You need to read the fine print on that CD sleeve.

"Not for public performance".

Same on DVDs.

"Not for use on oil rigs, in schools, ..."

Your alleged "ownership" of that CD means nothing when it comes to copyright, any more than photocopying books and handing them out to everyone for free.

Dumb paywall, but for reference, "full fibre" is not fully fibre still.

FTTC for the most part. 80+-year-old telephone lines for the rest.

It's a statistical engine and it hasn't been trained that "Don't Know" is the correct answer when its statistics fail it (that would require training it to answer Don't Know more than anything else, and for every possible question it hasn't got data for, which is why it hasn't happened).

Instead it hallucinates based on some spurious things being tiny fractions of a percent "more likely" by some statistical correlation.

These things are just statistical boxes, it has no way to do anything else. And it's inability to know when it doesn't know, and just say that, is one of its biggest problems, because instead it confidently spouts nonsense in those instances.

We can't agree on what it is but we should all be able to agree on one thing:

We don't have it.

That's far more to do with the death of the shopping "high street", because of rising rents and staffing costs.

Every week some famous high street retail outlet goes bust, I normally post them on my social media because I find it quite funny that anyone shops in physical stores any more.

The mobile phone stores I see tend to be trashy repair shops and 2nd hand outlets, and cell networks, never the mobile phone manufacturers themselves.

The physical store is dead. And I was a kid in the 80's. I can't even remember the last time I went "into town" to physically do some shopping, and certainly I wouldn't do it for a PC or phone (which you can just order online and are the same product wherever you order it).

I took great joy in even seeing things like my local DIY store die off. There's only so many of those that you need in range of your house, and having more doesn't help anyone. And to be honest, if they just stocked fence panels, doors and other large items they'd do just as well. Nobody is buying a screwdriver or a set of blades or some small ironmongery from a huge retail DIY outlet.

Dumbass business practices have nothing to do with cashless societies.

A business that doesn't have a cheap iZettle/Square/whatever reader under the counter, a backup SIM on a different network, or similar is just asking to lose business. It's like having a cash register that doesn't open... well... find another way to take people's money rather than standing there looking gormless.

And things like those readers are dirt-cheap and charge about 2%. I'd rather be taking 98% of my customer's money than nothing.

Just because some spotty teenage "manager" can't work that out is nothing to do with a cashless apocalypse. It's to do with literally failing to observe the primary rule of IT... always have a backup.

Now if ALL the cell networks and ALL the broadband goes down in an area and ALL the power and ALL the batteries in everything run flat... then you might have a problem. But a store taking literally hundreds of thousands per year, employing several staff, and not bothering to put a $20 reader behind the counter for emergencies? That's nothing to do with the price of a sandwich.

Same used to happen in McDonald's if they had to fall back to handling cash, to be honest. The teenagers just weren't able to do the sums on paper, even. So if the till (checkout) stopped working.... they used to give up or take MINUTES for every customer to add up the total, take the money, work out change, etc.

If you have no payment method, shut the shop. If that seems extreme, well, it's what happened effectively anyway. It's no different. The way to avoid it is to never be without a payment method that works, which means several backups.

Hell, places like supermarkets etc. in my company have local broadband / leased lines AND satellite connectivity on the roof. Because they can't afford to be without it because they would lose thousands every second even in one store.

I've been cashless for 20 years, I've never had a problem. In fact, the only problems I've witnessed were with cash (where stores literally didn't want to take cash, or didn't know how to) and with things like one particular credit card provider falling over, but, hey, I have half a dozen different cards in my wallet alone. Why?

BECUASE YOU SHOULD ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP.

Wage garnishment is a literal legal process in any developed country.

Haven't been paying your child support? Then your EMPLOYERS are legally required to take it out of your pay before you ever see a penny.

Tax debt, etc. all kinds of reasons why they use it. Sorry but the "I'm going to hide in a cash-only industry" thing is not only outdated but soon to die and actually raises MORE suspicions than just having a bank account. Money laundering regulations are slowly killing off the ability to operate like that and living a cash-only life is becoming increasingly difficult in any developed country now.

All of which are closed systems which have human checking elements before they are finalised.

HR/Payroll, they're just going to take it at its word and it only has to summarise something slightly incorrectly, or use a certain property to make a decision, or reveal the tiniest amount of information to someone else and you have tribunals and lawsuits coming.

Meanwhile, I give their custom to Amazon instead because every time I've ever spoken to their customer service they've understood one thing:

- Customer service is a necessary business expense.

So they normally just refund without question, let you keep the erroneous product, etc. - anything to get you off the line quickly, so long as your account is long-standing, has a good history, etc.

It's really NOT WORTH arguing with your own customers, or upsetting them... they will just go somewhere else for future purchases.

I have always said that - if they don't already - all CRM programmes should show, the second you connect to a phone call, your order history AND the amount of profit that company has made from that one single customer alone in the last year or so.

You're arguing with someone who's given you millions of dollars over decades about a single 2-dollar missing component on a massive order they made? You're insane. They're just going to go elsewhere. It's not even worth the time on the phone call to argue it.

The guy who, by popular consensus, leads the project.

A project which could be forked (and has, a thousand times over), could go elsewhere, could be renamed, could have any number of spinoffs, is the choice of plenty of famous developers who actively work with the intention to get into Linus' tree, including all the big distros.

He's literally the democratic leader and founder of the project. If he was that wrong, people would have gone elsewhere and there's be Linux spinoffs everywhere. Instead, every distro bases their trees on the main Linus kernel tree, include those in use by IBM, Microsoft, et al.

Sorry, but if you don't understand that someone has to put down rules, enforce those rules and rule on those rules and their interpretation... and that the guy who most often that's escalated to for the most definitive answer was basically PUT on that pedestal by countless thousands of developers.... then I don't think you understand that you don't need to be nice, "popular" (in the common sense), or involved in every patch to do that function. You just need to be good at that job, which means technically and academically (in terms of computer science).

You just need to be the person who people seek out to answer those questions, and heed when they give an answer.

Linux is a meritocracy. Those who can't follow the rules, do what's required, update, adapt (e.g. convert their drivers to a new API, etc.), or have the skill and experience to point out where things will go wrong and fix them... they don't last long.

I have had at least three suppliers who I have called up and asked them how to / to turn off the AI features they've introduced.

No, I don't not want your AI "summarising" long helpdesk tickets chains so that people don't bother to read them before telling users what the fix is or how long it'll take.

It will, quite assuredly, affect my future renewals and purchasing of such products if I can't turn it off, and it's something I'll be looking for. We're looking at new HR packages. I hit upon one that said it was an entirely AI-powered HR and payroll package. I cannot, for the life of me, imagine a situation more likely to go drastically wrong than AI being used in HR or payroll.

As a Brit, pro-Europe and anti-Brexit, who is quite into my solar...

I think this is a good idea. The money is better spent elsewhere and it's increasingly proven risky to rely on things running across ocean floors. To our nearest neighbours across the channel, we're probably okay, we can monitor that stretch easily enough and none of it is international waters.

But round to Morocco? That's just a nightmare of a project to even start and keeping that cable safe for decades to come? Seems unlikely.

For that price we can build nuclear sites, or HUGE solar or wind farms and just solve the problem ourselves, or more interconnects to closer countries (but I don't think we're at capacity in that regard anyway).

So when they shoved promotional content into your music library against your will and generated worldwide outrage, that WASN'T enough for you?

Microsoft spend decades shuffling where your stuff is stored around, while simultaneously letting every company in existence use that same storage however they liked.

That's on them.

In an ideal world, your documents folder would be under your control, have only your documents, and individual apps would have their own segregated storage that if you want to interact and open in other programs you have to grant permission to do so and it's done via a temporary conduit for just one file.

Having every cheap-shit app on your computer having full access to your documents folder to spam with whatever subfolders and junk they deem necessary was always going to end in tears. Don't even get me started on the two ProgramFiles folders, and the hidden-for-reasons ProgramData folder, and all the subfolders under your user profile.

There's a reason they stopped calling it My Documents. Because most of the crap that's in there isn't my documents at all.

Another specious argument?

Maybe educate your kid. Or lock the cable.