As I tell my users a thousand times a year:

If you're extracting data from PDFs... you're doing something wrong.

It was always designed as a WORM format for print publishing. Always from source text in a far more usable format. If you've lost access to the original and it was anything important... that's on you.

If you're getting your data from OCR'ing of images... even worse. If you're then using that data for anything important... more fool you. You can't even find the original sources, you're going off published pages only, you're trying to read data from graphs that are just images instead of the raw data, you'll get all kinds of OCR and alignment errors, and so on.

It's not a use case that I consider should be of any import whatsoever. Scanning in some "old" papers for which the data is no longer available shouldn't be used as a source of definitive reference. Ever. This isn't the Rosetta Stone, or the only surviving relic of a long-dead culture. It's a 90's paper that someone wrote and deleted the data and the original document. What value is in there is more than cancelled out by the work needed to do anything useful with it and the actual unreliability of the end result.

They'll be other data, elsewhere, from reliable sources.

Increasingly, whenever I fly now, I only fly with airlines that let me take hand luggage ("carry-on" in certain countries) enough that I never need to check any bag into the hold.

I think that the nonsense of being separated from your bag, having to queue up to have it weighed and roll off into the airport, and it NOT being ready by the time you get to the terminal at the other end needs to get into the 21st century (especially when it has a habit of going missing, when anyone can pick it up, when things get damaged, etc.). Not even counting when a passenger has to be offloaded, when you have to deal with musical instruments, bikes, wheelchairs and prams, and all the other hindrances to doing this (and all the damage/loss those items routinely incur).

It literally makes far more sense, if I wanted to do this, to post my luggage a week early and receive confirmation that it's arrived at the destination before I even THINK about setting foot on a plane. Some companies actually offer that as a rival service and you know what... that's a better idea entirely.

But until that becomes mainstream the whole nonsense of "pulling what you hope is *your* undamaged luggage off a conveyor" needs to stop. And CHARGING you for the privilege? Pff. Just fill the hold with cargo instead, you'll make more money, or just make planes and airports without that facility at all

For holiday, I take hand luggage with me on the plane. For anything more, I arrange to not need luggage the other end. I'd honestly rather arrive with just me, my passport and a credit card and buy some clothes the other end if it comes to it, just so I can not have that hassle/cost and can just walk out the other end after a long flight.

I tend to fly short-haul with British Airways. They allow two hand luggages, which is more than enough for everything I would ever usually bring. They've got the "relaxed flight" down to a fine art on their short haul flights. Ignoring all the long-outdated airport nonsense, I get on the plane, I get to my seat, I usually get offered a food/drink for free, I don't get advertised at (but, hey, can we stop the bloody safety announcements, please, fffs), I can just put my luggage up in the lockers, and keep my laptop under my feet with some snacks and drinks and a book, and then we fly. And I'm barely disturbed, ever. When I land, I get my stuff, get off the plane and... I'm there. And I pay not significantly more than "budget" airlines to do so.

Air travels needs a 21st century makeover. It needs to be as simple as getting on a bus, as relaxing as having a nap, as reliable as it can be made to be. I'll allow the security, no problem, that's a concession we've made. But the rest? It's just dumb. And checked-luggage is one of the dumbest things we still tolerate. People don't want an "experience" flying, and if they did they certainly don't want the experience you currently get.

They just want to get to their destination country with whatever they wanted to bring, with as little hassle, in as little time as with the least cost possible. And all these things add complications, time and expense to what should be a simple journey with your stuff.

So when can we expect your patch?

I live in the UK.

I get no post for any bill, service or business except unaddressed junk mail (i.e. flyers), or anything else for that matter.

I get almost nothing through the door, maybe a replacement credit card every couple of years.

I work in a multi-million pound business. Our parcel room is full of Amazon (because it's the cheapest way to source a ton of things), our mail is largely commercial junk that goes in the bin, and anything from our actual business partners, suppliers, etc. tends to be electronic. We have the occasional one-man-band small business that still sends printed paper invoices but nothing that couldn't be replaced overnight with a PDF of whatever they printed instead.

It's 2025. TWENTY TWENTY FIVE. "Old people" (e.g. my long-retired parents) are on Facebook, email, apps, smartphones, tablets and smart TVs. All their bills are electronic Direct Debits from their bank. And they are the very last generation that will ever give a damn about things on paper.

Only if you know what location to spoof and have all the other factors available too.

If it's more like "When you're at the Westfield site, the passwords for the Westfield site are at the top and just need your other factor to unlock", then it's just a convenience function and a further factor in MFA.

Same place you can buy a version of Microsoft Windows that has no licensing checks... nowhere.

Because they have chosen not to offer you that product. Doesn't mean that it's legal to just pirate their products anyway.

This the company that admits that even their $200 top tier for ordinary users isn't even profitable?

I switched to electric last year and I regret not doing it sooner. Charge at home, no diesel fumes, amazing performance, quiet, and does short trips without it being bad for the engine.

Two.

They get two.

If by two I'm not at least thinking "Hey, if this was a little better I could enjoy this", then it's not worth my time.

If the show is established, I'll take those two from random series. If the show is new, it has to be the first few episodes.

If I'm not hooked by two, at least for the potential of the series, then it's not going to work.

Sorry, but live is too short to give things 6 episodes of trial, and I don't think I've ever encountered a series where that would make any difference.

Sure, some series I think "Well, it's a bit meh, but maybe it gets better", but that's all I need to try a third episode. But if by two I haven't found a simple redeeming feature in the writing, plot, characters, actors, etc.... then it's not worth my time.

Even the two is only there because every series has that one TERRIBLE episode where you can't tune into it as a stranger to the series.

What happens now, of course, is that the first two episodes are great, high-budget, plenty-of-time-spent episodes with advancement of the plot and everything else... and then the rest of the series drags to some kind of conclusion. They then might commission it for another series... and that drags too. And by the time you're three or four series in you're not actually enjoying it any more and realise that it's going nowhere, they've introduced more new characters, cut all the special effects, all the sets are unchanged so they can reuse them, and nothing is ever "concluding" at all.

So tell me... at what point after it's pirated do they turn that stuff off (they don't), at what point after it's released in any format does the HDMI blacklisting turn off for that movie (it doesn't / can't), and at what point after the scheme is broken permanently and irreparably do they stop putting it on the disks (they don't)?

If it's just to cover that little release-to-compromise window, then you could argue it was cost-effective, but that's NOT what it's for. It's to control and profiteer off all content.

Which is why every certified HDMI device of a thousand different kinds have HDMI blacklisting, why every PC and tablet have TPMs and why every single DVD made after a given time includes CSS for no real reason - even movies that literally never made it onto DVD until long after the format was obsolete.

Also, after BD was compromised they came up with BD+, and that was compromised (how doesn't matter, it was compromised) and then from then on - 4K versions of those movies (some of which were decades old) were available forever.

It's nothing to do with the release window. It's to do with controlling literally everything from the day of release to decades after the format is obsolete. It is - again - punishing billions of people in perpetuity for the few pirates who honestly couldn't care less anyway.

Gaming is no different. There are some games that removed Denuvo only YEARS after the games were utterly compromised and widely available on illicit channels, but many didn't. Some still haven't done so.

It's handing control in perpetuity to something that was broken long before most people ever bought that movie / game anyway, and modifying literally every device that COULD touch it in any way to facilitate that functionality, even if it's a hindrance (e.g. Denuvo has been recorded with STUPENDOUS performance degradation to the game, and again the pirated versions didn't have that).

It is ludicrous that we have allowed things like HDMI ports on every machine in existence to take part in this profiteering - and we're paying for that to be there on behalf of the industry through licensing fees on every port / chip - when not one title out there is "uncopyable".

For 30+ years I've watched PC makers and the movie etc. industries try to stop people watching things they have legitimately purchased a licence to watch because some people use those avenues to piracy.

Everything from Macrovision to DVDCSS, to HDMI blacklisting to this nonsense where content won't show on secondary monitors, etc.

Hilariously, not once in those same 30 years, have those who pirate not been able to get a perfect copy of whatever content they want, even if that was a few months after the release.

The amount of money poured into this junk is just not worth it. The day a thing is released in the cinema, or Netflix or whatever, it's available online. They're literally punishing billions of people, for the sake of slightly hindering a few tens of people who pretty much aren't affected by such measures at all.

VB executables are basically a tokenised version of the VB wrapped in an interpreter. The code is basically "open" in reverse-engineering terms and there were VB decompilers and convertors of this era even back when it was mainstream, because it was relatively simple to make one.

It's why it needs VBRUN*00.DLL etc. - those are the things that actually do the heavy lifting, and the executable just calls them from the interpreted code.

I can remember that for VB3 and VB4 you got a programming reference book with the set that was chunky, but basically there are only a couple of hundred commands at best, well-defined types for each, no pointers or memory tricks (you had to use VB given functions with DLLs to convert to a C-style pointer to, say, your function or variable if you wanted to integrate with WinAPI) and any program you write you could just read out of the .EXE back to almost perfect source if you wanted to, including the layout of the forms, etc.

Hell, I could probably write a VB3/4 decompiler given the free time, it's not a "difficult" task, just long-winded. And there are dozens of them out now and they'll probably taken longer to find than they would to convert such a program back to source.

However, this is an extremely contrived example and it's hyperbolic to claim that AI did anything special here.

Yeah, only Europe ever bans devices or mandates they have to comply with certain laws.

Absolutely. The US never does that ever. Ever. At all. Or Canada. Or India. Or China. Or Australia. Or... the entire developed (and developing) world.

Aren't you the guys that banned all Chinese manufacturers of CCTV equipment, for example, and 5G infrastructure, and forced drones to comply with your rules or be banned? You can't even bring a Kinder Egg into the US. In fact with the Chinese ones you literally made your allies (e.g. the UK!) comply against their will or you threatened their trade.

Bans are universal, pretending that the US is "free" or indeed even "as free" as 44 nation states in Europe or the wider world is such brainwashing nonsense that it's hilarious.

HA is just one example of why I have "another" distribution and why I just dedicated a machine to it (their OS, their problem) rather than try to install it myself.

Such a nightmare.

Who the hell decided that YAML inside a container is a way to manage a machine?

My gaming laptop is 6 years old and is maxed out to 64GB RAM with an RTX card in it and barely cost that.

Sorry, but a desktop with 128GB RAM is NOTHING... and the fact that you try to compare it to an Apple Mac is telling in itself.

The most expensive component in that machine is the GPU. So... maybe more modular GPU options?