the real point is that you should never be accepting the notice. The consent button means "we are doing something evil with your data, which you wouldn't agree to if you knew what it was. So we have to ask your permission". Good websites simply don't need the cookie consent, because they don't do 3rd party tracking.
I had one, and it was horrible to use: it kept learning my behaviour - and assuming (very wrongly) that what I did last week applied to this week.
I replaced it with an old fashioned thermostat (a single knob and a bimetallic strip) and it's so much better.
Btw, some people may have "old" 240V manual thermostats running on a modern (12V/24V) boiler and hate the excessive hysteresis. That's because these older ones have a small heater resistor behind the bimetallic strip, designed to provide just enough extra warmth to reduce the 3-degree mechanical hysteresis to 1-degree or so. If you have a really old thermostat, it actually needs 240V, even though it's just a switch!
Agree - the only way to protect companies from being targets is to make sure that they can't pay.
The way to do it would be to fine companies who pay ransomware an amount equal to 10x the loss they would have experienced from not paying it.
We need a way to extend the robots.txt format to say "Yes, please index my site; No you may not train your AI on it".
Hydrogen won't ever work for flights, because the volumetric energy density is too low to be usable.
E.g. Boeing 787-8 jet weighs 227 tonnes (including up to 101 tonnes of fuel, with a volume of 126 m3), to give a maximum range of 13, 530 km.
If fuelled by cryogenic liquid hydrogen rather than kerosene, it would need 2.8× less mass of fuel, which saves 65 tonnes. However, it would need 4.1× more volume for the same energy. Currently, that would consume all the existing fuel-tank space, all the existing baggage/cargo capacity (136 m3) and 84% of the cabin capacity (302 m3).
Often the problem is that the tech isn't quite as set-and-forget as you'd like, especially for seniors.
In particular, we need:
* a way to prevent uninstalling and modifying the homescreen.
* a way to prevent the volume being turned down (sooo often, people can't hear because of how they picked up the device)
* absolutely no adverts
* absolutely no prompts. (the device must never ask permission to upgrade, or give notifications of new versions,
* guarantee of no spam - only specific people can call.
In some cases, a way to force the remote end to answer, without it needing any user-interaction (yes this is a privacy issue, it may still be necessary for the elderly).
Surely the answer is simply to legislate that "all cryptocurrency is deemed to be counterfeit money" and therefore every cryptocurrency is now banned.
There was a better option: nothing.
This kind of "all eggs in one basket (that someone else is carrying)" security model is worse than the risk it claims to mitigate.
We need a legal policy that states that AI tools that were trained on "the sum of human knowledge" are themselves common property, and must be released as open-source.
I completely agree - if only for the environmental advantages. Snap is so prodigiously wasteful of storage and bandwidth - not everyone has it, and for those that do, it's still a waste of money and CO2. We already solved the shared-libraries problem.
Except that AGPL is the GPL we wish we'd all used if we had forseen that we would be delivering software that would be used on the web.
Nextcloud (who use AGPLv3+) got it right.
Imagine how much better Android would have been if the core libraries had been GPL not LGPL.
I'd love to see more projects use Affero GPL (which solves the service-as-a-software substitute) issue, and to have a better migration path from GPLv3+ to AfferoGPLv3+.
It would also really help if there were more GPLv3 libraries in JS and PHP - many developers have a (technical) choice as to which libraries to build from which would allow them to make their code GPL-dependent, but at the same time, the company lawyers prevent developers from making a "license choice" for GPL, unless they can say "but I used a GPL library".
Finally, it's insufficiently clear what exactly you have to do to make a web (or python) application into a fully covered work - because there is no "compile" step.
As a Tesla owner, I just wish there were some way to report bugs!
It's really frustrating how bad some of the software is.
For example:
* the wing mirrors auto-fold at my home location, but won't auto-unfold for about 100m.
* the rearview parking cameras are sepia-tinted - perfect for blending in concrete pillars!
* the guideline white lines on reversing shows where the wheels will go, not the "hips" of the car. So you follow them into a tight-space, and crunch!
* summon never works where you need it to (i.e. in tight spaces in car-parks where there is no cellular, only bluetooth)
* every unrecognised voice command falls through to navigation. Eg. "Wiper off" is misheard as "Waipa off" which is mis-recognised as "Wifi
* "Phone Mum" doesn't work - because I don't have a "Mom" in my phonebook (that's an Americanism).
* The Phone keyboard has no ability to quickly enter names by typing the first letters (e.g. to identify "Peter", you might start typing "7 3 8", as P E T). Instead, you have to scroll through the whole list - and that's really hard to do safely when driving.
* Also, I expected that the self-driving would,at minimum, be able to park the car with greater precision than I can, in tight spots.
* When you restart, the car takes ages to re-acquire GPS, and it doesn't realise that it is in the same place it was when you parked! So it can be 500m off - and it takes up to 2 minutes to find itself - this is quite long enough to be satnav'd into going the wrong way.
* If there is no cellular, then trying to find a destination on the map gives as "destination not found" error, rather than a "No data available".
* If the headlights are in auto-mode, it's impossible to get them to stay on full-beam in a dark, narrow, isolated country-lane - even without any other cars, the nearby trees turn them to dipped.
Tesla has no way to contact them to tell them stuff - even when I went into a Tesla store, the owner just said, sorry, we can't feed it back. This is so frustrating, as I could get so much of it fixed, if they would only LISTEN.
What we really need is the requirement that these large platforms provide a free API for interoperability.
For example:
* If my friends use Gmail and I use Hotmail, then there is no problem for me to email them.
* But if my friends use Facebook, and I use Diaspora, then I can't share posts.
Email is an open, interoperable protocol between multiple platforms; Facebook (etc) lack this.
So, what we need is a requirement that people can communicate with users of a platform (eg Facebook) without being a member of that platform.
This is the only way that competing services will be able to exist, and that uses will have meaningful data portability.
The other thing I would do is require that every advertising-funded service should also be required to offer a paid service at the same (effective) price, where the user is in control.
In every other text field, clicking once places the cursor. Chrome changed this so clicking in the URL-bar selected the entire line. Then Firefox followed. This is really annoying when you're a web developer, and you often want to quickly edit the url parameters. I do still love Firefox (and it's my browser of choice), but it isn't getting better, and bugfixes take too long, if at all. As a developer, I do still try to check things work in both Fx and Chromium (and at least it's not the IE6 days of insanity).
If in any problem you find yourself doing an immense amount of work, the answer can be obtained by simple inspection.
