None of that matters- the default SMS app is just a UI. They don't need to make a single web call to build one. You can do it in a few hours without a server. They may have decided to send all those texts to their servers for analysis in the advertising, but that's because they saw value in it. But the default SMS app has nothing to do with webservers, SMS transport, cloudflare, or anything like that. It's a GUI and that's it. You can find dozens of tutorials on how to make a simple one, they don't actually have anything to do with sending an SMS other than hosting the textbox you type into

That's not what the default SMS app does. It doesn't send to a gateway, the OS does that. The default SMS app allows you to replace the UI for the messaging app and allows you total access to the SMS database on the device. Basically it allows you to fully replace the built in app. It was valuable to FB because of the "full access to SMS database" part. But they would never have had to pay for an SMS, that's just done by calling SmsManager.sendTextMessage at the OS level

More likel nobody used it. Being the default SMS app doesn't mean you pay for the gateway. It means you're the app that's called when an SMS comes in, and you have sole access to write the SMS database. Basically you take over for the SMS app UI. But the underlying sending of SMS is still done by the OS.

No, work is what you do to get paid. You can love it and dream of it or not. But most people with careers are actually passionate about them.

Maintenance on trains is a fraction of the cost of the cars. They also move far more people per unit time than a series of cars do. The reason this is cars is because Musk hyped up on an idea that wasn't technically feasible (and never will be), then decided that he could turn it into an even bigger grift by self dealing to his own company to boost it's revenue and make people think self driving is a thing (it isn't, they have drivers even in the Vegas tunnel) that will actually happen this decade (it won't even come close).

With those two agencies it's probably a good thing. Do you want the prosecution to have unregulated access to a judge's chambers and documents? They shouldn't even be in the same building, too high a risk of influence.

Now if we were talking say the FBI and the FDA, yeah that's crazy. But those two it makes sense to keep a barrier between.

Unless you have an entire empty office building, it may be more difficult than it's worth. You could consolidate, but if the orgs consolidating are too far apart they'd come from different congressionally regulated budgets and that would be hard to reconcile. Long term it's a solution, but its not something you can snap your fingers and do.

Yes, they have the political value "Let's scam people out of money", th t3echnical value of an extremely inefficient method of storing data that's could be done more easily and with less resource usage at least a thousand ways, and the philosophy of a 12 year old edgelord who was just given a copy of Atlas Shrugged. There is no value in any of it.

With it being so embedded into instagram, I wouldn't be surprised if accidentally clicking a link there counts you as using Threads.

The reporting requirement is 10K, not 4K. So either you're lying, or you made a smart ass answer and pissed the teller off.

And if you think that PayPal etc wouldn't tell the feds everything they wanted to know, you're kidding yourself. They're even more likely to, as they don't have privacy protections written into law.

No, it's an attempt to protect against typo squatting. Like people who register amason.com instead of amazon.com to steal your credit card or login. It's a great idea, it just always needs a "No, I typed what I meant, go there" option.

Your argument is badly broken by neural nets and machine learning paradigms. They are very much NOT same inputs, same output. The output depends on what the training set was, and the order items were added to it. Take the same algorithm and train it on two different data sets, or even the same set in a different randomized order and you can get two different results. The worse part is that we would never be able to tell someone why- neural nets don't use logic, or understanding. So there can be no rational explanation for some of their decisions other than a chance correlation.

That can have extremely negative effects in the real world. An easy example is recommendation engines. Due to how they work, it's easy to get pigeon holed into certain types of content. It's a major cause in political radicalization and bubbles that we see today.

Another is inherent bias in systems. An AI is only as good as its input is. Crap input, crap output. Which is why when trained on data to try to find criminals, there have been multiple studies where it only picked black people. Why? Because they were outsized in the training set. The opposite reason is why facial recognition has trouble with them- underrepresented in that sample set.

Which all doesn't mean that we shouldn't use AI. It means we should use it carefully, keep an eye on surprise negative effects, regularly improve and adjust training sets, and decide that there are some places where we should leave humans in the loop and an AI is advisory at most. If we had an AI reading the signals from sensors in 1983 instead of Stanislav Petrov, we'd be a radioactive crater right now.

That's not the plan you use to save money. Get the Flexible plan- $20 per month for unlimited talk and text, and $10 per GB for data, with a max charge of $60 a month for data. I almost never pay more than $30 a month, because I'm always on wifi. Add in the ability to use multiple networks (Sprint or Tmobile), and the data price staying the same in 100+ countries and it's a great plan.

Once again- if they don't have that data already on the web, why do you think they'd bother putting it in a barcode, which will almost assuredly just link to a website?

If they don't care enough to put it on their website, why do you think they'd care enough to put it in a barcode? And if it's already on their website, the gains of this new system are minimal to none.

If this unlocks some special new functionality for the supply chain, that's fine let's switch. But the consumer oriented part seems gimicky and unnecessary. Or could be done by a QR code.