... access to my physical location.

If you've brought hardware, then the delivery branch (also known as - a separate company ; I'm not even sure if Dell have a company in my country ; but I know they deliver boxes through Amazon's delivery system. Or did several years ago ; that could change, frequently.) needs temporary access to that data. No other branch of the company (including it's sub-contractor infrastructure) needs that data. So they should not have access to it. And frankly, "Sales" should be checking if the "delivery address" is intended to be different to the "billing address", for every sale. It's a routine part of maintaining customer engagement.

I'm surprised that in the august company of Slashdotters, we got this far in the comments without anyone bringing up "Rule 34". Which touches (consensually or not) upon the difficult - if not impossible - problem of defining pornography.

People were probably having this conversation when Mediaeval woodcutters started making porn for printing on the first printing presses. You can see how totally unsuccessful we have been at achieving consensus in the intervening centuries.

Then your car will accumulate it's few weeks of sun in the first couple of years. Imagine what it's like with a new car on Skye - it'd take decades.

Plus the car will be full of dead midges.

The gov't needs to figure out how many people die due to time lost trying to unlatch their seatbelts.

I'm sure they already have.

(This next bit may contain distressing information. Viewer discretion is advised.)

It is possible that the government's analysis disagrees with your opinion.

Shocking idea, isn't it?

I don't know what "driver training" was like in your country, but my passenger-while-flying training (between my first and second flights) included specifically the point of how to locate your seatbelt latch while (when necessary) upside down and underwater. It takes about a quarter second. Perhaps your driver training was less comprehensive than my passenger training - quite likely ; I don't know what your driver training was like. But that's the numbers, for properly trained users.

I'll add the possibility that your driver training might pre-date the availability of seat-belts. (My first car, a Volvo 122S, had seat belts as a factory-fitted but not legally required feature. You could remove them, but YOU had to do that.) Which would raise questions of whether your driving license should be suspended until you have taken (and passed) the current driver-training programme. I'm cool with that - I've advocated since I first shovelled a driver's brains back into his skull that driving licenses only last for 10 years before the driver has to re-sit the exams. As a flying passenger, I had to re-sit the courses and exams every 2 to 4 years (the numbers changed over the years) - so when seat-belts were changed from "2-point" or "3-point" harnesses to the now-standard 4-point harnesses, that was automatically covered in the (re-) training programme. Still, a quarter second.

My next heresy : the only people allowed to fit, or re-fit after removal, child restraint harnesses should have to pass appropriate training. Because no child has ever been strangled, or had their neck broken, by a well-designed child seat badly installed by one of their parents. But I'm sure you're happy with untrained people strangling their children through their own inability to retain and read the fitting instructions.

OK, for me specifically, this issue will change my annual games-spend from 0 to 0, which may not be a big deal for the industry. But that is largely because I'm not interested now - and never have been (since I last played an "online" game") - interested in playing games with "online content", because I spent so much of my life several hundred miles from an internet connection.

But adding adverts to games - well that just increases the number of "no chance" barriers by 1.

Clearly EA think they've already saturated their market, and are now in what Cory Doctorow would call the "enshittification" stage of their development.

Investors should take note.

I'm sure Apple is really, truly sorry for the ad.

I'm especially sure Tim Cook, Apple's marketing team, and the ad agency are popping champagne bottles for a brilliant ad campaign.

Why? Because the ad has generated probably billions of dollars worth of marketing alone - between all the antisocial media posts about getting "offended" to all the news articles reporting on it. I'm sure they're all high-fiving each other on a really successful ad that went viral

What was likely supposed to have been an low-key introduction of a rather boring product that's not doing terribly great (are iPads really selling all that much?) , suddenly days after the introduction you get a resurgence of interest on in brought on by the news.

I knew about the iPad introduction because it was covered heavily. I didn't bother seeing the ad at all. It was "meh" to me. Now, I've seen the ad in question to see what the hype was about. Or brouhaha.

It's a cute ad. But now they've probably had a few million views to hundreds of millions of views of that ad because of the "controversy"

And they probably got a bunch of people who didn't care and didn't know that Apple released a new iPad, into knowing that Apple released a new iPad. And maybe some of them suddenly think it might be time to upgrade their tablet.

Instead of people forgetting about the iPad a week later, this news will circulate round and round for the next few weeks.

You can't manufacture that kind of marketing.

So when do the normal people start benefiting from this 'free market' capitalism that I keep hearing about?

They never do.

Free market capitalism benefits those with capital. If you don't have capital, you don't benefit.

These days, the life of a billionaire is extremely easy. The life of a millionaire is not.

While the particular bug caused the pump battery to run down due to the repeated wireless communication, what if the bug triggered repeated insulin injection?

Presumably the pump has safeguards for that.

The pump can work without the app - the app just provides an easier to use interface. There's nothing inherently safety critical to the app - if the app decides "user asked for bolus" then the pump will push once and then have a backoff timer - you need to protect against app malfunction as well as user malfunction (the user might be spamming the button multiple times - a very common event).

Chances are, there were no safety concerns because well, the pump protects against them - the user is just as likely to spam the button on the pump as it would on the app, so there's no concern there of a bug causing the app to continuously request extra shots.

The problem was, the app crashed, which had a secondary side effect no one really considered - that is, it caused the pump to use more power since its Bluetooth connection was being used a lot more. This had the side effect of extra battery drain and instead of lasting a day between charges, it might last say, 12 hours.

This can trigger a recall because if the user expected to get through the day without needing to charge their pump, they probably weren't counting on it dying midway through. Probably took a fair amount of investigation as to why the battery life on the pump was suddenly going from good to horrible.

That's why the phone isn't safety-critical. It didn't need to. it was just that an external device accidentally had bad effects on the battery life of the device

They tried brown boxes for a while. It didn't last long.

I suspect there was some consumer backlash.

Here's a question - the 90s were flush with unbleached fully recycled printer paper. I know, because my high school used them.

You don't see them anymore. They sucked - the contrast was low on printed materials and consumers rejected them, so it's all back to bleached paper.

And honestly, any printed material you use will be on bleached paper - even those fancy all-black boxes you find products in. It's going to use white paper printed with all black ink.

The only things using unbleached paper are cardboard shipping boxes to which very little printing generally goes on it. Hell, they often slap a white label on them.

And if you must know, the boxes are unbleached cardboard with a glued paper overlay these days. So less paper needs to be bleached and you still get the nice white packaging (or other colors). Which is probably a reasonable compromise - the unbleached paper makes the majority of the paper used, while a thin overlay of bleached paper is used to cover it.

I don't know about Boeing in particular, but it's definitely a thing in aviation lately.

https://www.washingtontimes.co...

Except that's a reach. It's a 2013 policy being blamed for 2023 faults.

Sounds reasonable, right? Except between those years, a massive layoff of air traffic controllers took place. You might know the year too - it happened in 2020.

Since no one was flying, a bunch of ATC were laid off. And now things have rebounded, but they have not returned. There's a shortage of them.

In a shortage, turning away qualified personnel based on race is basically unheard of - you need people, and people are coming to your door, but you're not hiring them?

No, likely these were happening prior to the pandemic - when there weren't shortages but surplus.

It's an article that tries to blame "go woke go broke" as causing accidents, when the real cause is simple - there are not enough controllers to handle the traffic. We've had reports of controllers falling asleep because they've worked so long hours that they couldn't stay awake.

Of course, there are two solutions - you reduce the hours - but then you reduce the capacity of the air traffic system in general - i.e., less flights. Or you pay controllers more money to hire back all those that got laid off but didn't return to their previous jobs.

Even the FAA took away the quiz in 2018, 2 years prior to the pandemic, hired the people they didn't hire. So it even became a non-issue.

It's just more "anti-woke" messaging trying to tie two unrelated things together - AYC shortage right now is NOT caused by race - ti's caused by a lack of controllers. And the solutions to them hurt because it means paying people more or denying little Timmy his flight.

It has been known that ChinaÃ(TM)s SO*/NO* was holding temps down all over northern hemisphere.

"Known" for values of "known" that go as far as "strongly suspect". But yeah, that's definitely a suspicion that climate scientists have had for years.

Oddly, I saw something the other day that might help the arctic.[pumping mechanism]

The Proposal has been around for a couple of years, but I didn't know it had been used previously.

I hope that someone did a deal of science on this back then, to constrain the uncertainties on the process. Obviously the presence of significant salt (~32 permil) would have an effect. The big problem I can see is how to keep the PV panels above the new ice that you're forming. You could - temporarily - solve that by putting the (floating) PV farm at some distance from the pump and new ice floe. Floating PV is certainly in development - but that then changes the problem to that of getting the floating PV to climb onto the edge of the expanding new ice floe ... which is a different problem. Maybe you'd need to put the PV farm up onto (buoy-supported) stilts, and allow the ice to form below the farm ... choices, choices.

This could be started in April using PV, and pulled out in oct.

Hmmm. Look at numbers. Say you need 10,000 of these, each producing a 1km radius reflective floe (so 31,416 sq.km extra ice - is that anything like the necessary scale? Another order of 10?) - that is a lot of deployments and retrievals. It very rapidly - long before you get to that scale (unless you want to be building many, many additional harbours, storage facilities, construction yards too. Boatyards ...) gets to the point of leaving the things at sea permanently. You've still got a servicing and deployment problem, but you haven't created a deployment/ retrieval problem.

Hopefully, this would not turn darker than normal since it will have a constant small particles falling on it

I don't think you'll be adding to the existing issue of "soot in ice" significantly, as long as you put your water inlets ... order of 10 times the diameter of the suction pipe above the seabed. That's an estimate - from the effects of pumping into fluids - and needs updating from (I hope) the 1960s experience you refer to. I'd start with a keel of 20x diameter, just to be on the safe side. That will affect the water depth you need for deployment, hence distance from shore, hence number of deployment harbours, construction/ assembly facilities ...

You're talking about the Alaskan and Canadian coasts, because the chances of getting Russia to contribute meaningfully is negligible, and there is zero infrastructure in Greenland on it's North coast (and a few hundred thousand sq.km of reflective land ice too, just next door). So .. the Canadian northern archipelago (where the complex bits of the NW passage are). Yeah, that's a complex question. How much overland transport do you rely on in winter (when it is less unreliable than intermittently-iced sea) ... complex.

Someone, somewhere should be doing test deployments. To see if it works at all. And if it works, how well?

It's spelled "dementia". The dilemma is "shorter jail time versus admitting to the obvious dementia" ; neither is a disbarment form standing for presidency, AIUI.

Or the alternative dilemma : make allegations of dementia a thing against Biden, and see those allegations reflect upon yourself.

When does America face it's biscuit problem? November, just before or after Thanksgiving?

(The Biscuit Problem : choosing the lesser of two weevils.)

it is not hard for software to correctly read most of the signage, and flag ones that are difficult for a human to decipher.

So, Amazon shut down their "Mechanical Turk" service? Or is that dressed up in the clothes of an "AI solution" by some "fake it 'til you make it" startup?

How much does a room full of English-speaking (or in this case, -reading) Indian wage slaves cost these days?

What use case do you have for street name signs to be computer readable? Delivery companies use - as far as I can tell - geographic coordinates to direct delivery drivers (leading to things like Amazon drivers having to turn off data on their phones in order to deliver to premises where the delivery location has been wrongly encoded, and the driver has to deliver to a location distant form the nominal delivery location - farms were great for this, "leave parcels in the barn with the red door". Few delivery days working for Amazon didn't have several of these "disable data" events.)

Those little Amazon delivery robots use geographical coordinates too, but aren't bound to the road network, using cycle paths and paved footpaths where available.

The databases for this are essentially complete (though needing maintenance - Amazon request their deliverers to flag errors as described above, but few ever bother).

This is why you need Unions. Unions call management on this bullshit all the time. Boeing has a union, but it's too weak to stand up to management after decades of Ergonomics.

Boeing's Washington workers are unionized. However, their South Carolina factory, where the 787 is manufactured, is not. In fact, Boeing had their WA and SC teams compete in order to see who would get the 787 factory.

The whole competition was really just a way to get major concessions from the WA union - which Boeing got - pay cuts and other things. In the end Boeing gave the factory to SC and extracted major concessions in pay and benefits from their union, so win-win for Boeing,.