Is the selling point of this just that it's easier to install than setting up a Windows 95 VM? ISTR someone already did a browser-based Win95 emulation years ago.
Yup, this basically takes the in-browser emulators written in JS (as you can find many of these to emulate older machine), but instead of being a webpage you load into your browser, it uses Electron to make an app out of it.
Is it legal?
In theory Microsoft is still around and they still owns the copyright on Win95. In practice, Microsoft probably barely gives a fuck about such an old OS that they have themselves deprecated so long ago, and I'm quite sure that over the decades, you've probably ended up owning some license to run it legally (e.g.: as part of a pre-installed laptop, as some MSDN license through your university/your employer, whatever...) Might even qualify under the "comedy" exception of whatever serves the equivalent of Fair use in your local jurisdiction.
Plus the whole thing is smaller than the giant katamari of javascript libraries loaded by any modern web page any way~~~
If your excuse is that fat fucks magically get double energy from the regular calories regular people eat,
No, I'm arguing that the amount of fat you store is only a small amount compared to all the calories in the food. There's a lot of these calories which will end up elsewhere (which includes, spending more energy (re)building/repairing the body, or even simply wasted).
Some people have slightly broken metabolism which might lead to slightly more fat storage that others. Blaming these people be calling them "fat fucks" won't help. The proper way would be to get adapted professional advice, from real specialists (instead of listening to internet trolls).
and I don't try to put 22 gallons in my Ducati. Not all at once anyway.
But your motorbike will mostly spend the gaz on propulsion, whereas you car can have a significantly drop in mileage if the alternator is solicited more by, e.g., a running A/C. Changing the input (gaz poured in) and the output (pushing the gaz pedal) won't affect both vehicle the same. Body biochemistry is complicated. Again, seek advice of a real professional.
$other_person has an easier time staying skinny than you. Lucky them.
Yup, I personally happen to have a broken thyroid gland (which can have very real impact on weight uptake). But I don't complain, I just compensate it properly so I can stay fit despite it.
and you can absolutely prevent yourself from gaining weight
Yes, you can indeed DO stuff to help staying away from morbid obesity...
by not eating more than you burn. Even if you feel a conservation of energy explanation, is too simple, it doesn't make it wrong.
And there lies the problem. By oversimplifying, you're reducing all overweight people to cry babies who simply lack the self discipline to not eat 2 gallon-sized buckets of mayonnaise per day, and the only step they walk in a day are to reach their car (and/or to their segway). And that to even consider anything but "eat less" is just a lame excuse that the "fatties" are making up to avoid putting any effort into it. That's not the proper way to do it.
If you have weight problems, the proper way is to talk to your doctor, let him eventually - according to needs - address you to a nutritionist. Or an endocrinologist if he thinks it's necessary. etc. You need to take everything into account and get the best approach adapted to the person (instead of just blaming them).
But that requires actually having a functional public health system. Oh, yeah, I forgot what you had in the US.
"The technology is basically just keeping the slow pace of incremental innovation"
As in "real soon now"
Actually, like I said in the next sentence, not *real soon*, but "soonish after a couple of decades of lots of small incremental steps of innovation*.
But given the circus show that is your politics in the US, nobody is interested in starting a half-century long slow development project, because they won't be around anymore to reap the glory.
(And for the record, here around in Europe, we probably won't be able to pull it off neither : We *would* be pretty capable to vote for a half-century budget for such research, but then we'll more or less waste all that budget to various sub-sub-sub-contracting chains, and divers countries squabbling for the privilege of playing some relevant role. See: ITER, etc. Eventually, the whole thing will run ridiculously over budget. Several times.)
(Maybe China *could* have the dedication to try to pull it. Or maybe their economy will hit a wall by then).
Or, more accurately, "nope".
There are no *technical* reasons for not doing it.
It doesn't violate any currently known law of physics, it doesn't require any exotic new not-yet-existing matter (unlike a space elevator, which is currently impossible in practice, at least until chemistry has invented a way to produce kilometer-long strands of carbon nanotubes at a cheap enough cost).
Lots of the technologies already exists and/or have been tested on reduced scale (only nuclear impulse propulsion, which *a* possible way to solve point 1 and 2 in one go, hasn't been in prototype yet. But RTG + various electro-magnetic-based propulsion (e.g.: ion thrusters) is the current way used points 1+2 are done in several probes. And the current preferred way to solve point 6 is simply using mass (put the water reservoir around the living quaters) instead of some fancy energy shield (like the Earth it self does, and thus leveraged by anything near-Earth like ISS). The remaining points in the list (4+5) describe stuff which e.g. is mostly everyday life on the ISS ).
It "only" requires spending the next 50 years to advance the current tech to the point of have a giant base that can do orbit exchange between mars and earth. Takes lots of time and a fuckton of money. But nobody is interested.
The technology is basically just keeping the slow pace of incremental innovation that up to now has given us things like the ISS.
The main problem is that eventually reaching the point mentioned by the above poster is going to take at least several decades of progressive innovations and require multiple year to build each successive station, and that slowness doesn't fit into the short-term needed for a publicity stunt within the 1 or 2 cycles of 4 years each that your US politics has.
Meanwhile, shooting people in (single use) tin cans is somethings that can be done quickly enough to be a somewhat viable publicity stunt (despite being completely useless from the technological and scientific point of view)
Calories eaten and absorbed minus calories burnt from exercise and resting metabolism will be stored as fat, sure.
Calories eaten is under everyones voluntary control. I'm not sure what your point is here.
His point is that the sentence is running for a bit longer than that.
Yes, "calories eaten", i.e.: things that you put into your mouth and chew on is more or less under voluntary control (though might be influenced by impulsive behaviours, etc.) But then you don't necessarily control how much of what's in there will get absorbed by the body. (though you can slightly influence the body's ability to uptake stuff, by changing the mix of what you eat. e.g.: Food's content of fiber has an influence of how fast it goes through your gut).
You can voluntarily decide to burn some calories by doing exercice, but you don't have a direct control of how much the body will decide to burn for the rest. Some might have indirect influence (doing lots of exercice on a regular basis, body will use more energy to make and maintain muscle mass, even while you rest), (your body burn calories to maintain temperature and you can influence that), but there are tons of other processes, where the body could decide to burn energy instead of storing it long term, on which you don't have lots of direct control.
That what the " {food eaten} - {calories burned} = {remaining fat} " crowd doesn't get.s When you look into the details, there are gazillion of various energy consuming processes going inside a body, most of which will have some impact on body mass distribution type, but which you can't directly control necessarily.
Your basic mistake boils down to thinking of the body as a "bathtub" model : water (=food) goes in through the faucet (=eating), water (=burned calories) goes out through the drain (=exercice), the balance determine how much water there's in the tub (=fat storage). It's a bit too oversimplified.
Something more realistic would be to imagine it as a conveyor belt. The belt rolls from your mouth (and the food on your plate) to the ass hole (and your toilet). Along the way there are dozens of worker on station, sometime picking things up (absorbing), sometime putting things down (excreting) and most of the time passing stuff among each other. Fat is just one guy making a pile of reservers, when instructed so (= include influence of tons of hormonal messages), and who can occasionally handle out packs or reserve whenever/if asked so by other guys working on the same chain. Physical effort is just one of the client that might request reserves from the fat guy.
In the best world, yes, it would have been good if the software was better written.
In the real world, you deal with what you have in your hands. When in the middle of an emergency, there's not much free time to try to rewrite a better software.
Deciding if maybe changing data plan would be a good idea, and maybe improving the software based on what was learned during this emergency, should be best left for after the emergency, once you have some time to deal with it.
Can someone please specify what limitations exactly (preferably with a link to an unsolved Firefox bug if available)? The Mozilla people promised they would match the old functionality wherever there was a clear need. Were they lying or have they just not finished yet?
Depends on the extension.
In the case of NoScript : all the necessary functionality has been successfully replicated (though, it took a few days, it wasn't available from day 1 of the XUL-less firefox). The web extension has the exact same capability as the XUL extension. The thing is, its author took the opportunity to also overhaul the interface and rewrite everything in the new style used by most web-extensions (HTML kind of side bars) instead of OS-like dialog boxes and windows. Most of the complains nowadays are people who would complain when then the new version isn't a pixel-pefect of the old one. (there's ongoing details about the UI rework on the author's blog).
FoxyProxy: Old XUL extension could possibly hook anything in the browser. For filtering purpose, most modern web extensions can normally filter domains only. For privacy reasons they can't see the full URLs. Thus some RegEx patterns that you might have used in the older version won't work any more (basically you won't be able to redirect different sub paths of websites to different proxies). Also, during the initial time, it wasn't possible to transfer the settings from the XUL extension to the WebExt one. Also here again the author took opportunity to redesign the UI - probably that's where the remaining criticism is nowaday.
Image Zoom : WebExtensions aren't allowed to hijack direct mouse button clicks. So instead of rightclick, you need to use alt+rightclick to do the wheel zoom thing.
uBlock, FSF's Privacy Badger, HTTPS everywhere, and countless others : work as-is. Some have been webextension for a long time, some are even available on Chrome, too.
Session Manager : need full access to the whole session of a tab to save it/re-load it. Again, most web extensions are isolated from the full state of a tab. You can't do Session Manager using the API offered by Web Extensions, and the author wasn't motivated to work with Mozilla to add API extensions to make Session Manager possible. Luckily for me, the build-in session managing of Firefox fills most my needs.
(I strongly suspect that Tab Mix and LiveHTTPHeaders hit the same kind of limitation - like needing access to the raw stream of connection - which aren't available to the API)
But mainly : old extensions written for XUL 10 years ago that the author hasn't touched since and has completely forgotten about, and which miraculously survived the multiple recent versions bump, won't automagically get converted to Webextensions.
So, lots of people end up with things the worked for them, and suddenly won't work anymore.
Priority given to service restoration and special consideration
According to TFA, they did get special consideration: "public safety customers have access to plans that do not have data throughput limitations".
The department just chose not to buy such a plan...
In a case of emergency, some human brain somewhere should have fired a couple of neurons and decided that : Okay, maybe given the circumstances, it won't be bad to override the normal behaviour of the system and make sure that the emergency services get the communications means they might need to handle to emergency
Though, depending on the way the company is organized, it might happen that the only guy with the power to take such a decision was busy vacationing on his yacht. Or the (IT) guy with the practical capability of flipping the correct switch to make it happen would have had his pants sued for breach of whatever protocol.
Wine is a layer in the middle that adds some inefficiency, compatibility issues and bugs of its own.
How much more so than GTK+ as "a layer in the middle" between an application and Xlib?
Much more, for the reason that GTK+ is a layer that provides high-level functionnality (I want a button, I want a window, I want a drop list, etc.) to the application, while itself talking to a low level interface (mostly used for blitting and rectangles filling).
What wine is doing is taking a certain low-level API and reconverting everything into a completely different low-level API.
It would be like if you took that Xlib API, but instead talking to the Xlib library it self, you talk to a separate layer that takes in Xlib API and translates it into something that is displayed using openGL, running on SDL, so that it could be used on some weird gaming console, because that GTK+ application is compiled with a GTK version hard-coded in that isn't supporting OpenGL.
Could be entirely solved by having that application built with GTK supporting OpenGL as a render back-end, but it cannot be done, because you have zero control on it, thus you need a rube goldberg layer of pancackes of middle layers to get the application working.
Wine is that adaptation layer.
That's why it would be great if eventually one day developers started to target Linux too.
But until then, there's the chicken-and-egg problem of linux not being a popular gaming platform, thus not worth spending resources on from the developers point of view, and in turn never getting popular because there are no games on it.
Thus...
How much of this issue goes away if a developer instructs quality control to treat Wine as a fully supported platform alongside Windows 7 and Windows 10? That's how BGB (Game Boy debugger), FCEUX (NES debugger), OpenMPT (sample based sequencer), and FamiTracker (chiptune sequencer) work: the developer ships Win32 binaries tested on both Windows and Wine.
Yup, developers at least starting to give attention to wine is a good intermediate step. That at least solves the "users won't pick up linux as a platform due to lack of games" part of the equation.
And who knows, maybe this will suddenly make steam-on-linux a popular platform (maybe because it could enable cheap linux "steambox" gaming consoles ?)
And once these "steambox" gaming console become popular enough to show on the radar of the devs, some will try putting effort into true native linux builds, eventually ?
Facebook is not inciting violence intentionnally, per-se. Facebook is just optimizing for profits, and due to their specific market (advertising, data mining, etc.) they need, as the above poster stated, they need to increase engagement (i.e.: keep more eyeballs focused on facebook, for further reselling)
And old studies done in the era of TV have already shown, the thing that increases the most engagement is emotions, more likely negative emotion, thus fear and violence.
Thus even if Facebook hasn't in a "james bond vilain-style" decided to promote violence for pure evil intents, just by having machine learning algorithms that try to feed whatever attract the most user attention, they'll eventually start to automatically promote violence.
What you are seeing is an unintended side effect of people having, for the first time in human history, the ability to instantly communicate with millions of other people, allowing then to speak out against things going on in the world that they are unhappy about,
It's not the "instant communication" part that is main culprit (though it contributes a bit). It's the filtering going on.
We're not in the beginning of the age of internet anymore.
You're not suddenly exposed directly to the speech of the other millions of people, anymore. That's long past ago (you can't download the whole web on a DVD anymore:-P ) You're not even exposed to a random / representative of the speech of some of that other million of people, neither. Specially not since commercial companies jumped in and they need to profit from their business
You're specifically exposed to that tiny fraction (tiny enough so that it can fit within the limited attention span of our monkey-brains) of the speech of that other million of people, that the companies' machine learning algorithms have determined to be the most likely to attract your attention and provoke you into staying around (further speaking your own idea).
Yes, the increase of content has (somewhat) had some influence on the way we communicate. (We've reached the point where we can't follow everything).
The current data tech giant (Facebook, Google, etc.) are extremely strongly shaping the kind of communication that is going between people. But they need profit, so they focus on whats the most profitable to them even if that fucks everything up.
Basically, the "information highways" have slowly transmorphed into the "kingdom of the few most attention-grabbing filthy tabloids".
such as civilized countries being overrun with third world filth.
Yeah, thank your for this nice demonstration of your opinions.
Facebook cannot magically convert idiots into reasonable and rational people. Facebook isn't responsible for this particular problem it is the users causing the problems.
Facebook has its share of responsibilities. Its AI algorithm is optimized to autonomously search for what will keep the users on the site the longest (so that the company has more eyeball time to sell to advertisers / more behaviour data to sell, and thus the company gets richer).
Old studies done since TV is "a thing" have already shown that the human mind will pay more attention to emotion-generating content, even more if these emotions are negative. Eventually, human mind tends to pay most attention to violence and extremes. (Probably an evolutionary advantage in the distant past, as paying attention to which member of the ape-pack got mauled by a tiger is more likely to provide you useful information to save your ass, than paying attention to how the flowers are beautiful).
Thus, by trying to give to viewer whatever is the most likely to keep their attention focused, the algorithms used by Facebook will independently rediscover the above, and will spontaneously (machine-) learn to provide even more extreme content, until each "echo chamber" one lock oneself in slowly devolves into a giant mess of extremism, violence and crazy conspiracy theories. All this without the AI even having a clear idea of *what* the content is, only have the statistical notion that it tend to retain attention.
Facebook devs where the one writing these algorithm without taking into account where it can lead, they do share a part of responsibilities.
If you or I lived there, we would probably find a modem somehow and also an internet provider that had dial-in lines. Living in the UK, the latter is not the easiest
An actual ISP with dial-in lines would be one possibility.
Another would be remotely connecting to a machine you own somewhere is another possibility, (using this time some normal local number, so get either very low cost or free connection, depending on your phone line plan). i.e.: be your own ISP.
The E-mail-enabled printers I have worked with were not configured for network setup of scanning to mail* and while many E-mail addresses were stored in memory, subject lines and attachment naming still required the use of the unpleasant touch-screen keyboard.
The idea is to leave the stupid default (e.g.: "SCAN_yyyymmdd.PDF") and mail *yourself* a copy of the document using the 1-button fast-dial. Then, using your laptop and your favorite e-mail client, forward that e-mail to the final destination while editing the subject line and text body to fit your needs.
Managed to get my parents used to this workflow rather easily.
...but the result of their combined efforts ended up being mostly obsessed with try to sell subscriptions (Alexa) to Microsoft Office 365 online (Cortana).
However if someone with no tech skills needs to send me a document image it's often far easier to just send a fax rather than spend an hour trying to teach the person to scan, then save in whatever format, and then send via email or other method (if the file is too large for email, often a problem).
Though you can teach them to use an MFP to mail a scan to themselves (basically the same button presses as a sending a fax with a fast-dial number, except that the fast dial-preset point to their own e-mail box instead of another FAX phone number) and then teach them how to forward e-mails with their favorite e-mail client.
The "file too large for e-mail" won't happen that easily, because most MFP will do compression-to-PDF auto-magically usually with better than FAX codecs (though apparently FAX that can handle JPEG and JBIG compression have appeared in the recent decades). (If the file is too big for a modern mail account, it's also going to take ages of the FAX' slow <64kbits connection).
The kind of people who would be reassured with the legallity surrounding FAX wiretaping, is typically the type of user who has no clue that e-mail encryption *is* a thing, or what the words S/MIME and GPG are.
Well, if you're out in the woods with no internet connection, no mobile coverage but have two copper wires connected to a telephone exchange, fax can be your saviour.
From a purely technical point of view, if you can manage to connect a fax to those pair of copper wires, that means you can connect to an analog Modem (somewhere between 33 and 56k bits) or an ISDN digital signal (64k), because Fax machines ARE basically modems (pouring data into a printer with only a simple picture compression in the middle).
You could as well wire your copper wire to the appropriate type of modem and do way much more, including PPP to get IP packets. Maybe not use the modern Web (where every single page seems to need a giant katamari of multi-megabyte disjoint javascript frameworks) but there could be lots of other low bandwidth possible things beside pushing compressed pictures around. (text e-mail, connecting to some remote machine with better connection to handle your stuff, etc.)
Basically, a pair of copper wires IS a potential internet connection.
But for the rest, I agree. doing weird things with a modem on pair of copper wires is something specific to/. geeks. A fax machine is something that is granpa / granma-proof, because said grand-parents literally already used one in their past jobs before retiring.
Have you tried to enter the E-mail address on the small, resistive touch-screen of a scan-2-mail device?
Yes, did it successfully using a full blown keyboard because said machine accept configuring over a HTTP interface to input presets. From there, most of interactions a just push 1 or 2 buttons to "mail scan to preset 1" (which is my address, or on some machine could even be an SMB networked share instead of an actual e-mail address), and then all the remaining processing is done from a laptop.
Youtube also has another weird problem. It's recommendation has gotten absolutely click baitey only. It used to suggest really interesting videos but now all it suggests are click baits from a handful of content creators.
And the main culprit for that is your own human brain.
Youtube mostly uses machine learning nowadays for its recommendation system. Automatic systems designed to increase the time spent online watching, so that Google can earn more money. The AI powering Youtube autonomously learn that showing you video A instead of Video B (given that you've watched X, Y, Z) is more likely to keep you around.
And due to how human brains work, it *happens* that video A is going to be click baitey because that's what works the best at attracting humans attention.
The AI is simply independently rediscovering and learning on its own what has been studied since a long time regarding, e.g. , content on the TV that attracts attention (answer : emotions, specially violent ones).
Sailfish is interesting but does not run GNU/Linux desktop apps...
Smartphone aren't the perfect form factor to run desktop apps.
GTK-based apps could in theory be made to run on Sailfish (which uses Wayland, and GTK3 has been ported to Wayland) but it would probably look like crap. Basically, just forget about running GIMP on a smartphone.
Sailfish uses Qt, so desktop applications could be made to run on it but would probably look like crap if they aren't specifically adapted to the form factor and specific theming engine (silica). (Note: BLE scanner *DOES work*, it just *LOOKS like crap* being a generic QML app).
Text-mode user interface could be made to work on sailfish (it comes with a standard-compliant terminal) but trust me they would look like crap (you would need to set a small font size and hold the phone sideways so the app gets something closer to the desktop terminal it was developed for - thats the way I remotely run TUI apps over SSH).
Basically, your problem isn't missing GNU/Linux component (specifically in the case of Qt and TUI, the components are actually present, and have been used), but needing to tune software to the specifics of a small screen.
WebApps are about the only thing that doesn't look like crap, because most modern web application since the popularity of the iPhone have been designed to reflow nicely on smartphone screens. (On the other hand, the Gecko engine used by the built-in browser, and the QtWeb used by 3rd party browser are both a bit old, so some website might complain and not work 100%. You would need to used the Android compatibility layer and a modern Firefox Android.).
Specially crafted UI for smartphone screens (like most sailfish native apps, and anything you would get on the anrdoid compatibility layer), and command line interface (where you can use bigger font and portrait orientation) are the best thing.
Still you can do something like hack the partition table on a OTG connected USB stick, using common CLI tools without need to root anything.
You can run Linux in a container on a phone but have to use VNC and it is not native, you still have android underneath
In the case of Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish, the only "android"-y bits are the drivers provided by the maker of the chipset. The rest of the user land is plain GNU/Linux, and only uses libhybris so the drivers can run over it (e.g.: so they run on a GNU libc instead of bionic)
Librem will supposed to be a plain GNU/Linux with *open source* drivers - so 0% android underneath.
Then for eco-system access, most smartphone tend to provide some android compatibility layer. (Sailfish has a version of the JVM-like engine used by Android 4.4 kitkat written by Myriad called Alien Dalvik running in a chroot atop the GNU/Linux userland. I think Purism was considering Andbox as a potential solution for Librem users).
I wish there was an easy way to install Linux to any android device so I could ditch Android... {...} Ubuntu touch is dead and I'm not sure what else exists.
Jolla has developped Sailfish. as they've developped libhybris (the same thing that Ubuntu Touch used), it's possible for the community to develop ports to lots of android devices (a couple of Sony Xperias, upcoming Gemini, etc.)
the Police could always subpoena cellular carriers for tower tracking information regarding the location of the phone.
That requires : - the phone to be connected to an actual cell tower (not in Airplane mode, not a tablet with Wifi-only) - that there is a SIM in the phone (otherwise they only know that there is *a* smartphone with IMEI number, but not even a phone number) - that the SIM was registered so someone's identity (to know whose that number is).
Using google map locations seems like lazy police work
Google map location can work : - in airplane more using only pure GPS receiver. - online with no GPS chip, only by using lists of visible cell tower and visible Wifi ap.
Also Google accounts can be attached to a real identity.
If apps can store that location, and end-up syncing with google server at some point later in time, Google can know where you've been.
So it's worth asking Google too "Who's been near locaion (X;Y) ?" in additon to cell operator, you'll get all the other people that the cell tower missed.
tracking data has the potential to be "faked" by someone with sufficient resources.
Location spoofing is a standard defence against application that insist on getting location.
Google location tracking being enabled is the first mistake. It's like bluetooth, why turn it on if you're not actively using it? Check your google settings, repeatedly.
The thing is that even when disabled, some app might be storing it anyway.
What you're disabling explicitely is the streaming of your position to google for features like live tracking.
Other applications might still silently fetch your location (like when trying to make locally-relevent search results). e.g.: search for "pizza" and google will try to find pizza restaurants *around you*. They'll try based solely on your IP address if they can't get anything out of your phone.
Run your own map server locally (Sailfish server that works with multiple viewers, Android and iOS also have offline map solution, with MicroG providing several solutions for apps that require the Google Map API)
Fuck online companies. ( ^- that has actual very practical implications when you're abroad and have internet roaming or on a hike away from any connection services)
What is the most complex thing todays auto makers have to worry about? Pretty much it's wired input for gas and brake, that's about it... oh maybe something as important as On-Star's ability to stop a car running.
Maybe that the case in the US where the manufacturer seem to be only obsessed with constantly bigger cup holders as the selling feature. That's not necessarily the case everywhere (Certainly not here around in Europe).
However I do think Tesla is vastly ahead of other car makers in terms of practical self-driving car software, both because the not-quite-self-driving car Autopilot feature has been in production for some time,
Again, numbers matter. FCAS (Foward Collision Avoidance System), dubbed "City Safety" and using a forward laser grid has been available as a standard on every single one of the cars that VW currently produces, including the lowest cheapest one (like the Up). Not an option, a standard feature coming built-in. More exensive VW event get cameras (including LDAS - Lane departure alert systems). That makes it an extreme large number of cars currently on the streets.
Other brands like Volvo has been putting FCAS and LDAS and more recently lane following built-in in all their higher range of cars. German manufacturer (such as Mercedes) and asian manufacturer (I think mostly brands) have been using stereo cameras for better stereoscopy depth perception, whereas Tesla only recently started having multiple forward facing camera (and might only using them for different ranges and filed of views, though they could eventually be used for stereoscopy on their overlapping part of FOV).
The thing that currently Tesla is doing with their Autopilot driver assisting technology has been done for quite some time by multiple European and Asian manufacturer, often with more and better sensors.
Tesla's only main advantages are their over-the-air car communication, leading to better "in the wild" data gathering, and faster push of updates. That has enabled them to make progress much faster, enabling them to eventually close the gap and catch up the older player, and potentially over-take them (though I'm still betting that they'll put a couple more generations of sensors before being to deliver all that they've been promising).
A personal advantage that Tesla has is that their system is a bit more integrated, whereas other manufacturer tend to source some parts from 3rd parties (such as MobilEye), making it cheaper and faster for Tesla to integrate and iterate.
Even from a pure technical standpoint I wonder how much use you could get from what Tesla is offering when each company would have pretty different approaches to self driving cars.
You could at least get a lot of idea sharing and at a lot of brainstorming by comparing these different approaches. Thus eventually faster development of these different approaches, even if not all end up converging on the same code base.
Kind of how large scale opensource project have managed to pull out incredible features.
Slashdot Mirror
Details are in the Github repo which is linked in the slashdot summary.
What are we talking about here, is it a full-blown x86 machine emulation with Windows 95 installed?
Yes, as explained on the README, it's based on https://github.com/copy/v86
Is the selling point of this just that it's easier to install than setting up a Windows 95 VM? ISTR someone already did a browser-based Win95 emulation years ago.
Yup, this basically takes the in-browser emulators written in JS (as you can find many of these to emulate older machine),
but instead of being a webpage you load into your browser, it uses Electron to make an app out of it.
Is it legal?
In theory Microsoft is still around and they still owns the copyright on Win95.
In practice, Microsoft probably barely gives a fuck about such an old OS that they have themselves deprecated so long ago,
and I'm quite sure that over the decades, you've probably ended up owning some license to run it legally (e.g.: as part of a pre-installed laptop, as some MSDN license through your university/your employer, whatever...)
Might even qualify under the "comedy" exception of whatever serves the equivalent of Fair use in your local jurisdiction.
Plus the whole thing is smaller than the giant katamari of javascript libraries loaded by any modern web page any way~~~
If your excuse is that fat fucks magically get double energy from the regular calories regular people eat,
No, I'm arguing that the amount of fat you store is only a small amount compared to all the calories in the food.
There's a lot of these calories which will end up elsewhere (which includes, spending more energy (re)building/repairing the body, or even simply wasted).
Some people have slightly broken metabolism which might lead to slightly more fat storage that others.
Blaming these people be calling them "fat fucks" won't help.
The proper way would be to get adapted professional advice, from real specialists (instead of listening to internet trolls).
and I don't try to put 22 gallons in my Ducati. Not all at once anyway.
But your motorbike will mostly spend the gaz on propulsion, whereas you car can have a significantly drop in mileage if the alternator is solicited more by, e.g., a running A/C.
Changing the input (gaz poured in) and the output (pushing the gaz pedal) won't affect both vehicle the same.
Body biochemistry is complicated. Again, seek advice of a real professional.
$other_person has an easier time staying skinny than you. Lucky them.
Yup, I personally happen to have a broken thyroid gland (which can have very real impact on weight uptake).
But I don't complain, I just compensate it properly so I can stay fit despite it.
and you can absolutely prevent yourself from gaining weight
Yes, you can indeed DO stuff to help staying away from morbid obesity...
by not eating more than you burn.
Even if you feel a conservation of energy explanation, is too simple, it doesn't make it wrong.
And there lies the problem.
By oversimplifying, you're reducing all overweight people to cry babies who simply lack the self discipline to not eat 2 gallon-sized buckets of mayonnaise per day, and the only step they walk in a day are to reach their car (and/or to their segway).
And that to even consider anything but "eat less" is just a lame excuse that the "fatties" are making up to avoid putting any effort into it.
That's not the proper way to do it.
If you have weight problems, the proper way is to talk to your doctor, let him eventually - according to needs - address you to a nutritionist. Or an endocrinologist if he thinks it's necessary. etc.
You need to take everything into account and get the best approach adapted to the person (instead of just blaming them).
But that requires actually having a functional public health system. Oh, yeah, I forgot what you had in the US.
"The technology is basically just keeping the slow pace of incremental innovation"
As in "real soon now"
Actually, like I said in the next sentence, not *real soon*, but "soonish after a couple of decades of lots of small incremental steps of innovation*.
But given the circus show that is your politics in the US, nobody is interested in starting a half-century long slow development project, because they won't be around anymore to reap the glory.
(And for the record, here around in Europe, we probably won't be able to pull it off neither :
We *would* be pretty capable to vote for a half-century budget for such research, but then we'll more or less waste all that budget to various sub-sub-sub-contracting chains, and divers countries squabbling for the privilege of playing some relevant role. See: ITER, etc.
Eventually, the whole thing will run ridiculously over budget. Several times.)
(Maybe China *could* have the dedication to try to pull it. Or maybe their economy will hit a wall by then).
Or, more accurately, "nope".
There are no *technical* reasons for not doing it.
It doesn't violate any currently known law of physics, it doesn't require any exotic new not-yet-existing matter (unlike a space elevator, which is currently impossible in practice, at least until chemistry has invented a way to produce kilometer-long strands of carbon nanotubes at a cheap enough cost).
Lots of the technologies already exists and/or have been tested on reduced scale
(only nuclear impulse propulsion, which *a* possible way to solve point 1 and 2 in one go, hasn't been in prototype yet.
But RTG + various electro-magnetic-based propulsion (e.g.: ion thrusters) is the current way used points 1+2 are done in several probes.
And the current preferred way to solve point 6 is simply using mass (put the water reservoir around the living quaters) instead of some fancy energy shield (like the Earth it self does, and thus leveraged by anything near-Earth like ISS).
The remaining points in the list (4+5) describe stuff which e.g. is mostly everyday life on the ISS ).
It "only" requires spending the next 50 years to advance the current tech to the point of have a giant base that can do orbit exchange between mars and earth.
Takes lots of time and a fuckton of money. But nobody is interested.
The technology does not exist to do such a thing.
The technology is basically just keeping the slow pace of incremental innovation that up to now has given us things like the ISS.
The main problem is that eventually reaching the point mentioned by the above poster is going to take at least several decades of progressive innovations and require multiple year to build each successive station, and that slowness doesn't fit into the short-term needed for a publicity stunt within the 1 or 2 cycles of 4 years each that your US politics has.
Meanwhile, shooting people in (single use) tin cans is somethings that can be done quickly enough to be a somewhat viable publicity stunt (despite being completely useless from the technological and scientific point of view)
Calories eaten and absorbed minus calories burnt from exercise and resting metabolism will be stored as fat, sure.
Calories eaten is under everyones voluntary control. I'm not sure what your point is here.
His point is that the sentence is running for a bit longer than that.
Yes, "calories eaten", i.e.: things that you put into your mouth and chew on is more or less under voluntary control (though might be influenced by impulsive behaviours, etc.)
But then you don't necessarily control how much of what's in there will get absorbed by the body. (though you can slightly influence the body's ability to uptake stuff, by changing the mix of what you eat. e.g.: Food's content of fiber has an influence of how fast it goes through your gut).
You can voluntarily decide to burn some calories by doing exercice, but you don't have a direct control of how much the body will decide to burn for the rest.
Some might have indirect influence (doing lots of exercice on a regular basis, body will use more energy to make and maintain muscle mass, even while you rest), (your body burn calories to maintain temperature and you can influence that), but there are tons of other processes, where the body could decide to burn energy instead of storing it long term, on which you don't have lots of direct control.
That what the " {food eaten} - {calories burned} = {remaining fat} " crowd doesn't get.s
When you look into the details, there are gazillion of various energy consuming processes going inside a body, most of which will have some impact on body mass distribution type, but which you can't directly control necessarily.
Your basic mistake boils down to thinking of the body as a "bathtub" model : water (=food) goes in through the faucet (=eating), water (=burned calories) goes out through the drain (=exercice), the balance determine how much water there's in the tub (=fat storage).
It's a bit too oversimplified.
Something more realistic would be to imagine it as a conveyor belt. The belt rolls from your mouth (and the food on your plate) to the ass hole (and your toilet).
Along the way there are dozens of worker on station, sometime picking things up (absorbing), sometime putting things down (excreting) and most of the time passing stuff among each other.
Fat is just one guy making a pile of reservers, when instructed so (= include influence of tons of hormonal messages), and who can occasionally handle out packs or reserve whenever/if asked so by other guys working on the same chain.
Physical effort is just one of the client that might request reserves from the fat guy.
Sounds like a poorly written program.
In the best world, yes, it would have been good if the software was better written.
In the real world, you deal with what you have in your hands. When in the middle of an emergency, there's not much free time to try to rewrite a better software.
Deciding if maybe changing data plan would be a good idea, and maybe improving the software based on what was learned during this emergency, should be best left for after the emergency, once you have some time to deal with it.
Can someone please specify what limitations exactly (preferably with a link to an unsolved Firefox bug if available)? The Mozilla people promised they would match the old functionality wherever there was a clear need. Were they lying or have they just not finished yet?
Depends on the extension.
In the case of NoScript : all the necessary functionality has been successfully replicated (though, it took a few days, it wasn't available from day 1 of the XUL-less firefox). The web extension has the exact same capability as the XUL extension.
The thing is, its author took the opportunity to also overhaul the interface and rewrite everything in the new style used by most web-extensions (HTML kind of side bars) instead of OS-like dialog boxes and windows.
Most of the complains nowadays are people who would complain when then the new version isn't a pixel-pefect of the old one.
(there's ongoing details about the UI rework on the author's blog).
FoxyProxy:
Old XUL extension could possibly hook anything in the browser.
For filtering purpose, most modern web extensions can normally filter domains only. For privacy reasons they can't see the full URLs.
Thus some RegEx patterns that you might have used in the older version won't work any more (basically you won't be able to redirect different sub paths of websites to different proxies).
Also, during the initial time, it wasn't possible to transfer the settings from the XUL extension to the WebExt one.
Also here again the author took opportunity to redesign the UI - probably that's where the remaining criticism is nowaday.
Image Zoom :
WebExtensions aren't allowed to hijack direct mouse button clicks. So instead of rightclick, you need to use alt+rightclick to do the wheel zoom thing.
uBlock, FSF's Privacy Badger, HTTPS everywhere, and countless others :
work as-is. Some have been webextension for a long time, some are even available on Chrome, too.
Session Manager :
need full access to the whole session of a tab to save it/re-load it.
Again, most web extensions are isolated from the full state of a tab.
You can't do Session Manager using the API offered by Web Extensions, and the author wasn't motivated to work with Mozilla to add API extensions to make Session Manager possible.
Luckily for me, the build-in session managing of Firefox fills most my needs.
(I strongly suspect that Tab Mix and LiveHTTPHeaders hit the same kind of limitation - like needing access to the raw stream of connection - which aren't available to the API)
But mainly :
old extensions written for XUL 10 years ago that the author hasn't touched since and has completely forgotten about, and which miraculously survived the multiple recent versions bump, won't automagically get converted to Webextensions.
So, lots of people end up with things the worked for them, and suddenly won't work anymore.
According to TFA, they did get special consideration: "public safety customers have access to plans that do not have data throughput limitations".
The department just chose not to buy such a plan...
In a case of emergency, some human brain somewhere should have fired a couple of neurons and decided that :
Okay, maybe given the circumstances, it won't be bad to override the normal behaviour of the system and make sure that the emergency services get the communications means they might need to handle to emergency
Though, depending on the way the company is organized, it might happen that the only guy with the power to take such a decision was busy vacationing on his yacht.
Or the (IT) guy with the practical capability of flipping the correct switch to make it happen would have had his pants sued for breach of whatever protocol.
Wine is a layer in the middle that adds some inefficiency, compatibility issues and bugs of its own.
How much more so than GTK+ as "a layer in the middle" between an application and Xlib?
Much more, for the reason that GTK+ is a layer that provides high-level functionnality (I want a button, I want a window, I want a drop list, etc.) to the application, while itself talking to a low level interface (mostly used for blitting and rectangles filling).
What wine is doing is taking a certain low-level API and reconverting everything into a completely different low-level API.
It would be like if you took that Xlib API, but instead talking to the Xlib library it self, you talk to a separate layer that takes in Xlib API and translates it into something that is displayed using openGL, running on SDL, so that it could be used on some weird gaming console, because that GTK+ application is compiled with a GTK version hard-coded in that isn't supporting OpenGL.
Could be entirely solved by having that application built with GTK supporting OpenGL as a render back-end, but it cannot be done, because you have zero control on it, thus you need a rube goldberg layer of pancackes of middle layers to get the application working.
Wine is that adaptation layer.
That's why it would be great if eventually one day developers started to target Linux too.
But until then, there's the chicken-and-egg problem of linux not being a popular gaming platform, thus not worth spending resources on from the developers point of view, and in turn never getting popular because there are no games on it.
Thus...
How much of this issue goes away if a developer instructs quality control to treat Wine as a fully supported platform alongside Windows 7 and Windows 10? That's how BGB (Game Boy debugger), FCEUX (NES debugger), OpenMPT (sample based sequencer), and FamiTracker (chiptune sequencer) work: the developer ships Win32 binaries tested on both Windows and Wine.
Yup, developers at least starting to give attention to wine is a good intermediate step.
That at least solves the "users won't pick up linux as a platform due to lack of games" part of the equation.
And who knows, maybe this will suddenly make steam-on-linux a popular platform (maybe because it could enable cheap linux "steambox" gaming consoles ?)
And once these "steambox" gaming console become popular enough to show on the radar of the devs, some will try putting effort into true native linux builds, eventually ?
Complete and utter bullshit.
Facebook is not inciting violence.
Facebook is not inciting violence intentionnally, per-se.
Facebook is just optimizing for profits, and due to their specific market (advertising, data mining, etc.) they need, as the above poster stated, they need to increase engagement (i.e.: keep more eyeballs focused on facebook, for further reselling)
And old studies done in the era of TV have already shown, the thing that increases the most engagement is emotions, more likely negative emotion, thus fear and violence.
Thus even if Facebook hasn't in a "james bond vilain-style" decided to promote violence for pure evil intents, just by having machine learning algorithms that try to feed whatever attract the most user attention, they'll eventually start to automatically promote violence.
What you are seeing is an unintended side effect of people having, for the first time in human history, the ability to instantly communicate with millions of other people, allowing then to speak out against things going on in the world that they are unhappy about,
It's not the "instant communication" part that is main culprit (though it contributes a bit).
It's the filtering going on.
We're not in the beginning of the age of internet anymore.
You're not suddenly exposed directly to the speech of the other millions of people, anymore. That's long past ago (you can't download the whole web on a DVD anymore :-P )
You're not even exposed to a random / representative of the speech of some of that other million of people, neither. Specially not since commercial companies jumped in and they need to profit from their business
You're specifically exposed to that tiny fraction (tiny enough so that it can fit within the limited attention span of our monkey-brains) of the speech of that other million of people, that the companies' machine learning algorithms have determined to be the most likely to attract your attention and provoke you into staying around (further speaking your own idea).
Yes, the increase of content has (somewhat) had some influence on the way we communicate. (We've reached the point where we can't follow everything).
The current data tech giant (Facebook, Google, etc.) are extremely strongly shaping the kind of communication that is going between people. But they need profit, so they focus on whats the most profitable to them even if that fucks everything up.
Basically, the "information highways" have slowly transmorphed into the "kingdom of the few most attention-grabbing filthy tabloids".
such as civilized countries being overrun with third world filth.
Yeah, thank your for this nice demonstration of your opinions.
Facebook cannot magically convert idiots into reasonable and rational people. Facebook isn't responsible for this particular problem it is the users causing the problems.
Facebook has its share of responsibilities. Its AI algorithm is optimized to autonomously search for what will keep the users on the site the longest (so that the company has more eyeball time to sell to advertisers / more behaviour data to sell, and thus the company gets richer).
Old studies done since TV is "a thing" have already shown that the human mind will pay more attention to emotion-generating content, even more if these emotions are negative. Eventually, human mind tends to pay most attention to violence and extremes.
(Probably an evolutionary advantage in the distant past, as paying attention to which member of the ape-pack got mauled by a tiger is more likely to provide you useful information to save your ass, than paying attention to how the flowers are beautiful).
Thus, by trying to give to viewer whatever is the most likely to keep their attention focused, the algorithms used by Facebook will independently rediscover the above, and will spontaneously (machine-) learn to provide even more extreme content, until each "echo chamber" one lock oneself in slowly devolves into a giant mess of extremism, violence and crazy conspiracy theories.
All this without the AI even having a clear idea of *what* the content is, only have the statistical notion that it tend to retain attention.
Facebook devs where the one writing these algorithm without taking into account where it can lead, they do share a part of responsibilities.
If you or I lived there, we would probably find a modem somehow and also an internet provider that had dial-in lines. Living in the UK, the latter is not the easiest
An actual ISP with dial-in lines would be one possibility.
Another would be remotely connecting to a machine you own somewhere is another possibility, (using this time some normal local number, so get either very low cost or free connection, depending on your phone line plan).
i.e.: be your own ISP.
The E-mail-enabled printers I have worked with were not configured for network setup of scanning to mail* and while many E-mail addresses were stored in memory, subject lines and attachment naming still required the use of the unpleasant touch-screen keyboard.
The idea is to leave the stupid default (e.g.: "SCAN_yyyymmdd.PDF") and mail *yourself* a copy of the document using the 1-button fast-dial.
Then, using your laptop and your favorite e-mail client, forward that e-mail to the final destination while editing the subject line and text body to fit your needs.
Managed to get my parents used to this workflow rather easily.
...but the result of their combined efforts ended up being mostly obsessed with try to sell subscriptions (Alexa) to Microsoft Office 365 online (Cortana).
Hundreds of dollars just to pay for your semester.
In other saner parts of the world, hundreds of dollars *is* what you pay for the semester.
However if someone with no tech skills needs to send me a document image it's often far easier to just send a fax rather than spend an hour trying to teach the person to scan, then save in whatever format, and then send via email or other method (if the file is too large for email, often a problem).
Though you can teach them to use an MFP to mail a scan to themselves (basically the same button presses as a sending a fax with a fast-dial number, except that the fast dial-preset point to their own e-mail box instead of another FAX phone number) and then teach them how to forward e-mails with their favorite e-mail client.
The "file too large for e-mail" won't happen that easily, because most MFP will do compression-to-PDF auto-magically usually with better than FAX codecs (though apparently FAX that can handle JPEG and JBIG compression have appeared in the recent decades).
(If the file is too big for a modern mail account, it's also going to take ages of the FAX' slow <64kbits connection).
The kind of people who would be reassured with the legallity surrounding FAX wiretaping, is typically the type of user who has no clue that e-mail encryption *is* a thing, or what the words S/MIME and GPG are.
Well, if you're out in the woods with no internet connection, no mobile coverage but have two copper wires connected to a telephone exchange, fax can be your saviour.
From a purely technical point of view, if you can manage to connect a fax to those pair of copper wires, that means you can connect to an analog Modem (somewhere between 33 and 56k bits) or an ISDN digital signal (64k), because Fax machines ARE basically modems (pouring data into a printer with only a simple picture compression in the middle).
You could as well wire your copper wire to the appropriate type of modem and do way much more, including PPP to get IP packets.
Maybe not use the modern Web (where every single page seems to need a giant katamari of multi-megabyte disjoint javascript frameworks)
but there could be lots of other low bandwidth possible things beside pushing compressed pictures around.
(text e-mail, connecting to some remote machine with better connection to handle your stuff, etc.)
Basically, a pair of copper wires IS a potential internet connection.
But for the rest, I agree. /. geeks.
doing weird things with a modem on pair of copper wires is something specific to
A fax machine is something that is granpa / granma-proof, because said grand-parents literally already used one in their past jobs before retiring.
Have you tried to enter the E-mail address on the small, resistive touch-screen of a scan-2-mail device?
Yes, did it successfully using a full blown keyboard because said machine accept configuring over a HTTP interface to input presets.
From there, most of interactions a just push 1 or 2 buttons to "mail scan to preset 1" (which is my address, or on some machine could even be an SMB networked share instead of an actual e-mail address), and then all the remaining processing is done from a laptop.
Youtube also has another weird problem. It's recommendation has gotten absolutely click baitey only. It used to suggest really interesting videos but now all it suggests are click baits from a handful of content creators.
And the main culprit for that is your own human brain.
Youtube mostly uses machine learning nowadays for its recommendation system.
Automatic systems designed to increase the time spent online watching, so that Google can earn more money.
The AI powering Youtube autonomously learn that showing you video A instead of Video B (given that you've watched X, Y, Z) is more likely to keep you around.
And due to how human brains work, it *happens* that video A is going to be click baitey because that's what works the best at attracting humans attention.
The AI is simply independently rediscovering and learning on its own what has been studied since a long time regarding, e.g. , content on the TV that attracts attention (answer : emotions, specially violent ones).
Sailfish is interesting but does not run GNU/Linux desktop apps...
Smartphone aren't the perfect form factor to run desktop apps.
GTK-based apps could in theory be made to run on Sailfish (which uses Wayland, and GTK3 has been ported to Wayland) but it would probably look like crap.
Basically, just forget about running GIMP on a smartphone.
Sailfish uses Qt, so desktop applications could be made to run on it but would probably look like crap if they aren't specifically adapted to the form factor and specific theming engine (silica).
(Note: BLE scanner *DOES work*, it just *LOOKS like crap* being a generic QML app).
Text-mode user interface could be made to work on sailfish (it comes with a standard-compliant terminal) but trust me they would look like crap (you would need to set a small font size and hold the phone sideways so the app gets something closer to the desktop terminal it was developed for - thats the way I remotely run TUI apps over SSH).
Basically, your problem isn't missing GNU/Linux component (specifically in the case of Qt and TUI, the components are actually present, and have been used), but needing to tune software to the specifics of a small screen.
WebApps are about the only thing that doesn't look like crap, because most modern web application since the popularity of the iPhone have been designed to reflow nicely on smartphone screens. (On the other hand, the Gecko engine used by the built-in browser, and the QtWeb used by 3rd party browser are both a bit old, so some website might complain and not work 100%. You would need to used the Android compatibility layer and a modern Firefox Android.).
Specially crafted UI for smartphone screens (like most sailfish native apps, and anything you would get on the anrdoid compatibility layer), and command line interface (where you can use bigger font and portrait orientation) are the best thing.
Still you can do something like hack the partition table on a OTG connected USB stick, using common CLI tools without need to root anything.
You can run Linux in a container on a phone but have to use VNC and it is not native, you still have android underneath
In the case of Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish, the only "android"-y bits are the drivers provided by the maker of the chipset.
The rest of the user land is plain GNU/Linux, and only uses libhybris so the drivers can run over it (e.g.: so they run on a GNU libc instead of bionic)
Librem will supposed to be a plain GNU/Linux with *open source* drivers - so 0% android underneath.
Then for eco-system access, most smartphone tend to provide some android compatibility layer. (Sailfish has a version of the JVM-like engine used by Android 4.4 kitkat written by Myriad called Alien Dalvik running in a chroot atop the GNU/Linux userland.
I think Purism was considering Andbox as a potential solution for Librem users).
I wish there was an easy way to install Linux to any android device so I could ditch Android... {...} Ubuntu touch is dead and I'm not sure what else exists.
Jolla has developped Sailfish.
as they've developped libhybris (the same thing that Ubuntu Touch used), it's possible for the community to develop ports to lots of android devices (a couple of Sony Xperias, upcoming Gemini, etc.)
Jolla has also released it for a couple of select devices as an officially supported commercial project.
Also there's Purism's Librem 5 project to build a phone with an entire opensource Linux stack.
the Police could always subpoena cellular carriers for tower tracking information regarding the location of the phone.
That requires :
- the phone to be connected to an actual cell tower (not in Airplane mode, not a tablet with Wifi-only)
- that there is a SIM in the phone (otherwise they only know that there is *a* smartphone with IMEI number, but not even a phone number)
- that the SIM was registered so someone's identity (to know whose that number is).
Using google map locations seems like lazy police work
Google map location can work :
- in airplane more using only pure GPS receiver.
- online with no GPS chip, only by using lists of visible cell tower and visible Wifi ap.
Also Google accounts can be attached to a real identity.
If apps can store that location, and end-up syncing with google server at some point later in time, Google can know where you've been.
So it's worth asking Google too "Who's been near locaion (X;Y) ?" in additon to cell operator, you'll get all the other people that the cell tower missed.
tracking data has the potential to be "faked" by someone with sufficient resources.
Location spoofing is a standard defence against application that insist on getting location.
Google location tracking being enabled is the first mistake. It's like bluetooth, why turn it on if you're not actively using it? Check your google settings, repeatedly.
The thing is that even when disabled, some app might be storing it anyway.
What you're disabling explicitely is the streaming of your position to google for features like live tracking.
Other applications might still silently fetch your location (like when trying to make locally-relevent search results).
e.g.: search for "pizza" and google will try to find pizza restaurants *around you*. They'll try based solely on your IP address if they can't get anything out of your phone.
Run your own map server locally (Sailfish server that works with multiple viewers, Android and iOS also have offline map solution, with MicroG providing several solutions for apps that require the Google Map API)
For the location service it self, you can have lots of replacement including offline too .
Fuck online companies.
( ^- that has actual very practical implications when you're abroad and have internet roaming or on a hike away from any connection services)
What is the most complex thing todays auto makers have to worry about? Pretty much it's wired input for gas and brake, that's about it... oh maybe something as important as On-Star's ability to stop a car running.
Maybe that the case in the US where the manufacturer seem to be only obsessed with constantly bigger cup holders as the selling feature.
That's not necessarily the case everywhere (Certainly not here around in Europe).
However I do think Tesla is vastly ahead of other car makers in terms of practical self-driving car software, both because the not-quite-self-driving car Autopilot feature has been in production for some time,
Again, numbers matter.
FCAS (Foward Collision Avoidance System), dubbed "City Safety" and using a forward laser grid has been available as a standard on every single one of the cars that VW currently produces, including the lowest cheapest one (like the Up). Not an option, a standard feature coming built-in. More exensive VW event get cameras (including LDAS - Lane departure alert systems). That makes it an extreme large number of cars currently on the streets.
Other brands like Volvo has been putting FCAS and LDAS and more recently lane following built-in in all their higher range of cars.
German manufacturer (such as Mercedes) and asian manufacturer (I think mostly brands) have been using stereo cameras for better stereoscopy depth perception, whereas Tesla only recently started having multiple forward facing camera (and might only using them for different ranges and filed of views, though they could eventually be used for stereoscopy on their overlapping part of FOV).
The thing that currently Tesla is doing with their Autopilot driver assisting technology has been done for quite some time by multiple European and Asian manufacturer, often with more and better sensors.
Tesla's only main advantages are their over-the-air car communication, leading to better "in the wild" data gathering, and faster push of updates.
That has enabled them to make progress much faster, enabling them to eventually close the gap and catch up the older player, and potentially over-take them (though I'm still betting that they'll put a couple more generations of sensors before being to deliver all that they've been promising).
A personal advantage that Tesla has is that their system is a bit more integrated, whereas other manufacturer tend to source some parts from 3rd parties (such as MobilEye), making it cheaper and faster for Tesla to integrate and iterate.
Even from a pure technical standpoint I wonder how much use you could get from what Tesla is offering when each company would have pretty different approaches to self driving cars.
You could at least get a lot of idea sharing and at a lot of brainstorming by comparing these different approaches.
Thus eventually faster development of these different approaches, even if not all end up converging on the same code base.
Kind of how large scale opensource project have managed to pull out incredible features.