Officers in charge of these kinds of programs rotate on to a new assignment after 3 to 5 years. Contractors keep personnel on staff whose whimsical title is "project manager" but whose real job is to work the rotating cast of government program managers into keeping the program going.

In such an environment it is almost structurally impossible to contract smart for any program that takes more than a few years from start to finish.

That is, indeed, one of the problems, but it's not the one the article is discussing.

Sony has this tendency to sell overpriced hardware. Could it be that nobody was buying Sony's SD cards?

> No it's not. Multifunction devices existed long before enshitification. The two concepts are not remotely related.

Enshitification predates the internet. It is a concept as old as human invention itself. We just don't see it int he historical record, for the most part, because shitty devices generally don't become popular enough for examples to survive the scrap heap. However, if you dig into some antique catalogs (catalogs that are antiques, not modern catalogs listing antique items...) you'll see lots of dubious devices being advertised.

  > Your phone's main purpose is to make phone calls.

A phone's main purpose is to make phone calls. This is a categorical error on your part; a modern smartphone is, despite the unfortunate etymology, not a phone. It is a portable internet terminal more than anything that just happens, perhaps merely by virtue of its history and nothing more, to be able to make live voice chats.

> given this is an optional extra that costs money it is clear that someone deemed it a benefit

Yes. that someone being the manufacturer, who can add $20 worth of parts and sell it to dipshits like you for an extra $500 because apparently you're a toddler easily distracted by bright colors and movements. You're like the living embodiment of that Simpsons gag Nuts and Gum. And of course, apropos to this story, the manufacturers see extra benefit in that they get another way to harvest your behavioral data and shove advertisements in your face. You're being sold a solution to a problem you don't have in exchange for your privacy and attention. You are paying extra to become the product. You are both a figurative and literal tool.

> Man if only there was an internet connected screen in the kitchen from which to pull up my recipe...

It's amazing to me that you can have the solution literally in your hand and still sarcastically complain that there is no solution to the non-problem you have already solved. Just... fucking amazing. Is carrying a tablet from one room to another such a heavy burden that it justifies building another, shittier tablet into a random appliance? Even if you absolutely needed a tablet in every room of the house, could you entertain the idea of just.. buying them separately?

A true luddite would argue if you even need an internet connected device when printed books dedicated to recipes are a thing, and they'd at least have a solid point to make in that at books don't need batteries and continue to work even when the internet doesn't... and they don't actively spy on you either.

> False equivalence. A leatherman directly trades off primary function against additional functionality.

And a tablet built into a fridge door trades primary function (portability) for... actually not even additional functionality because a tablet in a fridge door does literally nothing to make the fridge better at its job, and attaching a fridge to a tablet does not make the tablet better at its job either.
=Smidge=

Why would they build a machine which just does what humans do in the field instead of building a stationary machine in a factory which builds 20' long sections which fit on a Semi trailer( 2 sections end to end and 2 sections side by side ) and then just have a standard crane on wheels run the sections out onto pre-installed posts? They are talking about "utility scale" installations so the ground has been leveled and prepped so it's not like the custom layouts needed for root-top distributed solar installations.

It seems short sighted when companies build robots which just mimic what humans do with our limited 2 short arms and 5 digit hands.

LoB

Tell me how you're ever going to implement this on any open-source operating system ever?

Because people will just patch it out.

It's not like it's even a boot-time requirement (thus necessitating it being in the kernel/initrd, etc.). It's an account requirement. Which means that it can be patched out in no time at all.

As far as I know, not one single open-source OS has actually implemented this requirement (they put a field that would be useful for it into systemd, but nobody's actually using it).

Apple push an silent automatic update just for your computer that the next time you type in that key, it sends it to the FBI.

Next?

We're not dealing with a bit of software piracy or finding out who stole someone's Bitcoin, you're talking about agencies dealing with anti-terrorism and wars.

Only in America could you legally argue that an unnecessary profit-making middle-man was legally required and that it would somehow "reduce costs".

I love Time Machine (except for how slow it is over SMB and how often the disk images corrupt themselves in ways that prevent future backups). Wish it existed on iOS and VisionOS.

That's because virtually 100% of patent holders use their patents defensively.

You missed the part where they knowingly allowed a patent to become part of a published open standard and ignored it for an entire decade, *then* started going after violations.

Oh, actually, it's worse than that. Dolby acquired these patents from General Electric two years ago. So in this matter, they quite literally ARE patent trolls. They did nothing to create this technology, but rather bought the patents to enrich themselves by becoming a leech on the industry now that companies are abandoning their codecs in favor of codecs whose encoders don't involve royalties.

You obviously don't understand patent law terminology, so let me give you a refresher:

• Defensive use of patents - patents held until someone sues you, then used to retaliate and make the other company's lawsuit more expensive and complex, usually resulting in a cross-licensing agreement.
• Offensive use of patents - suing someone else over the patent without having been previously sued by that someone else.

Suing multiple companies for violating a patent without getting sued first is the very definition of offensive use of a patent.

Those are actually separate lawsuits. (See link above.) The AV1 lawsuit is suing to stop them from using AV1 and force them to use a Dolby-licensed codec. They're also suing a Chinese hardware maker over AV1 at the same time.

The hell you can't. Patent infringement occurs on creating an instance of an invention. The moment they create source code for the software (an instantiation of the patent), they have violated the patent. It doesn't have to be instantiated into hardware or used by a business to be a violation. The patent violations began when AOMedia distributed the first beta versions a decade ago. The original patent holder (GE) did not sue.

To be fair, the reference implementation may not have been directly created or distributed by AOMedia, in which case the same applies, but to whatever company actually created and distributed it. This is largely an unimportant detail.

Businesses using products *also* infringe patents, which IMO, is a bad thing, but that's a separate discussion.

You literally didn't understand what I said.

Patent exhaustion occurs when a product is sold by someone who has the right to sell something that violates a patent, which typically means that either they own the patent or they paid licensing fees. It prevents someone from then suing downstream customers. And there is a six-year statute of limitations on suing over a patent violation. What I'm arguing is that:

• Distribution of open source software effectively occurs exactly once per version, because the redistribution permission inherent in open source software makes it impossible to determine whether a copy of the software was obtained directly from the creator on a particular date or from someone else who previously got it from the creator.
• Open source distribution is effectively a sale for patent purposes, just at zero cost.
• That sale occurred a decade ago when AOMedia distributed the reference implementation.
• Because no objection was made to that sale (against AOMedia) during the statutorily limited 6-year period, that sale should be considered to be an authorized sale, in which case patent exhaustion occurred on the results of that sale.
• All copies of the original reference implementation and their derivatives are therefore untouchable.

This is a legal theory. To my knowledge, it has never been tested in court, largely because companies do not do what Dolby is doing, suing companies for using open source reference implementations or their derivatives nearly a decade after their release. And it should be clear that this theory applies only to patents in the context of software.

They have a king and a quasi institutionalized class system. What do you expect?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Reply "yes", then close and reopen this message to activate the link.

No matter how idiot-proof you make technology, God will always create a better idiot. That's why the right way to solve this problem is:

• Make it as hard as possible for users to accidentally do something that is irreversible, and as easy as possible to roll back even serious mistakes. This means, among other things, keeping more than just a single backup. (Apple, I'm talking about your borderline useless iCloud backups here when I say that.)
• Make SSNs easily changeable and less easily guessable.
• Make it technologically as hard as possible to send out messages in a way where the sender's identity can be forged to look like it comes from someone else.
• Aggressively prosecute phone companies who allow calls and text messages onto their network from fake phone numbers.
• Aggressively track down, prosecute, and very publicly make an example of every person who tries to pull one of these scams, along with the people who employ them, so that anybody considering pulling such a scam is aware of previous scammers who have ended up behind bars for thirty to life within six months of starting their scam.

But IMO, the most important one is that last one. We would be a lot better off if the right to a speedy trial were taken seriously. If a year or more passes between committing a crime and being prosecuted, the threat of prosecution ceases to be a meaningful deterrent to crime.

If I were in charge, there would be two nationwide statutes of limitations added that apply to all crimes:

• Charges must be filed within six months* of law enforcement having solid evidence showing who committed a crime. Just cause must be shown for any exceptions to this. If the law enforcement fails to show that they received significant supporting evidence that made it possible to bring their case during the six month period prior to filing charges, the charges are automatically dropped.
• Cases must begin within thirty days* of bringing charges. If the case cannot begin within 30 days, the charges are dropped.

* I'm willing to consider arguments that these numbers should be slightly higher, but not dramatically so.

If legitimate extenuating circumstances outside the control of prosecution warrant a delay (e.g. the defendant being impossible to locate or in another country), a judge could order the statute of limitations tolled. But otherwise, the only exceptions should be in situations where a mistrial or similar forces a new trial (which obviously starts more than 30 days after the initial charges are filed). And even for a retrial, there should be a hard limit of maybe 90 days from the end of the previous trial or thereabouts.

This would result in a very large number of cases not getting prosecuted, but by forcing the prosecution to triage cases and bring important cases quickly, it would ensure that fear of being brought to justice would be a real deterrent to committing crimes. Right now, it is not. Good people don't (intentionally) commit crimes, because they have morality and ethics. Bad people do, because they have neither. Almost nobody avoids doing crime merely out of fear of punishment, and that's a bad thing.

I have to click through a half dozen popups to get anything done.

No surprises there.