hilbert42

What on earth would possess anyone to buy an AI/screen based fridge in the first place? Screen addiction must be worse than I'd realized.

More broadly, Force majeure refers to an act of God or such outside of human control.

Moreover, the reduction in or loss of manual trades (woodworking, machining, toolmaking, etc.) whether at home or in industry, amounts to an overall deskilling of the citizenry which has strategic implications.

This ought to be a salient lesson: never store card details online despite the convenience. Further, as I do, use only a debit card for online purchases with the available credit only marginally more that for one's immediate purchase. It's also an excellent policy in case of being hacked.

Companies that allow employees to use cards with essentially unfettered credit have to take a large amount of the blame in circumstances such as this. There's no reason other than bad policy or irregular monitoring of expenses to allow expenses of this magnitude to build up. The company's financial policies need drastic overhaul.

"Bluff" because no one other than perhaps Stalin would have followed through—to essentially extend WWII (this time between former allies).

So pragmatism was the order of the day, thus Poland and EE were sacrificed.

It seems to me the EU is overburdened with trivial regulations (like regulating the maximum power consumption of domestic vacuum cleaners) rather than prioritizing core issues of its single market, manufacturing, trade, etc.

Trouble is small vested interests hold overly powerful sway over EU-wide policy. The example above is a case in point, individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted.

You're correct, annoying regulations are bloating the EU bureaucracy making it lethargic and uncompetitive.

That's unfettered capitalism at work—"free" implies no bounds. Multinational corporations have never been more powerful now than at anytime in history.

If they were to change some within the citizenry would stand to gain at the expense of others. Inequality would increase.

Seems—for now—middle democracies aren't prepared to pay the high price of social upheaval such a policy would create.

So what! Until the 20th Century pharmaceuticals/medicines were unregulated (eg: buy laudanum (opium) anywhere without regs and instructions said it was fine to give it to kids). After deaths, disasters and addiction regulations tightened—especially so after birth defects and thalidomide. Now the industry is tightly regulated.

Right, it took over one hundred years for pharma to be regulated. So be it for software. It's time the Wild West came to an end.

There'll always be whingers along the way, especially if they stand to lose profits. The "Good Times" for the software industry ought to be over because consumers are no longer benefiting in the way they should. Want a quintessential example of 'junk' software: Windows 11.

Right, depends on the quality of the rubber I suppose. I've been suspicious of rubber because when it's old it often turns into a gooey mess or goes hard and cracks (as with VR [vulcanized rubber] used in house wiring in the days before PVC — and often a cause of fires.

At the moment that's a bit close to home. I'm in Australia where power is 240V and only two days ago I needed to test an old Advantest spectrum analyzer and I wasn't sure if it had been strapped for 240 or 110V but didn't have a 240/110V transformer to hand so I dug out an ancient variac/auto-transformer to do the job and its power lead was vulcanized rubber which had turned into a sticky mush (replacing the lead didn't help as the windings had a short to the laminations).

Similarly, the rubber insulation on my super flexible AVO multimeter leads with many, many strands of superfine Cu wire has disintegrated. It's similarly perished (but they're well over 30 years old).

My first experience of silicone comes from its use as the outer jacket/insulation in microphone cables used in an industrial environment (TV studio). It was wonderful, cables were super easy to roll up and keep orderly, and despite its so-called reputation for not being rugged enough heavy camera dollies would regularly run over it without damage. These cables would last for years (the only occasional issue with them was when an XLR connector would get ripped off when caught on something and someone pulled super hard to free it).

I've no issue with using VR for leads except I've not been able to get it (for example, I can no longer get a replacement for my AVO leads).

The warning has been there for 80 years and still most are unaware. When Vespasian built the Colosseum it was to help rule over the unruly. Netflix and ilk are its modern incarnation.

Users need to know the electrical features of their H/W and its limits. If a loudspeaker output stage is designed (hardware wired) so that it can never act as an input then no later firmware update can turn the speaker into a microphone.

This is why hardware authentication is becoming more and more important.

limits

Why wouldn't one be? Not that long ago 'dumb' TVs never even had firmware (and that was the situation throughout most of television history). Allowing a manufacturer to update TV firmware online is dangerous and foolhardy. (Same reasons why I never let any of my printers go anywhere near the internet—any driver software is always blocked by a firewall.)

Perhaps a few are unaware but most know. As I said in my post, some (like me) only want traditional FTA — and with it comes anonymity by default.

Smart TVs undermine and subvert the virtues of FDA services. It should be mandated that it's possible for modern smart TVs to switch to FTA-only mode if viewers so desire. Similarly, regulation should ensure that dumb TVs always be available for those who want them.

Fully solve it by disconnecting network cable/Wi-Fi so there's no internet.

For me a TV set only receives FTA signals and has connectors for local media/AV input. It ceases to be a TV set when it starts doing what my PCs and laptops do.

(Anonymity is the reason why FTA broadcasting is still so very important, by design it's only one-way — broadcaster to listener/viewer. Unfortunately smart TVs and the internet subvert anonymity by design.)

Despite the point in my comment about power cable extensions coverings becoming hard through the lack of plasticizers, I confirm your point about overplasticized PVC in instrument cables.

I have a lot of instrument leads that I thought were silicone only to find that after a year or so they've gone hard. So much so that new unpacked ones can no longer be easily straightened (the kinks remain unless one heats the cable up and then straightens them).

Despite availability issues,the problem is trying to determine what's real silicone and what's not.

What's made this situation worse is that it seems that worry over plasticizers and health etc. has lead to a reduction in the amount being used in cables. I have some power extenstion cables whose jackets have gone so hard that I can no longer coil them effectively — even though I take care the coiled cable still ends up a tangled mess.

Even if silicone jacketing is more expensive it's so good I'd pay extra. Trouble is it's not normally available on products found at the local hardware shop.

Seems to me we need to:

(1) Reverse engineer/disassemble the code to find out exactly how they're stealing our data.

(2) Hack the firmware to restore both our privacy and user-friendly functionality.

(3) Send garbage/random noise back to LG and Samsung, et al to overwhelm their servers—and actually cost them money for collecting our data.

Of course, this ought to be a temporary measure until our legislators listen to us and make what these manufacturers are doing strictly unlawful.

The real reason why vendors want users to use their apps is that an app maximizes the information they can steal from users with the minimum disruption (unfortunately users aren't aware of the fact).

I've never understood why this isn't obvious to everyone.

For years, I've avoided giving my phone number out to organisations by saying I don't have a phone. It's blistful, I almost never receive an unwanted call.

One way to familiarize students with mercury was to have several liters of it in a wide open-top jar and have them force their fist through the mercury pool to the bottom of the jar.

In fact, forcing one's hand through mercury between six to eight inches deep is not easy, some kids found it too difficult to do.

I'd describe my hand as feeling very squeezed and it being forced upwards to the surface with considerable force. The experience was certainly unforgettable.

There were some safety protocols: good ventilation (to minimize Hg vapor) and afterwards hands had to be thoroughly scrubbed with soap and water.

Very true, I still have my XT and AT manuals and use them as illustrations of how documentation should be done. Back then, good documentation included both operational and service manuals including maintenance and circuit diagrams (and as you say IBM even included BIOS source code).

IBM documentation up until at least that point had always been suburb across its product range. For example I have the original copy of this IBM typewriter manual even though I've no longer the machine because the manual is so very excellent:

https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibmtypewriricTypewrite...

Manufacturers considered their products and manuals proprietary and protected them with patents and copyrights but they were not secret as is so often the case nowadays. Right to Repair wasn't even a concept back then, had anyone suggested such a notion they'd be laughed at, as it was automatically assumed. What counts as documentation nowadays is an utter disgrace.

IBM was not alone, companies such as HP, Tektronix, Racal (and many others) also produced truly excellent documentation—especially so their maintenance and repair manuals. Equipment performance could often be judged on the quality of the manuals alone.

First is strong and enforceable law that makes it unlawful to violate one's privacy. The second is to prosecute violators directly—that is, employees cannot hide behind corporate walls and allow the corporate entity to take the blame.

Irrespective of what employers demand, employees have a responsibility to obey the law. Risk of individual employees being chucked in the slammer would change corporate culture overnight.

Fining corporations alone is a waste of time, they see such fines as the cost of doing business, losing one's freedom for an individual is another matter altogether. Employees must be frightened of the consequences of violating the law or the practice will continue.

Just a couple of hours in a supervised exam room with only one's own brain for answers.

Surely this is obvious.

For example, I used to use GIMP and became quite expert at it and would often swap between it and Photoshop. That changed when GIMP's developers removed the Fade feature (similar functionality as in Photoshop). The result is that they turned a perfectly functional program into a clunky mess that was ergonomically horrible to use. Using it was now like going from a modern auto gearbox back to a clunky manual.

Their rationale was that fading was better done by layers and such. Technically that's likely so (depending on what one's doing) but for the rest of us who were happy with the Photoshop-like Fade GIMP suddenly became useless.

GIMP's developers are more interested in some strange notion of technical purity than providing good ergonomic software that ordinary users can use. In short, GIMP's just a play toy for them, benefitting the opensource world isn't on their horizon.

Sure, as GIMP's developers they have the right to fuck up their software, what they don't have the right to do is fuck up bona fide users who've spent a large investment in learning the product by essentially making the product unusable.

Keep away from GIMP, as others have said there are much better alternatives now available.

More importantly, as I've mentioned, ReactOS is not stable nor reliable enough to even use as an offline O/S sans the Win 11 dross.

If these stability/compatibility issues were fixed then it'd develop a reputation for being reliable which would lead to further development work.

Unfortunately for everyone except Microsoft this is not the case.

Right, there is a long tradition in it taking centuries to build great cathedrals, Chartres, Notre Dame, etc.

I've little issue with that, however taking so long to build something such as an O/S that it's obsoleted itself many times over before being finished is another matter altogether.