While I think this is a silly way to block this project, Los Angeles sits on vast oil reserves. It's the reason the city grew to be the largest on the West coast. The La Brea Tar Pits (located right next to downtown Los Angeles) are a part of this. When they first began digging the tunnel for the Los Angeles subway, they came back the next morning to find that tar had seeped through the tunnel walls dug the previous day. They had to put the project on hold for a year while they figured out how to deal with the tar seepage. A delay which ballooned the construction cost from $400 million to over $1 billion (making it the most expensive public transportation project in U.S. history at the time, until it was eclipsed by Boston's Big Dig).
So yeah, an environmental impact report is most appropriate in this case.
But you also don't want any government assistance in its enforcement (outside of courts hearing cases). You want it completely free of any outside influence on its economics.
The basic premise behind IP is that the value created by the temporary monopoly exceeds the cost to society of that monopoly. Since the value is given to the IP holder, that gives us a perfect benchmark against which to measure the costs of enforcing that IP. If the IP holder cannot afford to enforce its IP rights, that is a clear indication that enforcing IP costs more than the value it creates. And thus constitutes mathematical proof that IP is no longer useful, and should be abolished.
What the IP holders are trying to do is externalize the cost of enforcing their IP rights. First they wanted ISPs to bear the cost. Now they want the U.S. government to bear the cost. Taxing them gives them the wiggle room to claim the government should enforce IP rights for them. That spreads the cost/benefit analysis across two different entities, muddying the calculation of whether or not IP is worth keeping around.
I seriously doubt Brexit has hurt the Leave movement as much as the stabilization of Greece, Italy, and Spain's economies has. If those three EU countries were still racking up debt (pillaging the Euro), Germany would be the first EU country out the door.
That's a problem the EU still has. They have a shared currency, but not a shared monetary policy. Any member country who racks up debt in Euros (something which back when they had their own currency would've caused their currency to devalue) essentially steals money from other countries on the Euro who are not amassing as much debt. Germany has been bearing the brunt of that theft.
Each company seems to be measuring a different thing when they report a process is "x nm." So while you can compare nm within a single company's offerings, you can't compare them between different fab companies. TSMC and Samsung's 7nm processes leapfrogged Intel's 14nm process (37.5 million transistors per mm^2). But they're still behind Intel's 10nm process.
Cognitivie bias develops because a person's experience detects a pattern of things happening. It is a good type of bias, which helps us stay alive because it's correct more often than it's not. There is nothing wrong with going with your gut instincts when you have nothing else to go on.
The problem is sticking to your gut instincts when faced with contradictory evidence.
Shipping cost is not just the fuel cost. The cost to load/unload cargo is also substantial, which is why overseas commerce didn't really takeoff until the advent of container ships. The containers are much cheaper to load/unload than mixed bulk cargo.
Why don't we use containers on trains, transferred to trucks at the final destination city? Because of the Interstate Highway System. It was created ostensibly to allow Americans to travel across the country at will. But fuel taxes from passenger cars pay for roughly half of it, while about 90% of the damage to the highways (and thus 90% of the maintenance cost) is caused by trucks. So trucks are effectively getting a massive subsidy, while rail has to compete at-cost.
The end result is that goods are transported via truck instead of cheaper rail, because using a truck saves the cost of one extra load/unload cycle, and the truck's transport costs are subsidized by passenger cars.
If this really bugs you, just type your response into some other text editor. Notepad, or even a comment submission window on slashdot. Then cut and paste it into the CSR window.
What seems weak to me are the procedures used in the accounting departments of the companies that get scammed. These tricks being used should not work in the first place. Seriously, is nobody paying attention?
You seem to think these social engineering attempts are once in a blue moon things. When I was doing the accounting at a business, I got several of these every week. Some of them even came via snail mail (made up to look like a recurring monthly bill). Even if you're careful enough to catch 99.9% of these, once every few years one of them manages to get through. Hopefully it's just a $100 subscription scam, not a multi-million dollar scam like in TFA.
For example, a friend got hit by ransomware on her work machine. She's not stupid, and she's very security conscientious (the moment she realized what was happening she knew she had to prevent other machines from being infected, so she immediately yanked her ethernet cable out of the wall - pulled the wires right out of the plug). How she got tricked was she gets monthly reports in Excel format emailed to her from each of the salesmen. That month, Frank's report happened to be late, so she sent him a reminder earlier in the day to send it. Just by pure chance, the ransomware sent her an email, with Frank as the spoofed sender, titled "Here's the monthly report you requested" and an attached Excel file. So of course she opened the attachment.
Another example. I bought something on eBay, and got the standard emails from eBay saying I'd won the bid on such and such item. About 30 minutes later I got an email saying there was a problem with my eBay order, and to please login for details and to resolve it. I clicked on the link, logged in, then realized what I'd just done. I immediately logged out, got on another computer, logged into my eBay account, and changed the password. Then I went back to that email, and sure enough although the email looked like a genuine notice from eBay, the included link went to some sort of phishing site made to look like eBay.
These phishing and social engineering attempts are not that sophisticated. They're just spammed to millions of people. Because if you send it to that many people, 99.9999% of them will immediately see that it's fake and wonder how anyone could be stupid enough to fall for it. But just by chance alone, it's going to look exactly like an email one of those persons is expecting, and they're going to click it thinking it's legit.
I have a hard time believing that this is accidental. Their semi-annual Win 10 releases would reset your major programs associations back to the default (i.e. to Microsoft apps). I guess enough people complained about that because the last update left the associations alone. But the first time I tried to open up a file associated with a non-Microsoft program, I got a pop-up asking "are you sure you really don't want to try the Microsoft app to open up this type of file instead?"
A friend of mine uses Office 2003 because she paid for it, and it does everything she needs. She called me up last month saying Word and Excel kept saying they were expiring. When I investigated, a Windows 10 semi-annual update had installed the Office 365 trial, and changed the Office file associations from her permanently licensed Office 2003 to the subscription-based trial.
Clue to Microsoft: The OS is supposed to be a productivity tool for me, not an advertising platform for you.
Instead of simply cutting the price, you keep the price the same and add a rebate. The rebate is limited to one per household (or however many the manufacturer thinks a single household would really need), and the item must be purchased from a list of stores that normally carry the product. Rebates neatly prevent resellers unaffiliated with the manufacturer (i.e.eBayers) from taking advantage of arbitrage to eat up the discounts themselves.
Problem is the final buyers hate it. They don't see it when resellers have marked up a price (or not passed on a discount they received) - they just assume that's the normal price. So instead all they do is complain endlessly about how rebates are evil and they hate having to spend 5 minutes to make $10 (which works out to the equivalent of $120/hr), and why can't they just cut the price instead? Well if they did that, some reseller would buy up all the stock and you wouldn't have been able to buy the item in the first place.
Yes there were problems with rebates being denied. But the manufacturers hate that as much as the people submitting the rebates. The manufacturers would contract with a rebate processing company to handle the rebates, and pay them a lump sum sufficient to pay for the rebates plus some. Anything left over after the rebates were paid off, the rebate company got to keep. So some of them set about denying as many rebates as possible. Since it's the manufacturer which takes the reputation hit from this, not the rebate processing company, the manufacturers don't like it. Most of them have begun using the better rebate processors. I haven't had one denied in 5 years.
Or the biggest fish of them all - cable service monopolies. They argue they're not a monopoly because they don't own 100% of the customer market. But they do own 100% of the market to access the customers they have. Which is why they're able to pull off things like extort money from Netflix for access to those customers.
This isn't just about Apple or video game consoles. Do you want a future where the only way to get software onto any device you buy is through the device manufacturer's store, where they charge a 30% tax^h^h^hfee? Or do you want a future where manufacturers only charge a token transaction fee to get software onto your device?
Google/Android has the right model IMHO. If you don't feel confident in your knowledge about tech to protect yourself, you can stick to the Google Play store and rely on Google to protect you. But if you want you can strike out on your own and get apps from different stores, or side-load them. It is, after all, your phone, not Apple's. When a company completely locks down access to devices like Apple does, they essentially create a monopoly for themselves. Not a monopoly to consumers, but a monopoly to software sellers. The only way to sell stuff to iOS devices owners is via Apple's store. They've set themselves up as an unavoidable middleman, which is something that should never be allowed.
Because the U.S. legal system operates based on case law, they don't have to go after video game consoles. If the lawsuit against Apple succeeds (and it holds up through appeals), then that sets a binding precedent. Any video game console maker attempting to fight off similar lawsuits would thereafter immediately lose in the first round of court because of the precedent. Or chipped printer ink cartridge manufacturers. Or manufacturers bricking devices repaired with third party screens.
Tesla, Nissan, GM are not the ones driving the EV revolution. CARB (California Air Resources Board) is. They introduced a ZEV mandate in 2012(?). Every year, each auto manufacturer must sell a certain percentage of Zero Emissions Vehicles (right now mostly EVs, though Toyota has a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle). A manufacturer who fails to meet that percentage must buy credits from a company which exceeded theirs (i.e. Tesla - this is the whole reason Musk set up the company - he realized he could sell EVs at a loss and still compete with ICE vehicles by selling the credits). A manufacturer who fails to buy enough credits is banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, they'd be banned from selling cars in about a third of the U.S. by population.
No manufacturer wants to be cut off from that much of the U.S. market, so they are all tripping over themselves developing EVs for sale. If they can't sell enough of them, they run sales and incentives to move enough of them off the lots so they can hit the percentage. That's why there are occasionally those crazy deals on EV leases in 2015 and 2016 (best I saw was $49/mo for 3 years for a VW eGolf). And that's why those crazy deals are only available in California (only EVs sold in California count towards the ZEV mandate).
In other words, the percentage of car sales which are EVs is not organic. It's pre-ordained by CARB. The formula is a bit complex, but for 2018 it's about 2.5% of vehicle sales which need to be ZEVs. For 2025 it's about 8%.
CARB has tried this before. They were first set to implement the ZEV mandate in 2000. That's why GM invested nearly a billion dollars developing the EV-1. By 1999, theirs was the only vehicle which could meet the ZEV mandate. GM stood to make billions of dollars licensing the technology to other automakers. The other automakers petitioned CARB saying that technology just wasn't developed enough to produce viable ZEVs, and the best they could do at the time was a hybrid drivetrain (which environmentalists initially hated because they derive all their energy from gasoline). CARB relented and rescinded the ZEV mandate, pulling the rug out from under GM and basically flushing their billion dollar investment down the toilet. In retaliation, GM recalled every EV-1 and destroyed them, and locked up their research in a basement file cabinet so that California would never benefit from their double-cross.
Asian societies are still strongly influenced by Confucianism, which includes obedience to authority. This includes the head of your family, those older than you, superiors at work, and the government (which helps explain a lot of the social weirdness you see if you enjoy watching anime). I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the remaining Communist governments are in Asia (China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos; Cuba is the lone exception). The people there are just less likely to rebel against government authority.
Respect for your elders is also part of it, So yeah it makes perfect sense that they'd worry about how it inconveniences the elderly, while thinking little about the consequences for government surveillance.
During the Holocaust miniseries, they aired an oven cleaner commercial. Looking over that wiki page, I see that it was NBC who did it. Now they want to automate commercial selection?
Also note that by specifying which services are to be left open, any router manufacturer which leaves in a secret backdoor would be in violation (looking at you Cisco).
If you've been to Germany before WPS, every private router had the WiFi password enabled. There were no open WiFi hotspots emanating from homes. Indicating that Germans take the time to learn how to configure their router correctly. A set of requirements like those, disabling nearly everything by default, would work well in Germany to prevent the accidental misconfiguration. If you need a feature (like uPnP), you must enable it.
Most of the rest of the world, people are too damn lazy to learn how to configure a router. (I'd draw an analogy to the the clock on people's VCRs perpetually flashing 12:00, but I doubt half the readers would get that reference.) So router manufacturers have bent backwards to design something akin to one-touch configuration. Unfortunately that means every service you can think of has to be enabled by default, with only advanced users going in and disabling the stupid stuff.
So yeah it's basic stuff. But it trades off usability for security. Not that I disagree with that philosophy, but the people who want to buy a router, not read the manual, push a single button to set it up, then forget about it forever are going to whine ceaselessly about this. It's just that there are very few such people in Germany.
The "problem" is probably that we now get to pick out seat when we book our flights. Nobody wants the middle seat in a 3-seat row. So the window and aisle seats get taken first. Then if a family books late, there are only middle seats left, forcing them to split up. The higher-fare seats usually sell last, requiring the family to pay for an upgrade if they want to sit together.
In the old days, you didn't get assigned a seat until you were at the gate and checked in (in fact that was the purpose of the gate agent). So there were no perks for buying your ticket early, and the airline could do everything it could to keep families together. I do specifically remember as a kid our family occasionally being split up when we got to the gate late (even back then they wouldn't assign you a middle seat if there were window or aisle seats available, unless you were traveling with someone).. Course Ryanair is European so I've never flown them, and they may do things differently.
I'd have to agree. I used to work as a freelance IT consultant. My family owns a building now, which I manage. I provide IT services for the tenants, half the time for free just because I enjoy figuring out what's causing the problem.
In the last 3 years, I'd say a good 75% of the problems I get called for are caused by Windows 10 Update. Usually the problem is it replaced a device driver which was working fine, with a "new" version which doesn't work. For about a year there was no fix - Microsoft removed the ability to exempt a device driver from updates. They finally added it back earlier this year, but by then some of our tenants had had to buy new printers because there was no way to make the working printer drivers "stick" in Windows 10.
The next most common is certain Windows functions (usually networking) failing or doing weird things. The cause is, again, Windows Update. This time an update requiring a reboot. But people used to get upset about Windows rebooting overnight without asking them, and losing all their work. So Microsoft erred the other way, too much. And now Windows often doesn't tell you when it needs to reboot to finish installing updates. But until it does, certain parts of Windows "mysteriously" stop working. (I used to just tell people to try rebooting. But with Win 8/10 Microsoft changed it so a shutdown and restart does not constitute a reboot. Shutdown now puts Windows into a hibernate-like state, whereas the updates need an actual reboot. To reboot Windows now, you have to actually select "Restart" from the shutdown options. Which is backwards - most people think a shutdown and power on is a more rigorous form of restarting.)
Unfortunately, all of their businesses are reliant on software which only comes in a Windows version (HIPAA-compliant). Which is why they opted to buy new printers rather than dump Windows.
Most email clients add one, but the email spec doesn't require it, much less provide a way to confirm that it's accurate. Spammers have run amok with this for decades (you didn't think your cousin Linda really sent you that spam about penis enlargement, did you?). Even Gmail doesn't enforce it - you can configure it to insert a different address as your From address. While it's cute that he's figured out a way to have to accept a blank as the From address, this is hardly an earthshattering bug.
What's odd is that ECC is not routinely used in all hardware. Depending on the conditions it can be of great help, as the rare bit flip can cause strange problems that can take ages to track down. And it works well for figuring out when you have a bad memory module -- the computer will figure it out on its own.
Others have already covered the higher cost and performance hit of ECC RAM.
The most visible symptom of a random bit flip is that your program crashes. The RAM a program occupies far exceeds the RAM your data occupies, so a random bit flip is more likely to affect a program than it is your data.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, this would cause your computer to hang or crash. You'd lose not just everything you were doing with that program, but also everything in all other programs running on the computer. This would cause a lot of screaming and cursing. Parity RAM to the rescue!
Eventually, multitasking on OSes got good enough that a program crashing wouldn't freeze your entire computer. Just the lone program would freeze or crash. Your OS (and all your other programs) would continue as if nothing had happened. And you simply restart the crashed program. You might curse at a bit of lost time, but, oh hey, looks like Word auto-saved your work just a couple minutes before the crash. No harm done then. Occasionally the OS starts acting a little wonky, but a reboot usually takes care of that.
Then the story will be about how you're driving your family for a nice relaxing Sunday afternoon at the park, when suddenly the car goes crazy. All the doors lock and windows close, and the car refuses all driver input, insisting on going to its own destination. Eventually you find yourself parked in front of a police station, where you and your wife are handcuffed and booked, your kids taken from you by CPS and placed into foster homes, your dog is put in a shelter (where its euthanized after 3 days), until you eventually manage to convince a judge that it was in fact your own car. You do a little research after being released, and figure out that some bozo you accidentally fragged a couple times in Fortnite precipitated the entire mess.
It's long enough ago that most of you younger folks have no idea. But once upon a time, Sony was the premier name in home audio. Their name became household with the Sony Walkman - a portable cassette player which solved the biggest problem with portable cassette players - maintaining playback speed when shaken. If you took a cassette player jogging, the tape motor would speed up and slow down with the vibration, distorting the music. The Walkman didn't do that, and it instantly became the biggest consumer electronics hit of the decade.
So why is Sony almost absent in home audio today, aside from a few headphones? In the 1990s, music was transitioning from analog to digital. First to CDs, then to MP3s. The music industry was already horrified that they'd screwed up with CDs. They had insisted CDs hold uncompressed audio, to try to limit the amount of music it could store to 1 hour, believing people wouldn't copy them because the uncompressed audio file was so big (a CD held 650 MB, my HDD back then was about 300 MB). But storage capacities quickly caught up to, then surpassed the amount a CD held. Then in the 1990s the MP3 format (compressed audio) appeared, and companies started playing around with a portable MP3 player. MP3s were small enough you could easily exchange them over the slow Internet speeds back then (56 kbps dialup, 1.5 Mbps DSL).
Sony was of course on the forefront. A lot of new unknown companies were the first to release MP3 players, but *everyone* remembered the Sony Walkman and was waiting for the Sony MP3 player. Problem was, in 1988, Sony bought Columbia Records. In terms of revenue, it was less than 1/10th the size of Sony's home audio division. But in a classic example of the tail wagging the dog, Columbia Records insisted on and got Sony's home audio division to add crippling DRM to its MP3 player. You couldn't simply copy MP3 files to it like you could with other MP3 players. Heck, the first ones couldn't even play MP3s. You had to use some cumbersome software which would convert a physical CD to its own compressed and DRMed audio format.
Sony's MP3 player bombed. As did their mini-disc player (though that did enjoy some success in Europe). And Sony nearly vanished from the home audio scene. The music executives at Columbia Records succeeded in killing off the biggest name in home audio electronics through their intransigence.
This story isn't unique. Over and over, executives in the music and movie industries have opposed every new technology out of fear of piracy. New technologies which then went on to become their biggest revenue sources. They opposed VCRs (movies on VHS and DVDs eventually surpassed theater revenue), video rental stores (video rental revenue eventually surpassed theater revenue), iTunes (most music and movie sales are now via Internet distribution), Netflix streaming (streamed movie revenue eventually surpassed DVD sales). They're clueless, short-sighted, with overly simplistic reasoning (anything which could promote piracy = death of their industry). They have a track record of opposing and even killing off technologies (e.g. Digital Audio Tapes) which eventually made our lives so much better. Their industry would be much better off today if they'd embraced these changes instead of opposed them. Perhaps then, music distribution would be through their own platform instead of iTunes and Amazon Music, and movie streaming would predominantly be through their own company (Hulu) instead of Netflix. They're their own worst enemy.
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While I think this is a silly way to block this project, Los Angeles sits on vast oil reserves. It's the reason the city grew to be the largest on the West coast. The La Brea Tar Pits (located right next to downtown Los Angeles) are a part of this. When they first began digging the tunnel for the Los Angeles subway, they came back the next morning to find that tar had seeped through the tunnel walls dug the previous day. They had to put the project on hold for a year while they figured out how to deal with the tar seepage. A delay which ballooned the construction cost from $400 million to over $1 billion (making it the most expensive public transportation project in U.S. history at the time, until it was eclipsed by Boston's Big Dig).
So yeah, an environmental impact report is most appropriate in this case.
But you also don't want any government assistance in its enforcement (outside of courts hearing cases). You want it completely free of any outside influence on its economics.
The basic premise behind IP is that the value created by the temporary monopoly exceeds the cost to society of that monopoly. Since the value is given to the IP holder, that gives us a perfect benchmark against which to measure the costs of enforcing that IP. If the IP holder cannot afford to enforce its IP rights, that is a clear indication that enforcing IP costs more than the value it creates. And thus constitutes mathematical proof that IP is no longer useful, and should be abolished.
What the IP holders are trying to do is externalize the cost of enforcing their IP rights. First they wanted ISPs to bear the cost. Now they want the U.S. government to bear the cost. Taxing them gives them the wiggle room to claim the government should enforce IP rights for them. That spreads the cost/benefit analysis across two different entities, muddying the calculation of whether or not IP is worth keeping around.
I seriously doubt Brexit has hurt the Leave movement as much as the stabilization of Greece, Italy, and Spain's economies has. If those three EU countries were still racking up debt (pillaging the Euro), Germany would be the first EU country out the door.
That's a problem the EU still has. They have a shared currency, but not a shared monetary policy. Any member country who racks up debt in Euros (something which back when they had their own currency would've caused their currency to devalue) essentially steals money from other countries on the Euro who are not amassing as much debt. Germany has been bearing the brunt of that theft.
Each company seems to be measuring a different thing when they report a process is "x nm." So while you can compare nm within a single company's offerings, you can't compare them between different fab companies. TSMC and Samsung's 7nm processes leapfrogged Intel's 14nm process (37.5 million transistors per mm^2). But they're still behind Intel's 10nm process.
Cognitivie bias develops because a person's experience detects a pattern of things happening. It is a good type of bias, which helps us stay alive because it's correct more often than it's not. There is nothing wrong with going with your gut instincts when you have nothing else to go on.
The problem is sticking to your gut instincts when faced with contradictory evidence.
Shipping cost is not just the fuel cost. The cost to load/unload cargo is also substantial, which is why overseas commerce didn't really takeoff until the advent of container ships. The containers are much cheaper to load/unload than mixed bulk cargo.
Why don't we use containers on trains, transferred to trucks at the final destination city? Because of the Interstate Highway System. It was created ostensibly to allow Americans to travel across the country at will. But fuel taxes from passenger cars pay for roughly half of it, while about 90% of the damage to the highways (and thus 90% of the maintenance cost) is caused by trucks. So trucks are effectively getting a massive subsidy, while rail has to compete at-cost.
The end result is that goods are transported via truck instead of cheaper rail, because using a truck saves the cost of one extra load/unload cycle, and the truck's transport costs are subsidized by passenger cars.
If this really bugs you, just type your response into some other text editor. Notepad, or even a comment submission window on slashdot. Then cut and paste it into the CSR window.
You seem to think these social engineering attempts are once in a blue moon things. When I was doing the accounting at a business, I got several of these every week. Some of them even came via snail mail (made up to look like a recurring monthly bill). Even if you're careful enough to catch 99.9% of these, once every few years one of them manages to get through. Hopefully it's just a $100 subscription scam, not a multi-million dollar scam like in TFA.
For example, a friend got hit by ransomware on her work machine. She's not stupid, and she's very security conscientious (the moment she realized what was happening she knew she had to prevent other machines from being infected, so she immediately yanked her ethernet cable out of the wall - pulled the wires right out of the plug). How she got tricked was she gets monthly reports in Excel format emailed to her from each of the salesmen. That month, Frank's report happened to be late, so she sent him a reminder earlier in the day to send it. Just by pure chance, the ransomware sent her an email, with Frank as the spoofed sender, titled "Here's the monthly report you requested" and an attached Excel file. So of course she opened the attachment.
Another example. I bought something on eBay, and got the standard emails from eBay saying I'd won the bid on such and such item. About 30 minutes later I got an email saying there was a problem with my eBay order, and to please login for details and to resolve it. I clicked on the link, logged in, then realized what I'd just done. I immediately logged out, got on another computer, logged into my eBay account, and changed the password. Then I went back to that email, and sure enough although the email looked like a genuine notice from eBay, the included link went to some sort of phishing site made to look like eBay.
These phishing and social engineering attempts are not that sophisticated. They're just spammed to millions of people. Because if you send it to that many people, 99.9999% of them will immediately see that it's fake and wonder how anyone could be stupid enough to fall for it. But just by chance alone, it's going to look exactly like an email one of those persons is expecting, and they're going to click it thinking it's legit.
I have a hard time believing that this is accidental. Their semi-annual Win 10 releases would reset your major programs associations back to the default (i.e. to Microsoft apps). I guess enough people complained about that because the last update left the associations alone. But the first time I tried to open up a file associated with a non-Microsoft program, I got a pop-up asking "are you sure you really don't want to try the Microsoft app to open up this type of file instead?"
A friend of mine uses Office 2003 because she paid for it, and it does everything she needs. She called me up last month saying Word and Excel kept saying they were expiring. When I investigated, a Windows 10 semi-annual update had installed the Office 365 trial, and changed the Office file associations from her permanently licensed Office 2003 to the subscription-based trial.
Clue to Microsoft: The OS is supposed to be a productivity tool for me, not an advertising platform for you.
On whether or not this is a good idea. No doubt most of those comments will be submitted by bots.
Instead of simply cutting the price, you keep the price the same and add a rebate. The rebate is limited to one per household (or however many the manufacturer thinks a single household would really need), and the item must be purchased from a list of stores that normally carry the product. Rebates neatly prevent resellers unaffiliated with the manufacturer (i.e.eBayers) from taking advantage of arbitrage to eat up the discounts themselves.
Problem is the final buyers hate it. They don't see it when resellers have marked up a price (or not passed on a discount they received) - they just assume that's the normal price. So instead all they do is complain endlessly about how rebates are evil and they hate having to spend 5 minutes to make $10 (which works out to the equivalent of $120/hr), and why can't they just cut the price instead? Well if they did that, some reseller would buy up all the stock and you wouldn't have been able to buy the item in the first place.
Yes there were problems with rebates being denied. But the manufacturers hate that as much as the people submitting the rebates. The manufacturers would contract with a rebate processing company to handle the rebates, and pay them a lump sum sufficient to pay for the rebates plus some. Anything left over after the rebates were paid off, the rebate company got to keep. So some of them set about denying as many rebates as possible. Since it's the manufacturer which takes the reputation hit from this, not the rebate processing company, the manufacturers don't like it. Most of them have begun using the better rebate processors. I haven't had one denied in 5 years.
Ugh, accidentally hit submit instead of preview.
Or the biggest fish of them all - cable service monopolies. They argue they're not a monopoly because they don't own 100% of the customer market. But they do own 100% of the market to access the customers they have. Which is why they're able to pull off things like extort money from Netflix for access to those customers.
This isn't just about Apple or video game consoles. Do you want a future where the only way to get software onto any device you buy is through the device manufacturer's store, where they charge a 30% tax^h^h^hfee? Or do you want a future where manufacturers only charge a token transaction fee to get software onto your device?
Google/Android has the right model IMHO. If you don't feel confident in your knowledge about tech to protect yourself, you can stick to the Google Play store and rely on Google to protect you. But if you want you can strike out on your own and get apps from different stores, or side-load them. It is, after all, your phone, not Apple's. When a company completely locks down access to devices like Apple does, they essentially create a monopoly for themselves. Not a monopoly to consumers, but a monopoly to software sellers. The only way to sell stuff to iOS devices owners is via Apple's store. They've set themselves up as an unavoidable middleman, which is something that should never be allowed.
Because the U.S. legal system operates based on case law, they don't have to go after video game consoles. If the lawsuit against Apple succeeds (and it holds up through appeals), then that sets a binding precedent. Any video game console maker attempting to fight off similar lawsuits would thereafter immediately lose in the first round of court because of the precedent. Or chipped printer ink cartridge manufacturers. Or manufacturers bricking devices repaired with third party screens.
Tesla, Nissan, GM are not the ones driving the EV revolution. CARB (California Air Resources Board) is. They introduced a ZEV mandate in 2012(?). Every year, each auto manufacturer must sell a certain percentage of Zero Emissions Vehicles (right now mostly EVs, though Toyota has a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle). A manufacturer who fails to meet that percentage must buy credits from a company which exceeded theirs (i.e. Tesla - this is the whole reason Musk set up the company - he realized he could sell EVs at a loss and still compete with ICE vehicles by selling the credits). A manufacturer who fails to buy enough credits is banned from selling cars in California. And since about a dozen states automatically adopt CARB's guidelines, they'd be banned from selling cars in about a third of the U.S. by population.
No manufacturer wants to be cut off from that much of the U.S. market, so they are all tripping over themselves developing EVs for sale. If they can't sell enough of them, they run sales and incentives to move enough of them off the lots so they can hit the percentage. That's why there are occasionally those crazy deals on EV leases in 2015 and 2016 (best I saw was $49/mo for 3 years for a VW eGolf). And that's why those crazy deals are only available in California (only EVs sold in California count towards the ZEV mandate).
In other words, the percentage of car sales which are EVs is not organic. It's pre-ordained by CARB. The formula is a bit complex, but for 2018 it's about 2.5% of vehicle sales which need to be ZEVs. For 2025 it's about 8%.
CARB has tried this before. They were first set to implement the ZEV mandate in 2000. That's why GM invested nearly a billion dollars developing the EV-1. By 1999, theirs was the only vehicle which could meet the ZEV mandate. GM stood to make billions of dollars licensing the technology to other automakers. The other automakers petitioned CARB saying that technology just wasn't developed enough to produce viable ZEVs, and the best they could do at the time was a hybrid drivetrain (which environmentalists initially hated because they derive all their energy from gasoline). CARB relented and rescinded the ZEV mandate, pulling the rug out from under GM and basically flushing their billion dollar investment down the toilet. In retaliation, GM recalled every EV-1 and destroyed them, and locked up their research in a basement file cabinet so that California would never benefit from their double-cross.
It's probably 15 trillion Yuan, which would be about $2.2 trillion.
Asian societies are still strongly influenced by Confucianism, which includes obedience to authority. This includes the head of your family, those older than you, superiors at work, and the government (which helps explain a lot of the social weirdness you see if you enjoy watching anime). I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the remaining Communist governments are in Asia (China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos; Cuba is the lone exception). The people there are just less likely to rebel against government authority.
Respect for your elders is also part of it, So yeah it makes perfect sense that they'd worry about how it inconveniences the elderly, while thinking little about the consequences for government surveillance.
During the Holocaust miniseries, they aired an oven cleaner commercial. Looking over that wiki page, I see that it was NBC who did it. Now they want to automate commercial selection?
Also note that by specifying which services are to be left open, any router manufacturer which leaves in a secret backdoor would be in violation (looking at you Cisco).
If you've been to Germany before WPS, every private router had the WiFi password enabled. There were no open WiFi hotspots emanating from homes. Indicating that Germans take the time to learn how to configure their router correctly. A set of requirements like those, disabling nearly everything by default, would work well in Germany to prevent the accidental misconfiguration. If you need a feature (like uPnP), you must enable it.
Most of the rest of the world, people are too damn lazy to learn how to configure a router. (I'd draw an analogy to the the clock on people's VCRs perpetually flashing 12:00, but I doubt half the readers would get that reference.) So router manufacturers have bent backwards to design something akin to one-touch configuration. Unfortunately that means every service you can think of has to be enabled by default, with only advanced users going in and disabling the stupid stuff.
So yeah it's basic stuff. But it trades off usability for security. Not that I disagree with that philosophy, but the people who want to buy a router, not read the manual, push a single button to set it up, then forget about it forever are going to whine ceaselessly about this. It's just that there are very few such people in Germany.
The "problem" is probably that we now get to pick out seat when we book our flights. Nobody wants the middle seat in a 3-seat row. So the window and aisle seats get taken first. Then if a family books late, there are only middle seats left, forcing them to split up. The higher-fare seats usually sell last, requiring the family to pay for an upgrade if they want to sit together.
In the old days, you didn't get assigned a seat until you were at the gate and checked in (in fact that was the purpose of the gate agent). So there were no perks for buying your ticket early, and the airline could do everything it could to keep families together. I do specifically remember as a kid our family occasionally being split up when we got to the gate late (even back then they wouldn't assign you a middle seat if there were window or aisle seats available, unless you were traveling with someone).. Course Ryanair is European so I've never flown them, and they may do things differently.
I'd have to agree. I used to work as a freelance IT consultant. My family owns a building now, which I manage. I provide IT services for the tenants, half the time for free just because I enjoy figuring out what's causing the problem.
In the last 3 years, I'd say a good 75% of the problems I get called for are caused by Windows 10 Update. Usually the problem is it replaced a device driver which was working fine, with a "new" version which doesn't work. For about a year there was no fix - Microsoft removed the ability to exempt a device driver from updates. They finally added it back earlier this year, but by then some of our tenants had had to buy new printers because there was no way to make the working printer drivers "stick" in Windows 10.
The next most common is certain Windows functions (usually networking) failing or doing weird things. The cause is, again, Windows Update. This time an update requiring a reboot. But people used to get upset about Windows rebooting overnight without asking them, and losing all their work. So Microsoft erred the other way, too much. And now Windows often doesn't tell you when it needs to reboot to finish installing updates. But until it does, certain parts of Windows "mysteriously" stop working. (I used to just tell people to try rebooting. But with Win 8/10 Microsoft changed it so a shutdown and restart does not constitute a reboot. Shutdown now puts Windows into a hibernate-like state, whereas the updates need an actual reboot. To reboot Windows now, you have to actually select "Restart" from the shutdown options. Which is backwards - most people think a shutdown and power on is a more rigorous form of restarting.)
Unfortunately, all of their businesses are reliant on software which only comes in a Windows version (HIPAA-compliant). Which is why they opted to buy new printers rather than dump Windows.
Most email clients add one, but the email spec doesn't require it, much less provide a way to confirm that it's accurate. Spammers have run amok with this for decades (you didn't think your cousin Linda really sent you that spam about penis enlargement, did you?). Even Gmail doesn't enforce it - you can configure it to insert a different address as your From address. While it's cute that he's figured out a way to have to accept a blank as the From address, this is hardly an earthshattering bug.
Others have already covered the higher cost and performance hit of ECC RAM.
The most visible symptom of a random bit flip is that your program crashes. The RAM a program occupies far exceeds the RAM your data occupies, so a random bit flip is more likely to affect a program than it is your data.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, this would cause your computer to hang or crash. You'd lose not just everything you were doing with that program, but also everything in all other programs running on the computer. This would cause a lot of screaming and cursing. Parity RAM to the rescue!
Eventually, multitasking on OSes got good enough that a program crashing wouldn't freeze your entire computer. Just the lone program would freeze or crash. Your OS (and all your other programs) would continue as if nothing had happened. And you simply restart the crashed program. You might curse at a bit of lost time, but, oh hey, looks like Word auto-saved your work just a couple minutes before the crash. No harm done then. Occasionally the OS starts acting a little wonky, but a reboot usually takes care of that.
Then the story will be about how you're driving your family for a nice relaxing Sunday afternoon at the park, when suddenly the car goes crazy. All the doors lock and windows close, and the car refuses all driver input, insisting on going to its own destination. Eventually you find yourself parked in front of a police station, where you and your wife are handcuffed and booked, your kids taken from you by CPS and placed into foster homes, your dog is put in a shelter (where its euthanized after 3 days), until you eventually manage to convince a judge that it was in fact your own car. You do a little research after being released, and figure out that some bozo you accidentally fragged a couple times in Fortnite precipitated the entire mess.
It's long enough ago that most of you younger folks have no idea. But once upon a time, Sony was the premier name in home audio. Their name became household with the Sony Walkman - a portable cassette player which solved the biggest problem with portable cassette players - maintaining playback speed when shaken. If you took a cassette player jogging, the tape motor would speed up and slow down with the vibration, distorting the music. The Walkman didn't do that, and it instantly became the biggest consumer electronics hit of the decade.
So why is Sony almost absent in home audio today, aside from a few headphones? In the 1990s, music was transitioning from analog to digital. First to CDs, then to MP3s. The music industry was already horrified that they'd screwed up with CDs. They had insisted CDs hold uncompressed audio, to try to limit the amount of music it could store to 1 hour, believing people wouldn't copy them because the uncompressed audio file was so big (a CD held 650 MB, my HDD back then was about 300 MB). But storage capacities quickly caught up to, then surpassed the amount a CD held. Then in the 1990s the MP3 format (compressed audio) appeared, and companies started playing around with a portable MP3 player. MP3s were small enough you could easily exchange them over the slow Internet speeds back then (56 kbps dialup, 1.5 Mbps DSL).
Sony was of course on the forefront. A lot of new unknown companies were the first to release MP3 players, but *everyone* remembered the Sony Walkman and was waiting for the Sony MP3 player. Problem was, in 1988, Sony bought Columbia Records. In terms of revenue, it was less than 1/10th the size of Sony's home audio division. But in a classic example of the tail wagging the dog, Columbia Records insisted on and got Sony's home audio division to add crippling DRM to its MP3 player. You couldn't simply copy MP3 files to it like you could with other MP3 players. Heck, the first ones couldn't even play MP3s. You had to use some cumbersome software which would convert a physical CD to its own compressed and DRMed audio format.
Sony's MP3 player bombed. As did their mini-disc player (though that did enjoy some success in Europe). And Sony nearly vanished from the home audio scene. The music executives at Columbia Records succeeded in killing off the biggest name in home audio electronics through their intransigence.
This story isn't unique. Over and over, executives in the music and movie industries have opposed every new technology out of fear of piracy. New technologies which then went on to become their biggest revenue sources. They opposed VCRs (movies on VHS and DVDs eventually surpassed theater revenue), video rental stores (video rental revenue eventually surpassed theater revenue), iTunes (most music and movie sales are now via Internet distribution), Netflix streaming (streamed movie revenue eventually surpassed DVD sales). They're clueless, short-sighted, with overly simplistic reasoning (anything which could promote piracy = death of their industry). They have a track record of opposing and even killing off technologies (e.g. Digital Audio Tapes) which eventually made our lives so much better. Their industry would be much better off today if they'd embraced these changes instead of opposed them. Perhaps then, music distribution would be through their own platform instead of iTunes and Amazon Music, and movie streaming would predominantly be through their own company (Hulu) instead of Netflix. They're their own worst enemy.