist to perform such a study or analysis with any amount of rigour is outside your (and my) means.
Tell me, have you read every medical paper that doesn't mention microplastics to see if the effects measured could be down to microplastics? No? Why? Because that's fecking ridiculous argument.
Cancer's what you die of if you don't die of anything else. Sure there are things that increase your chances of cancer (i.e. shit that kills you faster), but cancer rates increasing means nothing - it means you didn't die of all the other stuff, basically.
Autism - that's been around forever, but never been categorised and recorded. That's why all the graphs for diagnosis of it go up. It took until the late 90's to get a standardised definition that wasn't constantly having other things lumped into it (i.e. ASD instead of ten different conditions), or wasn't just an unspecified "psychiatric" condition. Plus there's evidence it's genetic.
Obesity rates are to do an overabundance of food and a lack of self-control. Grown adults filling fridges full of crap. You want to find the cause of that, open your own fridge.
What microplastics would have to do with any of them, I wouldn't be able to fathom. But, hey, I just have a degree in maths and can read papers and statistics properly.
If the US thinks it can make everything it needs, or currently gets from China and other such countries, I think it's sadly mistaken.
Cisco manufactures in China and Russia. Apple does. Ford just took a huge hit because most of their stuff is outside the US.
You've basically just added a "US jobs tax" on everything you buy, from critical network infrastructure to consumer goods to automobiles. And it'll work. Once. What will happen is that it won't CONTINUE to work, even if you could survive that and bring everything "in-house".
Similarly, China's will just reverse that situation and do the same back to you, like they do with trade deals. So everything you make in the US, other countries aren't as interested in buying any more.
It's fine so long as you can make everything you need for yourself and don't need to sell outside the US. There isn't a country in the world that's that closed on trade and comes out smiling about it.
Go look at how much stuff you BUY from China, and how much you sell back to them.
You buy four times more from them than you ever sell back to them. Decreasing that is cutting off your nose to spite your face. People buy from China because the US stuff is too expensive, your plan is to make everything yourself under US law, US wages, US supply chains. Literally at the moment, you're "abusing" foreign labour... when you stop doing that, everything's going to rocket in cost:
It costs as much as 25 times more to pay a US worker than a Chinese one.
What you're saying is "Let's make all our own mops in-house, that'll be cheaper than buying them from the home-store." It isn't going to be cheaper than saying some kid in China to sit and make them for you. It's gonna be 25 times more expensive.
You just cut trade with the world's largest economy. And pissed off the largest lender to the US.
And when those Chinese companies just move all their manufacturing out of China to avoid your silly tariffs (like they are already doing to Vietnam, etc. that aren't affected)... you'll still be in the same position.
I am not defending anyone here but this is part of the problem.
When drivers drive "exactly as they should've done", alongside humans who don't, then it ends in such accidents.
As my dad always said, you can always argue about who's to blame, or who has right-of-way, but it's easiest to just not have the accident in the first place.
And let me highlight - the problem with automated cars is not that they "can't break the rules" like humans do. I'd much prefer we kept to the same rules than they learned to expect us to break them because that's just madness. The problem is that there are two totally incompatible ways of driving on the same road, and one of them is unable to change it's programming.
That means it has to be just as rude as us, or it will literally follow the rule of the road and "cause" accidents (the cause is really the other guy being a dick, but you know what public perception will be).
Self-driving cars need to be on their own road. And at that point, you might as well just build personal trains.
They don't. Not really. They are just the functions already available to Javascript etc. anyway.
The "new" thing is offline caching, which is under browser control anyway. So you can load a web app when you're offline, like Google Docs already does.
It's a new name for the same-old, from what I see. The examples are all just... web-apps. Sure, they may be WebAssembly, or use workers, pick up a local-cached NoSQL data from an online source, but there's nothing new about them.
It's still subject to the browser security model, and you still need to jump through WebSockets hoops to actually transmit data across the network.
This is poorly explained, granted, but I find no evidence that it's anything other than the existing Javascript etc. APIs exposed, and a generic term for using them all. There's no local-disk access, no direct hardware access (though if you have the right extensions you can do some data-passing... much like the existing Gemalto eSigner etc. extensions for Firefox / Chrome etc. let you access their smartcard reader - it requires software in your PC, an extension loaded, permission to do so, etc. and basically your browser is just passing off data to a "local" web server that acts upon it).
There's nothing new here, or any more dangerous than... well... even a five-year-old browser had.
The second someone digs out statistics, I can always pick 20 holes with their methodology used, presentation of, choice of, or analysis of their numbers. Usually, I could make things come out "oppositely" with only minor tweaking and use of the other statistics from the same dataset that they discarded out of hand, and usually I could provide much better justification for the numbers I used than the ones they did.
People use statistics to back up their claims. That's it. And if you go looking hard enough and present statistics to do that, you can ignore all the stuff that doesn't match your claims. It's really easy to do.
And because nobody understand statistics (I would posit this category even includes statisticians!), you can get away with it.
I like to shout at shampoo adverts when they say "Women agree*" where the * leads you to a footnote saying they tested 19 women and 67% of those agreed... so you're telling me that, actually, worldwide, 12.7 women agreed... What the hell kind of selection criteria did you use to get that, and what use is that if you don't specify that they were random women from the street in a controlled trial rather than, say, the people who work in the office?
The old saying is right - there are lies, damn lies and statistics. If someone quotes statistics are you, assume it's a lie. It almost always is. Even when it's not, it's merely the portion of the truth that can be spun positively if you don't mind looking through an n-dimensional kaleidoscope at the data.
And what are they trying to do by telling you this? They're trying to tell you "Hey, look, you're stupid and have no idea what's going on and actually everyone else is really onboard". Statistics are used as the worst kind of "peer pressure" - if they are trying to convince you of something, rather than inform you.
Statistics can be incredibly useful, very revealing, and can lead to a better understanding. If you get them from a professional. Who'll then tell you what the statistics *mean* and whether or not they have caveats.
If you get them from shampoo ads and random junk on the Internet, they are no better than any other "fact" spewed at you in such a manner... wrong.
(Interesting fact: There's a TV program called QI, in which all kinds of "you'll never believe" stuff is presented in what's supposed to be a highly intellectual quiz show. QI facts are heavily researched, almost always counter-intuitive or contrary to what everyone has been told, and they spend years with some of the cleverest people from the top universities doing research for each series. And in one episode they reveal that the portion of facts that they themselves got wrong, or which have changed since, was over 50%).
If someone quotes statistics at you, don't just nod and go "Oh really?" because you're then likely to repeat that statistic without every checking it. The correct response is to think "What's he trying to convince me of?". Because you don't use statistics for anything else.
And unless you understand, truly understand, statistics, you know that any kind of amateur data-gathering or analysis by even the most well-intentioned people is a bottomless pit of potential failure.
Hell, to be honest, 99% of the time, I can't even work out the right answer for some statistics so I make it up and say 99%.
I have no doubt that at some point these things will take off.
But... look at the kids. Are they fighting to get the latest VR headsets, etc.? No. I watched a TV program the other day with a VR rollercoaster ride. The bit you can do at home (watch a movie of a rollercoaster that you can look around in) is... well... boring. The bit you can't do at home (sit in a seat that throws you about in time to the images) is the fun bit.
If VR were anywhere close to taking off then you'd see it in things like arcades (yes, these still exist), conferences, shows, at the back of the cinema, etc. - anywhere that people might say "That looks cool, let's have a go". When dance games took off, that's where they started.
VR-at-home is almost there. You can buy them now. But they are a bit meh, and they are very expensive. If the Switch had been a proper VR console, than a) Nintendo might have had a good selling point, b) it probably would have sold millions even if it was a bit of a cheap hack, c) you'd see that bleed into the other consoles who would try to play catch-up. Games are the driver, but the kids aren't interested nowadays, not this professional shite (if an architect wants a fancy 3D walkthrough, you can be sure he can afford it on his salary... and he could have done that at any time since hte early 90's VRML etc. days... the 90's "this is what's coming" TV was FULL of people with huge VR headsets on their heads.
Fact is, I can buy the headsets and stuff for my computer. Sure, my computer hasn't *quite* got the oomph that it needs, but that never used to stop me - I upgraded for Quake, upgraded for Half-Life, Half-Life 2, etc. There's a ton of scope for me to upgrade further. I could go to a top-of-the-line system with a big-name VR headset for one month's wages, which is nothing for a serious gamer who hasn't seen a truly ground-breaking game in years.
But it's all a bit meh still. VR is burdened with putting you in a world in a "avatar suit" that you can't really control. You can look round but to move properly and perform actions, you have to hold things and press buttons still. Though you might get stereoscopic vision out of it, there are cheaper ways to do that. Though you might get "a huge display" out of it, there are cheaper - and better - ways to do that. If I want a screen in front of my eyes as I go through my daily life, there are cheaper ways to do that. The movement kills it.
Then extend that to AR and you see the problem - besides that fact that AR can really only play the most basic of tricks, you're relying on moving through a real world to make it interesting, which is the exact part which kills it.
Now, I sound like an absolute naysayer, but you know what - I actually enjoyed Google Cardboard VR. It was hilarious and the perfect "Nintendo-level" pitch. I had one at a gaming night with a load of what we'd probably class "non-gamers" (i.e. we were all playing Pacman and Cluedo and things like that). Here, shove on a cheap bit of hardware and look around, isn't it cool? It worked for me. I loaded up the Cardboard demo app on my phone and loved watching that silly low-poly whale jump over my head.
But that's because I was a child of the 80's, and that kind of thing was showing in things like Back to the Future. It was "cool". That's as far as it went because beyond "viewing" it was impractical.
I'm sure Nintendo missed the boat and could have given us cheap mainstream hardware that we could use to introduce granny. I've seen any number of programs/adverts where they shove a VR headset on granny and let her scream at a virtual roller-coaster. And all of them cannot get to the point of suspending disbelief because of the movement. Also, VR renders you blind to the precise environment you've moving through (which is more dangerous than a Wiimote through the TV), while AR isn't able to suspend disbelief adequately enough.
The Lawnmower Man was a 1992 movie. 26 years later, it looks incredibly dated while also looking ridi
A relative with an old brick-factory / barn used as a WW1 museum in Italy. All kinds of metal objects inside (huge tank shells, etc.), extremely thick and solid brick walls, attached to their house/farm.
Wifi was unable to penetrate far. So I did what this says... a handful of old Wifi points, all set to the same SSID. Note that this is NOT proper mesh unless the points are on the same network, support meshing and can hand-off.
Guess what... it works. It's adequate. You couldn't get a thousand people online from it, but it's more than good enough for a school trip to walk around with an iPad or two and connect.
Why they needs an Ask Slashdot, I don't know.
P.S. Proper mesh with decent points would really show you up and likely network the entire place with only a couple of points. Slapping even a dozen points on the same SSID / different channels and then manually adjusting everything is just shit... it'll never get the performance and you have no idea whether or not you're making things worse (e.g. crowding out on channel, etc.). If you have something proper mesh-capable, more than likely it'll dial everything DOWN, not up.
Thermal paper rolls are cheap. Thermal printers are damn fast.
It's unnecessary, but also inevitable that some moron would take it too far on the "just give them all the coupons" front. I'm more concerned about the waste of paper and what the checkouts must look like because for sure I wouldn't touch that receipt and would leave it inside the store.
I know from experience though - I wrote a piece of software that produces a firelist for my employer. We needed a quick "who's supposed to be here now" list, and the software that controls the access control has all the necessary information to tell us but just won't churn it out in a compact enough form.
I put in a little test system with a thermal printer (no ink, quick printing, cheap to run) and when the fire alarm goes off, it churns out a list of my choosing.
It was so successful that over time I was asked to list every member of staff, whether they were in or not, the time they last tagged in/out, plus the people who aren't even supposed to be here, plus all the temporary visitors, plus the other sites, plus.... and then do it twice at both ends of the site so the duty of checking it can be split and we have a "backup".
It still only takes about 3-4 seconds (1ms processing time, the rest is sheer print-time) to churn out a complete list (which is longer than it takes to realise the alarm is genuine), but the list is now over 6 feet long.
Usually I check the paper reels immediately after any fire drill/alert because it uses up so much paper, but it's a good backup to any electronic system and churns out fast enough that you could grab it in a real fire (it's safer to grab that, than to try to check that everyone you think might be outside are - by the time you check anything else, they're already dead, but it takes seconds to skim the highlighted / obvious / simplified list of names and see who's missing).
I'm waiting for the ironic day that what catches fire is the thermal printer itself, or something nearby, and which just keeps feeding more and more paper into it to fuel it...
When Tesla call it a self-driving vehicle, there will be more than a few people who will be interested in that.
Because, for a start, they don't have a licence for that. And a lot of courts will sit up and take notice at, say, all those claims they made that a Tesla ABSOLUTELY 100% ISN'T a self-driving vehicle, and didn't kill that nice Apple engineer that time.
You can't denounce a claim on one hand, and then try to win on that same claim somewhere else.
It means that non-human-driven cars have collectively accounted for 0.000333% of all the miles travelled this year.
This means that... pretty much... they haven't way over 99.99% of the human race has never been in, with or near a driverless Waymo car.
This means that, pretty much, Waymo hasn't even covered a thousandth of a percent of the things it needs to cope with when driving.
And also... that if there is a single accident, that it would scale up 300,000-fold in terms of their overall average accident rate if we all jumped on board them. And Waymo's had quite a few.
Much more interesting a statistics would be: How much of this was at speed, on highways, etc. Because highways are much easier to drive on for automated cars (and humans, if they are sensible). But for sure, if you can make an autonomous car than can navigate the Hangar Lane Gyratory in London it would mean a whole lot more than even a million miles of highway driving.
Strangely, the higher automation you see, the higher employment rates. But generally employment rates don't change much over the long-term at all... it's much more affected by short-term events (e.g. wars, housing market crashes, etc.) than anything to do with automation.
That's true historically, geographically, etc.
It's not hard to see why - less workers = cheaper products, more machines = more service and manufacturing of them, greater production = cheaper living costs, etc.
If we could find out how to build houses in an automated fashion (and thus make housing cheaper while cutting out an awful lot of labour costs), we could drastically change the world... maybe then rents/mortgages wouldn't be in the "half your wages or more" category.
Fact is my job didn't exist 30 years ago, and probably won't exist in another 30 years. The "utopia" of the robots doing all the work and humans not being able to earn money... well.. that's a very, very, very long way off as there are currently several billion jobs around the planet with more being made all the time.
Historically, if the job wasn't within a few hour's walk, you couldn't ever have taken it... you really think that in the modern age of remote-working, mass transportation, etc. that we're not almost ridiculously better off jobs-wise? And actually the other thing is - regulation. If humans can only legally work X hours a week, in certain conditions, and the vast majority of human jobs aren't machine-replaceable (as is currently true, but folding clothes is obviously NOT an irreplaceable high-skilled job!), then you need to hire more humans than you would have before such legislation.
Fact is, employment is much more to do with "how highly skilled you are". Because a machine *cannot* currently write software, or design CPUs, or work stained glass, etc. If you're a basic unskilled labour worker, you're always gonna struggle for work.
Get a skill, any skill, and you likely will have a much better time of it. Get a skill that a machine can't automate and you're guaranteed that you won't get pushed out.
It's almost like all those years of people telling me to "get an education" paid off, in fact.
I'd switch to computer-controlled driving tomorrow...
If you don't rely on it trying to interpret a situation via shitty visual sensors, within inches of human-controlled vehicles and pedestrians, and instead run it in an isolated road that has all the necessary sensors and safeguards built into it, and human drivers and pedestrians aren't allowed anywhere near it, and someone takes full and complete responsibility for its actions (or inactions) while it's in that place.
In fact, I already have been. It's called a train.
Computer-controlled driving on a human-shared road is the dumbest thing I ever heard of. And it's not unique to Tesla to jump on the stupidity bandwagon.
In fact, to be honest, if you just push all liability to the companies and their directors, I'd probably use a computer-controlled car today. I just wouldn't use it for anything that involved my body... I'd use it as a personal parcel delivery service and see whether the companies went bankrupt in the 10 years before I dared put myself in one.
Because almost all modern cars are pretty good in this regard?
The 2014 Tesla Model S EuroNCAP tests (equivalent of this test, but only done on certain years, not EVERY possible year of model) actually put it below the Ford Mondeo (called a Fusion in the US) - all the scores are lower except the driver assist tech available on the Mondeo.
But they both score 5 stars. I'm sure in the 4 years since then the newer Mondeos probably score higher still, and the Tesla as well. As does pretty much every decent car - Ford Focus, Nissan Leaf, Kia Stonic, Honda Civic, Subaru Impreza.
It's the ones that DON'T pass with 5 stars that stand out. Pretty much they kill people and they are quickly resubmitted for testing after a redesign.
Do you really think that, in subjective tests, the difference between 5-stars and 5-stars being a small handful of points in things like "how many safety gadgets does the software boast" really make a difference?
I'm no Tesla fan. But I'm a massive safety fan. Safety is incredibly important to me - that's why I own a Mondeo and checked it first. But this is *one* factor - the question of "how much control do I have of the vehicle" is actually a bigger question for me. But orders of magnitude. Hence I don't have all the lane-assist junk on my car deliberately - I refused the option. Because I intend to drive it, not put software in the path of the steering wheel direction.
As one small factor, congratulations, it's a win for Tesla on a subjective test and may / may not actually be repeated around the world with stricter safety requirements on vehicles. In terms of "being a mass market car manufacturer", that puts you firmly in the... well... kinda "damn well expected" section of the statistics.
Congratulations. Tesla *isn't* shit at basic safety tests over a small portion of their cars, testing a small subjective portion of their ability to survive head-on/side collisions.
But you'd rather these people who can't use long-established timezone libraries, handling protocols and data formats did things like monitor your heart rate and ran your car instead?
The problem here is not DST or the complexity of it... if that were the case the banking industry, Internet, phones, etc. would fall over at the same time because of the same problems.
The problem is that someone at Apple doesn't understand how to handle dates properly despite there being long-established libraries for exactly that. And they didn't bother to check (i.e. test) adequately enough before releasing millions of dollars of mass-market products.
The problem is lax development and testing. Not the complexity of handling something that billions of devices owned by billions of people around the world handle every year just fine.
So what do you suggest? That we tax fossil fuel use to oblivion or stop it entirely.
Let's assume that we can go *snap* and all the fossil fuels are locked away from us and can't be touched for 100 years.
Now what? What do we do? What's the impact of that? How many people die of starvation or hypothermia while we sort it out? How long will the plans take to implement? What's the most practical replacement (NUCLEAR, don't argue otherwise)? How much do we need to ramp that up (double, maybe triple current usage)? How long will that take? What suffers in the meantime? How long will that last us? How much MORE / LESS CO2 will that generate than coal? Because... if it doesn't make bills much, much more expensive (fuel poverty deaths) then it may make them much, much cheaper (hell, let's just leave the air-con / heating on 24/7, we can afford it!)?
So... where's the analysis of that situation? Where's the suggestion? What's the timescale (it'll take longer than 30 years to replace every coal plant on the planet with nuclear and in some places we may not even allow that to happen politically!)? How many suffer because of that plan (a non-zero number)? And what impact will that have on actually stopping/reversing/undoing the CO2 emissions as they stand (because those three are VERY different things)?
What if doing that, worldwide, instantly, costs trillions, double energy prices, makes plastics unaffordable, holds off CO2 rises for 10 years, and then the levels continue to increase anyway? Was it worth doing? Honestly can we say that with any certainty?
Sorry, but if you want something from me, do it in writing. It's that simple.
If I want something from you, you demand I call your main number and agree/sign things. You have to do the same. Except I have to verify myself to you when I call, so when you call me I expect you to verify yourself to me.
Any automated or inbound call that doesn't give me information I demand ("Okay, can you tell me my last transaction and my account number please?") doesn't get anything from me. Yes, I've actually asked my bank for that. Guess what... they tell me that they can't tell me. Cool, then I can't deal with you. Because if the tables were reversed I'd expect you to not deal with a customer phoning up claiming to be me who also refused to give you the required information.
So now if it's important, you'll send me something on paper. It's really quite easy. Or you'll put a "secure message" inside my online banking account. And I'll go there myself to check (not just click and take your word for it that it'll take me there - same way I don't just follow the guy to the bank when he knocks on my door claiming to be from my bank needing money from me).
Security and verification work both ways. And anything legally-binding will end up on paper, especially if I say - on the call - "Sorry, I don't think you're my bank... could you prove it to me? No? Then I'm afraid I won't deal with you and I suggest you contact me in some more official way that I can verify you". Imagine that recording before a court of law, when the bank say "Oh, but we phoned him to tell him about the outstanding amount".
Sorry, but I don't even conduct such business via phone or email for any of my personal accounts. I don't even have bills dropping on my doorstep. I get literally zero post apart from junk mail (which I can't stop as it's just random minimum-wage people paid to put crap through every door on the street).
As such, an official letter stands out, but I still don't trust it and will verify. But all my "official" communique are sitting inside secured accounts that only those companies can ever post a message inside. Any email, phone call, text or even letter outside those bounds can only ever really say "Please check your account". That's it. Anything else is suspicious.
Slashdot Mirror
No headphone.
No expandable storage.
No removeable battery.
But you can load it up with cameras and shite I don't want.
No sale.
I don't want tailored content.
Netflix can't even manage to work out what kind of movies I like from a bunch of things created in the 80's, with a huge list of "thumbs up/down" ratings from me on other movies, and a complete record of my viewing history down to which second I turn the movie off.
Literally, it has NO IDEA what I like. Top picks "for me" today include: Cradle 2 The Grave (no idea what that even is), Transformers (never watched such a movie in my life), Gotham (never watched the Batman stuff), Oblivion (hate Tom Cruise), Peppa Pig (I don't have a child on my account and don't watch cartoons for 5-year-olds), and a film about the Vietnam War (I honestly wouldn't watch it if you paid me). The only thing even vaguely close is one right at the end - the original Jumanji. Something I've actually watched before on Netflix, when Robin Williams died. Every other one is basically like somebody was TRYING to make a list of movies that I actually wouldn't like.
If, quite literally, we can't get a movie recommendation correct, how the hell are we going to have anything gauging our personal preferences for an ending for a movie?
Same price you could just rent a VPS or even a really cheap dedi (I have a dedicated server for 10GBP a month - about $12) and do the same.
What makes you think you need cloud for that? Or Amazon being the "trusted endpoint" of all your computing?
Either way, I don't care about the VPN service. I care that they can't make money making a browser (what happened to all the money from Google to be the default engine?), so they try to monetise users with vaguely-related services instead.
I've never liked Firefox, not because of the browser (it's not the best but it's serviceable) but the culture behind it. I just want something that browses the web and doesn't get in my way, and there's not really much left that does that. From forcibly becoming the default browser, to being unextendable, to being full of pay-for bolt-ons, I just want a browser that's a browser.
From their own FAQ:
What happens when thereâ(TM)s low humidity in the air?
When the humidity is low, all air to water machines are challenged. Skywater machines are not designed for dry or cold climates and are not marketed there.
"The 378L/day one (at 50% RH) needs 4.2kW"
The bigger ones have 30KW diesel generators in them.
This isn't "water for free, forever", this is "a pittance of water at ongoing costs, fuelled by oil or wood or similar burning".
Sure, you can slap some solar panels and maybe you'd get your 4.2KW out of them... but then the purchase cost is going to be prohibitive and the running costs are going to be non-zero even then (water tanks and solar aren't the kind of things you can just leave unmaintained in a desert forever). It also makes it a target ripe for theft.
I would hazard that if you put a 30KW diesel generator, plus fuel, or 4KW of solar panels, etc. in a place where people can't afford/obtain water, it won't be long before bits "go missing" and end up on the black market in exchange for... well... some water, eventually, most likely.
That's not infeasible. It's just incredibly inefficient, that's all.
1500 times 67.6 cu m is just over 100,000 cubic metres.
I just pulled up a building-site fan - Clarke CAM110 30â Drum Electric Fan (110V) - 350W
Max air flow 200m3/min.
So it would take 500 minutes to pull through that much air, which is just 8 1/3 hours. So just a bog-standard, low-power building-site fan on the side, ducted to pull fresh air in, circulate it through the system, and then blow it out, would be able to do three times that in a day. I'm sure a lower power solution would exist to do just what the system can take and no more.
Take into account the halved humidity and it's still viable.
The question is really whether or not after pumping 100,000 cubic metres of outside air through it the water is contaminated with all kinds of crap, not to mention having to clean and change filters constantly. That kind of fan would build up a layer of dust-strands, hairs, etc. with in days even in a relatively clean air, then you're blowing that through a system trying to collect water from it, and having to filter it. Things like airborne dust etc. are going to need lots of filters in the path of both the air, and the water collection.
That's not to say it's completely ridiculous. It would, indeed, be able to make water out of thin air. I would just posit that it's probably easier and cheaper to ship a few bottles, or dig a well.
Especially if you consider that to be self-powered, it probably needs an entire roof of solar - anywhere people are desperate for water, shipping an entire container of very expensive (and valuable, which is different) electronics and metals out there probably is going to be subject to short-sighted selfishness, otherwise known as theft. Solar panels and refrigeration equipment like that is going to be worth a fortune in such a place.
Though it could probably "profit" after a number of years of flawless operation without maintenance costs, I could easily imagine that production costs, transport, maintenance, etc. would make it less viable than just shipping some Evian or a well-borer.
And it has zero value in any place that's not literally desert... nobody's going to buy an incredibly expensive box in order to get a few thousand litres out of it if there's a river even within a hundred miles. Thus the market is really quite tiny.
It's the kind of thing you'll see in a science museum in 50 years, just sitting them offering a free cup of water to visitors.
No. Have you? My time is worth more than a Slashdot comment pays.
Tell me, do you have the same kind of evidence to the contrary? Or even anything that hints at that? Because something so pervasive (no dispute there) and damaging as you claim would show up, no?
I don't need to do your homework for you to hypothesise that this is a for-eyeballs article which - although probably true in the extent of microplastic invasion - is completely misleading... like the "you've breathed a molecule from Caesar's dying breathe" kinda thing.
There is zero evidence, for example, that such microplastic presence, even in a human body, has any significant statistical correlation whatsoever to anything. And it would be quite easy to test, and check historical data for that. It would show, I would hypothesise, in coastal populations, especially those who swim or drink seawater (refined or not) compared to those who drink from frreshwater sources, and increase rapidly from the 1950's onwards as plastics became mainstream.
Unfortunately for you, the rate for a decent scientist to perform such a study or analysis with any amount of rigour is outside your (and my) means.
Tell me, have you read every medical paper that doesn't mention microplastics to see if the effects measured could be down to microplastics? No? Why? Because that's fecking ridiculous argument.
Sigh.
Cancer's what you die of if you don't die of anything else. Sure there are things that increase your chances of cancer (i.e. shit that kills you faster), but cancer rates increasing means nothing - it means you didn't die of all the other stuff, basically.
Autism - that's been around forever, but never been categorised and recorded. That's why all the graphs for diagnosis of it go up. It took until the late 90's to get a standardised definition that wasn't constantly having other things lumped into it (i.e. ASD instead of ten different conditions), or wasn't just an unspecified "psychiatric" condition. Plus there's evidence it's genetic.
Obesity rates are to do an overabundance of food and a lack of self-control. Grown adults filling fridges full of crap. You want to find the cause of that, open your own fridge.
What microplastics would have to do with any of them, I wouldn't be able to fathom. But, hey, I just have a degree in maths and can read papers and statistics properly.
If the US thinks it can make everything it needs, or currently gets from China and other such countries, I think it's sadly mistaken.
Cisco manufactures in China and Russia. Apple does. Ford just took a huge hit because most of their stuff is outside the US.
You've basically just added a "US jobs tax" on everything you buy, from critical network infrastructure to consumer goods to automobiles. And it'll work. Once. What will happen is that it won't CONTINUE to work, even if you could survive that and bring everything "in-house".
Similarly, China's will just reverse that situation and do the same back to you, like they do with trade deals. So everything you make in the US, other countries aren't as interested in buying any more.
It's fine so long as you can make everything you need for yourself and don't need to sell outside the US. There isn't a country in the world that's that closed on trade and comes out smiling about it.
Go look at how much stuff you BUY from China, and how much you sell back to them.
https://www.census.gov/foreign...
You buy four times more from them than you ever sell back to them. Decreasing that is cutting off your nose to spite your face. People buy from China because the US stuff is too expensive, your plan is to make everything yourself under US law, US wages, US supply chains. Literally at the moment, you're "abusing" foreign labour... when you stop doing that, everything's going to rocket in cost:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co....
It costs as much as 25 times more to pay a US worker than a Chinese one.
What you're saying is "Let's make all our own mops in-house, that'll be cheaper than buying them from the home-store." It isn't going to be cheaper than saying some kid in China to sit and make them for you. It's gonna be 25 times more expensive.
You just cut trade with the world's largest economy. And pissed off the largest lender to the US.
And when those Chinese companies just move all their manufacturing out of China to avoid your silly tariffs (like they are already doing to Vietnam, etc. that aren't affected)... you'll still be in the same position.
Does that mean that Switzerland is a developing nation and North Korea is developed then?
The criteria are a bit tougher to define that you suggest.
I am not defending anyone here but this is part of the problem.
When drivers drive "exactly as they should've done", alongside humans who don't, then it ends in such accidents.
As my dad always said, you can always argue about who's to blame, or who has right-of-way, but it's easiest to just not have the accident in the first place.
And let me highlight - the problem with automated cars is not that they "can't break the rules" like humans do. I'd much prefer we kept to the same rules than they learned to expect us to break them because that's just madness. The problem is that there are two totally incompatible ways of driving on the same road, and one of them is unable to change it's programming.
That means it has to be just as rude as us, or it will literally follow the rule of the road and "cause" accidents (the cause is really the other guy being a dick, but you know what public perception will be).
Self-driving cars need to be on their own road. And at that point, you might as well just build personal trains.
But...
They don't. Not really. They are just the functions already available to Javascript etc. anyway.
The "new" thing is offline caching, which is under browser control anyway. So you can load a web app when you're offline, like Google Docs already does.
It's a new name for the same-old, from what I see. The examples are all just... web-apps. Sure, they may be WebAssembly, or use workers, pick up a local-cached NoSQL data from an online source, but there's nothing new about them.
It's still subject to the browser security model, and you still need to jump through WebSockets hoops to actually transmit data across the network.
This is poorly explained, granted, but I find no evidence that it's anything other than the existing Javascript etc. APIs exposed, and a generic term for using them all. There's no local-disk access, no direct hardware access (though if you have the right extensions you can do some data-passing... much like the existing Gemalto eSigner etc. extensions for Firefox / Chrome etc. let you access their smartcard reader - it requires software in your PC, an extension loaded, permission to do so, etc. and basically your browser is just passing off data to a "local" web server that acts upon it).
There's nothing new here, or any more dangerous than... well... even a five-year-old browser had.
I'm a mathematician.
The second someone digs out statistics, I can always pick 20 holes with their methodology used, presentation of, choice of, or analysis of their numbers. Usually, I could make things come out "oppositely" with only minor tweaking and use of the other statistics from the same dataset that they discarded out of hand, and usually I could provide much better justification for the numbers I used than the ones they did.
People use statistics to back up their claims. That's it. And if you go looking hard enough and present statistics to do that, you can ignore all the stuff that doesn't match your claims. It's really easy to do.
And because nobody understand statistics (I would posit this category even includes statisticians!), you can get away with it.
I like to shout at shampoo adverts when they say "Women agree*" where the * leads you to a footnote saying they tested 19 women and 67% of those agreed... so you're telling me that, actually, worldwide, 12.7 women agreed... What the hell kind of selection criteria did you use to get that, and what use is that if you don't specify that they were random women from the street in a controlled trial rather than, say, the people who work in the office?
The old saying is right - there are lies, damn lies and statistics. If someone quotes statistics are you, assume it's a lie. It almost always is. Even when it's not, it's merely the portion of the truth that can be spun positively if you don't mind looking through an n-dimensional kaleidoscope at the data.
And what are they trying to do by telling you this? They're trying to tell you "Hey, look, you're stupid and have no idea what's going on and actually everyone else is really onboard". Statistics are used as the worst kind of "peer pressure" - if they are trying to convince you of something, rather than inform you.
Statistics can be incredibly useful, very revealing, and can lead to a better understanding. If you get them from a professional. Who'll then tell you what the statistics *mean* and whether or not they have caveats.
If you get them from shampoo ads and random junk on the Internet, they are no better than any other "fact" spewed at you in such a manner... wrong.
(Interesting fact: There's a TV program called QI, in which all kinds of "you'll never believe" stuff is presented in what's supposed to be a highly intellectual quiz show. QI facts are heavily researched, almost always counter-intuitive or contrary to what everyone has been told, and they spend years with some of the cleverest people from the top universities doing research for each series. And in one episode they reveal that the portion of facts that they themselves got wrong, or which have changed since, was over 50%).
If someone quotes statistics at you, don't just nod and go "Oh really?" because you're then likely to repeat that statistic without every checking it. The correct response is to think "What's he trying to convince me of?". Because you don't use statistics for anything else.
And unless you understand, truly understand, statistics, you know that any kind of amateur data-gathering or analysis by even the most well-intentioned people is a bottomless pit of potential failure.
Hell, to be honest, 99% of the time, I can't even work out the right answer for some statistics so I make it up and say 99%.
I have no doubt that at some point these things will take off.
But... look at the kids. Are they fighting to get the latest VR headsets, etc.? No. I watched a TV program the other day with a VR rollercoaster ride. The bit you can do at home (watch a movie of a rollercoaster that you can look around in) is... well... boring. The bit you can't do at home (sit in a seat that throws you about in time to the images) is the fun bit.
If VR were anywhere close to taking off then you'd see it in things like arcades (yes, these still exist), conferences, shows, at the back of the cinema, etc. - anywhere that people might say "That looks cool, let's have a go". When dance games took off, that's where they started.
VR-at-home is almost there. You can buy them now. But they are a bit meh, and they are very expensive. If the Switch had been a proper VR console, than a) Nintendo might have had a good selling point, b) it probably would have sold millions even if it was a bit of a cheap hack, c) you'd see that bleed into the other consoles who would try to play catch-up. Games are the driver, but the kids aren't interested nowadays, not this professional shite (if an architect wants a fancy 3D walkthrough, you can be sure he can afford it on his salary... and he could have done that at any time since hte early 90's VRML etc. days... the 90's "this is what's coming" TV was FULL of people with huge VR headsets on their heads.
Fact is, I can buy the headsets and stuff for my computer. Sure, my computer hasn't *quite* got the oomph that it needs, but that never used to stop me - I upgraded for Quake, upgraded for Half-Life, Half-Life 2, etc. There's a ton of scope for me to upgrade further. I could go to a top-of-the-line system with a big-name VR headset for one month's wages, which is nothing for a serious gamer who hasn't seen a truly ground-breaking game in years.
But it's all a bit meh still. VR is burdened with putting you in a world in a "avatar suit" that you can't really control. You can look round but to move properly and perform actions, you have to hold things and press buttons still. Though you might get stereoscopic vision out of it, there are cheaper ways to do that. Though you might get "a huge display" out of it, there are cheaper - and better - ways to do that. If I want a screen in front of my eyes as I go through my daily life, there are cheaper ways to do that. The movement kills it.
Then extend that to AR and you see the problem - besides that fact that AR can really only play the most basic of tricks, you're relying on moving through a real world to make it interesting, which is the exact part which kills it.
Now, I sound like an absolute naysayer, but you know what - I actually enjoyed Google Cardboard VR. It was hilarious and the perfect "Nintendo-level" pitch. I had one at a gaming night with a load of what we'd probably class "non-gamers" (i.e. we were all playing Pacman and Cluedo and things like that). Here, shove on a cheap bit of hardware and look around, isn't it cool? It worked for me. I loaded up the Cardboard demo app on my phone and loved watching that silly low-poly whale jump over my head.
But that's because I was a child of the 80's, and that kind of thing was showing in things like Back to the Future. It was "cool". That's as far as it went because beyond "viewing" it was impractical.
I'm sure Nintendo missed the boat and could have given us cheap mainstream hardware that we could use to introduce granny. I've seen any number of programs/adverts where they shove a VR headset on granny and let her scream at a virtual roller-coaster. And all of them cannot get to the point of suspending disbelief because of the movement. Also, VR renders you blind to the precise environment you've moving through (which is more dangerous than a Wiimote through the TV), while AR isn't able to suspend disbelief adequately enough.
The Lawnmower Man was a 1992 movie. 26 years later, it looks incredibly dated while also looking ridi
Similar project
A relative with an old brick-factory / barn used as a WW1 museum in Italy. All kinds of metal objects inside (huge tank shells, etc.), extremely thick and solid brick walls, attached to their house/farm.
Wifi was unable to penetrate far. So I did what this says... a handful of old Wifi points, all set to the same SSID. Note that this is NOT proper mesh unless the points are on the same network, support meshing and can hand-off.
Guess what... it works. It's adequate. You couldn't get a thousand people online from it, but it's more than good enough for a school trip to walk around with an iPad or two and connect.
Why they needs an Ask Slashdot, I don't know.
P.S. Proper mesh with decent points would really show you up and likely network the entire place with only a couple of points. Slapping even a dozen points on the same SSID / different channels and then manually adjusting everything is just shit... it'll never get the performance and you have no idea whether or not you're making things worse (e.g. crowding out on channel, etc.). If you have something proper mesh-capable, more than likely it'll dial everything DOWN, not up.
I shop in places that give me cheap prices in the first place, and don't make me carry around a ton of paper in my back pocket.
Thermal paper rolls are cheap.
Thermal printers are damn fast.
It's unnecessary, but also inevitable that some moron would take it too far on the "just give them all the coupons" front. I'm more concerned about the waste of paper and what the checkouts must look like because for sure I wouldn't touch that receipt and would leave it inside the store.
I know from experience though - I wrote a piece of software that produces a firelist for my employer. We needed a quick "who's supposed to be here now" list, and the software that controls the access control has all the necessary information to tell us but just won't churn it out in a compact enough form.
I put in a little test system with a thermal printer (no ink, quick printing, cheap to run) and when the fire alarm goes off, it churns out a list of my choosing.
It was so successful that over time I was asked to list every member of staff, whether they were in or not, the time they last tagged in/out, plus the people who aren't even supposed to be here, plus all the temporary visitors, plus the other sites, plus.... and then do it twice at both ends of the site so the duty of checking it can be split and we have a "backup".
It still only takes about 3-4 seconds (1ms processing time, the rest is sheer print-time) to churn out a complete list (which is longer than it takes to realise the alarm is genuine), but the list is now over 6 feet long.
Usually I check the paper reels immediately after any fire drill/alert because it uses up so much paper, but it's a good backup to any electronic system and churns out fast enough that you could grab it in a real fire (it's safer to grab that, than to try to check that everyone you think might be outside are - by the time you check anything else, they're already dead, but it takes seconds to skim the highlighted / obvious / simplified list of names and see who's missing).
I'm waiting for the ironic day that what catches fire is the thermal printer itself, or something nearby, and which just keeps feeding more and more paper into it to fuel it...
Yeah...
When Tesla call it a self-driving vehicle, there will be more than a few people who will be interested in that.
Because, for a start, they don't have a licence for that. And a lot of courts will sit up and take notice at, say, all those claims they made that a Tesla ABSOLUTELY 100% ISN'T a self-driving vehicle, and didn't kill that nice Apple engineer that time.
You can't denounce a claim on one hand, and then try to win on that same claim somewhere else.
It means that non-human-driven cars have collectively accounted for 0.000333% of all the miles travelled this year.
This means that... pretty much... they haven't way over 99.99% of the human race has never been in, with or near a driverless Waymo car.
This means that, pretty much, Waymo hasn't even covered a thousandth of a percent of the things it needs to cope with when driving.
And also... that if there is a single accident, that it would scale up 300,000-fold in terms of their overall average accident rate if we all jumped on board them. And Waymo's had quite a few.
Much more interesting a statistics would be: How much of this was at speed, on highways, etc. Because highways are much easier to drive on for automated cars (and humans, if they are sensible). But for sure, if you can make an autonomous car than can navigate the Hangar Lane Gyratory in London it would mean a whole lot more than even a million miles of highway driving.
Strangely, the higher automation you see, the higher employment rates. But generally employment rates don't change much over the long-term at all... it's much more affected by short-term events (e.g. wars, housing market crashes, etc.) than anything to do with automation.
That's true historically, geographically, etc.
It's not hard to see why - less workers = cheaper products, more machines = more service and manufacturing of them, greater production = cheaper living costs, etc.
If we could find out how to build houses in an automated fashion (and thus make housing cheaper while cutting out an awful lot of labour costs), we could drastically change the world... maybe then rents/mortgages wouldn't be in the "half your wages or more" category.
Fact is my job didn't exist 30 years ago, and probably won't exist in another 30 years. The "utopia" of the robots doing all the work and humans not being able to earn money... well.. that's a very, very, very long way off as there are currently several billion jobs around the planet with more being made all the time.
Historically, if the job wasn't within a few hour's walk, you couldn't ever have taken it... you really think that in the modern age of remote-working, mass transportation, etc. that we're not almost ridiculously better off jobs-wise? And actually the other thing is - regulation. If humans can only legally work X hours a week, in certain conditions, and the vast majority of human jobs aren't machine-replaceable (as is currently true, but folding clothes is obviously NOT an irreplaceable high-skilled job!), then you need to hire more humans than you would have before such legislation.
Fact is, employment is much more to do with "how highly skilled you are". Because a machine *cannot* currently write software, or design CPUs, or work stained glass, etc. If you're a basic unskilled labour worker, you're always gonna struggle for work.
Get a skill, any skill, and you likely will have a much better time of it. Get a skill that a machine can't automate and you're guaranteed that you won't get pushed out.
It's almost like all those years of people telling me to "get an education" paid off, in fact.
I'd switch to computer-controlled driving tomorrow...
If you don't rely on it trying to interpret a situation via shitty visual sensors, within inches of human-controlled vehicles and pedestrians, and instead run it in an isolated road that has all the necessary sensors and safeguards built into it, and human drivers and pedestrians aren't allowed anywhere near it, and someone takes full and complete responsibility for its actions (or inactions) while it's in that place.
In fact, I already have been. It's called a train.
Computer-controlled driving on a human-shared road is the dumbest thing I ever heard of. And it's not unique to Tesla to jump on the stupidity bandwagon.
In fact, to be honest, if you just push all liability to the companies and their directors, I'd probably use a computer-controlled car today. I just wouldn't use it for anything that involved my body... I'd use it as a personal parcel delivery service and see whether the companies went bankrupt in the 10 years before I dared put myself in one.
Because almost all modern cars are pretty good in this regard?
The 2014 Tesla Model S EuroNCAP tests (equivalent of this test, but only done on certain years, not EVERY possible year of model) actually put it below the Ford Mondeo (called a Fusion in the US) - all the scores are lower except the driver assist tech available on the Mondeo.
But they both score 5 stars. I'm sure in the 4 years since then the newer Mondeos probably score higher still, and the Tesla as well. As does pretty much every decent car - Ford Focus, Nissan Leaf, Kia Stonic, Honda Civic, Subaru Impreza.
It's the ones that DON'T pass with 5 stars that stand out. Pretty much they kill people and they are quickly resubmitted for testing after a redesign.
Do you really think that, in subjective tests, the difference between 5-stars and 5-stars being a small handful of points in things like "how many safety gadgets does the software boast" really make a difference?
I'm no Tesla fan. But I'm a massive safety fan. Safety is incredibly important to me - that's why I own a Mondeo and checked it first. But this is *one* factor - the question of "how much control do I have of the vehicle" is actually a bigger question for me. But orders of magnitude. Hence I don't have all the lane-assist junk on my car deliberately - I refused the option. Because I intend to drive it, not put software in the path of the steering wheel direction.
As one small factor, congratulations, it's a win for Tesla on a subjective test and may / may not actually be repeated around the world with stricter safety requirements on vehicles. In terms of "being a mass market car manufacturer", that puts you firmly in the... well... kinda "damn well expected" section of the statistics.
Congratulations. Tesla *isn't* shit at basic safety tests over a small portion of their cars, testing a small subjective portion of their ability to survive head-on/side collisions.
Go you.
But you'd rather these people who can't use long-established timezone libraries, handling protocols and data formats did things like monitor your heart rate and ran your car instead?
The problem here is not DST or the complexity of it... if that were the case the banking industry, Internet, phones, etc. would fall over at the same time because of the same problems.
The problem is that someone at Apple doesn't understand how to handle dates properly despite there being long-established libraries for exactly that. And they didn't bother to check (i.e. test) adequately enough before releasing millions of dollars of mass-market products.
The problem is lax development and testing. Not the complexity of handling something that billions of devices owned by billions of people around the world handle every year just fine.
I agree 100%.
So what do you suggest? That we tax fossil fuel use to oblivion or stop it entirely.
Let's assume that we can go *snap* and all the fossil fuels are locked away from us and can't be touched for 100 years.
Now what? What do we do? What's the impact of that? How many people die of starvation or hypothermia while we sort it out? How long will the plans take to implement? What's the most practical replacement (NUCLEAR, don't argue otherwise)? How much do we need to ramp that up (double, maybe triple current usage)? How long will that take? What suffers in the meantime? How long will that last us? How much MORE / LESS CO2 will that generate than coal? Because... if it doesn't make bills much, much more expensive (fuel poverty deaths) then it may make them much, much cheaper (hell, let's just leave the air-con / heating on 24/7, we can afford it!)?
So... where's the analysis of that situation? Where's the suggestion? What's the timescale (it'll take longer than 30 years to replace every coal plant on the planet with nuclear and in some places we may not even allow that to happen politically!)? How many suffer because of that plan (a non-zero number)? And what impact will that have on actually stopping/reversing/undoing the CO2 emissions as they stand (because those three are VERY different things)?
What if doing that, worldwide, instantly, costs trillions, double energy prices, makes plastics unaffordable, holds off CO2 rises for 10 years, and then the levels continue to increase anyway? Was it worth doing? Honestly can we say that with any certainty?
Sorry, but if you want something from me, do it in writing. It's that simple.
If I want something from you, you demand I call your main number and agree/sign things. You have to do the same. Except I have to verify myself to you when I call, so when you call me I expect you to verify yourself to me.
Any automated or inbound call that doesn't give me information I demand ("Okay, can you tell me my last transaction and my account number please?") doesn't get anything from me. Yes, I've actually asked my bank for that. Guess what... they tell me that they can't tell me. Cool, then I can't deal with you. Because if the tables were reversed I'd expect you to not deal with a customer phoning up claiming to be me who also refused to give you the required information.
So now if it's important, you'll send me something on paper. It's really quite easy. Or you'll put a "secure message" inside my online banking account. And I'll go there myself to check (not just click and take your word for it that it'll take me there - same way I don't just follow the guy to the bank when he knocks on my door claiming to be from my bank needing money from me).
Security and verification work both ways. And anything legally-binding will end up on paper, especially if I say - on the call - "Sorry, I don't think you're my bank... could you prove it to me? No? Then I'm afraid I won't deal with you and I suggest you contact me in some more official way that I can verify you". Imagine that recording before a court of law, when the bank say "Oh, but we phoned him to tell him about the outstanding amount".
Sorry, but I don't even conduct such business via phone or email for any of my personal accounts. I don't even have bills dropping on my doorstep. I get literally zero post apart from junk mail (which I can't stop as it's just random minimum-wage people paid to put crap through every door on the street).
As such, an official letter stands out, but I still don't trust it and will verify. But all my "official" communique are sitting inside secured accounts that only those companies can ever post a message inside. Any email, phone call, text or even letter outside those bounds can only ever really say "Please check your account". That's it. Anything else is suspicious.