Posts by shade82000

Andrew Tate's site ransacked, subscriber data stolen

Re: Buried in the lede

'Surely, few young men would begrudge $50 a month for such an unequivocal confirmation of their heterosexuality?'

Idk why they couldn't choose a representative with a chin though.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

This is all interesting to read. I drive a van and always wondered if larger vehicles were deliberately calibrated to make unsuspecting drivers go a bit slower, because you know the van driver stereotype.

I drive 99% on single carriageways and like to set the speed limiter to the 50mph limit for commercial vehicles on those roads, because it's a kinda heavy and dangerous thing.

The last 3 vans I've had were all calibraed so that actual 50mph was 54mph on the speedo, and 30mph is 32mph. This is easy to figure out after a while because those flashy signs with smiley faces tell me how fast I'm going, and when I go through average speed camera sections, everyone else slows down to exactly 50mph while my speedo shows 54mph.

It's just the speedo though, I have to set the speed limiter to 54mph to make it drive at 50mph.

Man who nearly killed physical media returns with $60,000 vinyl turntable

Re: Most sense I have heard from a vynil collector

I also prefer sound from vinyl. Not claiming it's better or worse, just a different sound and a different experience. I've seen claims that "vinyl is mastered differently without using compression/normalisation etc." Definitely not a valid claim for every album but I certainly have some albums where the quiet bits are quiet and loud bits are loud, vs. the cd or streaming equivalent where every instrument is just a sea of same-volume noise. Probably not an issue with recent music that was produced digitally and meant to sound like that, but a lot of older tracks sound weird on streaming services, when I have 30 years knowledge of how they should sound.

Also playing vinyl is a whole experience, I like it much more than a digital playlist because I can appreciate the art, and having to turn it over halfway through is more engaging and an appreciation of the old technology.

I generally listen to a streaming service outside the house. When I find an album I like, I still buy it on CD. A few albums make it to my list of all time favourites and I buy them on vinyl if available. Even then I have albums from modern bands that are still obviously mastered differently on vinyl and not normalised.

I only have a £150 Audio Technica turntable and a tiny valve pre-amp, but it sounds really nice through my old Arcam AVR350 and MA RS-8 speakers.

Don't bore us, get to the Horus: Elementary OS 7 is here and looking good

Re: No menu bars?

This bugs me no end, helping people out with computery stuff and they just save files in whatever directory the save dialog defaults to. Then they locate the files by searching for them. Makes no sense to me, I have structures and know exactly where all my files are.

Vendors don't help here - some software save dialogs will always default to their own document subdirectory, which helps. But others will go to the last location used, even if it was set by another program, so we end up with design files in the document directory last used by the spreadsheet program.

Re: No menu bars?

'Applications' on top left, then buttons immediately underneath 'View as grid' or 'View by category'.

First they came for Notepad. Now they're coming for Task Manager

So they moved the top to the left and the left to the top but aside from that it looks the same.

The inevitability of the Windows 11 UI: New Notepad enters the beta channel

Until you mistakenly use > instead of >> while typing line 42.

Tesla disables in-car gaming feature that allowed play while MuskMobiles were in motion

Re: Removing distraction = good

I live in the vicinity of Hemel Hempstead too and was scared of the roundabout at first but after a few runs you get used to it. It's much easier after realising it's just a group of smaller roundabouts that happen to be arranged in a circle.

It taught me one thing - that you can be the best driver in the world but 90% of it is avoiding other people (a skill that can never be learned to any degree of certainty). Not everybody knows the layout of the road they're on, some people are just dumb and unobservant. I don't know which are which so I give everyone more room.

I had a gf from Southend once and she drove me around a similar one near where she lived saying it was really bad (Five Bells Roundabout I think?). I then showed her the one near me. HH and Swindon may be the most notorious but they definitely aren't the only ones.

Not for children: Audacity fans drop the f-bomb after privacy agreement changes

Re: Depressing

This was my first thought, they can only do what the user expects if they're told what the user expects. The alternative is trawling through user feedback when people can actually be bothered to send it.

If there are no logins or collection of personal info or open documents, then anonymised usage patterns and crash data can't be all that bad. What features are people using most? Develop more in those areas. What hardware did it crash on? Let's see if there's a similarity with other devices that also crashed. Causes can be identified more easily and fixes can be quicker. I don't care if they know about my hardware as long as it's not data that can be used to identify the actual devices, and as long as they aren't collecting names and addresses. And the data collection should be transparent and honest because open source.

Having said that, any talk of telemetry still freaks me out because I couldn't personally trawl through all the code to see what's being collected. But given that it's open source, there'll be changelogs detailing any changes to the scope of telemetry, they will be honest because it can be independently verified, and you know there will be people doing exactly that, reviewing the code to ensure it's doing what they say it does and writing articles about it that we can easily refer to.

The whole thing more worrying in a closed source world, and I suspect a lot of people are seeing the word telemetry and remembering Windows 10 and the way MS ignore all the bad feedback they get about telemetry.

Black screens in Windows 11? Bork has seen it all before

It used to happen a lot on my old desktop because I had a few 3rd party peripherals that needed drivers. I remember reading about how stable Windows is and that most BSOD are caused by bad drivers, and it's Windows trying to gracefully handle a driver failure from something that has way more system-level access than a user application crashing, but all people see is Windows crashing. OK the article was written by an MS guy but this has definitely been my experience too. When I removed the peripherals and drivers I got no more BSOD.

Now I only work on a laptop where all of the hardware and drivers are designed to work together. I get no more situations where the peripheral manufacturer and MS are blaming each other and nothing gets fixed. It's been so stable and I've never seen a BSOD in three years.

I love Linux but it's always funny when people say "just use Linux." My experience has always been it's better on desktops with vastly different hardware, as long as it's supported. But it's a right pain on a lot of laptops because of all the additional problems like function keys not working, bad power management, and fans running at max speed all the time.

For me it's the need for a series 8 or higher Intel CPU which was listed in the requirements last time I checked, but nobody is talking about it. Everyone is focused on TPM and the Start Menu which can be easily moved back to the left.

I'm here with my i7-7820hq which is a very capable CPU, more than good enough to run eight System Center VMs in Win 10 side by side (one with up to four more nested VMs), but apparently it's not good enough to run a shell facelift on what is basically the same underlying OS. I mean the laptop is three years old this month.

Rocky Linux release attracts 80,000 downloads as ex-CentOS users mull choices

"when interest in using PS3s waned"

When sony disabled it.

This always-on culture we're in is awful. How do we stop it? Oh, sorry, hold on – just had another notification

Re: Not office hours? No contact

I get the reasoning but android permissions are granular enough these days that it should be possible to grant an organisation administrative or wipe permissions for a single app, while denying them any kind of access to the rest of the phone / personal data. Maybe I'm wrong but 'device admin' suggests they could do other things apart from remote wipe.

Imagine if it were the other way around, give me domain admin in case I need to access that shared folder one day.

I wonder how many people who lose their phones with a work app installed actually notify their work that they lost it.

Re: Not office hours? No contact

Surely it's on them to manage this with permissions. If you can install a tool on your personal device and it's able to connect to your work systems then it's their responsibility to disable it if they don't want it to happen.

Last year I installed Teams on my personal mobile because it seemed like a good idea, but I didn't really use it. It just installed with no problems and connected fine. Obviously I set the times to my working hours so I would show as unavailable in the evening.

A few months later I went into the app because I was in a personal appointment, and after an update there was a message saying it needed to be a device admin so they could remote wipe. I just uninstalled it, I'm not allowing that.

Brit firm fined £200k for banging on about missold PPI in 11.4 million nuisance calls

Re: There should be an app for that.

What we need is a way for legit organisations to validate themselves before ringing. I don't know, maybe like how your network operator can send specially formatted SMS with config settings for your phone, you could set up a different passphrase with legit organisations and have your phone block all numbers by default except those in your contacts.Then before they call you they have to send you a message containing a hashed version of the passphrase, your phone validates it and unblocks that number for five minutes so they are able to call you.

As it's a specially formatted message, your phone does the unblocking in the background, you don't see the SMS, but maybe it can pop up a notification saying company xyz is about to call.

Use a different passphrase for each company and then you can remove them when you no longer need to hear from them.

And if they don't have a passphrase? They get a pre-recorded message from the network operator saying "You're not authorised to call this number, please write to them on the address you have on file, or leave them alone."

Beware the ghost of operating systems past: In which our hero is visited by an old friend

It may boot 10 times faster on modern hardware, but the hardware back in 2001 was about 30 times slower so it's all relative.

Who watches the watchers? Samsung does so it can fling ads at owners of its smart TVs

Re: "how much more would people be willing to pay for an ad-free, privacy-respecting version?"

I bought the 65" in a moment of weakness during a sale.

The 43" was bought primarily as a monitor because it had one of the lowest latencies of any TV at the time. Other TV features weren't that important at the time, but after 13 months I decided it wasn't responsive enough, so bought an actual 43" monitor, and the TV went to the bedroom where the lack of features then became an issue. I gave it to my mum shortly after that. She's not too bothered about features.

"how much more would people be willing to pay for an ad-free, privacy-respecting version?"

£200, that's my price. Any mid-high end model 55" or above - kill all ads, remove the network connections, add 2 more inputs, take out any smart functionality, replace it with good old fashioned well designed menus with plenty of settings that I can play with. I'm in the market for one TV preferably 85"+ and another one 60"+ and I'll pay £200 more than each of their current prices for those features to be removed.

Talking of good old menus, my last two TVs have been toshiba and while the picture quality and latency were excellent, they had about six useful settings that can be configured in their menus. If you enjoy things like being able to rename inputs and setting a different picture / sound config per input that is actually retained, then stay away from toshibas, they are consumer shite designed for simpler folk.

Bad boys bad boys, what you gonna do? Los Angeles Police Department found fibbing about facial recognition use

Re: "We actually do not use facial recognition in the department,"

It's all in the tone which gets lost when the statement is transcribed. The operative word in their statement is 'We', the other words are diversions.

"We actually do not use facial recognition in the department," an LAPD spokesperson previously told the LA Times last year.

Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches for a 'complete virtualization stack' with Linux and Hyper-V

"Linux already runs well on Hyper-V"

Maybe CLI-only Linux server installations run well, but for me running a Linux GUI in Hyper-V has never been a good experience.

I've had multiple machines over the years. Every time, any version of Linux I tried has extermely poor GUI performance, the mouse is always jerky making it unusable.

I've tried everything from the top three pages of search results. Pick a distro with the hv... modules pre-installed, or get one without and install them myself. Configuring various boot options. There was a post with about 15-20 different suggestions, but nothing works.

There is so much info on the web with ways to make it more usable so I know it's not just me. Sadly none of the info I found makes the VMs GUI as smooth as VirtualBox, but of course that can't reliably coexist with Hyper-V.

Amazon gets its tax excuses in early amid rising UK profits – but leaves El Reg off the press list. Can't think why

Re: Same old, same old

You speak the truth, it's always been like this.

Party A is in power. Party B says things X, Y and Z need to be changed which would benefit everyone. Party A say party B previously did this and that other change when they were in power which left things a mess, and they say they would need to first clear up that mess which is why they can't implement X, Y or Z.

Then every few years they swap over and party A now calls for X, Y and Z, and party B gives all the reasons why it can't be done.

Party A and B, thing X, Y and Z can be anyone or any thing. It literally doesn't matter which party they are or who came before them, they are all the same.

Truth is they're all only interested in being self-serving pricks and helping out their rich CEO friends. Actually running the country properly is just a necessary inconvenience that comes with being in power, that they just have to give the illusion of doing. The whole point of their game is to keep people divided enough that they don't notice the above happening

India makes buying a used cow easier than buying a used car

>> The database, which takes after a similar system made to track Indian citizens, provides each animal with an ear tag containing a 12-digit identification number.

I call bullshit, I've never seen an Indian with an ear tag.

The one before Harmony? Huawei pushes out EMUI 11, running on Android 10

Agreed, same here. Tech sites were publishing articles in 2019 - 'Huawei releases list of Huawei devices that will be getting EMUI 10.1'. My sim free, unlocked Mate 20 X was showing as late 2019.

I was checking for updates every week or two and I got it end of August.

Well it may be better to go into the HiCare app and check for updates there (depending on your current EMUI version I think).

I have a Mate 20 X which came with EMUI 9, and I was waiting for EMUI 10 for months, using the Android Check for Updates button. I emailed Huawei and a person told me to go into HiCare and check for updates there. It found an update immediately.

As said that was back on EMUI 9 and the HiCare update checker interface looked different to the Android one.

Recently on EMUI 10 they renamed the HiCare app to 'Support', and the update checker now looks identical to the Android one, so maybe it just calls that now rather than having its own one built in.

Digital pregnancy testing sticks turn out to have very analogue internals when it comes to getting results

Re: Too soon?

Seems a bit illogical to only worry between an MOT and the results. It's not like people are more susceptible to getting sick after a check-up, present times excluded. Makes more sense to either not worry ever, or worry every day of your life. But try explaining rational thought to most humans ...

Amazon spies on staff, fires them by text for not hitting secretive targets, workers 'feel forced to work through pain, injuries' – report

Re: If you do not like this ...

I've had a similar experience, but what really made it hard to give up was their returns handling and customer service.

I'll pay quite a bit more to shop elsewhere, but if I'm not sure about a product or it breaks then it's so easy to return to amazon, and their customer service is faultless. Even with DSR or whatever it's called these days, so many other companies try to refuse returns or not pay shipping for faulty items, occasionally I can't be bothered with the hassle of dealing with them.

99 out of 100 purchases I manage to avoid amazon, but it's not just about getting low prices. Other companies really need to step up their customer service and returns game. And just like the government is ultimately responsible for the shitshow that allows amazon to behave like this, the government body that 'enforces' selling regulations really needs to start clamping down on companies who are not following the rules.

Re: Dystopian Nightmares Inc.

Most of the things you mention can happen anywhere.

I'm speaking from my experience. I've worked at my company for more than 20 years and most evenings I catch myself thinking about projects I'm working on, planning my work for the next day etc. For me it would be unthinkable to work at a place like amazon, and it sounds like you wouldn't enjoy it either.

I have friends who work all kinds of different jobs. Some of them enjoy warehouse work because they just don't care about the corporate bullshit and they can easily just not think about it. Somehow they choose to just not have a problem with it. They would have no problem meeting the targets, and even if they didn't and lost the job, they would just get another one without worrying about it, and they have always been employed, but in 10's of different places. I don't getunderstand it.

Some other people are oblivious to anything more than 5m away, and wouldn't understand the negative sides you and I see, even if you tried to explain it to them.

I totally disagree with targets being hidden though. I bet amazon have done a study that found if people had to pick 100 items an hour then they would pick 103. But if the targets are hidden they always work at their max and end up picking 130 out of fear. It must be a constant feeling of fear, like that feeling where you are being followed or chased but not knowing who by.

Re: Dystopian Nightmares Inc.

In a few years we'll all be thinking back to simpler times - bring back the good old supermarket days, when farmers were just being underpaid for their milk.

Re: I'll flip burgers

Haha no but I did cycle 14 miles each way to work there because all my friends lived in that town. I think it's justified if I was burning off the calories.

I don't remember ever eating in a fast food place since then, but I did walk past one a few months back and was surprised to see the people had been replaced with screens.

Re: If people didn't vote with their credit card

People are good at telling others to be alturistic.

Re: Easy solution to this, profits tax based on externalities created

So we should still allow companies to burn people out, but make them pay for it afterwards? The cost of your online purchases would go up, they have to employ more staff, and the people would be working under the same conditions.

Sorry I don't agree. I think the only solution is massive employment law changes, to outlaw these practices and prevent companies from putting people through this in the first place. Your shopping still goes up and they still have to employ more staff, but at least they would have better working conditions and higher minimum wage.

Re: If you do not like this ...

I agree with you on your principle, but do you also avoid any web services hosted on AWS? I doubt that's possible.

Amazon's shopping platform is a comparatively small percentage of their overall business. If everybody was to boycott their shopping platform then it would shrivel up and die. But we would all spend our time watching Netflix instead which is hosted where?

It's impossible for everybody to collectively boycott them now.

>> I don't suppose they would have those mechanical coin-op meters to pay for workers to pay for heat and lighting at their work stations?

Don't give them any ideas. No doubt this CEO would bill his workers for heat, light, water and air if he could get away with it.

People likely need money to / from work, but also making people keep their money on them removes any corporate responsibility from thefts. Things can be stolen from a locker, but if it was on you then it's never stolen, only lost.

Re: Dystopian Nightmares Inc.

Personally I despise the kind of business decisions we read about in articles like this and I would never work for a CEO who can happily destroy the wellbeing of thousands of employees at the chance of increasing £200 million profit this year into £201 million next year, and still sleep at night.

But some people don't mind it. Some are energetic and would have no issue with targets. For some people money isn't everything and they are just happy earning enough to pay the bills. For some people it's more important to work a job where they can switch off after their shift, and not have to think about work until their next shift. For every person like me who wouldn't work for a particular company on principle, there are a hundred others who will, who don't mind the conditions, or who desperately need to pay the bills and can't afford to refuse the low wages.

The system won't change though without government intervention, and that's unlikely because governments suffer from corporate intervention. Major employment law change in favour of employees will not happen if the CEOs and top people are able to influence how employment laws are made.

Re: I'll flip burgers

I worked at one for a short time while in college, they allowed a regular sized meal with a soft drink if the shift was long enough for a mandatory lunch break. Twas 24 years ago, maybe they have tightened the purse strings since. Also twas a franchise, so maybe twasn't an official corporate policy.

Peter was the best floor manager, he always told us when he was going to "cash up the tills while you <airquotes>throw the food away</airquotes>". Every other manager stood there while we put it into bin bags and then they walked outside with us to make sure it all went into the compactor. Thanks to Peter I have many memories of getting stoned after work, eating a box of 20 chicken nuggets that were actually chicken sandwich patties. Also mega macs (a big mac with four patties), but made with quarter pounder patties instead.

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

Re: @martinusher - So?

Because they are still in the Embrace stage of their triple E approach.

'Non-commercial use only'? Oopsie. You can't get much more commercial than a huge digital billboard over Piccadilly

Re: Free for non-commercial use?

I stopped using TV because the only options they give are either seeing the nag dialog on every disconnect, or paying corporate prices. If they had a more suitable paid option for personal use that was in line with what other companies charge (I'm thinking £7 / month like cloud storage) then I would have snapped it up.

Anecdotal of course but in my view it's a bad business decision because I know 15+ others who won't use it for the same reason but claim they would pay for it if there was a suitably priced option.

Samsung Galaxy Note 9: A steep price to pay

Re: Acorn UI

I agree with you, a few little thoughts made the RISC OS UI very pleasant.

The other feature I remember was that menus don't completely close when you click on an item. E.g. if you click Edit > Zoom > Zoom In. With Windows you would have to reopen the Edit menu to zoom again but in RISC OS you could stay in the menu and keep clicking Zoom In multiple times. Or was it that left clicking an item behaves like Windows but right clicking keeps the menu open? I can't remember.

Although I've tried a few emulators over the years, it's been a good 18 years since I last used my A5000. Wonder if it still works, must get it out of the loft and have a play.

Disk will eat itself: Flash price crash just around the over-supplied block

Sounds like we might end up with a fragmented market but there's still debait about whether the SSD industry is affected by this.

From tomorrow, Google Chrome will block crud ads. Here's how it'll work

Re: Static ads good, javascript baaaad

"I find it creepy to have a completely unrelated website to echo back to me what my recent purchases on Amazon were."

So this is not entirely about ads because I use a blocker and it currently doesn't stop the "How about these items" on Amazon and eBay ... so why is it that they insist on giving me recommendations for things I have already bought?

These companies obviously spend a lot of money and time developing algorithms to suggest items for people to buy but in my experience over the last 20 years it just doesn't work.

It's not that I don't buy much stuff online - I'd say we have a Prime delivery every other day and eBay stuff landing from various countries 5 days a week, so it's not like they don't have enough info to build a profile of the kind of stuff we buy and what else might be useful.

So, to illustrate some of the items I recently bought are: a rounded nut removal tool, 18x 200g bags of Kenco, 2x e-cigarette batteries, 24x packs of dried noodles and 6x boxes of Nairns oatcakes.

So, you'd think that these COMPLETED purchases might trigger some algorithm that figures I might appreciate a set of cheese knives, maybe some coffee cups, or a set of bowls, chopsticks, some e-cig tanks / juice, or a ratchet handle.

Nope, they want to sell me EXACTLY the same items that I have ALREADY just bought. Not even similar items, but endless clickable images of exactly the same items from various sellers.

That is truly annoying.

There are two type of ad that I really hate ...

1 - When a page has loaded and I move the cursor away from the window so I can read the page. The page detects the mouse has left and pops up a 'Wait, before you leave ...' graphic that I have to close. Normally I just use the back button and try the next site.

2 - When a page is loading and it seems like they have timed it so that the last component to load pushes everything down the page a bit. Just enough so that the ad gets moved to the place where the Search button was. There are so many mainstream sites that do this it can't be coincidence.

For me it's not necessarily the adverts or their content, but the tactics they use to force mouse clicks.

Until these tactics are blocked I'll block them myself along with everything else, thank you.

Proposed Brit law to ban b**tards brandishing bots to bulk-buy tickets

Re: Promoters culpable?

Nice one zappahey, That was the exact article I was referring to!

Re: Promoters culpable?

Apparently, "back in the day" they didn't have too many captcha variations, so the bots were written to get to the verification page, then many operators on terminals would type in the responses and the bot would take over again. That's even if it got to the online stage - the touts had a relationship with some of the sales people and they would persuade them on the phone to reserve more tickets than they were allowed to. This was even well past the introduction of online sales - apparently they still had better results from phoning the sellers directly, or would even do the deals before they went on general sale.

There was a really good 30+ page interview that I read a couple weeks ago but I can't find the link now, there are plenty of others to read if you are interested in the subject.

Not that any of this means anything - according to that same article, some popular gigs only allocated 20% of their tickets to the usual outlets (just 5% in one particular case), the rest went through 'other' distribution channels which would not be affected by this legislation anyway.

It was quite funny really, the interview had the writer of the original bot (now 'reformed'), a couple of event managers / promoters and a ticketmaster rep. They were all blaming each other for the process failure but the obvious thing was that the whole system is flawed and needs government intervention from ticket allocation, right through added fees, all the way to customer delivery. This legislation will only affect one small part of the problem and legislating just that bit will shift the problem to another bit unaffected by law. People will still be wondering why tickets are unavailable or expensive and it will take another 20 years to deal with that bit of the problem.

At Christmas, do you give peas a chance? Go cold turkey? What is the perfect festive feast?

They also deep fry a turkey on The Goldbergs episode 4x07, which doesn't go to plan.

Windows Fall Creators Update is here: What do you want first – bad news or good news?

+1 for Mint.

Give Peppermint a try as well, but plain Mint is well established and almost too easy.

MATE on the servers, KDE on the desktop / laptop.

VirtualBox, Win 7 VM & Win 10 VM ... Perfect

:)

^Edit: this is not a recommendation, but what works for me.

We don't need another hero: Huawei overtakes Apple – even without a big-hitter

Re: Recently got an Honor 8 Pro

The 8 Pro is an awesome phone ... I got one a week ago to replace my Oppo Find 7 - also a solid phone by 2014 standards but it fell out of my pocket on the same day that I told someone I have never had a broken screen before :-(

Only needed to charge it once on the first day and it's still at 65%. The signal where I work is non-existent so I enable aeroplane mode each morning. So obviously my time between recharges is not a fair comparison against other phones, but I do listen to music on it most of the day and it's holding up really well.

I didn't go for the 9 because they seem to be decreasing the screen size with each release and for me the slightly larger screen on the 8 was a winner.

Good luck to Huawei and all the other companies who can produce great phones with honest price tags.

They do have rounded corners though, I wonder how long before apple dispatch their lawyers?

70% of Windows 10 users are totally happy with our big telemetry slurp, beams Microsoft

Re: No need to change the default settings! Erase all of WIN 10

If they want to use the OS as a data collecting and advertising platform then they should make the OS free. That's the way it happens in most other areas but no, not MS. They want to charge you for the OS, collect all sorts of data about your usage and then use it to push targeted ads at you amongst other things.

Free OS with advertising and telemetry, or a paid for OS with all the crap removed.

Latest Windows 10 preview lets users link an Android to their PC

Hmmm

On my PC, in Chrome I click add bookmark then save to mobile bookmarks, then I open it up on my phone which defaults to the mobile bookmarks folder.

On my phone, in Chrome I click add bookmark then save to mobile bookmarks which is the default folder, then I open it up on my PC.

So what's new?

Ahh riiight I need an MS app on the phone, possibly a browser extension for Chrome or a complete switch to using Edge where the functionality is baked into the latest browser update.

I see now, they are trying to guide me away from other browsers toward Edge.

Thank you anyway MS but I'm happy with the way I've been doing it for the last six years, it just works.

MS seems to be a bit late to the party with all things concerning mobile. So so late that they are turning up drunk with a half bottle after everybody else has moved on to the next party.

Men charged with theft of free newspapers

"In England a man was successfully prosecuted for a related offence."

WTF?

"A woman was recently given an on the spot fine of GBP80 for emptying the remains of her drink of coffee down a street drain"

WTF?

Bitcoin exchange Coinbase crashes after Asian buying frenzy

Re: What happens as the limit is reached?

I think that the times I sell BTC in exchange for cash, there is a tiny fee (percentage or flat rate) for doing the transaction.

That doesn't apply to regular BTC wallet-to-wallet payments though - from a consumer perspective, payments are direct and there is no payment processor or fee as such. You send the BTC direct to the recipient's wallet so there is no way for a middleman to take a cut during the transaction, unless you purposely transfer it to the wallet of a middleman who then sends it on to the recipient, but that would be two transactions.

The middleman part is the bit that banks and various governments don't like because they can't control the flow of money. The calculations the miners are doing are basically confirming that nothing has messed with the transaction during the process.

The fee that the miners get is only increased by mining more efficiently and has no immediate impact on the amount of BTC you paid for the pizza.

Also, don't overlook that hardware becomes more efficient over time and the ecosystem kind of self-regulates in that respect. Ignoring the fact that it would take a lot longer, and you wouldn't be paid anything in return, imagine how much more electricity would be required to do the same number of actual calculations on 500 old desktop machines in a warehouse, compared to 500 ASIC miners built last week. From that point things will only get more efficient.