Posts by Elongated Muskrat 2812 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2022
Nice sentiment, except:
- Small youtubers (with below a certain threshold of views) don't get a penny from the adverts, it all goes to Alphabet.
- ads aren't just static images, or videos inserted into other videos, many of the so-called "ads" on web sites (not specifically YouTube here, but the general principle applies), are downloading and running arbitrary code on your PC. This is a delivery mechanism for zero-day, or unpatched exploits. No thanks.
For those who downvoted that, I think I should point out that promoting "tweets" with openly antisemitic tropes in them is not only abhorrent, but also so close to the stuff the actual Nazis did, that the only real difference between Musk and one of Hitler's lot, at this point, is the fact that he's not wearing a swastika armband. Making a valid comparison is neither reductio ad Hilterum nor an application Godwin's Law (Godwin himself states that valid comparisons to fascism are valid).
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and all that. It seems that people are being wilfully blind to the similarities between Musk and the industrial-corporatist-fascist complex of Nazi Germany. As has been pointed out elsewhere, Musk is a modern day Henry Ford. There are those who think this a good thing, and those who bother to study history.
Put on your wizard hat, go into the version info on your phone and tap it the magical number of times until your phone is in "developer mode", download and install adb on your PC (may also apply on a Mac, almost certainly will on Linux), plug your phone in via a USB cable, open an adb console, and uninstall it using the following incantation:
pm uninstall -k --user 0 com.google.android.music
The same technique can be used to remove all manner of "non-uninstallable" bloatware off your phone, including shiteware that mobile operators preinstall on new phones if you're silly enough to buy one through them.
Since he has tried, and failed, to get elected as an MP seven times, it might be difficult for him to become PM.
Not as difficult as it should be, mind, given that we seem to now be appointing people who haven't been elected to the HoL in order to shove them directly into high offices of state, and that is apparently fine.
If the hardware is slow (such as running on a Zero, or a first generation Pi), then it might introduce a delay to DNS lookups.
I'm running it on a 400 (as well as using it as a file server), and it doesn't go anywhere near using all the memory or processor cycles, so there is no noticeable delay.
Having said that, some pages might have scripts that wait for the ads to load, and which then time out and load the rest of the page. That would be a deliberate (and underhand) choice from the authors of that page.
What, you don't see the loud, intrusive video adverts that pop up in the middle of a sentence in YouTube videos?
Perhaps it's because Alphabet have now gained complete control of your subconscious mind, and you are now on your way to buy the latest (Pixel phone / Chromebook / whatever $Google product / delete as applicable) without even knowing it.
I think I'll stick with loudly shouting "fuck off" at them when I've not managed to block them, and vowing to never buy whatever shit they are touting at me, but you do you.
I've been using Firefox since before Chrome existed, and I can't think of a single instance of a page that didn't load properly, with the exception of those that demanded I use a specific version of IE, and I think that would probably have been over a decade ago.
So, I'm going to go ahead and call bullshit.
Edit - there are plenty of sites that won;t load with scripts blocked, though. If NoScript tells me that they are requesting that I allow numerous other domains that appear to have fuck all to do with that site to load scripts, I just go elsewhere.
However, as Musk is finding out with Twitter"X", (and Microsoft with IE and Edge) people have a limit where they'll just say, "I've had enough of this, I'll find something else." Once enough people make that decision, word spreads, and a "phase change" happens. Once that phase change has happened, it's very hard to get people to come back.
Google are not just pushing people away with Chrome, but also really annoying people with the excessive and pervasive ads on YouTube. They may think that they can continue to push the envelope of what users will tolerate, but sooner or later, it'll cross a line, and due to inertia, that line may not be obvious until it was crossed a while back.
We can't predict what the alternative is that people will flock to (we couldn't have predicted Chrome), but Firefox keeps trundling along with its 3% market share...
Yes, ludicrous that politicians should appoint judges, especially the head of state.
In the UK, this is the process for appointment of senior judges:
https://www.supremecourt.uk/about/appointments-of-justices.html
The selection commission must have at least five members. Where a selection commission is convened for the appointment of a Justice other than the President of the UKSC, it must consist of:the President of the UKSC, who will be the chair of the selection commission;
a senior UK judge (who is not a UKSC Justice) nominated by the President of the UKSC;
a member of the Judicial Appointments Commission;
a member of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland; and
a member of the Northern Ireland Judicial Appointments Commission.
Note how these do not include any politicians, does not include the Crown, the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary (the minister in charge of the Ministry of Justice), or any other publicly elected official. It is done by members of the judiciary, who have proven themselves to be impartial.
Most countries, rightly, see the system in the US, of elected or politically appointed judiciary, as corrupt and unworkable. Electing senior police (such as sheriffs) is also pretty brain-dead, as it leads to populist appointees, and although we have elected police and crime commissioners in the UK, they have no role in operational policing (and arguably are pretty useless).
Asserting that your way is the correct way, and that other systems don't exist, or are "ludicrous" only exposes your own ignorance, and inability to use your search engine of choice.
...meanwhile, democratic countries have a separation between the legislature and the judiciary, judges are not appointed by politicians, or via a political process, but get the job instead through experience, seniority and hard work. Somehow, in those countries, the judiciary applies the law as written (or as set in precedent by case law) without having to make decisions based on political, or religious ideology.
I wish I could say that my country is one of those, but our government is possibly even more corrupt than yours.
Yeah, I think Russia and China do have courts stuffed full of political appointees, no praying required, and your example (of Roe vs Wade) demonstrates how that has become the state of affairs in the US as well. Let's not forget that Obama was prevented from appointing replacement judges because he was about to leave office, but Trump did exactly that, with some extreme right-wing religious nuts. Who then went and overturned RvW...
In any case, I found employing the services of google to be more effective than praying in the ascertainment of information:
...I'll just add, that one of those "others" is "Search and News Advertising," which may include some dodgy tracking, but more likely is just "relevant" ads related to search results, which, whilst annoying, isn't nearly as much of a big problem, and falls within the bounds of "acceptable" advertising.
I think the "having to pay for new versions of Windows" is a bit of a red herring though, because, firstly, AFAIK Microsoft still DO charge for new versions of Windows, and if they decided not to (which they may), it's because they are doing their level best to move everyone to a "subscription model" for software that runs on that platform (the most egregious example being Office 365).
Even bothering to search for it would have given you the enlightening answers here as to what Microsoft's main revenue streams are. In the second quarter of FY23:
Server Products and Cloud Services:$19.59B (+19.61%)
Office Products and Cloud Services: $11.84B (+5.21%)
Windows: $4.81B (-27.09%)
Gaming: $4.76B (-12.57%)
LinkedIn: $3.88B (+9.77%)
... plus a few more below $3.5B ...
As you can see, their Azure business is worth more than four times as much to them as Windows, and, arguably, has a much higher tie-in, once they are hosting your stuff it's harder to move than, for example, switching to Linux on your home PC.
It's the owners of those web sites that are making them unusable. I could put up a web site, today, with static content, and even adverts on it, without the need to run any scripts or set any cookies, or session tokens, at all. I wouldn't need to store any kind of state, unless there was something on that site which requires a user to log in, in which case, I think the session cookie, or token, or whatever I would be using to do so, would almost certainly be exempt from requiring assent from the user, as long as it is only used to assure continuity and security of that session.
Also, all those pop-overs nagging the user to set their "preferences" are completely unnecessary, if the site assumes no consent, and then provides a button for the user to click and explicitly consent to the tracking scripts. I can count the number of users who would actually want them, and choose to do so, on the fingers of one foot.
So, the conclusion is, of course, that the internet is unusable due to dodgy web sites, and dodgy advertisers, not because of EU law, and that EU law is an attempt to rein that in. If the US ever gets some sanity and follows suit, the business models of large internet companies (which have got very rich off the back of exploiting users) would have to change, at least outside of other countries with dodgy attitudes towards privacy, such as China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
I wouldn't want to be working in a recycling plant dealing with lead (or, indeed, concentrated sulphuric acid with nasty lead compounds sloshing around in it). The thing about nickel and zinc is, that they're not going to give you heavy-metal poisoning if you accidentally ingest them or breathe them in, in dust form (although apparently breathing in nickel dust, as may occur in a refinery setting, is a suspected carcinogen).
Recycling is never a completely closed loop, and anywhere dealing with recycling lead from batteries is going to end up contaminated.
They all wear cheap blue nylon suits, and pretend to be your buddy whilst metaphorically reaching into your back pocket to nick your wallet.
The ones in the expensive blue suits are the ones who have succeeded in scamming enough people to buy a veneer of respectability, eh, "Call me Dave". (ooh! topical)
I think there's probably also an element of the viability of the business to start with. If your business is essentially to come to an agreement with operators to re-sell their products at a lower price, with the advantage of getting the money up-front, isn't it always going to be a case of taking the money and running away from the debt before it comes due?
I once worked at a place that administered part of the "cashback" deals P4U had, which they used to make their offerings look attractive to customers (I wasn't directly involved with this, but saw it in action). These were set up in such a way that the claimant had to make multiple claims, at specified dates, months after buying a phone, in order to get the money back. It doesn't take a great stretch of the imagination to see that this was done entirely so that a significant number of customers never got their "cashback," and the company made that money as profit. If those are the sort of business practices we are talking about, there's no requirement whatsoever for other parties to collude to put them out of business, the reputational damage they were causing to themselves, and loss of repeat business to disgruntled customers would do the job just fine.
"The Korean-language Yonhap News Agency report, through machine translation, talks of the 'bot normally handling boxes of paprika; Western media is taking that to mean bell peppers seeing as it's a produce-sorting facility."
I can't read Korean, so can't verify it, but my guess it's probably a box of gochugaru, a ubiquitous ingredient, and seasoning, in Korean cooking, and kind of half-way between mild chilli flakes and paprika. There's no direct translation into English, which might explain the near-miss of "paprika".
Yeah, right you are, just testing, carry on, as you were, etc...
As it happens, my first thoughts went to a VALIS reference, then I thought "don't be silly, that's PKD not RH," and then I went and made the same mistake in a different way. It's too many years since I read stuff by either, so it might be time for a re-read soon.
Facebook: "Here's a million quid we found down the back of Zuck's sofa."
Britain: "On second thoughts, off you go. No problem here."
This is nothing whatsoever to do with protecting people from padeoterrorists or about reining in big tech (Sunak is literally married to a big tech heiress). It will only ever (adversely) affect users, and ordinary people like you and I.
Whilst the Sir Humphreys do undoubtedly exist in Whitehall, those are far from the people in charge of the current government. Look to where the money is coming from, always.
If anything, the Sir Humphreys provide a useful scapegoat for the culture war against the vast majority of actual, low paid, overworked, civil servants.
The "big cheeses" of any sort of organised crime will by definition, be very rich. Did our government ever go after anybody very rich for wrongdoings of any kind? Can you think of one example? Nope, didn;t think so.
The fact that some of them are, themselves, very rich, should in no way indicate that they might be crooked, of course. They all just worked very hard to become multimillionaires, or billionaires without cheating or exploiting anyone. You could do so too, you're just lazy, etc.
They could be better at doing that, especially from those paying larger amounts. Of course, with all the "trickle down" bollocks (which has pretty conclusively been shown to be bollocks) that they push, it means taxing the poorest the most, but hey-ho, vote Tory, get a Tory. There's a reason the origin of that word is the Middle Irish tóraidhe, which means robber. When Ireland won its independence from Britain, the real achievement there was to get independence from Tories.
Maybe they've been laying off the wrong people?
This is the corporate malaise. An organisation grows to a point where it has senior levels of management who have no connection to the people who actually produce the things they sell. Because they don't understand what their people do, they don't understand how their business operates, and all they see are the spreadsheets.
The spreadsheets lead them to believe that their employees are a cost, and not an asset, and they decide to make a bunch of them redundant (or just straight-up fire them, if they're in a backward country with inadequate employment law, such as the US) in order to make their organisation more profitable.
In the same way as removing all the body panels from your car, this makes the organisation appear to be running more effectively in the short run, until the point where it becomes apparent those bits you cut off were vital to its ongoing viability. That car isn't going to make it through its MOT, and you'll probably find that, although you got some cash for the platinum in the catalytic converter, you actually needed it, for regulatory reasons.
There are then three choices: spend a load of money replacing the parts you removed to get back to viability, at an overall loss, sell off the remaining parts and close up shop, or try to transform the business into something else (in the same way that HP used to be an R&D company, and now it sells ink) without failing entirely. History is littered with companies that went the third way and failed.
