If you now are ripping open the earth, laying a DSL line is far more expensive in the long term than laying a gigabit one, as you need to replace the DSL in a few decades any way because none of your customers will want it or be happy with it. I mean the largest part of the costs of building out the last mile is just cost connected to moving soil.

Well, eventually they will figure it out how to make self driving cars safer than more than 99% of human drivers. When that happens, I'm not sure, but it will happen. Now, if you introduce them too early, a very risky and unsafe version of self driving cars that is maybe safer than 20% of the human driver population, but less safe than 80%, then anybody of those 80% using a self driving car would mean a safety risk.

Also, the first accident with a self driving car will surely be in the news, and if you haven't proven that you have introduced them very gently and driven many millions of miles/kilometers in test setups, then you will be blamed for the death, and such an accident may become a reason for the public and politicians to stop believing in the potential of self driving cars to be safer than 99% of human drivers, which in turn might give you many regulations and require you to jump through even more regulatory hoops and red tape. And the car manufacturers who don't have self driving cars would abuse that and try to convince politicians to forbid self driving cars completely. This would set back the whole industry and cause google and other self driving car companies to waste tons of resources on improving the image that could otherwise be spent on actually making the cars safer.

Alphabet has been testing these since a decade or so. They really don't rush it, which is good.

Oblig xkcd https://xkcd.com/865/

They might fill the need, but until then their R&D costs need to be driven in. So lets look forward to a few years or so when the people who believed this marketing crap bought those devices and by that made them cheaper.

"Standard" is just a label you give to a proposal. Right now all effort has been focussed on preventing to stick that label on EME. I think that effort could have been spent better.

You can for example make browser vendors adopt only DRM plugins that charge money for each visit, that will drive away all the little websites and makes every website owner think twice before they put their video under EME DRM. Really the worst that can happen now is that every video website on the web starts putting all their video into this EME DRM. This is what the actual war is about.

However, you can't introduce such a payment barrier overnight, as there is still flash. Users must uninstall flash in large numbers, and once browsers don't offer the flash plugin any more, you can make websites pay. So first step, petition people you know to uninstall flash, and all other plugins, maybe uninstall it yourself, and then as second step petition website owners which require flash to drop that requirement. Petitioning while you still have flash enabled may be more comfortable, but it sort of misses the point.

Yes, but if that is the point, why not let the user speak the username instead of the password? After all if you say it out loud, it can be intercepted much more easily (not all people are proficient with reading people typing keystrokes, although you should consider this too, and probably cover yourself when you type in your password), so there is no sense in keeping the spoken phrase secret.

Sorry, but couldn't get past all that sheep speak (aka dumbed down language). What exactly is that bridge for? Preventing badusb? Actually checking for malware files stored on the usb stick's filesystem? Preventing computers to flash the usb stick's firmware to make attacks permanent?

No, of course the reasoning is sound, but it would be horrible overall if the technology would be demonized and all its development on it abandoned before it even had the chance to mature because some people thought it already was mature enough to completely go driverless.

Full agree. But when it has the size of a scooter, I wouldn't call it "car" any more. That's a different category of vehicle.

I think its too early for autonomous cars to drive around without drivers. Imagine what happens when an accident occurs. Then the technology will be demonized. That would be horrible. Only allow autonomous cars to drive around without drivers once you are certain they are not just better than the average driver, but than 95% of all human drivers.

But I guess its like with most people who have a risky driving style: they say "who cares", until something horrible happens due to that carelessness, and then they are either unable to say anything any more, or are terribly sad.

No, it makes more sense to produce shitty and expensive products whose quality degrades over lifetime than to sell products where the customer buys it once and is so happy with it they don't need to buy it again.

In fact, many products in the world have gotten planned obsolescence put into the product so that you have to buy a new one over time.

Ever heard of the light bulb cartel?

And its made harder for many companies to make money once net neutrality gets removed. It essentially brings ISPs into the position to extort large sums of money from the service providers, and obviously on their own discretion. So it harms all companies which provide a service. Net neutrality also drives innovation by giving new and young service providers a more equal playing field with more established ones. Google can just say "well, then search, youtube and drive will be utterly slow", and can use this as leverage, but smaller companies don't have this lever. So it is against innovation and this is ultimately bad for the service provided to customers, and for the economy. The only ones profiting are the big ISP monopolists, but nobody else does.

I still remember when the entire smartphone industry was doing usb connectors, including blackberries (so not only android land), only apple refused and went with lightning connectors.

Has hell frozen over?