Decentralised communism? There is a need for a self-starter regulating set of rules governing a mass of human so that beneficial self-organisation is likely. Selfishnessand, greed and the love of money and power (sglmp) are the enemies here. Neoliberalism basically dresses those enemies as unquestionably good idols to worship, bringing us to a larger more abstract version of early caveman religious cults. Communism in the Soviet style is what happens when these self-same human tendencies (sglmp) run amok in the corridors of government. The problem of ideal societies is that they tend to asume away the problems of building such societies out of real humans.
The kind of computer power governments, Google and Amazon can wield are one of the two magic components the Soviets lacked. How to prevent a Stalin style autocratic regime was the other one.
What has got lost is the 'promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts' bit. The 'by securing' bit has become a religious dogma. In the modern world, examples like Free Software show how the current 'implementation' does not fulfil the aim of 'promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts'. In the light of the relatively modern invention of modern computing, the 'by' but (the implementation) needs a serious rethink. But those who benefit disproportionately are economically bound to campaign to move law more in line with their interests, and the 'promot[ion of] the Progress of Science and useful Arts' is the victim.
If you want to watch porn in McDonalds, just bring it in on a USB stick. More seriously, though, the 'public health crisis' or porn is a public health crisis with regards to how we deal with what, in our sex drives, is a basic survival instinct which is often strongly frustrated and dissatisfied, and constrained by traditional ideas that it should be all but starved out of existence. First, the main crisis is a near-total lack of sensible sexual education: what these biological functions and drives are, how they feel in various situations, how to use them safely and hygienically, and if you really need to go (just as needing to go to the toilet), what the sensible options are. In crafting a society where there are essentially no sensible options that are publicly acceptable, save for long term relationships, we force relief of sexual frustration into the foundations of long term relationships and marriages, telling people with strong sex drives to pretend to be somebody they're not, telling their partners to trust them to be that somebody they're not, and then acting disgusted when the person pretending to be something they're not can't keep up the pretense any longer, some breach of that trust (to be something they're not) occurs, and the relationship rapidly rips itself apart. By harboring strong traditional expectations, and withholding practical sexual education, we are creating this crisis. The massive popularity of porn is just one symptom, the acts of people instinctively and desperately seeking outlets for their sexual drives, and simultaneously trying to hide those acts to save face and possibly avoid prosecution is another. But make no mistake, by trying to cage our sexual drives and starve them into submission we are creating the problem, and by giving people little in the way of sensible publicly and socially acceptable outlets to relieve these drives, we deny ourselves a means to remedy it. Porn takes the blame for what religious zealotry has created.
Encode encrypted messages using pseudo poetry or something. Make it an approximation of the crap many post on fingers these days. Using a 24k article full of new age bullshit to transmit 1k of encrypted text is quite feasible.
Crypto can be done easily in JavaScript with commonly available libraries. A simple Ajax script with one additional function call ( as in send(end(msg),key) rather than send(msg) and similar for decryption ) is all you need once you have your encryption library and a means of secure key exchange. How they will implement something which can be implemented in a simple php script with a common is library is beyond me.
Time from movement to screen with no lag at 90hz is 1/90s. With 1 frame lag, it takes double that, so 2/90=1/45s, hence 1 frame lag means latency equivalent to half the framerate.
Rather than requiring foreign sites to adapt, the ISP level porn blockers could be adapted to do this: require an account's owner be age verified. How you separate access from an authorised machine at a home address from one which is not is another matter, but I doubt it's that hard. My worry is that this is more of a political stunt to win votes from conservative votes with tradition-derived anti-sex attitudes, and to try and win the religous vote to the Tories away from Labour: compassion and care for the poor vs anti-porn/sex/gay policy. Sensible followers of religion should be more interested in the former, but I fear the latter is more easy to motivate political support for amongst those (swing voters) who would waver between Lab and Con at an election. In additon, those who care about the ability to access porn for people who are not underage are likely too small a minority to have an effect at the ballot box.
Many will be happy to produce content with a balanced copyright law with fair use provisions. Those who would not can simply not produce. That will create room in the market for less greedy producers to fill.
Tribal caveman instincts. The basic psychological machinery which leads to 'us vs them' mentality between a group of people and those who are readily observed to be different is something that would have worked well in terms of survivability of groups of humans (tribes) in the many many millennia before civilisation. As such, the machinery has been bred in, and there is no effective means to breed it out, thus the need to teach each and every generation how to prevent these instincts from causing problems. Ironically I find the early scriptural writings of the major religions to be good stabs at doing this, but major religious traditions are often more interested in furthering themselves than actually understanding what their tradition was supposed to be, and vehemently oppose any attempts to persuade them to change (what is labelled 'religious conservatism' in polite circles, but which is basically refusing to turn the steering wheel when your car comes to a bend, declaring that it is divine will that you keep going in the same direction, and that if you hit the tree in front of you, it was foretold and inevitable, or similar). Our basic instincts will harness and co-opt all that they can to further themselves, and that is what they are effectively biologically programmed to do.
Politics has descended into rhetoric and vote-hunting. Nobody in politics cares that much about consequences of policies compared to whether it sounds good with the voters. Porn is a stable bogeyman in religion and politics, a 'great evil that lurks in the dark shadows of the internet' which must be valiantly fought against. Like the 'negative automatic traits' of clinical psychology, these ideas prevent themselves from being challenged: the reality is ignored, rhetoric prevails, votes get won, and nothing gets fixed. The problem with underage people accessing porn is one of sexual education, or lack thereof. Humans naturally seek sexual enjoyment, if starved of this and offered only a few choice morsels, people can be motivated to work desperately. This effect (akin to the squirrel learning an assault course, as shown in a BBC program called Daylight Robbery (2, part 4/4 on youtube if you are interested)) has probably been beneficial in the past, before the rise of modern marketing. Sexual is used in much of marketing because it works. It works because often pictures of scantily clad young women on adverts are all that a young man will see in their day, and their brain will naturally reward and learn things associated with them (the primitive mate hunting instinct, a relic of our evolutionary past, would never have needed to be adapted to modern marketing).
A more sensible and pragmatic viewpoint is that humans in general have sexual desires and fantasies, often quite strong, that leaving these desires starved and frustrated has the capacity to wreak havoc in somebody's decision making. Rather, modern society need to learn to both satisfy and harness these drives, ensuring acceptable and effective outlets exist for everybody so that there is no need to seek sexual outlets elsewhere. Sexual desire, being short lived, is not a good foundation for a long-term loving relationship or a family, and thus in the modern world these things (sex and relationships) need to be less coupled than they have been in the past. Yes, sex has a major place in relationships, and ensuring drives are satisfied is a responsibility of those in that relationship, but how they are satisfied needs to be far less prescribed than it has been in the past. In addition, if there is a mismatch between desires of those in a couple, there needs to be acceptable options if one or both in a relationship are not to be frustrated (and this frustration can have serious detrimental effects psychologically, both individually and on the relationship itself, if that relationship gets perceived as an obstruction preventing relief of sexual frustrations).
Various forms of sexual entertainment need to be available, people need to understand the basic human needs better, how to use sexual entertainment sensibly, when it is a sensible option, how to avoid addiction-like behaviours, how to prevent obsessions growing to the level of being problematic, and so on. Much of this needs to be taught to children in proper sexual education (rather than the traditional religious ideas of 'tell them it's naughty and not to do it, then hope they work everything out for themselves successfully'). Conservative attitudes to sex were probably a good thing back in their day (a few centuries ago, before the rise of modern science and medicine), but these days they do more harm than good. Appealing to them is an effective means of political point scoring (which is what the 'porn filter' stuff has been about).
That said, porn filters by default is not necessarily a bad idea in itself: parents should have a degree of control with respect to what information and imagery of a sexual nature is available, but this control _must be used wisely_ in the raising of children, and that is what I doubt will be the case. Trying to keep the lid on a Pandoras box that was never closed in the first place is stupid and foolish, yet politically expedient on countries such as the UK and the US. When will we learn?
The more general one is of rights without obligations. One has rights to own property and resources, but not the obligation to use those resources for the best of everybody. This tacitly encourages people to use them for selfish gain, in line with our inherited caveman psychology. The results in the modern world are plain to see, and we are turning in to a race of overdressed cavemen running around with magic toys.
While there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, you would expect those in charge of internet servers to be better aware of risks to avoid than the average home user.
You have 5 million unemployed, most of them probably could do decent jobs and would want to, provided they were there at decent pay. The trouble with private industry is you have a large collection of self-interested entities all of who want certain things. They do not care about people who could work for which there is no job they can do, they do not care about contributing to a society which could provide pathways for those unemployed, as a private company they cannot afford to, since the resources they would spend wouldn't be recouped by them, and would put them at a competitive disadvantage. So we have a mismatch between what is wanted, and what is available, and the wanters don't want to change their demands, and the available labour won't magically adapt to match the desires of the companies.
Let's get this clear: 5 million unemployed is wasteful. Some may not be able to work for health reasons, but only a small fraction. What happens in the West is that all these competing private companies have no incentive to improve the work situation for those 5 million unemployed, and the nature of market competition means they have a strong incentive no to. Thus bringing the country to a point where jobs are available, or appropriate training is practically accessible, is left to a government who is already heavily in debt to private companies the world over, and thus cannot afford to help the situation either. Those 5 million have little they can do beyond protests and protest votes. This is wasteful, and we need to take a top-down view, seeing all human and material resources as a single pool, and work out how to rectify the situation. Or we can simply have 5 million unemployed, employers with jobs they can't fill, overworked people complaining about the unemployed sitting on their arses, right wing politicians demanding we remove any social support and starve the poor buggers until they magically turn into the workers the private companies want, and left wing politicians demanding we tax the shit out of private companies to pay for better sofas for the unemployed to sit on, better TVs to watch, so as to win their share of the votes, and basically f*** all else. This is a tremendous waste, but who on earth is going to do anything to rectify the situation?
(Yes this is a rant, and is rather less well researched than I would like, so read it as such.)
I prefer to download or rip. My Amazon stick is nice, but both Amazon and Netflix have a habit of changing what is available. How many times have you begun watching a TV series only to have it pulled when you are partway through? In addition, local rips can be played with basically anything. A 32gb microsd in a pi with libreelec/osmc and usb keyboard is a fave. I like something which, when it comes to watching, I can just switch on and have work. I have toyed with a cut down openelec system which autoplays local media (stuck it on using your pc, store, then just plug into your pi and switch on at play time). Streaming is too complex compared to sit down, switch on, press play.
If we know the car is programmed to crash into a tree to avoid pedestrian casualties, this can be planned for in the safety design of the car, since it makes the kind of crash more predictable. Further, we can research into how to not get into those situations in the first place. This means looking ahead more when driving (what driving instructors often talk about, what driving students often omit to learn, and what serious police driver training used to drum into people). But being able to compile a comprehensive list of potential accident situations, and a comprehensive list of scenarios leading to them (again research worth doing) and programming measures for each one is not a bad thing. That means that the cars will be predictable in their behaviour in the case of an accident, and that predictability can be harnessed in programming other cars so as not to make things escalate (as happens on motorway pileups all too often: a driverless car will be programmed not to make the silly mistakes too many human drivers do). The best human drivers probably are better than driverless cars, but I imagine the median driver is much worse, and faced with driver safety and crowd safety will often end up achieving neither.
Is that if you want to use macOs or iOs, you have to put up with hardware design which turns incompatibily and unmaintainability into an art form. If macbooks were designed like thinkpads, and imacs and mac pros like the hp Z workstation, life with them would be so much easier. Instead Apple has become a shiny toy company whose raison d'etre is to prise as much mone from the expensive end of the consumer market as possible.
Correlation does not imply cause. Further, what other factors (such as higher GDP per capita, level of disposable income in the middle class, poor with access to technology, and so on) influence levels or piracy. Until you have an exhaustive list of correlated factors (rather than just one), it is unwise to do anything other than indicate you have a correlation. This is stuff that I was taught at GCSE, A-level and university level statistics.
Two are from business schools, one from an economics school. Doesn't surprise me. If an A-level student or a junior maths undergraduate submitted this as project coursework, it would justifiably get a reasonable mark, and a number of red pen scribbles. But that this is coming from three working academics shows how quality has fallen under pressure for more 'groundbreaking publications'.
If printed on tissue paper at least one could wipe their arse with it.
Build your messaging app with a API that other apps can hook into, and your custom app can do the encryption, sending encoded messages via the official app. (So these APIs will need to be banned: Twitter's API would also need to be banned, and indeed just about all the dynamic web.)
A few lines of javascript, crypto_js and a simple message relay written in PHP (which can be hosted anywhere in the world) is all you need for a secure messaging app. On the phone side, all you'd need is a web browser that can run standard javascript. On the server all you need is something like PHP (any language will do here: even a CGI script written in bash would suffice).
I still wonder how long it will be until the 'traditional host CPU' is scaled down to a small SOC, so that the traditional heavyweight CPU is freed up for tasks that actually require it: most of what runs on the i5 in the machine I am writing this on doesn't need anything remotely as powerful as said i5. Likewise, putting a small SOC-like chip in the graphics card and running most of the GUI there is another thing. As such, once processors hit the single core brick wall (and they're kind of doing that now), performance improvements will come from offloading what can run on a small power-efficient core to such a small power-efficient core. Given what the chip in e.g. a pi zero costs, it ought to make sense: connect your machine to power, and a tiny microcontroller handles the ILO and basic system management functions, and on power-on, a larger microcontroller/SOC does what the BIOS/UEFI does on current machines. Similarly in the screen we have the same arrangement, with a microcontroller starting up the GPU and display (independently of the rest of the machine). A modern PC is already like a small network (the GPU being networked to the main CPU via the pcie bus, multiple intel sockets networked via QPI etc.). Making this more explicit is the sensible thing to do.
A long white back, for a PhD project, a guy named Alexia (or previously Henry, the name the thesis was submitted under) Massalin, wrote an OS kernel called Synthesis. The aim there was to improve efficiency by using runtime code synthesis. In the modern world, along with sandboxing using processes and memory protection, given that we now have LLVM, it would be worth someone exploring an OS where binaries are more akin to the LLVM representation (or some high level representation), and importantly, there is no static list of kernel syscalls: rather at install time, a list of required syscalls is compiled, and possibly custom versions synthesised so that the process is restricted, at the binary level, to what it can access. Something like that. If you look at the system calls a process makes, how many of the available ones does it use? And of the calls that modify files, or use network sockets, how much of the potential of those calls actually gets used? What I am suggesting is basically using LLVM to enforce something close to the principle of least authority at the kernel syscall level using code synthesis.
Using virtualisation and a VPN at the hypervisor level, you can present an unencrypted network to the DOS software which is secure and encrypted when viewed from outside. MS-style EOL tactics should be outlawed in health software. Patients lives are more important than making money. If SA Health has a perfectly funtional system, the original vendor should be required to make their software maintainable past any business motivated EOL. That is the big problem with proprietary solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
Decentralised communism? There is a need for a self-starter regulating set of rules governing a mass of human so that beneficial self-organisation is likely. Selfishnessand, greed and the love of money and power (sglmp) are the enemies here. Neoliberalism basically dresses those enemies as unquestionably good idols to worship, bringing us to a larger more abstract version of early caveman religious cults. Communism in the Soviet style is what happens when these self-same human tendencies (sglmp) run amok in the corridors of government. The problem of ideal societies is that they tend to asume away the problems of building such societies out of real humans.
The kind of computer power governments, Google and Amazon can wield are one of the two magic components the Soviets lacked. How to prevent a Stalin style autocratic regime was the other one.
What has got lost is the 'promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts' bit. The 'by securing' bit has become a religious dogma. In the modern world, examples like Free Software show how the current 'implementation' does not fulfil the aim of 'promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts'. In the light of the relatively modern invention of modern computing, the 'by' but (the implementation) needs a serious rethink. But those who benefit disproportionately are economically bound to campaign to move law more in line with their interests, and the 'promot[ion of] the Progress of Science and useful Arts' is the victim.
If you want to watch porn in McDonalds, just bring it in on a USB stick. More seriously, though, the 'public health crisis' or porn is a public health crisis with regards to how we deal with what, in our sex drives, is a basic survival instinct which is often strongly frustrated and dissatisfied, and constrained by traditional ideas that it should be all but starved out of existence. First, the main crisis is a near-total lack of sensible sexual education: what these biological functions and drives are, how they feel in various situations, how to use them safely and hygienically, and if you really need to go (just as needing to go to the toilet), what the sensible options are. In crafting a society where there are essentially no sensible options that are publicly acceptable, save for long term relationships, we force relief of sexual frustration into the foundations of long term relationships and marriages, telling people with strong sex drives to pretend to be somebody they're not, telling their partners to trust them to be that somebody they're not, and then acting disgusted when the person pretending to be something they're not can't keep up the pretense any longer, some breach of that trust (to be something they're not) occurs, and the relationship rapidly rips itself apart. By harboring strong traditional expectations, and withholding practical sexual education, we are creating this crisis. The massive popularity of porn is just one symptom, the acts of people instinctively and desperately seeking outlets for their sexual drives, and simultaneously trying to hide those acts to save face and possibly avoid prosecution is another. But make no mistake, by trying to cage our sexual drives and starve them into submission we are creating the problem, and by giving people little in the way of sensible publicly and socially acceptable outlets to relieve these drives, we deny ourselves a means to remedy it. Porn takes the blame for what religious zealotry has created.
Encode encrypted messages using pseudo poetry or something. Make it an approximation of the crap many post on fingers these days. Using a 24k article full of new age bullshit to transmit 1k of encrypted text is quite feasible.
Crypto can be done easily in JavaScript with commonly available libraries. A simple Ajax script with one additional function call ( as in send(end(msg),key) rather than send(msg) and similar for decryption ) is all you need once you have your encryption library and a means of secure key exchange. How they will implement something which can be implemented in a simple php script with a common is library is beyond me.
Time from movement to screen with no lag at 90hz is 1/90s. With 1 frame lag, it takes double that, so 2/90=1/45s, hence 1 frame lag means latency equivalent to half the framerate.
Rather than requiring foreign sites to adapt, the ISP level porn blockers could be adapted to do this: require an account's owner be age verified. How you separate access from an authorised machine at a home address from one which is not is another matter, but I doubt it's that hard. My worry is that this is more of a political stunt to win votes from conservative votes with tradition-derived anti-sex attitudes, and to try and win the religous vote to the Tories away from Labour: compassion and care for the poor vs anti-porn/sex/gay policy. Sensible followers of religion should be more interested in the former, but I fear the latter is more easy to motivate political support for amongst those (swing voters) who would waver between Lab and Con at an election. In additon, those who care about the ability to access porn for people who are not underage are likely too small a minority to have an effect at the ballot box.
It is actually quite fun being chatted up by a fembot. It is funny how they all say the same things, and how often the apparently live up the road.
Many will be happy to produce content with a balanced copyright law with fair use provisions. Those who would not can simply not produce. That will create room in the market for less greedy producers to fill.
Tribal caveman instincts. The basic psychological machinery which leads to 'us vs them' mentality between a group of people and those who are readily observed to be different is something that would have worked well in terms of survivability of groups of humans (tribes) in the many many millennia before civilisation. As such, the machinery has been bred in, and there is no effective means to breed it out, thus the need to teach each and every generation how to prevent these instincts from causing problems. Ironically I find the early scriptural writings of the major religions to be good stabs at doing this, but major religious traditions are often more interested in furthering themselves than actually understanding what their tradition was supposed to be, and vehemently oppose any attempts to persuade them to change (what is labelled 'religious conservatism' in polite circles, but which is basically refusing to turn the steering wheel when your car comes to a bend, declaring that it is divine will that you keep going in the same direction, and that if you hit the tree in front of you, it was foretold and inevitable, or similar). Our basic instincts will harness and co-opt all that they can to further themselves, and that is what they are effectively biologically programmed to do.
Politics has descended into rhetoric and vote-hunting. Nobody in politics cares that much about consequences of policies compared to whether it sounds good with the voters. Porn is a stable bogeyman in religion and politics, a 'great evil that lurks in the dark shadows of the internet' which must be valiantly fought against. Like the 'negative automatic traits' of clinical psychology, these ideas prevent themselves from being challenged: the reality is ignored, rhetoric prevails, votes get won, and nothing gets fixed. The problem with underage people accessing porn is one of sexual education, or lack thereof. Humans naturally seek sexual enjoyment, if starved of this and offered only a few choice morsels, people can be motivated to work desperately. This effect (akin to the squirrel learning an assault course, as shown in a BBC program called Daylight Robbery (2, part 4/4 on youtube if you are interested)) has probably been beneficial in the past, before the rise of modern marketing. Sexual is used in much of marketing because it works. It works because often pictures of scantily clad young women on adverts are all that a young man will see in their day, and their brain will naturally reward and learn things associated with them (the primitive mate hunting instinct, a relic of our evolutionary past, would never have needed to be adapted to modern marketing).
A more sensible and pragmatic viewpoint is that humans in general have sexual desires and fantasies, often quite strong, that leaving these desires starved and frustrated has the capacity to wreak havoc in somebody's decision making. Rather, modern society need to learn to both satisfy and harness these drives, ensuring acceptable and effective outlets exist for everybody so that there is no need to seek sexual outlets elsewhere. Sexual desire, being short lived, is not a good foundation for a long-term loving relationship or a family, and thus in the modern world these things (sex and relationships) need to be less coupled than they have been in the past. Yes, sex has a major place in relationships, and ensuring drives are satisfied is a responsibility of those in that relationship, but how they are satisfied needs to be far less prescribed than it has been in the past. In addition, if there is a mismatch between desires of those in a couple, there needs to be acceptable options if one or both in a relationship are not to be frustrated (and this frustration can have serious detrimental effects psychologically, both individually and on the relationship itself, if that relationship gets perceived as an obstruction preventing relief of sexual frustrations).
Various forms of sexual entertainment need to be available, people need to understand the basic human needs better, how to use sexual entertainment sensibly, when it is a sensible option, how to avoid addiction-like behaviours, how to prevent obsessions growing to the level of being problematic, and so on. Much of this needs to be taught to children in proper sexual education (rather than the traditional religious ideas of 'tell them it's naughty and not to do it, then hope they work everything out for themselves successfully'). Conservative attitudes to sex were probably a good thing back in their day (a few centuries ago, before the rise of modern science and medicine), but these days they do more harm than good. Appealing to them is an effective means of political point scoring (which is what the 'porn filter' stuff has been about).
That said, porn filters by default is not necessarily a bad idea in itself: parents should have a degree of control with respect to what information and imagery of a sexual nature is available, but this control _must be used wisely_ in the raising of children, and that is what I doubt will be the case. Trying to keep the lid on a Pandoras box that was never closed in the first place is stupid and foolish, yet politically expedient on countries such as the UK and the US. When will we learn?
The more general one is of rights without obligations. One has rights to own property and resources, but not the obligation to use those resources for the best of everybody. This tacitly encourages people to use them for selfish gain, in line with our inherited caveman psychology. The results in the modern world are plain to see, and we are turning in to a race of overdressed cavemen running around with magic toys.
While there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, you would expect those in charge of internet servers to be better aware of risks to avoid than the average home user.
And using a private modprobe to inject his personal code into her kernel.
You have 5 million unemployed, most of them probably could do decent jobs and would want to, provided they were there at decent pay. The trouble with private industry is you have a large collection of self-interested entities all of who want certain things. They do not care about people who could work for which there is no job they can do, they do not care about contributing to a society which could provide pathways for those unemployed, as a private company they cannot afford to, since the resources they would spend wouldn't be recouped by them, and would put them at a competitive disadvantage. So we have a mismatch between what is wanted, and what is available, and the wanters don't want to change their demands, and the available labour won't magically adapt to match the desires of the companies.
Let's get this clear: 5 million unemployed is wasteful. Some may not be able to work for health reasons, but only a small fraction. What happens in the West is that all these competing private companies have no incentive to improve the work situation for those 5 million unemployed, and the nature of market competition means they have a strong incentive no to. Thus bringing the country to a point where jobs are available, or appropriate training is practically accessible, is left to a government who is already heavily in debt to private companies the world over, and thus cannot afford to help the situation either. Those 5 million have little they can do beyond protests and protest votes. This is wasteful, and we need to take a top-down view, seeing all human and material resources as a single pool, and work out how to rectify the situation. Or we can simply have 5 million unemployed, employers with jobs they can't fill, overworked people complaining about the unemployed sitting on their arses, right wing politicians demanding we remove any social support and starve the poor buggers until they magically turn into the workers the private companies want, and left wing politicians demanding we tax the shit out of private companies to pay for better sofas for the unemployed to sit on, better TVs to watch, so as to win their share of the votes, and basically f*** all else. This is a tremendous waste, but who on earth is going to do anything to rectify the situation?
(Yes this is a rant, and is rather less well researched than I would like, so read it as such.)
I prefer to download or rip. My Amazon stick is nice, but both Amazon and Netflix have a habit of changing what is available. How many times have you begun watching a TV series only to have it pulled when you are partway through? In addition, local rips can be played with basically anything. A 32gb microsd in a pi with libreelec/osmc and usb keyboard is a fave. I like something which, when it comes to watching, I can just switch on and have work. I have toyed with a cut down openelec system which autoplays local media (stuck it on using your pc, store, then just plug into your pi and switch on at play time). Streaming is too complex compared to sit down, switch on, press play.
If we know the car is programmed to crash into a tree to avoid pedestrian casualties, this can be planned for in the safety design of the car, since it makes the kind of crash more predictable. Further, we can research into how to not get into those situations in the first place. This means looking ahead more when driving (what driving instructors often talk about, what driving students often omit to learn, and what serious police driver training used to drum into people). But being able to compile a comprehensive list of potential accident situations, and a comprehensive list of scenarios leading to them (again research worth doing) and programming measures for each one is not a bad thing. That means that the cars will be predictable in their behaviour in the case of an accident, and that predictability can be harnessed in programming other cars so as not to make things escalate (as happens on motorway pileups all too often: a driverless car will be programmed not to make the silly mistakes too many human drivers do). The best human drivers probably are better than driverless cars, but I imagine the median driver is much worse, and faced with driver safety and crowd safety will often end up achieving neither.
Is that if you want to use macOs or iOs, you have to put up with hardware design which turns incompatibily and unmaintainability into an art form. If macbooks were designed like thinkpads, and imacs and mac pros like the hp Z workstation, life with them would be so much easier. Instead Apple has become a shiny toy company whose raison d'etre is to prise as much mone from the expensive end of the consumer market as possible.
Correlation does not imply cause. Further, what other factors (such as higher GDP per capita, level of disposable income in the middle class, poor with access to technology, and so on) influence levels or piracy. Until you have an exhaustive list of correlated factors (rather than just one), it is unwise to do anything other than indicate you have a correlation. This is stuff that I was taught at GCSE, A-level and university level statistics.
Two are from business schools, one from an economics school. Doesn't surprise me. If an A-level student or a junior maths undergraduate submitted this as project coursework, it would justifiably get a reasonable mark, and a number of red pen scribbles. But that this is coming from three working academics shows how quality has fallen under pressure for more 'groundbreaking publications'.
If printed on tissue paper at least one could wipe their arse with it.
Build your messaging app with a API that other apps can hook into, and your custom app can do the encryption, sending encoded messages via the official app. (So these APIs will need to be banned: Twitter's API would also need to be banned, and indeed just about all the dynamic web.)
A few lines of javascript, crypto_js and a simple message relay written in PHP (which can be hosted anywhere in the world) is all you need for a secure messaging app. On the phone side, all you'd need is a web browser that can run standard javascript. On the server all you need is something like PHP (any language will do here: even a CGI script written in bash would suffice).
I still wonder how long it will be until the 'traditional host CPU' is scaled down to a small SOC, so that the traditional heavyweight CPU is freed up for tasks that actually require it: most of what runs on the i5 in the machine I am writing this on doesn't need anything remotely as powerful as said i5. Likewise, putting a small SOC-like chip in the graphics card and running most of the GUI there is another thing. As such, once processors hit the single core brick wall (and they're kind of doing that now), performance improvements will come from offloading what can run on a small power-efficient core to such a small power-efficient core. Given what the chip in e.g. a pi zero costs, it ought to make sense: connect your machine to power, and a tiny microcontroller handles the ILO and basic system management functions, and on power-on, a larger microcontroller/SOC does what the BIOS/UEFI does on current machines. Similarly in the screen we have the same arrangement, with a microcontroller starting up the GPU and display (independently of the rest of the machine). A modern PC is already like a small network (the GPU being networked to the main CPU via the pcie bus, multiple intel sockets networked via QPI etc.). Making this more explicit is the sensible thing to do.
A long white back, for a PhD project, a guy named Alexia (or previously Henry, the name the thesis was submitted under) Massalin, wrote an OS kernel called Synthesis. The aim there was to improve efficiency by using runtime code synthesis. In the modern world, along with sandboxing using processes and memory protection, given that we now have LLVM, it would be worth someone exploring an OS where binaries are more akin to the LLVM representation (or some high level representation), and importantly, there is no static list of kernel syscalls: rather at install time, a list of required syscalls is compiled, and possibly custom versions synthesised so that the process is restricted, at the binary level, to what it can access. Something like that. If you look at the system calls a process makes, how many of the available ones does it use? And of the calls that modify files, or use network sockets, how much of the potential of those calls actually gets used? What I am suggesting is basically using LLVM to enforce something close to the principle of least authority at the kernel syscall level using code synthesis.
Using virtualisation and a VPN at the hypervisor level, you can present an unencrypted network to the DOS software which is secure and encrypted when viewed from outside. MS-style EOL tactics should be outlawed in health software. Patients lives are more important than making money. If SA Health has a perfectly funtional system, the original vendor should be required to make their software maintainable past any business motivated EOL. That is the big problem with proprietary solutions.