No videos until you consent?
If you are required to consent to the ad blocker detection, could YouTube simply say 'if you don't consent to us running the code to detect ad blockers, we won't let you watch any videos'?
90 publicly visible posts • joined 23 May 2010
"Getting the model up and running also isn't straight forward, unless you're used to handling systems of this kind, and repurposing it for more nefarious activities will also require further technical expertise"
Somehow I don't think the level of difficulty will dissuade the kind of people who engage in 'nefarious activities'. Technical expertise is not in short supply in the world of cyber crime.
"semiconductor demand has declined"
So why build another factory? If you'll only build it with German government money, and there's no demand for it anyway, well then don't build it.
I'm assuming the subsidies Intel are getting are just free money. If they were loans, that's not a problem, because a chunk of Intel's profits would pay it back. If it's just free money, Intel gets to keep any profits they make and the German government gets nothing.
If the banks won't give Intel free money, why do governments feel they need to do it?
First impressions at this news is that Musk is thinking:
Okay, whether or not the price is good, I will OWN one of the world's most important communications platforms. If I've paid 5, 10, 15 billions more than I should? Whatever. It's all numbers. It's all Monopoly money. I will have Twitter, which gives me:
(1) The power (He-Man)
(2) The Force (Star Wars)
(3) The eyes of the world (Twitter)
I have so much money. I'll take it. You know you will regret this, right?
In other news, shares in popcorn just went up. Chomp. Chomp.
I think the point is that both of the following are sexist:
"Wear a short skirt to show your legs"
"Wear a long skirt to cover your legs"
It is the act of telling a woman what to show and what not to show which is the issue. "Dress smartly" is what they should have said. That would be open to interpretation, but at least it would not be telling women how much of their bodies they should be showing.
New rules - you have to present your legal birth certificate for ID, shake hands with your opponent, and sit on a standard-sized chair at the game table, where you will be required to physically move your pieces without outside assistance. That should stop the robots competing... for at least a couple of months.
But seriously, why is he giving up because an 'entity' can beat him? The fastest female sprinter doesn't stop competing just because she will never beat the fastest male, who himself will never beat the fastest greyhound. You compete like for like, to be the best in your field. In Go, this man is the best HUMAN Go player.
From now on, we will have to assume that only high quality video sources are not faked, because the fakers cannot do 4K video, and maybe even good 1080p, convincingly. The fakers will catch up, but they will need to be an order of magnitude better to fool us - the more detail used by a video format, the more it can be analysed for forgery and fakery. Courts will presumably at some point no longer allow 'grainy' footage to be used as evidence, being too unreliable and easy to manipulate. Forensic tools will improve, and so will the tech needed to avoid them. It's an arms race. Interesting to see where this goes.
Ads used to be just that, something to display information about a service or product. They were boxes with basic information. You clicked if you were interested. That was it. Then they became horrendous 'suck the life out of every page' monsters, where on some sites you have to fight to know where the actual original web site's content is being displayed at all. Refresh, refresh, pop under, pop over, track, auto-video-play, spy, send data, follow to other sites... how does any of that translate to something any casual visitor of a web site really wants?
I get it, you want to fund the content, because content isn't free. But you made the experience so damned impossible to bear, and that's why we use ad blockers. Now Google, you want to take that away? Well let's see... can you just leave us with a popup which says 'this site is so plastered with ads you really don't want to go here'? We'll all be happy with that. We already get it - the anti-ad-blockers which tell you you can't come in unless you view the ads. If I see a site which says 'you absolutely cannot view this site without ads', I give it one try. If I can read the page and still ignore the ads (if they don't take over the whole experience), then I'll stay. If they crawl over my screen like a bad infection, I just won't go there again.
Come for the content, stay for the experience, leave because the ads take over and spoil everything..
We don't really need ad blockers, we just need something which tells us 'this site is impossible to use because the ads have taken over like a virus'. Either way, Google seems to be saying 'no chance' to that.
I always prefer to use the previous version, at least until the next one is released. That way every tool and gadget I like to add will have no compatibility issues. Using VS 2015 now. Will probably shift to VS 2017 when this new one comes out, although even then only if there's a compelling reason to do so.
Someone I know, who looks a lot like me but definitely isn't me, drove a Vauxhall Corsa and over time the dashboard lights were getting dimmer and dimmer until finally they went off altogether. He was just about to take it in to be fixed when his significant other, who looks like my significant other but also definitely isn't, wondered if it was simply the dashboard dimmer dial (I believe that's the technical term for it). Not having heard of such a thing, he wondered where this was.
"Down by your knee."
He being 6'9" and driving a Corsa (I refer you to Hightower, Police Academy), his knee not only obscured the dial but regularly brushed against it, gradually dimming the lights. Once fixed, never forgotten, and constantly reminded of it.
I'd also once turned the fog lights on that way. Or he had. We no longer talk about it.
Bonus points: the red paint had faded to pink over the years. Loved that car, and I still see it parked outside my house on Google maps.
I know we got rid of Darwin with the change to the plastic tenner, but he is certainly one of the most influential figures in science and history. I still remember the reactions of some American evangelicals, who were congratulating themselves on having 'In God We Trust' on their money, when I showed them that one of our notes had that pesky evolution bloke Charles Darwin on it. Minds blown.
Whenever I travel I just take a basic device (phone, tablet or laptop, whichever is most appropriate) with little of importance on it, and use TeamViewer to connect to my computer back at home. This has the added advantage that if I'm somewhere with slow WiFi I can still run software at full speed - it's running at home and TeamViewer essentially just sends me screen updates. It would be trivial to enter a country with a factory reset device, install and use TeamViewer once you get there, then remove TeamViewer (or factory reset for extra security) before you leave. You'll need to remember your TeamViewer codes, but nobody can ask you for those if you don't have TeamViewer installed at the border.
The egg people say "Eggs are the perfect salad accompaniment", which by definition means they are not a part of the salad, just something to go with one. Me, I think a pork pie is the perfect salad accompaniment, but I will understand if the salad emoji doesn't show it. Wait, what? There is no separate pork pie emoji? You'll be telling me there are no Cornish pastie or black pudding emojis next. As for the pork pie with an egg in, that is simply an abomination - does it even have a name, let alone an emoji? Pig-egg pie?
You think that's luxury? I've done tech support using a 300 baud modem (no k, just 300), in a corridor (because that's where the only spare phone point was) so cold that I had to bring my own electric bar heater to work. It was often just quicker and easier to drive to the customer site instead.
We had proper ads in my day. None of this video and scripting malarky, no dragging your browser and computer down to the point of death. No, they were good, solid rectangles, nothing more than an animated GIF with a quick link to a crappy product page if you liked it, or keep scrolling if you didn't. You could see the content and you could see the ads and (important this) you could tell the difference between the two. Now it can take 2 or 3 minutes to load a page, but in the good old days it took, well, 2 or 3 minutes. No broadband. But when you tell kids these days about 14.4k dial-up modems they just don't believe you.
I've owned several dogs, and although they've all been the same breed (English springer spaniels), part of the joy of having each dog is that they were all very different, in both looks and personality. The only reason I can see for having a clone is that they would look the same and/or act the same. Yet I wouldn't want to be constantly reminded that my new companion looks just like the old one, but really isn't. Sam, Ralfie, Douglas... never replaced, just, er, a word that means I'll be looking for a new one eventually, but NOT a clone!
When updating to the 'Windows 10 Fall Creators Update', it decided that it didn't like the folder which contained my user information, so promptly changed a registry entry and pointed to an empty 'temp' folder - same username/password, different folder. Without knowing what it had done, it appeared that the update had wiped all my installed software and settings, and it took a number of hours before I (a) realised things were still there and (b) found what registry entry to change to get my login pointing to the correct folder again. A non-techy user would have had little chance of fixing it. This techy user did not appreciate waking up to a seemingly 'clean' Windows desktop and the prospect of getting my entire working environment re-installed.
Learned my lesson. I now have Windows Update scheduled for its next update several days in the future, which I constantly kick forward every few days. I'll update when I'm ready, thanks. Just AFTER I do a full system backup, in case it all goes tits up again.
A single point of failure for every garage door? Wonderful. So if the company's servers go down, every customer's garage door will end up being stuck, closed (or open) for hours. Please tell me there's a manual override. There is? Then ditch the company before it has a blackout, and just open the door yourself, manually.
I really do not see the sense in everything being connected to the internet. My personal bugbear is the Hive-style heating nonsense. Wow, I can switch on the heating remotely before I get home? Is that a problem I've ever needed to be solved? Right now I get home early, the house is 5 degrees cooler than I'd like, I switch on the heating, it warms up. A basic timer caters for 99% of my needs. If I'm late, the house has been warmed up without me and the extra expense will probably not force me to re-mortgage the dog.
I certainly do not need to open my garage door from anywhere in the world. The only place I need to open it is when I am directly in front of it, probably driving up to it or out of it, but certainly not driving while looking at my phone and trying to find the correct app to open the door.
When I looked it up it gave me something about jets in a carburetor, which is why I assumed it was a job for the garage mechanic. If you'd said water jets we'd have been on the same page immediately. The combined effect is that it's always necessary to communicate properly, so we're all conceivably right and wrong at the same time I suppose. But it's still good to vent about idiot end users :o)
"I'm looking at my keyboard and I can't see a key with "Enter" written on it."
Mine does say Enter, but I've had keyboards with the bent arrow there too, so I take your point. The real issue is that an IT manager should know what the Enter key does and where it is, even if there was nothing on it at all.
Thinking back, I may even have called it 'Return', but then I learned to type on typewriter, which had an actual carriage return. The whole thing happened in the 1990s, when I was doing tech support in a cold corridor over a 300 baud modem. Tell that to kids these days and they won't believe you :o)
You've told people not to use jargon, but I have no idea whatsoever what 'top-up the jets' means*. As far as I know, my car has a four-stroke petrol engine, no jet power in sight.
*I had a quick Google for it and I'm not much wiser. Unlike checking the tyres, it doesn't seem to be something the average car owner would want to do for themselves. Saying that 'power button' is jargon is the same as saying 'put the key in the ignition' is jargon. No, at some point you have to be aware of such fundamental terms to be a user of any kind of machinery or tech. Jets? As a driver I don't need to know about that - I drive the car, but I pay my garage to service it. And yes, I can 'check the tyres'.
I'd maintain that 'power button' is absolutely NOT 'jargon'. If someone is employed to use a computer at work all day, I'd hope that their standard of education is such that they can understand basic concepts such as that. He'd already 'asked her to turn it off and turn it on again', and she later said 'Oh you mean the button I use to switch it off with?' Neither 'turn it off' or 'switch it off' are 'jargon'.
I had an IT manager - a MANAGER mind you, of an office full of IT equipment and employees - who when told to type in something and press the Enter key said 'what's the Enter key?' Having to tell someone that it's the big key with 'Enter' printed on it was embarrassing for both of us. It's hard not to lose it in those situations.
Jargon isn't the problem. Some people are just morons who shouldn't have passed the interview for the job in the first place.
How many times have we seen the statement "The ISP was told that the advert must not appear again in its current form"? Since this invariably comes *after* the company's ad campaign has already ended, why bother at all? It's just a licence for anyone to start a short-term deceptive campaign, one which will already be over before they are criticised for it. Until financial penalties are imposed, this kind of warning will continue to be ignored. An ad with Usain Bolt and Richard Branson sat on the naughty step is what we want, at the very least :o)
So now that she is no longer allowed to buy e-books from Amazon, presumably the only option is to find 'alternative' sources for these books. Alternatives which are not going to add any money to Amazon's coffers, or indeed to the pockets of the author. Spectacular fail there guys, you just sent a paying customer over towards the dark side.
Can she at least get a refund for the purchase price of her now-useless Kindle, and for the books which she can no longer access legally? I suspect not.