Re: I've heard it all now
If they didn't advertise it on the internet, who would notice?
3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
If I understand correctly, they are accusing YouTube of tracking children, because they show videos for children on the main site, which children are not supposed to watch, and which tracks all users. And the solution is... Removing all content for children from the main site?
That's an interesting strategy. In this way, you could also argue that Google Search is clearly tracking children, because it tracks all users who access the web, and the web contains a lot of stuff for children. Ultimately, you would not be allowed to track any user at all unless you're a porn site. PH because porn site.
To be honest, I would be really interested in seeing what could be done with a 3D interface to the web. We largely surf in 2D, but I can see no particular reason it has to be so.
Of course, it might amount to nothing. On one hand, 3D games are legitimately a form of entertainment very different from 2D games. On the other hand, you don't really need VR or AR to have a 3D interface, so if there was something great to do in 3D, people would probably have thought of it already...
Live report on YouTube:
Slowly but surely, the only option left to EU governments to implement the privacy protections guaranteed by their own laws will be to demand that private data must be held in European data centers operated by independent European companies, which have no need to obey US demands. I'm not sure they will go that far, or that they care enough about our privacy...
I am afraid that in this case, the convergence of the OS also means a convergence of the UX. In particular, I'm afraid that because most Mac users use it for very little serious work, the UX is going to converge to a consumer experience similar to the phones.
There has already been a few changes in that direction. For instance, they had in Finder windows this "All my files" folder, which is so useless to anybody doing serious work on a computer that's it's almost insulting. I think that's been removed now (and of course you have people complaining since it was so useful to them), but it's a pretty good indication of what can go wrong when you design for your average users.
A bit like when Windows introduced the ribbon, and the most prominent buttons were "copy" and "paste".
It shouldn't be hard to reproduce the accident scene, and find what went wrong.
What I wonder is, even if we admit that the lidar didn't see her, at some point she was in the headlights, and the cameras should have seen her. For almost a second. Too late to avoid the accident, but never too late for an emergency break, reducing the damage. If it takes more time for a computer to recognize the situation and react than for a human, we have another big problem.
Indeed, it used to be that GPU were completely unreliable for precise computations. Of course, that has changed in the past decades, when the industry realized that there was money in fast GPUs that did not make mistakes, and advertised them as such.
There's nothing wrong in itself with GPU that return slightly imprecise results in exchange for speed; but that should be clearly announced so that buyers know what to expect.
Polonium-210 is just yet another agricultural poison
You know, for a lot of your tirade, I don't really know whether what you are saying is correct or incorrect. I admit it's not my domain of expertise. But if you are going to claim that Polonium-210 is routinely used in agriculture as an herbicide or insecticide, then let me go ahead and say that this part, right there, is complete bullshit.
could someone please specify what the legal status of an untrained lawyer is ? Because as far I know, it is NOT A LAWYER.
You have something wrong here. This process is the equivalent of ringing the bell of your neighbor and asking him if he would cut down his tree which is growing over your side of the fence. You might threaten a lawsuit if he refuses to do it; but at this point, it's not a legal process. You didn't hire a lawyer yet, he doesn't need a lawyer to answer you, one way or another.
What Google is doing with this process is deciding whether they will accept the request immediately, removing the need for a lawsuit and all the red tape. If they say no, then the lawyers get involved.
In the end, it's only in front of a judge that real legal decisions can be taken. Lawyers can only argue for one side or another. It makes no sense to demand Google use lawyers unless you hire your own lawyers to argue against them, and the whole point of the process is to avoid that.
Sure, salaries are twice higher in Switzerland... But then everything is twice as expensive as well!
That said, I've never understood why IT salaries in London are so low, considering the cost of living, and what should be a healthy competition among finance companies to attract talent.
And that's why I'm not a judge.
Is it really important what exactly did that man (it's a man, right?) do all those years ago? In a sense, the gravity of his crimes was already measured when he was convicted to less than 4 years of jail (which is I understand a condition for a conviction to be considered as spent). Ideally, it should not be necessary to decide of that again. I'd have thought the judge would just throw out any and all arguments about the gravity of his crimes as irrelevant.
But maybe that's also why I'm not a judge.
Is it really a significant increase, whether in bandwidth, or in number of nutjobs?
I mean, Wikipedia isn't exactly a small site that nobody visits. And it's already been the target of conspiracy nutjobs for many years. I doubt that there's going to be a sudden increase in traffic from people who had never heard of the site before.
I think it might be the first time a website would complain about Google relying on them and sending them users :-D
[...] will result in his name being plastered everywhere again
Does it? I'm not sure it means that. The injunction could pretty well keep going after the lawsuit is over, even in case of a loss, couldn't it? I'm sure that there are open-ended injunctions.
The loss only means that you will be able to find those websites on Google by looking for his name, whatever that name is, just like you are able to do it now.
they had a duty to build such safeguards into their systems, before they got big
Well actually, the thing is, there is no law forcing those companies to build safeguards. If there was such a law, they'd be getting sued already. What's under discussion is whether they will police themselves, or whether governments will have to write ham-fisted laws forcing them to.
That said, I don't recall big tech ever openly claiming they were too big to be regulated. They might play with the notion, hinting that they'll just leave the country and drop services if regulators attempt to control them; but I've never seen an example where they just go out and use that as an argument. In fact, it'd be pretty stupid of them to do that, because that's precisely the kind of behavior that means regulators should intervene.
Face Vomiting was approved as part of Unicode 10.0 in 2017 under the name “Face With Open Mouth Vomiting” and added to Emoji 5.0 in 2017.
You're welcome!
such as Apple making iCloud a worthwhile competitor.
I'm not sure how that would make a difference? Dropbox already has plenty of competition from Google and Microsoft, and their products are reasonably worthwhile. Were Apple to somehow decide to wake up from their slumber, I doubt they'd go for the people who would otherwise choose Dropbox.
Relatively few problems have known efficient solutions with a quantum computer, but that isn’t the same at all.
The key point is that a QC can execute at least one NP-hard problem in polynomial time.
No! NO! NO!!1!
There is not, I repeat, not a single NP-hard problem for which we have found an algorithm solving it in polynomial time. Even with a quantum computer.
To quote the Wikipedia article on Quantum Computing: "There is a common misconception that quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. That is not known to be true, and is generally suspected to be false."
The proof is not constructive, it just says it can be done
The proof is constructive, just impractical.
No! The class of algorithms efficiently computable by Quantum Computers (i.e. BQP) does NOT include NP-hard or even NP-complete problems.
To be pedantic: If you can prove your statement, you have a million dollars waiting for you.
I think what you mean is that BQP is not known to include NP-complete problems.
As I understand it, there's terribly few problems whose known complexity is smaller with a quantum computer. In fact, the only that I know is factorizing large numbers. Which sounds very useful to destroy cryptography, until you remember that elliptic-curve cryptography is not affected, so we can just change algorithms and carry on...
So really, what's the use of quantum computers?
I mean, the tech giants are all — technically — following the rules as it is. Why would they sign up for an additional tax? Are governments simply going to decide case by case who should pay that tax?
Apart from that, I'm thinking that Apple, Google and Facebook might be fine with a tax on turnover, because they have massive margins. That's probably going to hurt Amazon a lot more, though.
Let's all use a messaging system which charges you by the message!
Jokes aside, I wonder how many people still use SMS by default and don't use or even know about WhatsApp/Messenger. I suspect it's not much. Facebook claimed in 2016 that Messenger and Whatsapp together had three times as much traffic as SMS worldwide. And I'm pretty sure SMS has lost ground since then...
And how many of these are sent from an iPhone to an Android, since that's what iMessage does in this situation?