While you're building out your mythical wireless mesh network, the rest of us just got some regulators and laws to make our ISPs a bit more competitive. Whilst the ISPs are 'unique' and hold the keys to the last mile, I don't see mine as having much of a 'stranglehold'. Sure, BT could be doing a much better job of renting out the last mile to other companies (and the regulator is making them split things up more to address this), but even still, my monthly ISP bill is really pretty cheap. If mine starts turning the thumbscrews, I can choose from a couple of dozen more (yes, really - that many).
If the regulators ever get to it, what I'd really love to see is that any joe-schmo can apply to put fibre between a couple of houses on a street. Right now, there may be ducts and whatnot, but it's so difficult and expensive you need to be a big corp to do it. Once it's just a matter of pulling the cables and complying with a load of paperwork, then we can indeed have the 'new Internet' as communities club together to do it all themselves.
However, my utopia is some years away, if it ever happens. In the meantime, I'm not too fussed about my Internet bill. I'm considering getting fibre connection and using the existing one as a backup (yeah, that's how cheap it is).
What I will concede is that our government also feels the need to get into our actual Internet traffic far too much, all "for the children". That probably precludes my utopia, but things may change.
(I apologise if this comes off as a slashvertisment - I don't work for Google, and I'm only just starting out as a customer of theirs, so I've yet to see how good/bad they really are)
I had a chat with some Google folk about their cloud services. They told me that to them, the need for a support call was a 'bug'. They want to keep support as expensive for them as possible so that they're motivated to avoid it. They only staff with pretty senior people, and of course those people are able to (programatically) solve the problems customers call them with.
It may all have been sales chatter, but it was quite refreshing to hear that someone was actually treating support as something other than a cost centre. They're using it as a feedback mechanism to improve their products and the documentation - which is what support always should be, its just that very few companies actually do that, and most of them end up doing the things you're talking about, as if making the support job as shit as possible would somehow make their customers happier or more productive.
Slack is an instant messenger style 'chat' app, primarily aimed at business user, although they also gently court 'groups', such as open source projects and whatnot. It has some nifty features, such as chat history (even when you're not logged on), private/public groups, private chats, bots for many popular apps and easy developer integration APIs (so it's super easy to have your monitoring system write messages on alerts, for example). Conversations can have media in them (pictures, videos, file attachments, etc) as well as threads.
Slack can be accessed in a variety of ways, but the main ones are a web app, or 'thick client' on the desktop. The desktop app looks and behaves almost exactly the same as the webapp, primarily because it (seems to) share code between the two.
The webapp is fairly complex, and as such does work the browser pretty hard. People have reported it using up a lot of CPU/memory in the browser, particularly if left running for a long time, or when used with multiple accounts (eg. work + and open source project or two). Further, the desktop app also suffers from CPU/memory bloat under similar circumstances. Personally, I've found it to be horrible when using the new voice chat calling feature too.
As geeks, we're looking at a (simple) chat tool and wondering why it's so horribly inefficient. Ostensibly, "it's just IRC", which is, on many levels true, but that does somewhat over-simplify the service somewhat, although none of that justifies it having such a huge system-footprint.
Going further, the Slack company is potentially going to be bought for lots of money by one of the existing big tech companies. Many argue "it's just IRC + some toys", which as before isn't entirely wrong, but over-simplifies what the company is. The company has lots of customers, each paying small or large amounts of money, and so that customer-base is responsible for a significant part of the company's supposed value.
Slack seems to be a little like marmite - you either love it or hate it. Personally, I rather like it - it does what I need and mostly keeps out of the way when I want it to. However, I take the criticism that you can spend hours/days just being 'nagged' rather than actually doing any real work, although that's probably true of any reasonably successful chat app. I'm also a fan of it because so many other tools exist and yet are far, far worse to work with. For example, right now I can chat on Lifesize (incredibly terrible, to the point of unusability), Skype for Business (awful for more than just pinging someone to see if they're calling soon), Microsoft Teams (awful too - very hard to keep more than one conversation going, and even then it's not easy) and I've also got Telegram - which is okay for 'text message' type conversations, but I'm not sure I'd like to use it to argue out why X is better than Y. So on that sense, Slack does quite well;-)
We have a Thinkgizmos something-or-other - it cleans our kitchen/diner very nicely. I don't know if the Roombas have this problem, but in ours there's a little box that needs emptying from time to time - it seems to fill up with fluff, crumbs, hair etc. If they could make an app-controlled version of my robot that didn't have this problem, then I might be interested;-)
FWIW, our vacuum was about £150, much less than the £300+ for a roomba. I can't say if it's better or worse, but it does clean pretty well, so in that regard, it meets requirements. It also doesn't have any sort of network connection - AFAIK, you can't even update the software via USB or anything. Honestly, I'm fine with that - sure, a new release might save 15 minutes out of an hours cleaning time, but if it gets clean, then it gets clean, and I'm not going to worry about the time it takes while I'm asleep.
Whenever Trump uses any superlative, he's essentially lying about it. "We're going to make the best golf course in the world" (or similar - can't be arsed to look it up) - not true.
"Working on major Trade Deal with the United Kingdom. Could be very big & exciting. JOBS! The E.U. is very protectionist with the U.S. STOP!" - means "working on a small deal, which will probably fuck over as many people as it helps"
"A big, beautiful wall" - well, I think we know how that one is going;-)
Trump-slagging aside, my point is, if he can do it, then why can't we all (Tim Cook included)? We're in the era of 'fake news', so just bluff your way as much as you need and let the fact checkers pour over your work at a later date.
I was gonna say something similar... you guys have a whole slew of agencies who should be all over this - DHS, NSA, CIA, your new cyber whatsit, and probably half a dozen others. That all that in mind, how does an industry body successfully lobby for less regulation to be placed upon it?
I both do and don't understand their proposed model - you get charged because you're using the site more. That sounds good in principle, because you're charging by usage. But you're encouraging less use, which invites people to google for whatever they want to read, which naturally takes them out of facebook.
Zuck is a lot richer than me, so I'm sure I can't tell him much about how to make money. This all seems very weird though.
Having a dedicated button that you can't configure is rather arrogant. If you could configure it to open any assistant or other program then Samsung would get stats about just how unpopular Bixby really is. They've always made their utter shit software uninstallable though, so this is nothing new on their part.
I have a long-since abandoned Galaxy Note tablet - getting no updates from Samsung because they can't be arsed. If you accidentally press the home button too long it opens up the 'samsung assistant' - and what an utter piece of shit that is. Unusable is a generous description.
As for 'deep learning', I'd trust Google to actually implement some sort of improvement over time 1000 times more than Samsung. Samsung have a long, long history of crap software abandoned in favour of the Next Big Thing, which they seem to pick by flicking through recent copies of PC World magazine.
I'll be sticking with my Wiley Fox phone - less than half the price of the equivalent Samsung, and so far, only a small amount of uninstallable crapware (not including some of the google stuff in android I'd rather not have).
...or worse... asking for you to enter a password twice in order to authenticate!!
(Microsoft did this on Windows NT when connecting to a wifi network - and despite numerous Service Packs, never fixed it)
For things like credit card numbers, masking isn't necessary, as you're most likely copying the numbers off the card right in front of you. However, I guess it can mask when you move on to the next field - not great UX, but a reasonable compromise IMHO.
No one need take drugs that are 'expired'. The point is that we can print a longer expiry date on the box *if* we bother to test that drugs longevity. We don't bother because it costs the drug companies money to do so. The trouble is, it costs absolutely everyone money not to do that testing.
It's true, we're 'too rich' to worry about the longevity of things. However, can't we use a tiny amount of that wealth to extend the usable lifespan of drugs where it's easy to do so? If a drug is tested to be stable, even when stored in someone's kitchen cabinet for years on end, then why not regulate that it should have a longer lifespan printed on it? Ultimately, it just comes down to money - "we" don't want to spend the money doing the testing.
My wife used to work in Pharma, so I have some knowledge of the plethora of rules they have to follow.
I wonder though, if a new drug could initially be sold with (say) a 1 year expiration, but in subsequent years the batches have longer and longer lifespans such that an old drug (say, Neurofen) could have a 10 year shelf-life and have the tests to back it up. This isn't going to work so easily for niche drugs, or even a lot of prescription drugs because the sales volumes aren't high enough - but I'll bet it would still save the world a lot of money if you look at it all 'net'.
I'm sure this would have some detrimental effect on drug companies profits - but I'd guess that once Neurofen went out of patent the margins dropped a good chunk, so to some extent putting longer shelf life on it wouldn't make it drop all that much further. Of course, I have no maths, or even wikipedia to back up my claims, but it 'feels' like it might be reasonable.
As a parent, I can somewhat sympathise. I mean, if my kids search online for some pictures of people with no clothes on, then ostensibly that's not too bad. I mean, they may get unrealistic expectations of how they and others should look, but hey ho - to some extent that's a manageable problem.
The problem with the Internet is that in doing that search/viewing, there's a very good chance you're also going to be exposed to some content that's way, way more hardcore than you're ready to see or think about. There are some scenes in that Nicolas Cage film, 8MM which even as a middle aged adult I find a bit disturbing. I'd really rather my kids didn't have to accidentally find anything like that before they're ready.
All that said, as a parent, it's my job to protect my children from things I think may harm them, and it's also my job to let them explore their boundaries and to help them if they go a bit too far. I also take it as my job to keep the f'ing government the hell away from the Internet - I want the whole Internet, not some filtered piece of crap controlled by some shitheads in Whitehall. We've got a prime minister who thinks running through a corn field is the most naughty thing she's ever done - heaven help us when she discovers people take drugs, drunk, fall over in the street and vomit in doorways. Let alone that that may be curious about what other people do with each other 'behind closed doors'.
...prepaid cards don't pass the same checks - it's not just that you can enter a card number - it's that you can enter a CREDIT card number. To have one of those, you need to: 1) Be 18 OR 2) Steal your dad's card number
Given that most porn isn't even a UK business, I see this having an effect on maybe 0.1% of the porn available on the internet.That weird kid in school is still going to have loads of it on his phone and will be ready to trade - same as it ever was.
An ex-smoker once told me that you get over the craving for a cigarette after one or two puffs, but smoke the rest of it anyway. It's a bit like that with "single serving" anything too - in my anecdotal experience, most 'single servings' are about 30% bigger than you actually need (and when I visit the USA I'm always amazed how much bigger 'single servings' of things are there compared to Europe).
For example, a 330ml can of drink - I love the very occasional diet coke (or recent new favourite is diet pepsi with ginger) - I'll have maybe one a 2-4 weeks. I've started to pour it into a glass and throw half of it away. I'm finding it's still enough to get the enjoyment, and I feel satisfied by it, but I'm only getting half of the not-calories and whatever else that's not good for me.
Likewise sugar that you might put in tea/coffee. I don't add any sugar any more, but sugar lumps are like a properly decent sized spoon of sugar (as are little bags of sugar). If I used a spoon I'd take a good deal less (and if you come to my house and ask for sugar in a drink, I'd give you as much as I used to take way-back-in-the-day - ie. less than a lump).
Whenever I think of stuff like this, I can hear my mum saying "they're just trying to sell you more of ", which she said to me in relation to laundry detergent, when she was teaching me to use the washing machine when I was a kid. Even there, a convenient 'ball' or whatever is actually way more detergent than you need unless you really stack your washer to the max.
So my point is... corporations can't be trusted to define what a 'single serving' of anything actually is - even if convention agrees with them (like 330ml is the convention for cans of drink). A glass of water can be any size and still be perfectly good for you - that's not true of pretty much anything else.
Right now I'm in a room we didn't get around to refurbishing yet. My desk is a mess, the wallpaper is horrible, and it's generally a bit of a dumping ground in here. I'm fine with it though - when I'm facing the computer, all that stuff behind me doesn't phase me at all.
However, when we were renovating other bits of the house this room wasn't available, so I used to work in a shared work space in town (maybe 15-20 minutes walk from here). That had all the features you mention - clear, empty, quiet, etc. It also had a kitchenette to go to if you wanted a cuppa (so a handy mental break from your desk). That place cost £25/day for an ad-hoc 'turn up when you like' sort of arrangement. I could have negotiated a lower rate if I committed time. Contrast to £32 return train ticket (which then also consumes another 2 additional hours of travel time, on top of the 20 to get to town), and it's actually a pretty good deal.
The thing I most appreciate about home working is the lack of commute. Not having to do that saves me time which means I get time to have breakfast and some playtime before bed with the kids. It also saves me a good deal of stress. Not walking to and fro does mean I need to get exercise in other ways though, which can be one of those things you never get around to without some self-discipline.
I'd have to agree - it would be hugely arrogant to assume Mars is devoid of life, just because we've got some ideas about a few things we've observed from outside Mars. Once we've done a proper survey of every nook and cranny, cave and hole, then maybe we can say it, but until then not so much. We can't predict everything we find on earth, and so how could we do it for a planet of which we have a relatively minuscule understanding?
I'd imagine the solution would be the sort of walk-in space suits Nasa were developing for the moon. The idea being that the suit is sterile on arrival, and stays outside the building throughout the visit. The human sort of steps into it and detaches it from the building to walk about. That way, the human stays wrapped in the suit, and the outside of the suit never comes into contact with humans.
Amazon isn't terrible for stumbling over something you might want to watch. They really, really need to make a way to only show free stuff though (even just a "row" of free stuff would be a good start. They also need the 'profile' feature of Netflix so my kids can look at something age-appropriate (and can't see stuff I'm not going to pay for).
I read the jist of what he's saying not so much as "we should be able to view source" but "we need a way for newbies to get online". To some extent I agree with him - the webdev I've ever done has been so unintuitive and tedious I can't imagine why anyone would ever want to be a webdev.
To elaborate, I find HTML pretty straight forward. It's pretty clear what you're supposed to be doing. However, once you start needing CSS, then things get considerably less intuitive. CSS means that the ordering in HTML is somewhat irrelevant, although in some cases, even though the CSS is re-ordering things on the screen, the HTML ordering is still important. That's confusing. Then browser differences make the whole thing really, really annoying because you get it all working in your favourite browser and try it in another and it looks hideous, or worse, it looks fine, but a banner or heading is sized differently and so it looks weird. Worse still is you try it in the same browser on a different OS and it looks different in another way. Getting anything to look right in all cases is (it seems to me) a hard problem.
Once you've got all that straight, then try adding in some Javascript. It's not a great language to get started in, and it too has so many weird foibles that "real" programming languages don't. Testing it works is hard too because of browser differences, screen differences etc. You can't really even have unit tests on non-UI-affecting stuff. If you want to do anything more formal, with proper testing regimes and so on, then you're into a really complex development process with some pretty exotic tools.
So... after all that... yeah, a simpler 'web' would be no bad thing. Getting there would be near impossible though - making a replacement for CSS and Javascript sounds like a noble endeavour, but the world has too much investment in them to want to switch any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
F'ing something completely sounds like a job Adobe is perfectly qualified for!
While you're building out your mythical wireless mesh network, the rest of us just got some regulators and laws to make our ISPs a bit more competitive. Whilst the ISPs are 'unique' and hold the keys to the last mile, I don't see mine as having much of a 'stranglehold'. Sure, BT could be doing a much better job of renting out the last mile to other companies (and the regulator is making them split things up more to address this), but even still, my monthly ISP bill is really pretty cheap. If mine starts turning the thumbscrews, I can choose from a couple of dozen more (yes, really - that many).
If the regulators ever get to it, what I'd really love to see is that any joe-schmo can apply to put fibre between a couple of houses on a street. Right now, there may be ducts and whatnot, but it's so difficult and expensive you need to be a big corp to do it. Once it's just a matter of pulling the cables and complying with a load of paperwork, then we can indeed have the 'new Internet' as communities club together to do it all themselves.
However, my utopia is some years away, if it ever happens. In the meantime, I'm not too fussed about my Internet bill. I'm considering getting fibre connection and using the existing one as a backup (yeah, that's how cheap it is).
What I will concede is that our government also feels the need to get into our actual Internet traffic far too much, all "for the children". That probably precludes my utopia, but things may change.
(I apologise if this comes off as a slashvertisment - I don't work for Google, and I'm only just starting out as a customer of theirs, so I've yet to see how good/bad they really are)
I had a chat with some Google folk about their cloud services. They told me that to them, the need for a support call was a 'bug'. They want to keep support as expensive for them as possible so that they're motivated to avoid it. They only staff with pretty senior people, and of course those people are able to (programatically) solve the problems customers call them with.
It may all have been sales chatter, but it was quite refreshing to hear that someone was actually treating support as something other than a cost centre. They're using it as a feedback mechanism to improve their products and the documentation - which is what support always should be, its just that very few companies actually do that, and most of them end up doing the things you're talking about, as if making the support job as shit as possible would somehow make their customers happier or more productive.
Slack is an instant messenger style 'chat' app, primarily aimed at business user, although they also gently court 'groups', such as open source projects and whatnot. It has some nifty features, such as chat history (even when you're not logged on), private/public groups, private chats, bots for many popular apps and easy developer integration APIs (so it's super easy to have your monitoring system write messages on alerts, for example). Conversations can have media in them (pictures, videos, file attachments, etc) as well as threads.
Slack can be accessed in a variety of ways, but the main ones are a web app, or 'thick client' on the desktop. The desktop app looks and behaves almost exactly the same as the webapp, primarily because it (seems to) share code between the two.
The webapp is fairly complex, and as such does work the browser pretty hard. People have reported it using up a lot of CPU/memory in the browser, particularly if left running for a long time, or when used with multiple accounts (eg. work + and open source project or two). Further, the desktop app also suffers from CPU/memory bloat under similar circumstances. Personally, I've found it to be horrible when using the new voice chat calling feature too.
As geeks, we're looking at a (simple) chat tool and wondering why it's so horribly inefficient. Ostensibly, "it's just IRC", which is, on many levels true, but that does somewhat over-simplify the service somewhat, although none of that justifies it having such a huge system-footprint.
Going further, the Slack company is potentially going to be bought for lots of money by one of the existing big tech companies. Many argue "it's just IRC + some toys", which as before isn't entirely wrong, but over-simplifies what the company is. The company has lots of customers, each paying small or large amounts of money, and so that customer-base is responsible for a significant part of the company's supposed value.
Slack seems to be a little like marmite - you either love it or hate it. Personally, I rather like it - it does what I need and mostly keeps out of the way when I want it to. However, I take the criticism that you can spend hours/days just being 'nagged' rather than actually doing any real work, although that's probably true of any reasonably successful chat app. I'm also a fan of it because so many other tools exist and yet are far, far worse to work with. For example, right now I can chat on Lifesize (incredibly terrible, to the point of unusability), Skype for Business (awful for more than just pinging someone to see if they're calling soon), Microsoft Teams (awful too - very hard to keep more than one conversation going, and even then it's not easy) and I've also got Telegram - which is okay for 'text message' type conversations, but I'm not sure I'd like to use it to argue out why X is better than Y. So on that sense, Slack does quite well ;-)
We have a Thinkgizmos something-or-other - it cleans our kitchen/diner very nicely. I don't know if the Roombas have this problem, but in ours there's a little box that needs emptying from time to time - it seems to fill up with fluff, crumbs, hair etc. If they could make an app-controlled version of my robot that didn't have this problem, then I might be interested ;-)
FWIW, our vacuum was about £150, much less than the £300+ for a roomba. I can't say if it's better or worse, but it does clean pretty well, so in that regard, it meets requirements. It also doesn't have any sort of network connection - AFAIK, you can't even update the software via USB or anything. Honestly, I'm fine with that - sure, a new release might save 15 minutes out of an hours cleaning time, but if it gets clean, then it gets clean, and I'm not going to worry about the time it takes while I'm asleep.
Whenever Trump uses any superlative, he's essentially lying about it. "We're going to make the best golf course in the world" (or similar - can't be arsed to look it up) - not true.
"Working on major Trade Deal with the United Kingdom. Could be very big & exciting. JOBS! The E.U. is very protectionist with the U.S. STOP!" - means "working on a small deal, which will probably fuck over as many people as it helps"
"A big, beautiful wall" - well, I think we know how that one is going ;-)
Trump-slagging aside, my point is, if he can do it, then why can't we all (Tim Cook included)? We're in the era of 'fake news', so just bluff your way as much as you need and let the fact checkers pour over your work at a later date.
Yep, idiots - that's who. Oh, and people who are so desperate for a job they can't get one anywhere else.
Once enough of them have 'voluntarily' signed up, it'll become 'best practice' and 'commonplace' and so mandatory.
That's why we're getting as many as we can ;-)
...and the proposed regulations only target flying vehicles over 250grams.
I was gonna say something similar... you guys have a whole slew of agencies who should be all over this - DHS, NSA, CIA, your new cyber whatsit, and probably half a dozen others. That all that in mind, how does an industry body successfully lobby for less regulation to be placed upon it?
I both do and don't understand their proposed model - you get charged because you're using the site more. That sounds good in principle, because you're charging by usage. But you're encouraging less use, which invites people to google for whatever they want to read, which naturally takes them out of facebook.
Zuck is a lot richer than me, so I'm sure I can't tell him much about how to make money. This all seems very weird though.
Having a dedicated button that you can't configure is rather arrogant. If you could configure it to open any assistant or other program then Samsung would get stats about just how unpopular Bixby really is. They've always made their utter shit software uninstallable though, so this is nothing new on their part.
I have a long-since abandoned Galaxy Note tablet - getting no updates from Samsung because they can't be arsed. If you accidentally press the home button too long it opens up the 'samsung assistant' - and what an utter piece of shit that is. Unusable is a generous description.
As for 'deep learning', I'd trust Google to actually implement some sort of improvement over time 1000 times more than Samsung. Samsung have a long, long history of crap software abandoned in favour of the Next Big Thing, which they seem to pick by flicking through recent copies of PC World magazine.
I'll be sticking with my Wiley Fox phone - less than half the price of the equivalent Samsung, and so far, only a small amount of uninstallable crapware (not including some of the google stuff in android I'd rather not have).
...or worse... asking for you to enter a password twice in order to authenticate!!
(Microsoft did this on Windows NT when connecting to a wifi network - and despite numerous Service Packs, never fixed it)
For things like credit card numbers, masking isn't necessary, as you're most likely copying the numbers off the card right in front of you. However, I guess it can mask when you move on to the next field - not great UX, but a reasonable compromise IMHO.
Why not 'charge by the pound'? That way, you charge based on the wear and tear of the pavement, and you promote healthier living.
No one need take drugs that are 'expired'. The point is that we can print a longer expiry date on the box *if* we bother to test that drugs longevity. We don't bother because it costs the drug companies money to do so. The trouble is, it costs absolutely everyone money not to do that testing.
It's true, we're 'too rich' to worry about the longevity of things. However, can't we use a tiny amount of that wealth to extend the usable lifespan of drugs where it's easy to do so? If a drug is tested to be stable, even when stored in someone's kitchen cabinet for years on end, then why not regulate that it should have a longer lifespan printed on it? Ultimately, it just comes down to money - "we" don't want to spend the money doing the testing.
My wife used to work in Pharma, so I have some knowledge of the plethora of rules they have to follow.
I wonder though, if a new drug could initially be sold with (say) a 1 year expiration, but in subsequent years the batches have longer and longer lifespans such that an old drug (say, Neurofen) could have a 10 year shelf-life and have the tests to back it up. This isn't going to work so easily for niche drugs, or even a lot of prescription drugs because the sales volumes aren't high enough - but I'll bet it would still save the world a lot of money if you look at it all 'net'.
I'm sure this would have some detrimental effect on drug companies profits - but I'd guess that once Neurofen went out of patent the margins dropped a good chunk, so to some extent putting longer shelf life on it wouldn't make it drop all that much further. Of course, I have no maths, or even wikipedia to back up my claims, but it 'feels' like it might be reasonable.
As a parent, I can somewhat sympathise. I mean, if my kids search online for some pictures of people with no clothes on, then ostensibly that's not too bad. I mean, they may get unrealistic expectations of how they and others should look, but hey ho - to some extent that's a manageable problem.
The problem with the Internet is that in doing that search/viewing, there's a very good chance you're also going to be exposed to some content that's way, way more hardcore than you're ready to see or think about. There are some scenes in that Nicolas Cage film, 8MM which even as a middle aged adult I find a bit disturbing. I'd really rather my kids didn't have to accidentally find anything like that before they're ready.
All that said, as a parent, it's my job to protect my children from things I think may harm them, and it's also my job to let them explore their boundaries and to help them if they go a bit too far. I also take it as my job to keep the f'ing government the hell away from the Internet - I want the whole Internet, not some filtered piece of crap controlled by some shitheads in Whitehall. We've got a prime minister who thinks running through a corn field is the most naughty thing she's ever done - heaven help us when she discovers people take drugs, drunk, fall over in the street and vomit in doorways. Let alone that that may be curious about what other people do with each other 'behind closed doors'.
...prepaid cards don't pass the same checks - it's not just that you can enter a card number - it's that you can enter a CREDIT card number. To have one of those, you need to:
1) Be 18
OR
2) Steal your dad's card number
Given that most porn isn't even a UK business, I see this having an effect on maybe 0.1% of the porn available on the internet.That weird kid in school is still going to have loads of it on his phone and will be ready to trade - same as it ever was.
An ex-smoker once told me that you get over the craving for a cigarette after one or two puffs, but smoke the rest of it anyway. It's a bit like that with "single serving" anything too - in my anecdotal experience, most 'single servings' are about 30% bigger than you actually need (and when I visit the USA I'm always amazed how much bigger 'single servings' of things are there compared to Europe).
For example, a 330ml can of drink - I love the very occasional diet coke (or recent new favourite is diet pepsi with ginger) - I'll have maybe one a 2-4 weeks. I've started to pour it into a glass and throw half of it away. I'm finding it's still enough to get the enjoyment, and I feel satisfied by it, but I'm only getting half of the not-calories and whatever else that's not good for me.
Likewise sugar that you might put in tea/coffee. I don't add any sugar any more, but sugar lumps are like a properly decent sized spoon of sugar (as are little bags of sugar). If I used a spoon I'd take a good deal less (and if you come to my house and ask for sugar in a drink, I'd give you as much as I used to take way-back-in-the-day - ie. less than a lump).
Whenever I think of stuff like this, I can hear my mum saying "they're just trying to sell you more of ", which she said to me in relation to laundry detergent, when she was teaching me to use the washing machine when I was a kid. Even there, a convenient 'ball' or whatever is actually way more detergent than you need unless you really stack your washer to the max.
So my point is... corporations can't be trusted to define what a 'single serving' of anything actually is - even if convention agrees with them (like 330ml is the convention for cans of drink). A glass of water can be any size and still be perfectly good for you - that's not true of pretty much anything else.
Right now I'm in a room we didn't get around to refurbishing yet. My desk is a mess, the wallpaper is horrible, and it's generally a bit of a dumping ground in here. I'm fine with it though - when I'm facing the computer, all that stuff behind me doesn't phase me at all.
However, when we were renovating other bits of the house this room wasn't available, so I used to work in a shared work space in town (maybe 15-20 minutes walk from here). That had all the features you mention - clear, empty, quiet, etc. It also had a kitchenette to go to if you wanted a cuppa (so a handy mental break from your desk). That place cost £25/day for an ad-hoc 'turn up when you like' sort of arrangement. I could have negotiated a lower rate if I committed time. Contrast to £32 return train ticket (which then also consumes another 2 additional hours of travel time, on top of the 20 to get to town), and it's actually a pretty good deal.
The thing I most appreciate about home working is the lack of commute. Not having to do that saves me time which means I get time to have breakfast and some playtime before bed with the kids. It also saves me a good deal of stress. Not walking to and fro does mean I need to get exercise in other ways though, which can be one of those things you never get around to without some self-discipline.
I'd have to agree - it would be hugely arrogant to assume Mars is devoid of life, just because we've got some ideas about a few things we've observed from outside Mars. Once we've done a proper survey of every nook and cranny, cave and hole, then maybe we can say it, but until then not so much. We can't predict everything we find on earth, and so how could we do it for a planet of which we have a relatively minuscule understanding?
I'd imagine the solution would be the sort of walk-in space suits Nasa were developing for the moon. The idea being that the suit is sterile on arrival, and stays outside the building throughout the visit. The human sort of steps into it and detaches it from the building to walk about. That way, the human stays wrapped in the suit, and the outside of the suit never comes into contact with humans.
I was going to say something like this: https://www.neowin.net/forum/t...
I agree - although Netflix is worse.
Amazon isn't terrible for stumbling over something you might want to watch. They really, really need to make a way to only show free stuff though (even just a "row" of free stuff would be a good start. They also need the 'profile' feature of Netflix so my kids can look at something age-appropriate (and can't see stuff I'm not going to pay for).
I read the jist of what he's saying not so much as "we should be able to view source" but "we need a way for newbies to get online". To some extent I agree with him - the webdev I've ever done has been so unintuitive and tedious I can't imagine why anyone would ever want to be a webdev.
To elaborate, I find HTML pretty straight forward. It's pretty clear what you're supposed to be doing. However, once you start needing CSS, then things get considerably less intuitive. CSS means that the ordering in HTML is somewhat irrelevant, although in some cases, even though the CSS is re-ordering things on the screen, the HTML ordering is still important. That's confusing. Then browser differences make the whole thing really, really annoying because you get it all working in your favourite browser and try it in another and it looks hideous, or worse, it looks fine, but a banner or heading is sized differently and so it looks weird. Worse still is you try it in the same browser on a different OS and it looks different in another way. Getting anything to look right in all cases is (it seems to me) a hard problem.
Once you've got all that straight, then try adding in some Javascript. It's not a great language to get started in, and it too has so many weird foibles that "real" programming languages don't. Testing it works is hard too because of browser differences, screen differences etc. You can't really even have unit tests on non-UI-affecting stuff. If you want to do anything more formal, with proper testing regimes and so on, then you're into a really complex development process with some pretty exotic tools.
So... after all that... yeah, a simpler 'web' would be no bad thing. Getting there would be near impossible though - making a replacement for CSS and Javascript sounds like a noble endeavour, but the world has too much investment in them to want to switch any time soon.