Posts by doublelayer 9378 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
I've had some ones that lasted longer. The one I remember the most was a metal-cased 1 GB stick, mostly because it was small enough to be useless for most things. That turned out to be an asset because it meant that I never erased it for a temporary Linux or Windows installation disk, and therefore my system repair image could always be found on it. It lasted about a decade, and I think I lost it rather than it breaking.
Or more likely, the European customers just completely ignore the terms in the license and nothing bad happens. I was recently taking apart a system image and found a library in it that is licensed under the AGPL 3.0, a license that requires that I be able to replace it and have the device on which it's running execute my replacement. It's not sandboxed, so if the company gave me the required access, I would have full root access which I don't normally get. I bet that if I send an email requesting they comply with that license term, it's not happening. Does anyone want to take the other side of that wager?
I have a feeling that the court will not accept that logic if you're still taking bug reports, feature requests, or donations. If you've completely orphaned the code and will not speak of it again, you might have a better chance. This is especially true if some company who wants to avoid their own liability is pushing you as the responsible party in court, because they have an incentive to find all the reasons why you should have been and therefore why it's not a problem that they didn't check for vulnerabilities.
At least in that case, there are legal entities that agreed to use the products of another legal entity. It could still be a mess, but there are contracts specifying who needs to do what and there are specific people who can be targeted.
If I put up some code, and I get pull requests from people who don't have their names on their GitHub accounts, and then my code is used by a company who never told me what they were doing, might be violating my licenses or might not, and there ends up being a problem in the code that someone anonymous wrote, I reviewed and accepted, and the company swallowed without checking, who's at fault? I have a feeling that the court isn't going to accept me saying "It's GitHub user zcjue829, go find them". Even if they did, I don't want to unleash that on someone who probably just wanted to introduce a feature or bug fix and didn't know that a vulnerability existed.
I agree, and on the surface, she would be the perfect person to serve as the new CEO. Twitter's driven away a lot of advertisers and Musk got in fights with several of the remaining ones, and advertising is the way Twitter makes basically all of its money. The pay for unverified encryption and a check mark plan isn't going to make a dent. I think hiring someone with knowledge of the advertising industry and relationships with advertisers is likely going to extend Twitter's life by at least a couple months. If she had a lot of power, it would have the option of being longer, but Musk is the guy who has done all the stupid stuff for the past few months, so I see no reason to believe he's just going to stop. As such, although she has the opportunity, she should probably look at this as a speculative stepping stone, not a long-term deal.
"How come staff never get stock awards of any kind ?"
Why do you assume they don't? It's certainly not going to be as big as the CEO's awards, but they do get them. From some self-reported figures, such awards appear to make up 12-25% of total compensation for NVIDIA employees making average salaries. I don't work there. I have not worked there in the past. Why do you jump to assumptions when you can disprove them?
"Why is this not considered discrimination ?"
If NVIDIA never gave any stock awards to the average worker, only to the executives, it would not be discrimination in the sense of illegal act. The reason is that those people do different things, and the company can choose to compensate them in a different way if they want to, just as they can compensate them in different amounts. Discrimination would be illegal if they made those choices on the basis of protected attributes like ethnic background, gender, or age. If they make the choices based on other attributes like what job they're doing or how long they've been doing it, it's not illegal.
However, you can erase them and install something of your choice, which wipes out not only the manufacturer's image and any bloatware, but also the operating system. You can start from scratch, or you could run a disinfecter over that image. Hey Google, can you explain how you saw that and somehow managed to go backward on security when the starting point was Windows before security features got added?
Yes, it certainly will. I don't like the chances either, but I haven't wasted any breath asking for regulation because, by the time we get any, the ship will have sailed. There will certainly be a lot more spam on every network that accepts it now, and we'll just have to deal with that. I'm not sure any regulation at any time could have prevented that, but it's certainly too late now.
"Those useful little things that could go a week without needing to recharge."
Take a smartphone and try using it as little as you did a feature phone. I've done that before, and it also lasts a week. The one I used, which wasn't designed with a massive battery, lasted several days with the hotspot function turned on and in use, because I didn't have other stuff on it and I wasn't turning on the screen. Now take a smartphone and a feature phone, both fully charged, and have them call each other, with something to alternate sending noise through each one. Wait until one of them dies, and check how the length changes. Unless the smartphone's battery is old, you can usually make calls on it for much longer than you can on the feature phone.
The feature phone didn't last longer because it was so much more efficient, but because it was less frequently in use. People like to use the features of smartphones enough to take that tradeoff.
They're easier than building a computer would be, but you can't just take a receiver, an old laptop, and a bunch of wires and build one out of it. There are some ways you can make a machine not intended for the purpose end up emitting a signal, but one that's very weak and hard to tailor for your purposes. Most attempts will end up with something that has worse range and fidelity than a cheap WiFi router. DIY FM transmitters aren't a solution to emergency communications.
I like the headphone jack as well, but I must disagree with your estimated costs and lifetimes of headphones:
"a decent pair of wired earbuds is £15 and will last decades."
The way I use them, that's a reasonable price and it will last months. They tend to be made from the thinnest wires possible, and some part of the wire breaks after enough uses and movement. I don't tend to mind that too much since they are quite cheap, but I've never seen a cheap set that lasts very long if it's frequently used. More expensive headphones tend to last longer because they often have replaceable cables (and if they don't or the cable is custom, don't buy them), but that's a very different level of product and they are more expensive.
"A pair of AirPods costs £180 with "up to" 6 hours charge while the batteries are good."
Don't buy those. You can spend a lot less and get similar devices that have as good if not better battery life. Similarly, don't buy the cheapest possible pair either. In case you are interested, there is a person (not me, and I don't know them) who has reviewed hundreds of models of cheap Bluetooth headphones and posts those reviews on the website scarbir.com. I bought a pair for about £30 which have lasted over two years so far without noticeable degradation in the battery and get 7-8 hours on a charge. They do run out of power if you use them long enough so they're not for everybody, but as I tend not to use them for that long and they charge automatically when stored, it's rarely been a problem for me.
Real world economics doesn't mean that you get to charge people as many times as you like for providing the service you said you would. They are perfectly within their rights to charge, which is why I have to pay them every month if I want to have a connection. They decide how much they'll charge, and they decide such other things as how fast my packets will go and if there's a limit to how much I can use. They decide all of these things, and I get to choose between the options they give me, if they're kind enough to have multiple choices.
What they don't get to do is charge me for a connection, then charge me again because I managed to make money using that connection. Very few places get to do that. It doesn't matter that people are making a profit by buying their services. That should be great for the ISPs; if the internet makes people money, then they'll want to put more stuff online, which means more packets flowing through the ISP's networks. Yes, the ISP will have to spend some money building a network that can handle that, but they also get to charge more because they tend to charge either by the flow used or by the data transferred, both of which are going to increase. They don't have to cut their prices, and if they are, it's because of real world economics which sometimes proves that building a functional network isn't as expensive as they'd like their users to believe it is. The reverse is also true: if an ISP doesn't want to build a new network, they're perfectly within their rights to go to their customers and say that the ADSL connection is as fast as it's going to get, so deal with it. Some companies do that, and it sometimes works out for them. Of course, when real world economics means that their users start cancelling and buying service from someone who did a better job, too bad.
You can see the words and the acronym. Is there a word there whose starting letter isn't in it? There's only so far politicians can go to make every law a perfect bacronym. I spent more seconds than I should have trying to find a word that could fit into that name, and I haven't got one that makes sense in context.
In fact, depending on how it's done, it makes it easier. If they use one of the famous ones, the blockchain makes the transfer public. Everyone can, if given the details, see the ransom payment made and follow transactions from wallets that have a connection. Even if they put it through a tumbler, that gives you more wallets to watch because they all could have some ransom money in them, but you can still watch. If it was cash, then you can't track who handed who some notes unless you're having them followed.
The problem with ransomware is that most successful operations aren't a couple of people in a country that makes their actions illegal. They tend to be much larger, and most are operating at least some things in countries that give them the protection of not investigating them. Russia is the most famous and likely the largest example. If they can figure out some way of getting a ransom payment into Russia, law enforcement who will not be invited will have no chance of following that money. That doesn't even mean that the criminals have to only operate from Russia, because once they have the money there, they can anonymize it at their leisure and transfer it to their companions in other places, the way that cryptocurrency is cashed out already.
Cryptocurrency provides one major benefit to the operators which is why they'll stick with it if they can: it's fast to transfer and can't be pulled back. They don't want to figure out physical transport issues unless it becomes necessary. However, I'm certain that if it did become necessary, they would think about it and figure out a successful method of getting it done.
Depending on what that exchange does, probably they do. If that exchange wants to store some money somewhere, they are likely to choose a bank that has business in New York, if not one that has its headquarters there. That bank is able to take their money, and New York has the power to assess a fine on the exchange. The bank would be a useful way of taking the exchange's money, no matter where the exchange's servers or directors are located.
Companies that wish to violate this law will certainly show up, but they're more likely to hope for regulatory incompetence or inaction rather than the law denying the regulator the necessary powers. For example, the many crypto scams that have popped up recently tend to act as if normal fraud laws don't apply to them, and they have frequently found that those laws don't need to mention cryptocurrency or computers at all for fraud to still be fraud.
I doubt it. They're more likely to try creating a shell game where one company creates a commodity, and another company is a completely independent exchange for that commodity that happens to promote it unrealistically. As long as the scammer in charge has a family member running the other company, surely that makes them separate and not subject to the regulation? The law will probably figure this out and deal with it, but those who like crypto-themed fraud tend not to notice how obviously illegal their acts are under current legislation and seem to think that, because they use a bunch of computers in theirs, the law can't have caught up.
"You would delete the entire ransomware industry practically overnight."
I don't think you would. Even making paying the ransom illegal tends not to completely destroy the ransom business model, but at least that one would directly act against it.
I know that ransomware today nearly exclusively uses cryptocurrency to transfer the payments, and if cryptocurrency had been banned a decade ago, it might have had an effect on the small upstart criminals who started it. We're not in that world anymore. Modern ransomware organizations are quite large and operate like companies, with such things as a helpdesk for victims who have paid, translation teams for global effect, and for some relatively unwise groups, a PR wing. They can manage that because they sometimes get really large payouts. This also means that they have a lot more reason to want to keep up a successful business model and that they have the resources necessary to find some other way of getting money from victims to them which is not banned. It would be great if solving ransomware was that easy, but big problems rarely are.
Cheaper, yes, but it wouldn't be any more efficient. A 50-watt heating element and a 50-watt processor take in the same power and put out the same heat. I've long wondered if someone might try to take advantage of that by building heaters that use old processors instead of heating elements and put those processors to work. Maybe it's so cheap to build traditional heating elements that nobody's bothering.
A friend of mine took advantage of this fact. Her university did not permit students to operate electric heaters and didn't provide enough heating, but they did allow students to operate computers. She had access to some kind of computer, my memory says that it was a PDP8 but it might not have been, which worked pretty well to fix that problem. This would have been years after the PDP8s were new and expensive, which is why I'm not sure how likely one would be to be used, but it was before my time so I can't speak from experience on whether it's likely.
There are several cases where a small computer is desirable and a laptop isn't needed, and this can be a candidate for those roles. However, in my experience, those roles tend not to need such a powerful one, which means you can opt for something with a much cheaper processor that generates less heat, and that would save you from the fans. There are a lot of tiny boxes with Celerons, I mean Intel Processors*, that run at 6-15 watts, and those tend to be quieter and some are fanless. While you'll get a lot less performance out of that than you would with an I7, they can be suitable if you want a basic desktop spec, either for a basic desktop or for a use case where a Raspberry Pi would be suitable but a bit more performance or X86 software compatibility is wanted.
* I'm probably never going to get used to the Processor line of processors. There are AMD-powered ones as well, but they're usually a bit larger and more expensive.
The only explanation I can think of is that all of these things involve financial actions. The water department systems that aren't working are related to bills and the court system needs to collect fines and pay jurors, and many other parts of the government will have to handle some financial matter. Maybe all the financial stuff is run by one part of the city bureaucracy which has a common network. That's not necessarily a good idea, but it's also not that unusual for systems run by one organization to have less internal separation than would be desirable.
I agree that a harsher penalty is desirable, but I don't think destruction of the entire company should be the goal here. The people who committed the crime should suffer more than the rest of the company, and we should try to have a penalty that acts as a deterrent to committing the crime, not a deterrent to anything happening at all. That means that the people at fault get most or all of the penalty, and those who had nothing to do with it are spared.
You may not care about this company, and I'm not that bothered about them either, but would you feel the same if some executive of a company you appreciate did something similar? It's not unusual for people with power to do something unethical that results in legal charges, but do you want that to mean that the rest of the work done by the company gets hammered down, even when that work was likely unrelated to the crime? My guess is that you're trying to prevent the cases where an executive commits a crime and the company gets a tiny fine which doesn't change their practices, and I think we can more easily deal with that by punishing the people who broke the law personally rather than by punishing the company, whose bills the executives won't be paying, and letting the responsible parties off easy.
This is incorrect. Taxes are also deducted before people are paid, as is quite common because countries like having the money now, not asking for it later. The software companies lobby for making the tax preparation process more difficult so their software is needed, but the money from wages has already been withheld.
As far as I can tell, neither the method of paying taxes from wages nor the complicated system for preparing documentation has anything to do with how the tax authorities communicate with taxpayers. However your country does it, the communication method is subject to fakes. Whether you're used to getting letters on paper, calls, emails, or anything else, someone can try to imitate the method they used, or as many scammers do, just send something that some people will believe anyway even though it's not how it would normally be done.
I've heard a theory that at least some scams use the poor grammar as a method of filtering out people who are likely to smell a rat later in the process. If they have to expend manual effort on people who believed the email but don't believe the phone call, they might end up spending more on executing unproductive scams than the people they lose. I doubt that is the reasoning for every scam, and it may not be that common, but it is a plausible hypothesis.
Of course, people who have specific targets or a more automated attack plan don't bother with that, so there's no guarantee of such easy tells.
Yes. Usually it started first with music, with the music publishers being certain that every advancement in technology would mean a complete loss in music revenues. Most of the time, they were mostly wrong, but they've had several occasions where they had a point, such as the first music sharing services on the web. They sued those services, and they won, but it didn't happen in a day. It didn't happen that quickly even when it was a clear case, such as Napster and similar services which were effectively Piracy Inc, with an easily found corporate entity running it. OpenAI has a lot more arguments for why their thing is acceptable which Napster never did, and although I don't find those arguments convincing, they'll likely need to be tested by lawyers for a while.
"Would a publishing company sue a person for being well read, and being able to quote literature?"
No, but a publishing company would sue a person who was well read, able to quote literature, and used those skills to write, sell, or give away copies of their books. The thing that would make their actions illegal is the distribution, not the knowledge.
"Would a record company sue an artist, who was deeply immersed in their field, and could play any piece of music from memory?"
No, if they played from memory to a group of friends. If they performed those songs in public, or if they recorded themselves playing them and sold the recordings, a lawsuit is more likely.
The answer is both of them. It was copyright violation for it to end up on the internet, and it is violation when OpenAI makes a product that continues to redistribute the copyrighted work. It would not be a violation if you stumbled on the file by accident, but it is if you keep a copy for your own use, let alone sending that copy to others which is what someone can argue that GPT is doing.
In this case, OpenAI should have, and certainly did, know that there was going to be copyrighted content in their training data somewhere. I'm not sure they put much effort into looking for it or doing anything about it, which is probably not going to please the holders of copyright. The same thing has happened with Microsoft's GitHub Copilot bot which likewise copied a lot of code that has copyright and license conditions.
If it reads it to you in chunks, you can just write a script to keep asking for chunks and attaching them together. That would take about two minutes. Then again, finding a pirated copy somewhere probably takes four minutes, so it's not that big a risk. I doubt publishers will feel the same way.
And when a computer "stores" some data, isn't that anthropomorphizing it? After all, "store" is used for many operations, including writing some bits to volatile memory from the registers, which certainly doesn't count as putting something in storage. How about reading? A computer doesn't read in a human sense; it copies data from one form of storing it into a different form, or it takes a series of input events and stores them. Or how about "file". A computer doesn't use files in the sense that the term used to be used; it's a chunk of bytes that can be read or written in series. Except, of course, that every definition I've provided here relies on another of the words that represents a different human activity.
It's natural for us to use verbs for an action that a computer does that is analogous to it, and we do so all the time. For example, we frequently refer to RAM or sometimes storage as "memory" since it records data which can be referred to later, and the process of "memorizing" a book involves conveying that book into "memory" from which it can later be retrieved. Why shouldn't memorize describe that action?
That's all true, and it's certainly no panacea. However, I hope that, if insurance companies decide they're still going to insure cyber risk, they'll eventually put some effort into figuring out which certifications of security policies are good at proving real benefit and which are not. That will only happen if there's a cost to them of not checking, and that will only happen if they have to pay a lot of claims from companies they've insufficiently checked so they fix that process. Maybe some insurance companies will decide that it's still a lucrative market and they'll hire some people to make a better method of auditing and certifying security practices. Or they'll decide it's not and they'll stop selling the insurance, which is also fine with me because then it goes back to being the companies' responsibility to pay for the results of their mistakes.
Which is not as pleasant, but at least they'll have to make things clear when you sign the contract rather than trying to slip it in. If a contract makes it clear that I'm not buying something, at least that means I can compare it to other clear contracts. The worst situation is when it looks like I'm buying something but I'm actually not.
That's why insurance should be more expensive if you don't do things correctly. That way, a place can still get some degree of protection from an attack, but they have an incentive to secure themselves properly to minimize the risk. Insurance companies should, if they intend to cover people for computer security events, audit their clients' security and use the results of that audit to set premiums. I think this process will work much better if the insurance companies have to do that for their own profit motive, and that is less common if they always find some excuse why they never have to pay a claim. So, in a complex chain, I think making the act of war provision more difficult for insurance companies to use will probably improve security of companies that choose to buy insurance.
You'd have to check whether that works anymore. If this is in firmware, it likely doesn't boot up far enough to connect to an NTP server. If the user had set it to an earlier date before the lock engaged, maybe that would have worked, but probably not now. Meanwhile, the temporary license that works until July might be set to not work before May, and if the person writing the code is any good at it, it might detect tampering with the clock and lock again, the way the 30-day trial modes on many shareware programs detected and probably still do if you tried to change the clock to extend the period. It's worth trying, but there are reasons it might not work.
It looks like we're saying the same thing. Your summary is exactly what I think happened: "Most of the time it's a case of unintended consequences. What's more often the case is that after something happens the company will try to cover it up,"
I don't think Apple deliberately specified the wrong batteries. I called it a "design error" and that's what I think it was. When they discovered that they had built millions of devices whose batteries wouldn't work for very long, they went into panic mode and released software to automatically and silently reduce the hardware's capabilities so the batteries would last longer. Their changes were unable to make the batteries always work, but they prevented the crashes from happening even more quickly after purchase and frequently. Probably most of the desire was to avoid the bad press of three generations of iPhones keeling over after only a little use, but another factor would be the cost of repairing all those faulty devices under warranty. By pushing it out, they managed both to have the failures noticed after the warranty period and several months longer without people noticing.
This would have worked out quite well for them except some people noticed that they were slowing down the processors and assumed that was the plan. As I said, I don't think that was the plan at all, since their new processors were going to be faster anyway. The fact remains, however, that other devices don't have the kind of battery problems that these phone models did. Laptops don't tend to fail abruptly when their battery's a year old. Even the ancient ones I have whose batteries last twenty minutes just show the battery level dropping frequently, not claiming to have 90% and dying anyway, only to show that the battery really does have 90% when connected to the mains. Other iPhone models don't do it either, neither those before or after the faulty models.
"here was an example of a company trying to keep older devices working properly for a longer period of time."
That wasn't it, and it wasn't about slowing down the devices. They had specified batteries that couldn't run their devices, and they were trying to hide their design error. Their batteries were not sufficient to run the electronics they attached to them, and they figured this out, so they artificially hampered the electronics to avoid crashing their users' devices so frequently. They still ended up crashing, but it took a bit longer to get there, meaning that warranties and consumer protection timelines ran out before the problems became as evident.
The problem comes because the feature was turned on without people knowing and because the problems when the feature is not turned on is so bad. When a normal computer's battery is old and the maximum performance setting is set, the battery doesn't last very long because it discharges to zero quickly. When the iPhone's switch is turned off, or even sometimes when it's turned on, the phone spontaneously reboots even though the battery says it has, and actually has, plenty of charge left. I had one of those phones. I never disabled the throttling. Even with the throttling on, it got to the point where doing something as simple as answering an incoming call would sometimes require more voltage than the battery would give and cause the phone to shut down. I would have to plug it in to reawaken it, the phone would come up saying that the battery had 45% or so of battery remaining, and I could call the person back and apologize for the downtime.
Other devices don't do that.
"'no radios when flying' law."
The regulation is not that restrictive. WiFi and Bluetooth may still be used, as demonstrated by all the planes that have installed WiFi. What can't be used, and therefore what is turned off by the airplane mode switch, is cellular connectivity. There are separate switches for WiFi and Bluetooth which can be used to disable those. While it's possible they will be changed later to not reflect your setting, they do disable the features at the moment, which you can check with a cheap radio analysis tool.
"Nobody needs these tags, we all managed just fine before they appeared."
Nobody needs computers, we all managed just fine before they appeared. Computers can help someone who wants to kill someone else. Smash all the computers today.
You'll need better logic than "at one point we didn't have X, so X should be forbidden".
Let's see if DuckDuckGo is affected by the "worship" you suggest must be there:
Does your theory expect that eventually the worship will insert TBL into the search results so he can push out all the people who are actually in the search results? While some of those articles do mention him, they mention him later than these other guys and they explain that what he built was a part of the system we use today, not the whole thing.
"It's not simply disagreeing with an opinion. It is decades of past experience demonstrating that a one-word answer to a multi-level problem likely indicates a lack of familiarity on the part of the party uttering that one word."
The post you replied to has more than one word, and was not entitled "A comprehensive review of the Gopher protocol's advantages and disadvantages". The post was not trying to encompass every detail of the protocol, whether it was good or not both objectively and in comparison, and how it was and is used. It was expressing an opinion, and the one word you chose to quote simply indicates that the opinion is negative.
Not only do you appear to have completely ignored that reality, but you assume that the person never used the system. Their negative opinion, with which you disagree, can't be because they came to different conclusions than you did, nor can it be because they were unfamiliar with something you used which improves the experience. No, you allege that they didn't use the system at all, and presumably just made up an opinion out of whole cloth. You dismissed an opinion based on no evidence at all, and in a way that doesn't make logical sense. I never used Gopher, and I have no opinion about it. I could try using the remnants that are still around and come to an opinion, but unless I do, my view on it is neutral. Their view is not, which is a lot more likely to have come from using it and not liking it than deciding to make up an opinion for no reason.
You've expressed negative views on systemd in other posts. Usually, you don't write an essay explaining each complaint you have about systemd's design or use, you simply say it's bad or you call it a "cancer". That's "a one-word answer to a multi-level problem". How would you react to someone who said "How to tell me you've never used systemd"? It would be incorrect and I'm sure you know that.
Their characterization, that he only wrote a browser, is wrong. Your characterization is also wrong. Of course it wasn't unheard of, but it also didn't exist in a format like that and the format that was created has remained useful in a form quite similar to its original form today, rather than being superseded.
This is similar to the development of the internet. You could make a similarly derisive, simplistic statement about how the internet wasn't revolutionary: "they took computers that used digital data and had them send that data, still in digital form, over a phone line. Big deal." That is inaccurate about how the internet works and why it is actually new, and it ignores that the internet is still in use today, without having to be reinvented. Nor do I worship TBL's contributions, just recognize that they are important to a piece of technology that is very common in the world today, and thus his work has proved important.
Allow me to introduce you to humanity.
Every major invention has been idealized by somebody, often the initial inventors. Often some of those ideals truly come to pass. Never are those absolute ideas met absolutely, because humans want to do bad things and they will use any tools available to do so.
It did make knowledge available to all, not every bit of knowledge, and not to all people equally, but there's a lot more availability than there used to be and it covers a lot more people than any previous system did. However, it enables people to post any information, correct or not, that they want. It's obvious that that was going to happen from the start, even if people hoped it wouldn't happen.
That's not unique to the web, the internet, the computer, electrical technology, or anything in particular. Any advancement produces some benefits, often the ones the idealists hope for but in a limited fashion, and some downsides. It's not even as if the downsides weren't predicted. Science fiction writers are good at coming up with ways that a technology completely breaks things, and although many of their dreams end up being unrealistic, others prove prescient.
"I just find it disingenuous they attribute it to one man who [...]"
If you want to argue about disingenuous, you might want to learn what that one man actually did. It wasn't an invention of every internet-related technology used today, and nobody, especially him, ever said it was. Neither was it as limited as you claim.
"created a GUI method to view web pages."
Yes, he did that. And a GUI to edit them. Of course, what is a web page? If you asked a contemporary, they would have to guess at the details, because he also invented those as well. HTML was his invention, without which the web page concept isn't formalized. And that's just the page part. What makes it a web page? Part of it was the transfer protocol which he also invented, although it's a pretty simple protocol so it's not a really important or difficult invention. Except that doesn't do a web either, because that's still a one-to-one connection with a server. The part that makes a web is the URI system to identify resources from other ones, thus enabling hypertext (which already existed) to refer to other locations without having to agree on interoperability first. That's a short list of stuff that he invented.
"Didn't even create a search engine": No, he didn't. Why did he have to invent a search engine when the way he enabled global hypertext is the reason that search engines tend to work these days? He doesn't get the credit for inventing the search engine any more than the developers of TCP would get credit for his work, but each step allowed the development and proliferation of the next to happen the way it did.
"or DNS. No DNS no http.": Wrong. No DNS a much more annoying experience using HTTP, but it can and has been done. Those protocols are independent and you are free to use one and not use the other.
"The internet is the WWW. Who separates the two?"
People who want to be specific and refer to them separately, although your next statement is a bad example of this.
"How many times have you heard someone say I'm going to check the internet when they really mean the WWW?"
Not a distinction that matters. What they mean when they say "check the internet" is that they'll connect to something that will tell them information. I say it, and often I do mean the web, but sometimes I mean that I'll use a different communication system such as connecting to a remote terminal, accessing a database, email, or an FTP server. All of those are on the internet, and insisting that people use a specific service name instead of the generic and well-understood term is useless.
"Beside "World Wide Web" is the technology behind HTTP. HTTP is just something that sits on top of it and translates text to pages after you use DNS. A GUI."
All of that is wrong. Starting from the end. HTTP is not a GUI. It's a protocol for transferring things. HTML isn't a GUI either; it's a language for specifying content that can be rendered graphically or not. The GUI is in a browser engine such as Gecko, WebKit, or Blink. The WWW is a collection of inventions including HTTP and HTML but not limited to those. In fact one of the most important parts might be the URI system that is used by HTTP resources but also many other systems, both ones that existed pre-HTTP and ones created later. DNS doesn't necessarily come into it, as that is an internet system that is often, but not universally used in HTTP or other WWW technologies. A URI that has an address instead of a domain is still a valid one. Systems that have their own naming systems independent of DNS and use HTTP on top are also valid ones.
They are related technologies. The WWW could continue if the internet shut down by using a different communication system, but since we don't have another world-wide communication system available to the general public, it would be a much smaller WWW and there would probably be multiple separate ones. For the same reason, I could complain about anyone who gets credit for the internet because you're just piggybacking on the existing inventions made for computers and communication systems, which would be similarly simplistic. The internet was an important invention, and HTTP and related technologies another one. Both are extremely important to the way we live life today, and fighting for who should get credit, or rather in the case of this argument who should be denied credit, is pointless and petty.
How to tell me that you never used Gopher without having to say "I never used Gopher"
I really like how simply disagreeing with your opinion means they can't possibly have any experience, and that they're lying to boot. Can you tell me the secret to making my opinion the right one, disagreements with which are universally wrong without having to know any facts about the person who disagrees? So far, all the statement says is that they don't like Gopher, not any reason why or any allegations of what Gopher did or didn't do.
Then turn it off. If automatic updates are off, then you won't install it unless you push the button. The "rapid" part of the name is just because it no longer needs to send a full OS image, so it's quicker to develop, test, and download. It doesn't make it mandatory if you have disabled that switch.
You're including a lot of generations in your count. They don't release anywhere near that number every year, so while you can still choose last year's chip, you don't have to go through that choice if you're planning to build with the most modern parts available. They also need to have chips for a wide range of devices with CPUs, from handheld units to servers more powerful than the average server, so they need to have a lot of options just for power and performance. When you add in that people often don't need the most performance for their power situation that can be achieved, it makes sense that they also add in versions of most ranges that are cheaper and less performant.
These factors mean that you don't really have to look at all those models when choosing something. If you're building a desktop right now, you can eliminate the chips that are too expensive for your use, likely most of the Xeons, and you can eliminate those intended for laptops or low-end devices like the Processor range*. Furthermore, you can eliminate many of the older generations unless you're buying used or recycling because, even though the 9th generation is still fully supported and is perfectly good, it's not sold very often by retail providers of CPUs. There will still be many choices, but not hundreds of them.
* The Intel Processor range: it still sounds stupid when I say this. I would have preferred them to stick to calling them Celerons or Pentiums. They could eliminate one of the names and consolidated, but eliminating both of them just makes a mess.
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