I'm hanging out waiting for augmented reality - I want a way to sit back in my chair and be able to look at the worlds biggest monitor, which has decent resolution and can have all my (current) windows side-by-side with room to spare. When I look down I want to see my actual keyboard and mouse and I want to be able to see my hands so I can co-ordinate them onto the keys properly. Then I'll get to work. If my wife walks in, I can just turn around and see her, and hopefully not look like a complete twat with some stupid contraption stuck to my face. Extra bonus points if it can make it look like my wife is naked every time I look at her, but that may get a bit confusing if the kids or neighbours are around. When I look out of the window I want my eyes to relax so they can see long distance, although I guess I'd accept it brightening up the weather sometimes, that might be nice.
VR though? no thanks, the world is mostly a nice enough place to be most of the time.
Just think of the poor, hand-to-mouth, hard working middle men such as record companies and their industry representatives (RIAA, BPI, etc). How are they gonna afford five-star food and lodgings and to pay off governments unless Spotify burns to the ground in a mountain of debt?
Not helping the entitled is really about the worst thing anyone can do, and $deity knows it. I strongly recommend you start only 'consuming' music from approved providers. Choice is not a virtue.
If Google paid to get Yelp content on Google Search results, then there's clearly some value in that content. If Google use that to promote their own reviews service, and eventually end up with enough content of their own that they don't need Yelp, then they have two options (in the eyes of anti-monopoly regulators):
1) Show their own reviews, but also, and in approximately equal measure, promote other companies reviews (and seeing as Yelp leads the market in that area, that means showing a lot of Yelp on search results) 2) Go to court and duke it out there
Turn this around to your own view point: Lets say you've got a blog all about fishing. I happen to run the biggest fishing related website on the Internet. I come to you and ask to put your content on my site in certain situations (to fill in some gaps in my own content) - and you agree. However, when placing your content on my site, I advertise to my users that they could write up stuff like this on my website's knowledgebase wiki (and earn points which could win prizes).
A couple of years go by and my wiki is looking pretty awesome. I've got nearly all the same information on it as you've got on your blog, so I terminate our agreement. Suddenly, you don't get income from me, and don't get anywhere near the levels of traffic you used to, so get less advertising income too. Wouldn't you look to try to get some sort of redress against me for my somewhat underhanded business practices?
Turn this out a third way (maybe a bit more tenuous, but here goes)... Let's say your favourite political party is blue. Would the world be a better place if blue took over the entire country and apart from maybe a couple of seats, entirely wiped out the red, yellow and green parties? Would it really be better in a few years time?
Kanye West is Tidal, on account of it's proximity to the Pacific ocean. Kanye East is in-land, although has a lake along one edge of it, so looks 'watery' but is not Tidal.
"jayzed" (or "jayzee", depending on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be on) is just a way of saying it's not the letters from A-I. As you know, AI is nearly magic, but clever people like Stephen Hawking have been warning of it's potential downsides.
Rusty Trombone is a guy from New York, originally called Rusty Patterson, but changed his name on account of being a reasonably talented jazz musician (go look him up - he's on most of the music streaming sites).
WTF is a government facility used by the EPA - it's a Water Testing Facility.
This was mostly run by the City of London Police. This is a police force that has responsibility for about 1 square mile of London. That area has almost no residents, so it's primarily paid for by businesses.
The City Police are a bit short of work to do, and a bit over-financed (is my belief). They 'crusade' against copyright infringement and now about scam phone calls. In theory this is no bad thing - after all, some scammers are off to jail. However, we have another organisation called the National Crime Agency who *should* be doing this sort of work (or at the very least should be leading it). After all, it's a national/international problem, and it doesn't originate in, or really affect the City of London (square mile) very much (arguably less than most other areas of the UK). The problem is that the City of London police have no oversight from ordinary people, and so to some extent are free to do as they please.
As I've said before, I think the City of London should probably be abolished in its current form, and the City of London police should almost definitely be folded into the Metropolitan Police (who look after the rest of Greater London). Whatever the City of London Police is doing like this should be done by the NCA, and wherever this funding surplus is coming from either needs to be refunded or the money given to the Metropolitan police instead.
Well, bully for you with your own natural gas supply. Ours partly comes from Russia - it's not too hard to imagine the price or scarcity of that supply going up in the near future.
Going off grid only makes sense if it's cheaper than the grid. The grid really ought to be able to do a better job of it than any of us can, especially if the whole customer base used (say) 50% less than they do now. At the moment, home carbon/pollution costs aren't really counted by anyone - if they were, then your generator looks a lot less appealing, especially as pound-for-pound it runs far dirtier than a gas power station can/should.
As for the argument that only the rich will go off grid - probably true. Either you have to buy/rent the renewables to do it yourself, or you pay the electricity company to do it for you. That doesn't seem like it's penalising the poor too much, although it could turn into that if 90% of the population was off grid. The only way that could really make sense is if the market was skewed sufficiently though.
Actually, having a mundane job teaching people something means that the real estate or stock market are not your primary income (even though it may be 2x what you get from teaching). Depending on your tax laws, that can mean that all your real estate income is considered 'capital gains', and taxed as such. If you stop teaching, then it's capital gains and income, which can mean you end up paying more tax. In some jurisdictions having 100% of your income from capital sources can be enough to suspect criminal behaviour (because the state just can't understand how someone doesn't have a 9-5 job that pays a regular salary).
Oh no, us international folks already knew lots of rich americans live in disgusting houses. There are plenty of articles about them already, it's just that they say "look at this amazing place" where this guy said "house boner" and whatnot.
I just googled "top ten most expensive houses in la" and found this right at the top of the results: https://la.curbed.com/2017/1/2...
Sadly, no arrows and slagging off, but you can still marvel at just how gaudy the rich seem to like their houses.
Anti-apple product bashing such as this just simply won't work here on/. The formula to stick to is to link to an article that praises the worst piece of apple-crap ever as the most awe-inspiring and amazing gadget ever created. Then let the comments slag it off.
Oh, and we like an actual article to ignore, not just a mobile twitter link.
I was actually going to same much the same thing (although as a Brit, I have no direct knowledge at all). My take on it was that during the soviet era (and even for a few years afterwards), things like CPU resource were so scarce or expensive that if you wanted to write code, you had to be super-efficient at it. To do that meant thinking around problems in unusual ways.
Western programmers could just import a huge code library they didn't understand and have their 486+FPU run it quickly. Meanwhile, Soviet/Russian coders had to make the whole thing work on something more akin to a 8086 or maybe a Z81, by doing all manner of mental gymnastics and 'hacks' in code.
I seem to remember the Apple Newton's handwriting recognition code was written by Russians. If true, it's a nice demonstration - writing something pretty hard on a necessarily small, low power architecture and not even having the whole system free to do it either.
Whilst all of that was several years ago, it takes a few generations to 'wash out' the knowledge of the past, and even longer if you're actively trying to maintain it.
Personally, I find Slack to be very usable. Contrast to Microsoft Teams, Lync, Skype for Business or Lifesize (all 'enterprise' chat systems) - they all suck at chat in various ways. Lync is sort of okay, but the version I used to use didn't have tabs. Teams is so godawful I can't imagine anyone using it for long. Skype for business looks like one of those website chat boxes, and Lifesize is similarly awful. None of those products has any easy way for ordinary users or developers to integrate with something they care about (eg. monitoring systems, todo lists, or any other system that might like a chat tool). Slack fits the bill nicely.
Now, is it worth $9bn? I doubt it, but then I don't value companies.
Don't buy anything in Gartner's 'magic quadrant' - don't even allow the vendor to give it to you for an extended free trial. The magic quadrant should be considered "death-knell of any organisation that uses it".
While you're at it, don't do the 'best practice' of buying your most expensive software products on the golf course either.
What is this "explosion in quality online content" of which you speak?
Do you mean re-makes of old stuff, endless sequels and prequals, and more films where Tom Cruise is a super-ninja-spy who takes down the entire world single handedly? If so, I think maybe you're mistaken.
There are some nice things around (House of Cards, Black Sails, and maybe Lord of the Rings), but I must be missing this 'explosion', even though we have Netflix, Amazon and Freesat.
...in fact, for LGBT equality, every citizen must have been educated about how it's wrong to discriminate.
So, it may only affect 0.1% of the population or whatever, but it requires 100% of the population to make a change. Just like any other kinds of discrimination.
Apple removed the I Am Rich app (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich), without official response, by presumably because it was somewhat unbecoming for a nice app store like Apple. Thus, they should be removing this sort of thing too - unless it demonstrably does actually do some useful anti-virus function, then they should remove it. If it does actually do something of some use, then I guess we can argue that it's dramatically over-priced, but that's about all.
The tight-rope Apple has to walk is "remove too many and lose revenue" versus "remove too few and be seen as a dangerous place, and lose revenue". The former has a far smaller PR fallout that the latter, although requires a bit more effort on their part.
As I said on the other version of it - hacking is hard. I know the basics, and yet for me to hack a vulverable webcam would probably take me days of dedicated work. I could of course buy suitable tools to do it automatically, or I could enlist the help of a company to do it for me.
The problem with that is of course that only the rich will be doing the 'hacking back'. You and I simply won't have the resources, and so we're at the mercy of the big corps who 'have reasonable suspicion' of us hacking them. How on earth diplomatic missions expect to do any useful work when various companies are hacking allies, enemies and all in between at their whim remains to be seen.
To make any money, they need a much more compelling product. At the moment, a measurable number of people get "all" the followers. 99% of people only get their friends as followers, and maybe not even that many. As such, for most people, the only way to get any attention is to be a troll or whatever - low value tweets designed to inflame or defame. Since your account has 5 followers, you can easily ditch it (or let it get banned) and start a new one.
On the other hand, celebrities and famous/interesting people value their accounts highly. They've only got it all to lose though - they're not trolling or inflaming arguments, they're just posting their own brand of whatever it is they post. They just get loads of abuse from the low-value accounts.
Thus, by accidental design, Twitter has an inherent imbalance - the people you want to retain are the biggest targets of the kind of activity you want to suppress. Suppressing bad activities is as good as impossible because the people doing it think nothing of just rotating accounts.
Possibly the only was for Twitter to 'survive' is to create a reputation system similar to/. karma. However, followers and retweets are about as unreliable a measure of 'reputation' as they come, so they'd need some other tools to get reputation information, and they'd need to make it low-value-rotated-accounts proof too. Not easy to do, but I don't imagine impossible either.
As for the 'co-op' - it's gonna have to be a penny stock before any investors will go for that idea. By that time though, it'll probably be a dead platform - although we'll see, it may fail in the market faster than its users can be convinced to go elsewhere. Certainly, governments are queuing up to find ways to give them higher costs of doing business.
...not really - explosive doesn't look like the inside of a statue, or like any other kind of tourist tat when you're looking at them with the x-ray. There's something to be said for them looking a bit like liquids, but most liquids are easily identifiable as liquids, and so not explosives. If your statue looks like an explosive, then you won't be allowed to take it on (and you'll probably find yourself in a lot of trouble unless you can show genuine innocence of any intent - eg. "I bought it at the gift shop").
As for 'better scanning' - any suggestions what we should use? If you do, form a company and sell it - you'll get very rich in short order.
...because under x-ray, an explosive is super-dense, where as book pages are not. Your book will get spotted very quickly.
However, it turns out that batteries are very similar to explosives under x-ray. As a result, you have to separate your laptop, as it has a big battery or maybe a big explosive in it. The x-ray person looks at the laptop and decides if it's legitimate or not - the x-ray shows up screen, keyboard, circuits etc, so to some extent it's possible to make a reasonable guess if a laptop is actually a laptop. I have no idea what would happen if you construct your own laptop with an RPi and a few other bits and pieces. I also don't know if you could make a battery that was powerful enough to show the laptop working, but left plenty of space for some explosive alongside. I suspect that even though battery and explosive look very similar, they're different enough that it would be spotted.
The bottom line is that if you're looking for explosives, then batteries do really cause a problem for you. If you're flying aeroplanes, then batteries are a concern for you too as they can, without warning or obvious reason* start to heat up and catch fire. They make their own oxygen when they burn too, so the low air pressure doesn't help you.
If your laptop is wrapped up in your suitcase, then it's actually harder to detect if it's got an explosive instead of a battery because it may not be exactly 'side on' when viewed by the x-ray scanner. Also, you may have wrapped it in your finest super-flammable clothes, so if it were to be a legitimate laptop, it might still burn very fiercely, even at low-air pressures. Putting fire suppression into the hold is an expensive business and might not be terribly effective because by the time the fire's "got out" of a slightly protective suitcase it's already pretty big and hot.
There's been suggestion that you'd take your laptop through security and to the gate where they'd take it off you and put it in a special box in the hold. This is almost the worst of all possible solutions because first of all, unless they frisk everyone and check every bag at the gate, there's no guarantee everyone's playing along. Second, if one of those laptops does decide to catch fire, it's got plenty of other batteries around to help fuel the fire. You'd get a sort of chain reaction and before long the tech-packed box is practically molten and burning your plane down. It's slightly more possible that fire suppression might work inside the box mind you, although I believe you need to cool a burning battery to make it stop trying to catch fire again when your back is turned, so it's still questionable how such fire suppression might work (I guess it's very cold outside when you're high up, so maybe they could suck up some of that air and vent the box with it?). What happens when you start to descend is an open question. Either way, it's a long way from "throw it in a box and put it in the hold" like they do with your baby buggy or other stuff, so it's going to need some careful consideration by the *AAs of the world, the manufacturers and airlines if this is a solution that they'll ever adopt.
So in short... it's hard to see what they're going to propose that is actually going to do any good.
* I know the physics well enough to know there is a reason, but from an airline's point of view, it might as well be a random event.
Google Cloud stuff (Compute Engine, etc) only works in Chrome though. If you choose to buy Google Cloud, then you have to take Chrome, or else you can't control your account.
I can get that its easier to make a UI work in one browser than many, but I'd have much less of a problem with it if the one browser it worked with wasn't made by the same company as the UI. It's Microsoft all over again.
It's probably more akin to breaking in to a bank to get your wallet though. Kicking someone's door in to gain entry isn't that hard, and I'll bet about 80% of the population could do it if they really needed to. But breaking into a computer is well beyond 95+% of the population - I know technically what's required, but it would still take me an awful lot of dedicated time and effort to do. Thus, I'd need to hire a pro - and they don't come cheap (unless you're a big company, in which case you already hired a few of them).
So aside from collateral damage, which seems like it's almost a desired outcome, you've also got the problem of "justice for the rich" (or rather, corporations throwing their weight about).
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hanging out waiting for augmented reality - I want a way to sit back in my chair and be able to look at the worlds biggest monitor, which has decent resolution and can have all my (current) windows side-by-side with room to spare. When I look down I want to see my actual keyboard and mouse and I want to be able to see my hands so I can co-ordinate them onto the keys properly. Then I'll get to work. If my wife walks in, I can just turn around and see her, and hopefully not look like a complete twat with some stupid contraption stuck to my face. Extra bonus points if it can make it look like my wife is naked every time I look at her, but that may get a bit confusing if the kids or neighbours are around. When I look out of the window I want my eyes to relax so they can see long distance, although I guess I'd accept it brightening up the weather sometimes, that might be nice.
VR though? no thanks, the world is mostly a nice enough place to be most of the time.
Just think of the poor, hand-to-mouth, hard working middle men such as record companies and their industry representatives (RIAA, BPI, etc). How are they gonna afford five-star food and lodgings and to pay off governments unless Spotify burns to the ground in a mountain of debt?
Not helping the entitled is really about the worst thing anyone can do, and $deity knows it. I strongly recommend you start only 'consuming' music from approved providers. Choice is not a virtue.
Nothing wrong? I'll let a judge be the judge of that! (and if we can't find one, then we'll settle for the Daily Mail)
Therein lies the potential merit here...
If Google paid to get Yelp content on Google Search results, then there's clearly some value in that content. If Google use that to promote their own reviews service, and eventually end up with enough content of their own that they don't need Yelp, then they have two options (in the eyes of anti-monopoly regulators):
1) Show their own reviews, but also, and in approximately equal measure, promote other companies reviews (and seeing as Yelp leads the market in that area, that means showing a lot of Yelp on search results)
2) Go to court and duke it out there
Turn this around to your own view point: Lets say you've got a blog all about fishing. I happen to run the biggest fishing related website on the Internet. I come to you and ask to put your content on my site in certain situations (to fill in some gaps in my own content) - and you agree. However, when placing your content on my site, I advertise to my users that they could write up stuff like this on my website's knowledgebase wiki (and earn points which could win prizes).
A couple of years go by and my wiki is looking pretty awesome. I've got nearly all the same information on it as you've got on your blog, so I terminate our agreement. Suddenly, you don't get income from me, and don't get anywhere near the levels of traffic you used to, so get less advertising income too. Wouldn't you look to try to get some sort of redress against me for my somewhat underhanded business practices?
Turn this out a third way (maybe a bit more tenuous, but here goes)... Let's say your favourite political party is blue. Would the world be a better place if blue took over the entire country and apart from maybe a couple of seats, entirely wiped out the red, yellow and green parties? Would it really be better in a few years time?
Let me try to help...
Kanye West is Tidal, on account of it's proximity to the Pacific ocean. Kanye East is in-land, although has a lake along one edge of it, so looks 'watery' but is not Tidal.
"jayzed" (or "jayzee", depending on which side of the Atlantic you happen to be on) is just a way of saying it's not the letters from A-I. As you know, AI is nearly magic, but clever people like Stephen Hawking have been warning of it's potential downsides.
Rusty Trombone is a guy from New York, originally called Rusty Patterson, but changed his name on account of being a reasonably talented jazz musician (go look him up - he's on most of the music streaming sites).
WTF is a government facility used by the EPA - it's a Water Testing Facility.
I hope that clears things up for you.
Rant all you like, but pellet burners != wood stoves.
Oh, and quoting the daily mail for anything except "$celeb boob flash at $function" is likely peddling 'fake news'.
Have a nice day :-)
This was mostly run by the City of London Police. This is a police force that has responsibility for about 1 square mile of London. That area has almost no residents, so it's primarily paid for by businesses.
The City Police are a bit short of work to do, and a bit over-financed (is my belief). They 'crusade' against copyright infringement and now about scam phone calls. In theory this is no bad thing - after all, some scammers are off to jail. However, we have another organisation called the National Crime Agency who *should* be doing this sort of work (or at the very least should be leading it). After all, it's a national/international problem, and it doesn't originate in, or really affect the City of London (square mile) very much (arguably less than most other areas of the UK). The problem is that the City of London police have no oversight from ordinary people, and so to some extent are free to do as they please.
As I've said before, I think the City of London should probably be abolished in its current form, and the City of London police should almost definitely be folded into the Metropolitan Police (who look after the rest of Greater London). Whatever the City of London Police is doing like this should be done by the NCA, and wherever this funding surplus is coming from either needs to be refunded or the money given to the Metropolitan police instead.
Well, bully for you with your own natural gas supply. Ours partly comes from Russia - it's not too hard to imagine the price or scarcity of that supply going up in the near future.
Going off grid only makes sense if it's cheaper than the grid. The grid really ought to be able to do a better job of it than any of us can, especially if the whole customer base used (say) 50% less than they do now. At the moment, home carbon/pollution costs aren't really counted by anyone - if they were, then your generator looks a lot less appealing, especially as pound-for-pound it runs far dirtier than a gas power station can/should.
As for the argument that only the rich will go off grid - probably true. Either you have to buy/rent the renewables to do it yourself, or you pay the electricity company to do it for you. That doesn't seem like it's penalising the poor too much, although it could turn into that if 90% of the population was off grid. The only way that could really make sense is if the market was skewed sufficiently though.
wrong Korea, but nevermind.
Actually, having a mundane job teaching people something means that the real estate or stock market are not your primary income (even though it may be 2x what you get from teaching). Depending on your tax laws, that can mean that all your real estate income is considered 'capital gains', and taxed as such. If you stop teaching, then it's capital gains and income, which can mean you end up paying more tax. In some jurisdictions having 100% of your income from capital sources can be enough to suspect criminal behaviour (because the state just can't understand how someone doesn't have a 9-5 job that pays a regular salary).
Oh no, us international folks already knew lots of rich americans live in disgusting houses. There are plenty of articles about them already, it's just that they say "look at this amazing place" where this guy said "house boner" and whatnot.
I just googled "top ten most expensive houses in la" and found this right at the top of the results: https://la.curbed.com/2017/1/2...
Sadly, no arrows and slagging off, but you can still marvel at just how gaudy the rich seem to like their houses.
Anti-apple product bashing such as this just simply won't work here on /. The formula to stick to is to link to an article that praises the worst piece of apple-crap ever as the most awe-inspiring and amazing gadget ever created. Then let the comments slag it off.
Oh, and we like an actual article to ignore, not just a mobile twitter link.
ahh.. concrete tyres, and rubber roads - you could be onto something ;-) No more kids with grazed knees from falling over crossing the road either.
I was actually going to same much the same thing (although as a Brit, I have no direct knowledge at all). My take on it was that during the soviet era (and even for a few years afterwards), things like CPU resource were so scarce or expensive that if you wanted to write code, you had to be super-efficient at it. To do that meant thinking around problems in unusual ways.
Western programmers could just import a huge code library they didn't understand and have their 486+FPU run it quickly. Meanwhile, Soviet/Russian coders had to make the whole thing work on something more akin to a 8086 or maybe a Z81, by doing all manner of mental gymnastics and 'hacks' in code.
I seem to remember the Apple Newton's handwriting recognition code was written by Russians. If true, it's a nice demonstration - writing something pretty hard on a necessarily small, low power architecture and not even having the whole system free to do it either.
Whilst all of that was several years ago, it takes a few generations to 'wash out' the knowledge of the past, and even longer if you're actively trying to maintain it.
Personally, I find Slack to be very usable. Contrast to Microsoft Teams, Lync, Skype for Business or Lifesize (all 'enterprise' chat systems) - they all suck at chat in various ways. Lync is sort of okay, but the version I used to use didn't have tabs. Teams is so godawful I can't imagine anyone using it for long. Skype for business looks like one of those website chat boxes, and Lifesize is similarly awful. None of those products has any easy way for ordinary users or developers to integrate with something they care about (eg. monitoring systems, todo lists, or any other system that might like a chat tool). Slack fits the bill nicely.
Now, is it worth $9bn? I doubt it, but then I don't value companies.
Don't buy anything in Gartner's 'magic quadrant' - don't even allow the vendor to give it to you for an extended free trial. The magic quadrant should be considered "death-knell of any organisation that uses it".
While you're at it, don't do the 'best practice' of buying your most expensive software products on the golf course either.
What is this "explosion in quality online content" of which you speak?
Do you mean re-makes of old stuff, endless sequels and prequals, and more films where Tom Cruise is a super-ninja-spy who takes down the entire world single handedly? If so, I think maybe you're mistaken.
There are some nice things around (House of Cards, Black Sails, and maybe Lord of the Rings), but I must be missing this 'explosion', even though we have Netflix, Amazon and Freesat.
...in fact, for LGBT equality, every citizen must have been educated about how it's wrong to discriminate.
So, it may only affect 0.1% of the population or whatever, but it requires 100% of the population to make a change. Just like any other kinds of discrimination.
Apple removed the I Am Rich app (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich), without official response, by presumably because it was somewhat unbecoming for a nice app store like Apple. Thus, they should be removing this sort of thing too - unless it demonstrably does actually do some useful anti-virus function, then they should remove it. If it does actually do something of some use, then I guess we can argue that it's dramatically over-priced, but that's about all.
The tight-rope Apple has to walk is "remove too many and lose revenue" versus "remove too few and be seen as a dangerous place, and lose revenue". The former has a far smaller PR fallout that the latter, although requires a bit more effort on their part.
...not least because the story is a dupe.
As I said on the other version of it - hacking is hard. I know the basics, and yet for me to hack a vulverable webcam would probably take me days of dedicated work. I could of course buy suitable tools to do it automatically, or I could enlist the help of a company to do it for me.
The problem with that is of course that only the rich will be doing the 'hacking back'. You and I simply won't have the resources, and so we're at the mercy of the big corps who 'have reasonable suspicion' of us hacking them. How on earth diplomatic missions expect to do any useful work when various companies are hacking allies, enemies and all in between at their whim remains to be seen.
To make any money, they need a much more compelling product. At the moment, a measurable number of people get "all" the followers. 99% of people only get their friends as followers, and maybe not even that many. As such, for most people, the only way to get any attention is to be a troll or whatever - low value tweets designed to inflame or defame. Since your account has 5 followers, you can easily ditch it (or let it get banned) and start a new one.
On the other hand, celebrities and famous/interesting people value their accounts highly. They've only got it all to lose though - they're not trolling or inflaming arguments, they're just posting their own brand of whatever it is they post. They just get loads of abuse from the low-value accounts.
Thus, by accidental design, Twitter has an inherent imbalance - the people you want to retain are the biggest targets of the kind of activity you want to suppress. Suppressing bad activities is as good as impossible because the people doing it think nothing of just rotating accounts.
Possibly the only was for Twitter to 'survive' is to create a reputation system similar to /. karma. However, followers and retweets are about as unreliable a measure of 'reputation' as they come, so they'd need some other tools to get reputation information, and they'd need to make it low-value-rotated-accounts proof too. Not easy to do, but I don't imagine impossible either.
As for the 'co-op' - it's gonna have to be a penny stock before any investors will go for that idea. By that time though, it'll probably be a dead platform - although we'll see, it may fail in the market faster than its users can be convinced to go elsewhere. Certainly, governments are queuing up to find ways to give them higher costs of doing business.
...not really - explosive doesn't look like the inside of a statue, or like any other kind of tourist tat when you're looking at them with the x-ray. There's something to be said for them looking a bit like liquids, but most liquids are easily identifiable as liquids, and so not explosives. If your statue looks like an explosive, then you won't be allowed to take it on (and you'll probably find yourself in a lot of trouble unless you can show genuine innocence of any intent - eg. "I bought it at the gift shop").
As for 'better scanning' - any suggestions what we should use? If you do, form a company and sell it - you'll get very rich in short order.
...because under x-ray, an explosive is super-dense, where as book pages are not. Your book will get spotted very quickly.
However, it turns out that batteries are very similar to explosives under x-ray. As a result, you have to separate your laptop, as it has a big battery or maybe a big explosive in it. The x-ray person looks at the laptop and decides if it's legitimate or not - the x-ray shows up screen, keyboard, circuits etc, so to some extent it's possible to make a reasonable guess if a laptop is actually a laptop. I have no idea what would happen if you construct your own laptop with an RPi and a few other bits and pieces. I also don't know if you could make a battery that was powerful enough to show the laptop working, but left plenty of space for some explosive alongside. I suspect that even though battery and explosive look very similar, they're different enough that it would be spotted.
The bottom line is that if you're looking for explosives, then batteries do really cause a problem for you. If you're flying aeroplanes, then batteries are a concern for you too as they can, without warning or obvious reason* start to heat up and catch fire. They make their own oxygen when they burn too, so the low air pressure doesn't help you.
If your laptop is wrapped up in your suitcase, then it's actually harder to detect if it's got an explosive instead of a battery because it may not be exactly 'side on' when viewed by the x-ray scanner. Also, you may have wrapped it in your finest super-flammable clothes, so if it were to be a legitimate laptop, it might still burn very fiercely, even at low-air pressures. Putting fire suppression into the hold is an expensive business and might not be terribly effective because by the time the fire's "got out" of a slightly protective suitcase it's already pretty big and hot.
There's been suggestion that you'd take your laptop through security and to the gate where they'd take it off you and put it in a special box in the hold. This is almost the worst of all possible solutions because first of all, unless they frisk everyone and check every bag at the gate, there's no guarantee everyone's playing along. Second, if one of those laptops does decide to catch fire, it's got plenty of other batteries around to help fuel the fire. You'd get a sort of chain reaction and before long the tech-packed box is practically molten and burning your plane down. It's slightly more possible that fire suppression might work inside the box mind you, although I believe you need to cool a burning battery to make it stop trying to catch fire again when your back is turned, so it's still questionable how such fire suppression might work (I guess it's very cold outside when you're high up, so maybe they could suck up some of that air and vent the box with it?). What happens when you start to descend is an open question. Either way, it's a long way from "throw it in a box and put it in the hold" like they do with your baby buggy or other stuff, so it's going to need some careful consideration by the *AAs of the world, the manufacturers and airlines if this is a solution that they'll ever adopt.
So in short... it's hard to see what they're going to propose that is actually going to do any good.
* I know the physics well enough to know there is a reason, but from an airline's point of view, it might as well be a random event.
Google Cloud stuff (Compute Engine, etc) only works in Chrome though. If you choose to buy Google Cloud, then you have to take Chrome, or else you can't control your account.
I can get that its easier to make a UI work in one browser than many, but I'd have much less of a problem with it if the one browser it worked with wasn't made by the same company as the UI. It's Microsoft all over again.
It's probably more akin to breaking in to a bank to get your wallet though. Kicking someone's door in to gain entry isn't that hard, and I'll bet about 80% of the population could do it if they really needed to. But breaking into a computer is well beyond 95+% of the population - I know technically what's required, but it would still take me an awful lot of dedicated time and effort to do. Thus, I'd need to hire a pro - and they don't come cheap (unless you're a big company, in which case you already hired a few of them).
So aside from collateral damage, which seems like it's almost a desired outcome, you've also got the problem of "justice for the rich" (or rather, corporations throwing their weight about).