Why should anyone waste their time when the software you're using is inherently out of date, obsolete, unsupported and quite clearly dangerous to use.

There's no more point filing CVEs against ancient PHP than there is filing CVEs against Window 3.1 or 95. We know it's broken, beyond repair, will never be fixed, and should never be in production use. Why bother to catalogue HOW broken it is against pretty much every attack you want to try?

7.4 has been "security fixes only" for over 2 years and end of life for nearly 18 months. Publishing CVEs for it only encourages people to keep using it, but make sure they patch those CVEs, which are likely to be nothing more than the icing on the cake in terms of actual obvious holes in the software.

Developer time, testing time, etc. is limited and wasting it on literally obsolete software that is officially stated as "A release that is no longer supported. Users of this release should upgrade as soon as possible, as they may be exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities." doesn't help anyone.

"Personally, I find taking calls through Bluetooth to be more distracting than using the handset"

And studies have conclusively shown multiple times that having a conversation with someone who's not in the car (and thus doesn't pause to let you consider responses, etc.) is far more distracting than radios, passenger conversations or a variety of other activities.

It's literally nothing to do with call quality or speaking. It's to do with the person you're speaking to being remote to you and it severely affects your concentration and/or ability to pass basic tests while it's happening.

The real question, then, is why CB radios were ever tolerated in moving vehicles.

And, indeed, there are levels of window tint that are not permitted, including anything on the front windscreen. Those rules are throughout the UK and EU as far as I know, and police even have "tint meters" they can use to determine at the roadside if you're over the limit.

Those rules, however, long predate speed cameras or mobile phones.

Current "AI" isn't AI. It's just statistical automation.

It cannot infer, which is why it suffers from "hallucinations" which I think I more accurately call "superstitions". It's fed a ton of data, it makes a spurious correlation between that data and the expected results, it deals with new data according to that spurious connection. No different to people thinking that wearing their lucky socks made their team win, so they all wear their lucky socks every game. It takes a LOT of untraining (basically until all the relevant previous training is then in the minority) to get it to stop doing that. And then it can only really act on another superstition that it comes up with.

Statistical automation can be amazing, it can really help the world. But it's not intelligence. And - again - if your job can be replaced satisfactorily and safely by automation, maybe it should. Why should you be slaving doing something that a machine can do far better, for far longer, with no downsides? The problems come when it replaces a job where that's not true (e.g. self-driving!).

Every job lost through automation is a movement towards universal basic income too (of which there has never been a unsuccessful trial). The fact is that many of the jobs that automation replaced have gone forever and nobody really misses them. People doing dangerous, heavy works now replaced with tools and vehicles. People just moving a box from one conveyor to another. And so on.

But around it are still jobs that can't be replaced - from the more intellectual ones to the ones that don't require a ton of thought, just basic human senses and flexibility.

If your job can be automated, you need a new job or to get better at it. Because you can also be replaced with ANY OTHER HUMAN willing to do that job for a penny cheaper. And there will be cheaper, younger, less experienced humans who will do it just as well and want to do it.

AGI doesn't exist, and there's nothing even suggestive of AGI in any of the recent "advances". It's all just the same 1960's schtick that we're given - if only we had more money ("trillions of dollars"), more power, more connectivity, more training data, more time, etc. etc. then intelligence will somehow magically appear out of the data spontaneously. It's never been true, and isn't true now, and probably isn't a truth at all.

https://support.google.com/chr...

ChromeOS devices receive 10 years of updates.**

** For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services might not be supported.

Sorry, but if you buy "unofficial" Chromebooks, then yes. But I've watched the support life of official devices (not just Google, but HP, Lenovo, Acer, etc.) increase from 5 to 7 to 10 years in the last decade or so. I ran a school entirely on them (even staff). That wasn't through choice, it's because they couldn't afford anything else, and it damn well worked.

Most Chromebooks, especially those you would buy for education or enterprise, have a more than adequate support life and your users will reject them for speed/hardware (e.g. old chargers) far quicker than ChromeOS will stop working on them.

Yep.

I have PoE cameras, with inaccessible cabling, wifi backups, notifications for obscuring or losing contact with the cameras, on-board SD, local and remote cloud backups of footage, plus detection alerts to my phone (because literally the only person who cares about my property is ME, so the only person worth informing is ME, and I can then check the cameras and decide if escalation is necessary or it's just the cat).

Have I spent a fortune? No. Just cheap "smart" cameras. IP68, fitted and cabled by myself and I also have PTZ models, 2-way calling to them, external lights and alarms on them if I press the right button in an app or configure their "smart" junk, RTSP streaming/recording, etc. The most complex part is the internals to power them via PoE (which is also backed up not only by UPS but by an ATS to switch to solar power banks).

I spent almost nothing on the cameras themselves.

I fit CCTV as part of my job, working IT in schools - mostly CCTV is useless. In 25+ years and numerous crimes (thefts, assaults, trespasses, burglaries, hit-and-run car incidents etc.), there was only ever one conviction based even vaguely on actual footage... and that was of a teacher in a school corridor breaking up a fight. Most footage is useless precisely because even with the best camera you'll be lucky to get more than "a guy in a black hood, with black clothing and black shoes hid his face from the camera in the dark".

But my experiences with all that told me many years ago when they first came in that wifi-only cameras were the dumbest idea in existence. First, they're a nightmare to reliably power (batteries running out, not enough solar, etc.) but second they can be jammed by the cheapest piece of hardware ever from quite a distance.

And CCTV in general is only useful is someone is AWARE of what it's picking up as it happens. After-the-event recordings are only for evidential requirements, not crime-detection. If you don't have someone watching, being alerted, being responsible for acting upon the footage (like you would do with your own house if the CCTV pings your phone to let you know something's moving indoors), then you're wasting your time. All you've done is record your security weaknesses for posterity.

"Is there a regulatory agency that tracks down and destroys spammers in a globally connected communications application?"

No. There's an agency that takes reports from users and asks service to shut down spamming accounts.

I'm in Europe. Also never have Whatsapp spam, SMS spam, or even really phone spam (maybe about one call every 18 months or so, I just ignore it because they're not on my contact list).

I've had the same phone number for nearly 25+ years now.

A page that requests notifications immediately upon first load for a new visitor?

And is, on the face of it, no different from the way Plex operates?

No thanks.

Strange.

I've watched my Plex offline plenty of times, it's the best thing to watch in a powercut.

You just go to the direct web interface on the device, rather than through the Plex app, or app.plex.tv etc.

Sure, I'd like an open-source version of Plex, but there isn't one that's quite the same, at least there wasn't a few years ago when I looked. And I've paid for Plex now. Until it does something I absolutely don't want it doing, I'm sticking with it.

My Plex has lived on a Netgear NAS and now lives on a RPi running Ubuntu.

Don't fore me to upgrade to a "better" operating system, because if you do, I may well go out and find one.

And given my recent experience with a Steam Deck (Linux running Wine/Proton), I'm not hard-pushed to think of a single reason that such an operating system would be Windows-based at all.

And this is coming from someone who exclusively ran a Slackware-based desktop for about 8-9 years while managing Windows networks. Windows 7 bought you a lot of kudos, even if it was far from perfect, and it could also be used at home to run my games (which is a large part of my investment in my software library because it's probably the only category of software I'm happy to pay for personally!). 10 was a huge leap but also viable.

Don't make me reconsider. Because I know for a fact that I can operate my entire life without Windows, and that it actually works quite well. And now that includes enough of my personal software library that I wouldn't give it a second thought.

Hell, the other day I wanted to play an old Windows 3.1 game and a '95 game. Neither worked on my 10 laptop, they basically refused to run outright no matter what settings were chosen. I copied them to my Steam Deck and run them under the desktop mode. First time. Not even a thing to do. Switched to "Steam" mode and both ran, and the one that *was* actually viable to play on such a device (i.e. didn't need keyboard) ran absolutely flawlessly.

About once every 5-10 years, I re-evaluate my way of working, usually because of stuff like this. Don't make me sit and evaluate that decision again. I don't think it'll go the way you want, Microsoft.

Hold on.

My workplace has 10gig connections. There are hundreds of desktops. I think it would be possible for me to do these kinds of numbers, because that's a dumb way of adding it up - saying that you have 9000 x 100Gbps lasers, in fact, makes those numbers not all that great.

Now... more interesting - what's the actual used bandwidth of unique traffic (not counting it three times because it bounces between three satellites), and the average download speed for users?

Because that's FAR more interesting to know.

My UK house:

There is one bus that comes once on a Friday. It goes only to the nearest town (3 miles away). Hilariously that bus doesn't return so anyone using to can't come back on it. And there are no other buses serving my village.

The nearest train station is a 20 minute DRIVE away. It would take me approximately 3 hours to get the train to work from the station *if* those trains actually ran 3 hours before my work started. They don't.

So I would need to either walk 3 miles (4 days a week), then get multiple connecting buses to get a train to travel 3 hours to then walk several more miles to my employer and/or more buses. And convince my employer to let me start work at 11am (if I leave at 7am) and not expect to get home before... 10/11pm (but actually some of those services would not be running at that time of night either!).

I would need a season ticket for the trains, a Tube ticket covering multiple zones, plus bus journey costs and/or a lot of shoe leather.

Or, I can get in a car, drive for 30 minutes, and get straight from door to door.

Car-free lifestyles are great if you are prepared to live and work close together in a single major city, where cars are basically a burden anyway (i.e. parking, etc.) and are being paid far more than the average by doing so such that you can afford to do so (I know I can't afford to live in London any more, and have to have "London suburb wages" paying "rural-level housing costs"!).

Everywhere else they're a terrible idea.

Sure, they could lay on more buses, trains, things going my way, I could work locally (and take a MASSIVE hit on salary) or move close to work (and require FAR MORE salary to do so, I literally cannot afford to live near where I work!), but it would require countless billions in investment to even make it *viable* let alone my first choice (and as someone who used to live in London, I can tell you that public transport will never be my first choice, all else being equal).

Fact is, your car-free lifestyle literally isn't even vaguely viable for everyone, let alone their preference.

My nearest supermarket (that's not a corner shop) is 25 minutes drive away. My village's ONLY facility is a small, very expensive, farm shop that's only open during the working day, M-F, basically.

A lot needs to change, at all kinds of levels, and with all kinds of expense, before I can even consider abandoning my vehicle.

The trip was 5.5 hours (charging excluded).
They waited 3 hours for a charger.
Presumably the charging time before they could continue their trip was 2 hours.

I had a lot of silly casual games on my Steam account.

Some stopped working any more on modern Windows.

Put them on my Steam Deck (which runs Linux / Proton) and they "just worked" again.

Now if only the same could happen for the original GTA (which needs a lot of tweaking to make it go and I don't want to spend my downtime faffing about trying to get it going), I'd be happy.

I'm comfortable not owning any Ubisoft games, does that help?

"These things simply don't have the power in their current form to be useful for any devices that need watts of power."

No, but like almost all nuclear batteries, they are great for things like space travel, arctic experiments and things left unattended for decades but that need to be constantly powered in harsh conditions where any kind of grid power or even solar is inconceivable.

This isn't a battery for your phone. This is a battery for an ocean or outdoor sensor to run for five decade without needing any maintenance, enough to charge up for a day and then blasts its data through the airwaves, and do so consistently and reliably for a lifetime.

Whether it's a competitor to actual proper nuclear batteries, or even just an ordinary battery and a maintenance programme, is another question entirely, but it's most likely not snake oil - just not what you think they are trying to sell you, and they're not trying to sell it to you at all.

Wildlife trackers would be my first thought, given the size. If the weight's right you could shove this on a whale and it'd power the radio tracking beacon for the whale's lifetime without you ever needing to catch that whale again.