Re: UK Government
To be fair, the mobility data they showed is hardly different or more privacy invasive than the traffic jam warnings they display in Google maps... To the general indifference.
3721 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
One possible reason for the fast launch is that Swiss universities had a hand in the development of the DP-3T decentralized protocol. Newspapers in Switzerland act as if it was invented there, so national pride is involved.
And yet, even in Switzerland, polls seem to indicate nowhere near enough people will download the app...
The examples I know where the website reimplements the search functionality are when the page content is dynamically loaded. One such "website" is Google Sheets. You don't want the huge spreadsheet to be loaded in the browser, so only the part you see is downloaded. For the search functionality, the tool actually sends the search query to the server, which finds and sends back the relevant part of the page.
So this is a VAT, and therefore technically paid by the end user... Though in practice companies sell at whatever price point which gives them the most total revenue, so it's likely they will lower their theoretical VAT-less price to compensate. It's easier to tax digital services, because the marginal cost of selling more is near-zero; meaning once you've produced the thing, there's almost no chance you will decide not to sell in Indonesia because you make less money there.
It's an interesting move. Seems a lot fairer and more efficient than taxes on turnover proposed by various EU countries; maybe because EU rules would not allow them to raise the VAT in this way?
There are some big holes in the logic though. The argument for diversity programs is that they right an "unjust" disparity in representation. He attempts to justify the disparity between the number of men and women in IT by claiming it is caused by women choosing not work in IT. He says that this is the natural order of things and we should not try to force it.
However, he notes himself that the diversity programs at Google also try to increase the number of black people hired in IT; yet he offers no explanation as to why black people would be underrepresented in IT. Is that the natural order of things that black people choose not to work in IT? And if there is no particular need to justify the disparity in the number of black people, why even offer a justification for women?
Not sure what you mean by that zero sum comment? If I understand correctly the argument, there is limited charity money, and limited jobs. Charity money is only given to poor people, because they don't have enough money, and some jobs are given preferentially to women, because they don't have enough jobs. Both are unfair, and rich people and men are entitled to complain about discrimination.
Lawsuits against large companies are usually free, with the lawyers getting a big part of the settlement in case of victory. From what I understand, this particular lawyer is a politician treating similar cases as free campaigning opportunities, and is unlikely to insist on getting paid to keep going with a lawsuit.
Question: Were companies allowed to bid against each other during the call for bids? Or did each company give out a single bid in a sealed envelope that nobody but the customer was allowed to see? Or would the DoD come to one of the company and tell them y'know, your competitors are a lot cheaper...?
Not sure what would be best, there are probably hidden implications in every solution.
the venture capitalist mob who are underwriting these outfits to the tune of billions have left themselves with little option but to continue the money flow. If they don't, then it folds and the lose everything
That's the sunk cost fallacy! But actually, the VC mob got its money back when Uber went public. Now it's private investors who would be left holding the bag.
Arguably, the vast majority of users never even type a URL, so you could say that it doesn't even matter which TLD you are using. People Google for facebook instead of typing fb.com. On the other hand, I do know that El Reg's website ends with .co.uk, and I can therefore trust that I am on the right website... Though that logic is full of issues, starting with lookalike unicode characters used to write stuff like "tнеrеgɪѕtеr.сo.uk".
So, maybe the whole thing ought to get revisited, and companies should just register a domain name under the cheapest TLD available...?
I recall that in Germany at least, publishers were able by law to choose whether to allow Google to display snippets; the intent was that Google would have to negotiate with them a fair price. Google offered them zero, and they all accepted sooner or later.
Of course, even though big publishers initially refused, you'd have cheap fly-by-night new sites that would accept it immediately, which meant their results were more attractive to users and received more traffic, which meant that the big publishers lost any leverage to force Google to accept their terms. Typically, bigger outfit would be able to out-advertise small operations, but since Google News is free for everybody, they can't. This makes Rupert Murdoch very unhappy.[citation needed]
The big problem of Google News is that it makes not much difference if you're a great outfit with carefully researched stories, or a one-man outfit copy/pasting stories with automated scripts; for a lot of news it makes no difference.
This makes it possible for Google to just say: "We'll let you decide exactly what you want to us to display on Google News, and we'll pay you nothing at all". And publishers all fall over themselves to allow Google to show everything it wants.
My understanding is that monitors can normally only represent a triangle in the horseshoe of the full color gamut, because they only have subpixels of three different colors (usually red, green and blue), and that by mixing them you can only represent the convex hull of these three colors (therefore triangle). You can choose colors that are as far apart as possible and as pure as possible, but you cannot represent the full gamut because you cannot have a subpixel in a color that does not exist outside of the horseshoe gamut (you'd need to find a way to activate only certain photoreceptor cones and not others, even though they normally both react to a different degree to the same lightwaves).
So how is it possible for "modern monitors" to display more colors? Are they using four subpixels?
Which seems an odd choice to me, as won't that mean servers will need to keep track of browsers and version numbers, in order to know what standards they can utilise?
That's pretty much what they do now, isn't it? My user agent string looks like "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_3) AppleWebKit/XXX.XX (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.XXXX.XXX Safari/XXX.XX" good luck figuring out what standards that means...
I wouldn't bet much on the new assistant (I suppose Samsung has an assistant hiding somewhere and nobody cares), but the app store is something more interesting. Considering the percentages demanded by Apple and Google, there is a need for more app stores, and some game companies are already taking steps...
That said, does somebody understand why these sanctions make it impossible for Huawei to put Google Play on their phones, but lets Microsoft put apps on Huawei's app store? Maybe Google should put Google Play in Huawei's app store?
Who would benefit from that? And I don't mean in a money sense. Literally, what good would it make to make these non-routable? It feels to me like you just discovered somebody has been hoarding a collection of rare stamps, so you decide to... burn it all.
I think wanting Google to keep quiet about delistings to prevent the site owners from republishing it misses the point of the Right To Be Forgotten. First, if the site owners are determined to disseminate that information, not even Google can prevent them. Second, if the site owners are determined to disseminate that information, then that information is not irrelevant or obsolete.
If the goal was to prevent site owners from disseminating the information, then they would be ordered to take down the page; but that is not the case. If the goal was to prevent users to find the information if they look for it, then the page would be delisted for all search terms; but that is not the case either.
The point of the Right To Be Forgotten is only that Google should not display this information when nobody particularly wants to disseminate it and nobody is particularly looking for it.
As far as I know, in all those years, Google has informed site owners in every EU country, and though some people complained, no other country has forced them to stop.
Online payments are ridiculously more complicated and/or expensive that they need to be. I'm not saying Revolut is going to be the one platform to rule them all, (and there doesn't need to be only one,) but there is a serious need to break the hold of companies like Visa and western Union on payments.
Note that Google's DNS privacy policy surprisingly claims they don't use the DNS queries to track users. Though it looks like they might use it to analyse website popularity.
how do the repeater stations get power to do the job?
Boring: The cable contains an electric wire. Though if I remember correctly, only one; they just create a voltage with the ground at each end. And yeah, they generally pull the cable up, unless they're one of the special submarines used by the NSA to splice in-situ.
It does seem logical that people would prefer ads that are relevant to the context, rather than targeted. On the other hand, I can't imagine that the Google guys would not experiment with that as well, and chase whatever brings more cash. As far as I know, the ad money is always split the same between Google and the website, targeted or not, so their interests ought to be aligned here.
It's the dark matter of the Internet: People who like targeted ads, click on all of them and make Google all its money.
the inertia of developers who stick with SQL no matter what
Amen! SQL is very nice for semi-competent people who are not into programming; but it's a tragedy that developers often query databases by concatenating strings to build "queries" in a 70s syntax which is about as evolved as COBOL, only to have it parsed back at the other end. Functionally and chronologically, it's the equivalent of communicating between computers using physical punch cards.
With all the energy spent into inventing new programming languages, I'm astonished nobody took the time to invent a declarative language based on theoretical concepts. Instead, I am stuck using nested queries four deep which look like a Proust novel rather than the equations that they should be.
Microsoft generally wants you to buy the next shiny, which is why they kill off the old one.
The problem of Google is that by fear of missing out on potential opportunities, they create hundreds of projects, even though they cannot possibly maintain them all. Inevitably, that means they must kill off the ones that are unsuccessful. And by unsuccessful, they mean less than 100 million users.
I'm not sure where you live or studied, but I was paid something like $20 an hour for being a math TA, which I thought was reasonable...
That said, I'm not sure why the university is at fault here? It's pretty standard to design part-time employment contracts to avoid paying the benefits associated with full-time. It's a bit weird to say that the threshold is 25%, then say it's cheating to aim for 20%. It feels a bit like getting a fine for running a red light "just before it turned red".