My optician has a peripheral vision test machine which uses floppy disks to transfer results over to the main system. A quick search shows that such pieces of kit are in the high 4-figure sum to buy (and that's a second hand one via Alibaba, so I'm guessing that a replacement is not going to be bought any time soon

My work (large O365 site) recently announced that people who didn't send enough emails didn't need the full version, so would be reduced to the online only licence.

That was done to save money, as MSFT presumably had already ramped up the price.

(The signs were there. In the past, there was the Home User Program, where you could buy a copy of MS Office for about 90% off the retail price, or about the same as a cost per seat corporate licence. A couple of years ago, that 90% off the purchase was changed to "30% off an annual O365 subscription". )

"The technology allows for emergency messaging like marking the car stolen or indicating an Amber Alert, and can be personalized through an app with touts like "Go Warriors" or "Go Lakers" to cheer on the local sports teams"

Instead of changing the message above the actual numbers and letters, why not change the letters themselves.

If the car is normally XRV 132, and you overtake RAG 431, then you could change the display on your own vehicle to read RAG 431 as you put your foot down in an area with speed cameras. You get to drive fast; the other guy gets your speeding tickets

I wonder how long it will be before some landlords start looking at ... riskier tenants. "What's that, you say? You'd like to rent some office space for your oxygen and acetylene storage company. Go right ahead. And did you know, we've gone all trendy and replaced light bulbs with candles"

Accidents that still look like accidents will be insured, right?

The comedian Dave Gorman, on his "Modern Life is Good..ish" show, once offered an Epson printer free to the first audience member who put up their hand.

He then outlined the cost of the ink, so the audience member who had initially wanted it then changed their mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Sounds about right.

"But why wouldn't they say how fast their computer is?"
Depends what they are using it for - it it's something "obvious" like weather forecasting, or even particle motion simulations, then yes, maybe the owners of it might want to say how powerful it is.

If it is something "non-obvious" (some of the other posters alluding to some kind of AI, but equally it could be something that can brute force encryption breaking that was thought to be in the realms of "that will take thousands of years" category), then you might want to let the general public believe that the task would take thousands of years, when your machine has it down to 1000s of hours

While the EU can go after GDPR infringements, it does seem that they may only do so if alerted to the breach.

As you say, it is disappointing that it takes research institutions to uncover the infringing "grab details before submit" actions. That at least is still better than "You have no laws in place to stop these people"

Maybe, instead of an "anti-Turing" test (the "I am not a robot" ones), Musk should implement a better Turing one to defeat the bots.

A small site I use has one of those "I am not a robot" features when an authorised user needs to make changes to the content, although for me it is literally tick the box, rather than jump through the hoops of "tick all the ones with...". Perhaps the background checks (eg time from navigating to a page vs start of any input) mean it is obvious that only a human is doing the input.

So, a better test for humans (which makes it as simple as possible) is a good thing

Cloud seeding has been known about for decades. It does work, but the area of effect is quite small, the amount of effect is quite small and the amount of effort to do it is quite high.

The Soviet Union would cloud seed on the outskirts of Moscow to ensure that any rain fell before it reached the city, and hence the My Day parade through Moscow never had rain.

However, it was deemed impracticable to do it for larger areas, or for more of the time.

Whether the Saudis think they have overcome the scale and effort issues is another matter

But, but (waves hands). "Chrome" has a nice hard sound, so must be cool. "Linux" has an 'x' in it, so is dodgy and x-rated

While the amount generated won't be enough to power a torch, it hints at being able to provide enough (when spread over a large enough array of panels) to provide sufficient electricity for any base load monitoring systems.

50mW /m2 means that a small array of 100 panels could provide enough power for a phone

Around 25 years ago, the building I worked in was networked to 2 others - one nearby, and the other a few hundred miles away (where the system developers were). Within the main building were some fancy network bridge cards, connecting different network segments. Every now and then, these cards would suddenly be reset to factory settings. Which puzzled everyone, including the card manufacturer.

It turns out that the developers would be trying out new configurations on the bridge card down at their end. At the end of the testing, they would issue a factory reset command. Except the command was sent across the network, and was picked up by all the live cards as well as the test one.

Apparently, the cards being able to respond to a general reset command was considered a feature, not a bug. It looks as though these modems suffered in the same way

Not far now... :-)

Android - 40%
Windows - 31%
iOS - 17%
MacOS - 6%
Linux - c1%

However, with Android being based on Linux, and iOS/MacOS being Unix, then that's 41% for Linux (based) and 23% for Unix based.
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-...

I like reading about these kinds of projects - trying stuff out "because we can", even if there are bits that don't work yet.

After all, today's experiments could end up being the basis for tomorrow's core system.

Patterns that repeat temporally sounds like some of the shapes in Conway's game of life.

Back in the 1980s, and that was about the limit of what people could do with their microcomputer (Commodore PET, TRS-80 era) based progarms.

Now there are enough known repeating patterns that a digital clock can be done using the game of life rules
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Wonder what will be done with these qubit patterns in 40 years