Blockchains are relevant for ledgers and logs (basically a secure utmp/wtmp). However, for authentication, it really doesn't help much.
Instead, MS would be better off designing an open protocol like RFC 6238 or RFC 4226, except using public/private keys as opposed to shared secrets, and having an open authenticator app for this.
Depends on the ROM. If a launcher is ugly, replace it with Nova Launcher. This ensures that no matter what Android device I have, be it LG, Samsung, or HTC, it has the same UI as the one I used previously, so I don't have to get used to a new way of working.
As for bloatware, this is why a rootable/unlockable bootloader is a deal breaker of a feature. With root and a good firewall, an Android phone can be quite private, with only vetted apps allowed to phone home. Without it, a device can be a privacy disaster.
Apple can do a notch because they know the dimensions on what their sensor array is going to be. With Android, this is a different story. An inexpensive phone may just have an IR sensor and a low-end camera. A more expensive phone might have more front facing stuff. Will this be a one size fits all notch, or something that is wider/narrower depending on the device? If it is one size fits all, that may hurt hardware makers. If it is variable, that would stomp on devs trying to make their apps have the right dimensions and contribute to the complaints of fragmentation.
For video watching, few sites compare to YouTube, especially the ability to handle varying resolutions and bandwidth rates, CDN presence so you watch a video, and not a "buffering" icon for the most part, analytics, and many other things. There are other video sites, but they are either so heavily ad-laden where there isn't any real point in bothering, even with the latest ad blocker. YouTube also centralizes things in one spot. Until recently, it also made revenue generation easy. Upload a video, add a bank account, get your check. Now, with the monetization changes, only the top few artists get paid, and demonetizing videos for no stated reason is commonplace (where virtually every YouTube content producer is bitching about it on their channels.)
Even though YouTube is good, a lot of people said the same thing about MySpace being impossible to topple. The mass demonetization This type of stuff is only going to kill YouTube as people move to other sites that actually offer payments to small time content makers for content.
I can envision a video site that gets revenue one of a few ways: First, is dedicating CPU time to cryptocurrency mining. Second, is credit for ad watching. Third is a subscription fee. The site gets their chunk of change, and the rest goes to the content producers.
The Windows Store has a lot of potential. If Microsoft allows normal apps (similar to how Apple allows any type of app, even ones with kernel drivers like Parallels), it would be a boon to the Windows ecosystem. Instead of developers having to do their individual packing of downloads (and having to use sites which often bundle additional programs with it), as there would be a central, trusted distribution point.
From there, it is a matter of training users to always use the MS repository and ignore downloads from dodgy sites, and that will do a lot fo reduce Trojan downloads.
As it is now, the MS store doesn't have much functionality to make it useful. Yes, one can get a game or two, but for day to day program downloads (Notepad++, 7Zip, etc.) it is essentially worthless.
We have had shifts in the market before, making a popular item become history. Geocities -> Livejournal -> MySpace -> Facebook come to mind where the first version of a technology was strong... but got end run around another.
Yes, Bitcoin is the standard, because it is the biggest. However, it is a "v1.0" cryptocurrency. It is becoming more expensive (either in time or money) to do transactions with. The blockchain is going on 200 gigs. It can only really be mined by very specialized hardware, as even FPGAs are worthless. It can even be argued that there are enough miners in one group that gets over 51%, allowing for potential hanky-panky because their blockchain is the authoritative blockchain, due to popular consensus.
It is only a matter of time before a "v2.0" cryptocurrency comes around, uses a different algorithm (perhaps proof of storage), is ASIC resistant, doesn't require the entire blockchain to be parsed, has a lot better anonymity (like DASH), and is better all around, both as a way to store value, and a way to exchange value.
Heck, we could even see a cryptocurrency that automatically adds currency to pay a government tax, so there would be no such thing as tax fraud. For example, if the tax rate is 10%, and Alice hands 100 coins to Bob, the taxman gets 10 coins, Bob gets 100 coins. Yes, it devalues everyone's coin, but it allows for taxes to be collected without getting in the way.
What we are seeing is the fact that a company stakeholder and a stockholder are completely different people now. Now, especially with HFT, if your company has any bad news, investors bail in droves. You can't just focus on the next quarter, but the next few days, to keep the shareholders happy. You do a charge-off (a company investment in retooling or some major renovations to change from being a better buggy whip maker to a car accessory maker), you will be served with a class action shareholder lawsuit first thing the next day.
Because companies are under the constant lash of this quarter uber Alles, the only real way to expand into a new market is to buy an already existing company, unless one is Apple and investors know they will have their cake and eat it too when Apple forges into a new area.
Keeping a company private is a wise thing. The board that runs Dell isn't stupid, and after they removed themselves from the public market, product quality has improved. Plus, why subject one to the whims of market manipulators and pump/dump artists, when capital can flow from other sources?
Very true. People tend to avoid the deep web. However, if told by the government that cryptocurrencies are bad and they will go to prison for a long time if they look at cryptocurrencies cross-eyed, they will fire up a VPN, which has little to no relation to the dark web. Not going to jail is a good incentive for people to use technologies which they wouldn't have bothered looking at in the first place.
In fact, a good currency app will handle all the TOR functionality, perhaps using a VPN for the entrance and exit, so all the user needs to do is just download it from the store, input their stuff, and it handles all communications for them, so they don't really need to worry about what is underneath.
A ban will reduce numbers, but who would be left would be people harder to catch. It would also spawn social networks dedicated to it (similar to speakeasies in the Prohibition era) which would make police work even more difficult.
I do think some regulation might be a good idea... but what is "reasonable" and what is "overreaching" is debatable.
5) How do you enforce it? Worst case, people use VPNs. The government may be able to make examples of some low-hanging fruit, but the US doesn't have a Great Firewall, so all people do is just use TOR for their transactions, have the apps do a different function (for plausible deniability), and have some form of stego or PhonebookFS like storage of wallets, so if it is asked, one just gives up the partition showing the pr0n stash, and that's that.
Ultimately, crypto is math, and it is tough to ban math...
The problem is that if regulators step in, what are they going to do? Lets say they do an outright ban, with penalties of 20-life minimum sentences:
1: People will have a lot of offshore VPNs and/or TOR circuits. 2: Someone will have a cryptocurrency or cryptocurrencies that are anonymous, perhaps with good old fashioned Chaumian blinding factors, DC-nets, or other rock-solid security. 3: It would be a waste of money to enforce, similar to how much money gets wasted on hunting down pot smokers. 4: It might cause people to just rebel and ignore the law, creating secure, private social networks, just to be able to trade securely.
Regulation makes sense, but if it is pushed too far, people will just give a middle finger and ignore it, finding means to get around it.
There are tablets in form, and tablets in a role. However, a good tablet in form (The Microsoft Surface, or the Dell equivalent) can work as a tablet role (tapping on the screen for media consuming), as well as a desktop role (especially with USB-C and external GPUs allowing for relatively easy docking.) Even low to midrange laptops are being offered with a "tent mode", or some way to fold the keyboard back so they can be used as a tablet.
With so much gray area between the old Android/iOS tablet and a full featured computer, coupled with the strong rumor that Apple is going to allow iOS tablet apps to work on macOS, tablets may be replaced by... tablets which have full fledged general purpose desktop operating systems.
Bitcoin might wind up becoming the Myspace of cryptocurrencies... notable as a pioneer, but others supplanted it. Already, we have Ethereum and other coin offerings which can handle a number of BTC's shortcomings, and ICOs are happening on an hourly basis. Eventually there will be a Bitcoin 2.0 which fixes the biggest shortcomings, be it anonymity, cost of transactions, time for transactions to propagate to the blockchain, having to have the entire blockchain stored locally to ensure you are not double-spent, etc.
There is always PoC mining, like what Burst offers. It requires storage, and storage is... well storage, and can't be easily stuffed into an ASIC. PoS based currencies are also useful. Either of these are more energy efficient than PoW based currencies.
Even immensely large endeavors can be abandoned. Myspace comes to mind as something that was considered unassailable, and is now a relative footnote in history.
This isn't to say that Bitcoin has done wonders... but with the ever increasing cost of doing transactions (and an alpha-level Lightning Network isn't a real fix due to many reasons), there is plenty of room for a new currency, especially one that is ASIC resistant (or perhaps uses a different model like PoC), has anonymity (so someone can't just go through the blockchain and arrest people years after a transaction), ability to scale , and not require the entire blockchain to be parsed in order to ensure that a transaction isn't being double-spent. It would be nice if after a few years, the older transactions on a blockchain would "fall off" and not be needed for anything, going forward, while keeping the core ledger integrity in place.
Ideally, an ATM should be running a secure, embedded OS. Not "secure" as in a mainstream OS, but secure as in an OS designed from the ground up, like QNX, Tock, Wind River, INTEGRITY, or similar. A desktop OS is not needed, because an ATM doesn't need much of the functionality (and attack surface) a general purpose OS provides, other than being able to drive a graphical touch screen so the designers can have their spring/fall fashions. There are secure hypervisor OSes out there which is useful since this allows the ATM's OS to be in a single OS image, so updates are as easy as having an image's signature validated, the image copied, the old image saved as a backup, the hypervisor shut down the old OS, and the new OS started. During the startup process, the image's signature is validated, so if it does get replaced by something off a USB flesh drive, the hypervisor will just throw an error code and tell the owner to call for service, or if the machine is always on the Internet, perhaps go and fetch the latest copy of the OS from the server, copy that in, validate and run from there.
Defense in depth can be done, and done relatively cheaply. Game consoles are a good example of this, where the latest XBox One and PS4 have been out for a number of years without a single significant break. It is just spending a little bit of cash to do it "right", rather than just grab a desktop OS and do the job cheaply.
I don't think Apple would do a dockable phone. It is a cool idea, and Motorola showed that it can be done fairly well with the Atrix/Atrix 2 line. However, because Apple makes cash from both computers, smartphones, and tablets, I don't think they would want to urge people to buy one device that does multiple roles. Samsung, on the other hand, also has desktops (interestingly shaped towers for one), but they are more into gaining market share than trying to force people to buy their PCs.
There is also the opportunity for blackmail. A few choice photos that were "leaked" can ruin someone's career, or in some countries, have them executed.
I thought other places would have learned a lesson in protecting their users after the Ashley Madison breach, with the fallout that happened over that. However, guess not.
Time to swipe left on that service until they actually put some value into their internal security.
This boggles me as well. A channel this critical to communication, in previous decades, would be regulated and well funded, similar to 911 centers. Twitter is more suited for what someone talks about breakfast, or how they are mad at a ref's call during a football game, as opposed to mission-critical communication. Especially for the fact that not everyone follows the governor, or state officials.
Maybe what might be needed is a bounty system to entice someone to create an application and do project management duty. Get enough people together who are willing to shell out $20 or so for something with Aperture's functionality, and someone, somewhere might be able to get something together. From there, the project would get critical mass and likely be a solid competitor.
The worst thing is that if there is a financial downturn where one has to figure out to pay rent and get food on the table, you are hosed. At least you know that with software that is purchased, that it will work for a while, and if one loses their job for a while, it can be made to work, even if it has to reside in a virtual machine with a backlevel OS. However, with a subscription, that is not the case.
LibreOffice is just as good as MS office for virtually any task. The only time issues arise is that it is 99.99% compatible with Word/Excel/etc. However, that 0.01% can mean issues, especially with a complex Excel spreadsheet, a Word document with a ton of formatting, and so on. However, for most tasks, they are pretty much interchangeable.
There is a period of time where a child is adept at picking up languages. That might be a perfect time to teach a kid not just the local language, but at least 4-5 commonly spoken languages by a robotic teacher with a top notch accent, so kids have the ability to handle conversation globally. (Arabic, English, Chinese, Spanish, and Hindi come to mind, but this can be discussed/argued endlessly.)
It can happen even if one has a relevant major. If one graduates into a crappy economy (like those who graduated December of 2008), student loans capitalize, and that much student debt can be easily amassed just through having to kick the can due to forbearances.
The US is the only country which has this system where if one wants to better themselves, they have to mortgage their entire life. China, Russia, Chile, and most of Europe, college and/or trade programs are "free". They understand that if they want a "harvest" (i.e. skilled people), they have to plant "seeds" (as in education.) This is a fact that seems lost in the US.
Hepvo traps are up to building code these days, and can be placed both horizontally or vertically. The nice thing about these is the fact that they don't require water to keep the sewage gases at bay, so evaporation doesn't cause a disused bathroom to smell bad.
The ironic thing is that here in the US, one obtains zero knowledge that deals with the real world. Yes, one may know stuff about Shakespeare and some Common Core math, but things like balancing a checkbook, looking at the long term cost of something are not taught, much less trade skills. No, a machinist may not be a top tier position, but it pays the bills, and it takes expertise to make tool paths to not fuck up the work, hard jaws versus soft jaws, etc. Similar with plumbing, HVAC work, and an electrician.
College is nice, but the issue is that it isn't a must for most jobs. In fact, if someone wants a high-paying DevOps job, knowing a CI/CD pipeline, being able to code in the latest language fashion of the month, and be able to have basic social skills will be able to get one a decent career path.
Here in the US, it would be nice to have a career path. In Germany, the government pays for tradeskill lessons or college. The result is that the populace in general is a lot more skilled. Having that here would be nice, because the more skills, the more tools one has available to adapt or change. For example, and old hand machinist can leap to CNC machining.
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Blockchains are relevant for ledgers and logs (basically a secure utmp/wtmp). However, for authentication, it really doesn't help much.
Instead, MS would be better off designing an open protocol like RFC 6238 or RFC 4226, except using public/private keys as opposed to shared secrets, and having an open authenticator app for this.
Depends on the ROM. If a launcher is ugly, replace it with Nova Launcher. This ensures that no matter what Android device I have, be it LG, Samsung, or HTC, it has the same UI as the one I used previously, so I don't have to get used to a new way of working.
As for bloatware, this is why a rootable/unlockable bootloader is a deal breaker of a feature. With root and a good firewall, an Android phone can be quite private, with only vetted apps allowed to phone home. Without it, a device can be a privacy disaster.
Apple can do a notch because they know the dimensions on what their sensor array is going to be. With Android, this is a different story. An inexpensive phone may just have an IR sensor and a low-end camera. A more expensive phone might have more front facing stuff. Will this be a one size fits all notch, or something that is wider/narrower depending on the device? If it is one size fits all, that may hurt hardware makers. If it is variable, that would stomp on devs trying to make their apps have the right dimensions and contribute to the complaints of fragmentation.
I wonder how Google will handle this.
For video watching, few sites compare to YouTube, especially the ability to handle varying resolutions and bandwidth rates, CDN presence so you watch a video, and not a "buffering" icon for the most part, analytics, and many other things. There are other video sites, but they are either so heavily ad-laden where there isn't any real point in bothering, even with the latest ad blocker. YouTube also centralizes things in one spot. Until recently, it also made revenue generation easy. Upload a video, add a bank account, get your check. Now, with the monetization changes, only the top few artists get paid, and demonetizing videos for no stated reason is commonplace (where virtually every YouTube content producer is bitching about it on their channels.)
Even though YouTube is good, a lot of people said the same thing about MySpace being impossible to topple. The mass demonetization This type of stuff is only going to kill YouTube as people move to other sites that actually offer payments to small time content makers for content.
I can envision a video site that gets revenue one of a few ways: First, is dedicating CPU time to cryptocurrency mining. Second, is credit for ad watching. Third is a subscription fee. The site gets their chunk of change, and the rest goes to the content producers.
The Windows Store has a lot of potential. If Microsoft allows normal apps (similar to how Apple allows any type of app, even ones with kernel drivers like Parallels), it would be a boon to the Windows ecosystem. Instead of developers having to do their individual packing of downloads (and having to use sites which often bundle additional programs with it), as there would be a central, trusted distribution point.
From there, it is a matter of training users to always use the MS repository and ignore downloads from dodgy sites, and that will do a lot fo reduce Trojan downloads.
As it is now, the MS store doesn't have much functionality to make it useful. Yes, one can get a game or two, but for day to day program downloads (Notepad++, 7Zip, etc.) it is essentially worthless.
We have had shifts in the market before, making a popular item become history. Geocities -> Livejournal -> MySpace -> Facebook come to mind where the first version of a technology was strong... but got end run around another.
Yes, Bitcoin is the standard, because it is the biggest. However, it is a "v1.0" cryptocurrency. It is becoming more expensive (either in time or money) to do transactions with. The blockchain is going on 200 gigs. It can only really be mined by very specialized hardware, as even FPGAs are worthless. It can even be argued that there are enough miners in one group that gets over 51%, allowing for potential hanky-panky because their blockchain is the authoritative blockchain, due to popular consensus.
It is only a matter of time before a "v2.0" cryptocurrency comes around, uses a different algorithm (perhaps proof of storage), is ASIC resistant, doesn't require the entire blockchain to be parsed, has a lot better anonymity (like DASH), and is better all around, both as a way to store value, and a way to exchange value.
Heck, we could even see a cryptocurrency that automatically adds currency to pay a government tax, so there would be no such thing as tax fraud. For example, if the tax rate is 10%, and Alice hands 100 coins to Bob, the taxman gets 10 coins, Bob gets 100 coins. Yes, it devalues everyone's coin, but it allows for taxes to be collected without getting in the way.
What we are seeing is the fact that a company stakeholder and a stockholder are completely different people now. Now, especially with HFT, if your company has any bad news, investors bail in droves. You can't just focus on the next quarter, but the next few days, to keep the shareholders happy. You do a charge-off (a company investment in retooling or some major renovations to change from being a better buggy whip maker to a car accessory maker), you will be served with a class action shareholder lawsuit first thing the next day.
Because companies are under the constant lash of this quarter uber Alles, the only real way to expand into a new market is to buy an already existing company, unless one is Apple and investors know they will have their cake and eat it too when Apple forges into a new area.
Keeping a company private is a wise thing. The board that runs Dell isn't stupid, and after they removed themselves from the public market, product quality has improved. Plus, why subject one to the whims of market manipulators and pump/dump artists, when capital can flow from other sources?
Very true. People tend to avoid the deep web. However, if told by the government that cryptocurrencies are bad and they will go to prison for a long time if they look at cryptocurrencies cross-eyed, they will fire up a VPN, which has little to no relation to the dark web. Not going to jail is a good incentive for people to use technologies which they wouldn't have bothered looking at in the first place.
In fact, a good currency app will handle all the TOR functionality, perhaps using a VPN for the entrance and exit, so all the user needs to do is just download it from the store, input their stuff, and it handles all communications for them, so they don't really need to worry about what is underneath.
A ban will reduce numbers, but who would be left would be people harder to catch. It would also spawn social networks dedicated to it (similar to speakeasies in the Prohibition era) which would make police work even more difficult.
I do think some regulation might be a good idea... but what is "reasonable" and what is "overreaching" is debatable.
5) How do you enforce it? Worst case, people use VPNs. The government may be able to make examples of some low-hanging fruit, but the US doesn't have a Great Firewall, so all people do is just use TOR for their transactions, have the apps do a different function (for plausible deniability), and have some form of stego or PhonebookFS like storage of wallets, so if it is asked, one just gives up the partition showing the pr0n stash, and that's that.
Ultimately, crypto is math, and it is tough to ban math...
The problem is that if regulators step in, what are they going to do? Lets say they do an outright ban, with penalties of 20-life minimum sentences:
1: People will have a lot of offshore VPNs and/or TOR circuits.
2: Someone will have a cryptocurrency or cryptocurrencies that are anonymous, perhaps with good old fashioned Chaumian blinding factors, DC-nets, or other rock-solid security.
3: It would be a waste of money to enforce, similar to how much money gets wasted on hunting down pot smokers.
4: It might cause people to just rebel and ignore the law, creating secure, private social networks, just to be able to trade securely.
Regulation makes sense, but if it is pushed too far, people will just give a middle finger and ignore it, finding means to get around it.
There are tablets in form, and tablets in a role. However, a good tablet in form (The Microsoft Surface, or the Dell equivalent) can work as a tablet role (tapping on the screen for media consuming), as well as a desktop role (especially with USB-C and external GPUs allowing for relatively easy docking.) Even low to midrange laptops are being offered with a "tent mode", or some way to fold the keyboard back so they can be used as a tablet.
With so much gray area between the old Android/iOS tablet and a full featured computer, coupled with the strong rumor that Apple is going to allow iOS tablet apps to work on macOS, tablets may be replaced by... tablets which have full fledged general purpose desktop operating systems.
Bitcoin might wind up becoming the Myspace of cryptocurrencies... notable as a pioneer, but others supplanted it. Already, we have Ethereum and other coin offerings which can handle a number of BTC's shortcomings, and ICOs are happening on an hourly basis. Eventually there will be a Bitcoin 2.0 which fixes the biggest shortcomings, be it anonymity, cost of transactions, time for transactions to propagate to the blockchain, having to have the entire blockchain stored locally to ensure you are not double-spent, etc.
There is always PoC mining, like what Burst offers. It requires storage, and storage is... well storage, and can't be easily stuffed into an ASIC. PoS based currencies are also useful. Either of these are more energy efficient than PoW based currencies.
Even immensely large endeavors can be abandoned. Myspace comes to mind as something that was considered unassailable, and is now a relative footnote in history.
This isn't to say that Bitcoin has done wonders... but with the ever increasing cost of doing transactions (and an alpha-level Lightning Network isn't a real fix due to many reasons), there is plenty of room for a new currency, especially one that is ASIC resistant (or perhaps uses a different model like PoC), has anonymity (so someone can't just go through the blockchain and arrest people years after a transaction), ability to scale , and not require the entire blockchain to be parsed in order to ensure that a transaction isn't being double-spent. It would be nice if after a few years, the older transactions on a blockchain would "fall off" and not be needed for anything, going forward, while keeping the core ledger integrity in place.
Ideally, an ATM should be running a secure, embedded OS. Not "secure" as in a mainstream OS, but secure as in an OS designed from the ground up, like QNX, Tock, Wind River, INTEGRITY, or similar. A desktop OS is not needed, because an ATM doesn't need much of the functionality (and attack surface) a general purpose OS provides, other than being able to drive a graphical touch screen so the designers can have their spring/fall fashions. There are secure hypervisor OSes out there which is useful since this allows the ATM's OS to be in a single OS image, so updates are as easy as having an image's signature validated, the image copied, the old image saved as a backup, the hypervisor shut down the old OS, and the new OS started. During the startup process, the image's signature is validated, so if it does get replaced by something off a USB flesh drive, the hypervisor will just throw an error code and tell the owner to call for service, or if the machine is always on the Internet, perhaps go and fetch the latest copy of the OS from the server, copy that in, validate and run from there.
Defense in depth can be done, and done relatively cheaply. Game consoles are a good example of this, where the latest XBox One and PS4 have been out for a number of years without a single significant break. It is just spending a little bit of cash to do it "right", rather than just grab a desktop OS and do the job cheaply.
I don't think Apple would do a dockable phone. It is a cool idea, and Motorola showed that it can be done fairly well with the Atrix/Atrix 2 line. However, because Apple makes cash from both computers, smartphones, and tablets, I don't think they would want to urge people to buy one device that does multiple roles. Samsung, on the other hand, also has desktops (interestingly shaped towers for one), but they are more into gaining market share than trying to force people to buy their PCs.
There is also the opportunity for blackmail. A few choice photos that were "leaked" can ruin someone's career, or in some countries, have them executed.
I thought other places would have learned a lesson in protecting their users after the Ashley Madison breach, with the fallout that happened over that. However, guess not.
Time to swipe left on that service until they actually put some value into their internal security.
This boggles me as well. A channel this critical to communication, in previous decades, would be regulated and well funded, similar to 911 centers. Twitter is more suited for what someone talks about breakfast, or how they are mad at a ref's call during a football game, as opposed to mission-critical communication. Especially for the fact that not everyone follows the governor, or state officials.
Maybe what might be needed is a bounty system to entice someone to create an application and do project management duty. Get enough people together who are willing to shell out $20 or so for something with Aperture's functionality, and someone, somewhere might be able to get something together. From there, the project would get critical mass and likely be a solid competitor.
The worst thing is that if there is a financial downturn where one has to figure out to pay rent and get food on the table, you are hosed. At least you know that with software that is purchased, that it will work for a while, and if one loses their job for a while, it can be made to work, even if it has to reside in a virtual machine with a backlevel OS. However, with a subscription, that is not the case.
LibreOffice is just as good as MS office for virtually any task. The only time issues arise is that it is 99.99% compatible with Word/Excel/etc. However, that 0.01% can mean issues, especially with a complex Excel spreadsheet, a Word document with a ton of formatting, and so on. However, for most tasks, they are pretty much interchangeable.
There is a period of time where a child is adept at picking up languages. That might be a perfect time to teach a kid not just the local language, but at least 4-5 commonly spoken languages by a robotic teacher with a top notch accent, so kids have the ability to handle conversation globally. (Arabic, English, Chinese, Spanish, and Hindi come to mind, but this can be discussed/argued endlessly.)
It can happen even if one has a relevant major. If one graduates into a crappy economy (like those who graduated December of 2008), student loans capitalize, and that much student debt can be easily amassed just through having to kick the can due to forbearances.
The US is the only country which has this system where if one wants to better themselves, they have to mortgage their entire life. China, Russia, Chile, and most of Europe, college and/or trade programs are "free". They understand that if they want a "harvest" (i.e. skilled people), they have to plant "seeds" (as in education.) This is a fact that seems lost in the US.
Hepvo traps are up to building code these days, and can be placed both horizontally or vertically. The nice thing about these is the fact that they don't require water to keep the sewage gases at bay, so evaporation doesn't cause a disused bathroom to smell bad.
The ironic thing is that here in the US, one obtains zero knowledge that deals with the real world. Yes, one may know stuff about Shakespeare and some Common Core math, but things like balancing a checkbook, looking at the long term cost of something are not taught, much less trade skills. No, a machinist may not be a top tier position, but it pays the bills, and it takes expertise to make tool paths to not fuck up the work, hard jaws versus soft jaws, etc. Similar with plumbing, HVAC work, and an electrician.
College is nice, but the issue is that it isn't a must for most jobs. In fact, if someone wants a high-paying DevOps job, knowing a CI/CD pipeline, being able to code in the latest language fashion of the month, and be able to have basic social skills will be able to get one a decent career path.
Here in the US, it would be nice to have a career path. In Germany, the government pays for tradeskill lessons or college. The result is that the populace in general is a lot more skilled. Having that here would be nice, because the more skills, the more tools one has available to adapt or change. For example, and old hand machinist can leap to CNC machining.