"Today, there is intense interest in the use of multivibrators in cryptography. Turing’s key generator, the most original part of Delilah, contained eight multivibrator circuits, along with the five-wheel assembly mentioned previously. In effect the multivibrators were eight more very complicated “wheels,” and there was additional circuitry for enhancing the random appearance of the numbers the multivibrators produced."

They also manage more modern standards for color FWIW, ffmpeg supports several SMPTE standards.

As an aside, it's really difficult to type SMPTE if, for years, you've been frequently typing SMTP. They should change their name!

It wouldn't be Android if you weren't fighting the UX.

I'd like it to:

- Honor autoplay off settings when hooking up to Android Auto. It doesn't. It always loads the music player, even after a reboot, and no matter what player it is, and how many "Do NOT fucking play my music unless I hit the play button" settings I've selected, it blasts music the moment I start reversing out of the drive way.
- Either put the navi buttons on permanently, or at least not hide them within 5 seconds of me sliding up from the bottom to bring them up. They won't change that, it's too annoying, from their point of view it's a feature.
- I'd like the phone app to actually act consistently. And maybe "Contacts" can display my contacts, rather than be an intermediate screen that shows the most recent calls? I know, I know "Nobody makes phone calls any more dumbass", well I do, jackass.
- Allow certain frequently abused functions to be blocked. Why are ads allowed to open the Play Store? That's fucking annoying. There should at least be a dialog along the lines of "Do you want to open the play store or just close this ad" when ads do that. (And if you're a marketing "genius" who thinks this is a good idea, I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who refuses, permanently, to install an app from an advertiser that does this.)

I guarantee though Android 17 is worse than 16. That's been the pattern so far since Android 4, they're not going to stop now.

No, that's not how Android works. You can run current apps on Android 10 if you want. There is no obligation to run the latest greatest, and typically each Android release since 4.0 is slightly worse than the previous version, making you less inclined to want to upgrade.

I agree but that's not the issue here. The issue is a massive RAM shortage, because of the AI corps.

The solution doesn't involve guillotining trillionaires who make computers and charge what the market will bear, it involves guillotining trillionaires who own AI companies.

Socialized only to make sure they fail, not to provide for the general welfare.

The modern democratic party is quite right of center, and that's a problem. The Democratic party is an enormous fan of corporate welfare and subsidies for industries that are aligned with their talking points. There are still a few firebrands in the party, mostly centrists like AOC and Elizabeth Warren and possibly Bernie Sanders and Ilhan Omar, but they took suck at the teat of irresistible corruption.

And this is not a both sides argument. For there to be a both sides argument, there have to be two sides in opposition, and the truth is that there aren't.

Carvanna is a used car dealership. While your comments are, obviously, something everyone here will agree with except maybe the Muskophiles, they're not really relevant to this article which is about the process of buying a car, used or otherwise.

Outside of Buy Here Pay Here places, the vast majority of used car dealers - whether they sell new cars and are selling "Certified Used" or equivalent, or dedicated used car dealers, are notoriously dishonest and engage in pressure sales, hidden feeds, the 2x2 matrix, etc. The only exception I've found is Carmax, and Carmax is priced higher because it knows what it's competing against.

Any movement to make car buying less unpleasant is a welcome change.

What's the objection to sim cards? Sims are why we're not locked to carriers any more. And yes, I'm aware of eSims, and that's a way to get back to carrier-locked phones by the back door.

Yeah, also "the web" is a big place. Being able to look things up in Wikipedia (or even a dictionary) is a useful feature. As are things like looking up prices, or getting technical information about the lawnmower you're fixing. So blocking the entire world wide web just to prevent doom scrolling is absurd.

Just block x.com, facebook.com, threads.com, bluesky.com, and tiktok.com if you're going to go that way.

There are equivalents, yes. They don't use a hosts file but act as an alternative internal DNS server. I used one called personalDNSFilter. It comes with a number of domains blocked by default and you can add more.

The management was great until Jack Tramiel was kicked out.

I think one thing that made it great and mostly successful until then was that Tramiel had enormous respect for the people who did the work. He basically seemed to respect anyone who wasn't a middleman, at least, as a person. So dealers and managers had a bad time under his hand, but customers and the team of talented engineers who put everything together got the support they needed. My understanding from the stories told by Haynie et al is that when he was fired, morale plummeted among engineers and never really recovered.

I guess he loved the foot soldiers over the officer class, to stretch his own analogy, which makes a lot of sense. I think most people do too.

So you have something that nobody is asking for (not in the way genAI is anyway), and you decide, of all things, rather than making a case for it, you force people to use it, in the hope they get addicted, think they can't do without it, and continue using it after you start pricing it at profitable levels.

This is the business model. Why are they not making a case for it? Why are they, instead, pretending it's something it isn't? Because nobody would take it seriously if they did the latter. The only way they can get people to use it is via force, and that means persuading idiot CEOs with a FOMO issue, while pricing it well below cost.

The question isn't "Will they make a profit", that's not something you or I should care about. Who gives a crap if a bunch of vulture capitalists get busted? The question is "How much damage will they do with this particular con job".

The end game of this, remember, is to get companies dependent upon genAI companies. To make them unable to function any more without handing over control of their systems to the genAI people. And idiot FOMO CEOs who have gotten the dopamine rush from using genAI tools are making sure their companies will be run that way, despite the obvious dangers.

So the answer to "How much damage" is, so far, a crazy amount. So far. There are now many, many, companies that have lost control and knowledge of how their own businesses run. And it's getting worse.

Yeah, for even two hundo, I'd be considering buying this as a fun accessory.

For five hundo? Nope.

Petitions are a first step, and it also is a way to raise issues that the government may not even be aware of, and if it is aware of may not consider important in the belief not enough people care about the issue.

Democracy isn't simple, it's not a simple power game, it's a system that requires two way communications. There's a reason the first amendment of the US talks of petitioning the government.

If you don't see that, you probably don't see the value in writing to your elected representative either. Yet people do it. Ever wonder why?