It's why people hate using Apple Subscriptions. Because Apple makes it too easy to subscribe and unsubscribe to services - you get a neat list of all your subscriptions, and you cancel by turning off that subscription. A dialog pops up to confirm, what the end date is (your subscription is active until it expires). But it's just one click, no muss, no fuss.

Of course, companies hated it because Apple kept a lot of user details private and kept them from doing "retentions". Lots of people used it even though it was a costlier option (since most companies added the Apple tax to the subscription fee if you used Apple). It was just so easy to cancel - you do it without talking to anyone or anyone trying to get you to resubscribe.

Apple made it too easy that companies hated it, so pretty much only Apple uses it.

Apparently it's leading to a renaissance in landlines. Kids will need to communicate, but they don't need a smartphone. So some parents simply get them a landline so they can make phone calls to their friends.

This works for younger kids to keep in touch, but who don't wander too far away from parents, so likely adolescents in elementary school. Instead of a smartphone, they get a landline.

Older kids like teens get old school flip or feature phones. This lets them talk to their friends, make and receive calls so parents can keep track of them, etc. They can get the smartphone once they turn 18.

Actually, Funai (the last maker of VCRs) greatly simplified the VHS tape mechanism over the 30 years they made it. The last machines they made in the 2000s are extremely simple mechanically and since Funai was the only maker of them, they are practically all identical.

So if you gather a few of the new old stock players still available you have a collection of players with spare parts. And they are very mechanically simple - sure there's some oddball shaped cogs and sprockets and gears that perform the complex operations in a simple way. but they beat what an 80s era VCR had in mechanical complexity.

The last VCRs often only had 3 motors - the one driving the rotary head, one driving the capstan roller and the takeup spools (and do the fast-forward/rewind). The final motor handles the tape insertion, loading and threading, and ejection of the tape. All of it done with precisely engineered injection molded gears designed for easy mass production.

An 80's era VCR has easily a half dozen motors more with dozens of switches, limit sensors, and other things. The gears and cogs are much simpler, but the mechanism and timings are so much more complicated and has to be coordinated by a processor.

And head cleaning is easily done with the lid off - you can easily clean the heads on the drum with a little isopropyl alcohol and a q-tip.

It's a magic of mass production that the final VCRs gave great performance and everything had been simplified to a single sided circuit board and a mechanism consisting of only a few gears and motors. The complexity of operation has been simplified to a plastic gear that choreographs the operation.

Cheating isn't irrational, it's a perfectly rational response, especially to things that are perceived as random - to reduce the risk.

Cheating in gambling games is rampant because it's rational to want to put the finger on the scale to tilt the balance in your favor, and not the house's.

Cheating in multiplayer games takes many forms - from cheating the matching algorithms so you can get cannon fodder for an opponent (this is especially if you are planning on "showing off" via streaming or other thing), so you appear better than you are to your audience who them rewards you with "chips" or other currency counterpart. Or you might cheat to get an edge by having intelligence not normally available, again making you look better.

Cheating might even help you win, providing you can avoid careful scrutiny. That's why election ballots are often counted in the presence of others and cameras to verify the vote - it's much harder to cheat when there's a lot of scrutiny that goes on.

Cheating to gain an advantage is a common rational reason to cheat, and many forms rely on sleight of hand to perform some action which might be missed by even a camera without careful observation.

The only time cheating isn't rational is to have fun. But a lot of time, fun can be hard to obtain. Even people who don't cheat, game developers often decry how people will optimize the fun out of your game.

Worse yet it's going to make glasses even more expensive.

For those not in the know, EssilorLuxottica is basically the monopoly for everything glasses related. They're the reason you spend hundreds of dollars on 2 cents of plastic for a frame, and why mass produced optical lenses cost hundreds of dollars each.

And they own the vast majority of stores that sell glasses - from the ones your optometrist sells (about 100% of them), to several huge chains like LensCrafters. Its basically a worldwide monopoly.

Sure, you can save by going to independent stores, of which there are a few chains, but they are much more limited in their offerings.

Glasses frames are just cheap pieces of injection molded plastic, or a few dollars worth of metal. They hold a lens. There's nothing high-tech about any of it, yet they cost hundreds of dollars apiece. More if you want them molded with some designer's name on it.

LIkewise, the lenses come from well known lens manufacturers - Nikon, Canon, Zeiss, etc., who make them by the millions, likely their main source of income over say, camera or projector lenses. There's no reason what is effectively a cheap piece of optical plastic coated with well known coatings (anti reflective, etc) should also cost hundreds of dollars. They don't require the precision assembly of a multi-stage camera lens which cost about the same amount of money. It's just a lens.

Granted, someone needs to cut the lens to fit the frame, but even that's generally machine controlled - the machine finds the optical center and using the lens template (the fake lens in the frame) and your prescription cuts the lens as needed. A process which may be done on site, or automated at some factory.

So yeah, it's concerning because the world doesn't need more expensive glasses. It's a pure profit item likely rivalling margins of popcorn and soda at movie theatres.

I hope it's a vulnerability in a kernel DRM component so that gamers learn to hate that bullshit more.

Gamers do hate it. It's not DRM, but anti-cheat, so it's only really accepted as a necessary evil, because cheating in online multiplayer games, especially popular ones like CoD, is rampant. Unless you can come up with a way to resolve this, it's going to be around. Network communications can be secured with TLS, but you can still cheat using hacks that don't even interact directly with a program. There are aimbots that will analyze the screen and send input making it even harder to detect.

This issue right now is a fault in the netcode of the game - apparently it's a lame buffer overrun, so you know two things - 1) it's not encrypted, and 2) it's still a buffer overflow. I don't think it's even a ROP-chained overflow, it's just a plain old overflow off the stack.

This is videogame development. You almost never have a "main" where all your games are made from - a game is a self-contained app.

Typically development starts by cloning a copy of the game engine to where you will do your development. This will go into a new tree because after the game is released, other than updates, it will never be used again. Even though you have say, Call of Duty 1 and Call of Duty 2, they are about as same as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.

So it's likely it was discovered and fixed for one game, but that fix was not propagated to other trees because well, they're pretty much all independent and to do so would require manually applying the patch.

Oh, and game developers are had pressed to churn out stuff. There almost is no time to simply go and apply random patches for security issues found in other games. It might have been on someone's to-do list but completely forgotten about because they're busy churning out code for the product.

The problem here is that people who know the exploit realize they can use it while they're playing multiplayer so they've been using the well known exploit really quickly.

Nobody is being asked to work for free. They are being asked to help out in the warehouse instead of their normal job duties.

Or more likely, "in addition to". Salaried workers, which are likely what the corporate workers are on, generally don't get overtime. So Amazon could easily ask them to work in the warehouse for an hour after their usual hours, like your boss might ask you to do some OT for free on Friday and that progress bar just doesn't want to reach 100%.

So it is technically "working for free" because you aren't getting paid more to work in the warehouse.

No need. Just increase the punishment. Right now the punishment is usually just a failed filing and attorney's fees (you wasted time and money of opposition). Just start demanding that the first person found using AI to lose the case. If you're the plaintiff, you lose and pay the defense their entire attorney's fees plus damages for bringing the defense through the hassle of a lawsuit. Add in punitive damages as well to discourage the behavior.

Likewise for the defense.

The threat of an instant-win should cause lawyers to double-check everything - the lawyers on the other side want an easy victory so they're going ot check, and the lawyers on the filing side want to prevent an easy win.

And let this apply to both civil and criminal trials. No lawyer wants to be the one who gets their client convicted for a bad filing, or let some killer go free because they made a bad filing. It would basically be the end of their career.

Finally, it's not like it takes a lot of effort - checking citations is a 5 minute job using any search engine. Google, Bing, whatever. No specialized search engine, Lexis-Nexis, etc needed. (Though if you're citing cases wrong, that's a different issue). There is no excuse - it takes 5 minutes to check all your citations. And that's assuming there's no tools you can get to do it for you automatically.

Of course, one could also ask about the lack of requirements for double-blind studies for things like homeopathy and for the alternatives to vaccinations he promotes.

Sadly, this won't be coming to the US any time soon. RFK Jr. has arbitrarily declared that future vaccines will only be approved if the control group in the trials got an inactive placebo. Why? No reason at all, it's just an absurd requirement he made up. The control group in this trial got a conventional flu vaccine instead of a placebo (which would have been unethical), so it doesn't count.

He's relying on the double blind studies for effectiveness. New drugs go through the double blind test - where you have a control group and a test group, and the participants - both the people who give the medications and record the results as well as the patients don't know who got what. This is considered "gold standard" research.

(There is also the "single blind" study, where only the patients don't know if they're getting the drug or the placebo, but the people giving it to them do know. This is of lower quality since there may be inadvertent communication that tells the patient what they're actually getting)

Of course, you can't do true double blind studies of vaccines, because it's unethical to tell someone they're getting the flu shot and then not give it to them so they believe they're protected against the flu when they really aren't. And the flu can kill, it sends people to hospital all the time (it did to me, and gave me a permanent heart condition). So it's basically impossible to do a double-blind study of vaccines. It's possible to judge the effectiveness of it though through a non-blinded study (the participants know if they're getting the shot or not) - simply by observing if the people who come in with flu symptoms and asking if they got the shot or not.

Of course, that's the worst kind of study, but it's the only one that can be ethically done for vaccines - they are a choice, and many people choose to get the shot, while others choose not to and you can compare how the two populations did. We've traditionally used Australia and New Zealand for these studies because their peak flu season happens during "our" summers so we can tell their effectiveness or lack thereof.

RFK Jr. Is just being smart. He knows it's unethical to do a double-blinded vaccine study, so he's throwing it in the face of researchers and simply using "gold standard research" as a way to promote anti-vax beliefs.

The problem is, the insurance industry already is building in climate change into their actuarial tables. They know it's real because it leads to real money being paid out by them - everything they can insure is affected.

And the DoD knows it's real as well - because they're having to prepare for unrest caused by climate change - from immigration, to natural resources, water, or other things that people will go to war over.

You can deny it all you want, but companies are going to feel the effects. The DoD will have to get increased budget to handle the increased demand to protect Americans from this. Insurance rates skyrocket. You can deny all you want, but you're either going to pay for it by inflation in costs, or pay for measures to limit the effects by cutting back on CO2 and such.

What I do not get is why people continue to fall for this crap when information on how this works is readily available. People must be even more stupid than I thought and my opinion of the "average" person is already very low.

That's because cults prey on the vulnerable.

Scientology, for example - it doesn't want thinking people. But it preys on those who are in severe depression who are looking for a different way. They offer a solution to your problem - likely caused by relationships - and offer you a safe space to which you can feel loved and respected. That's the primary hook - and people fall for it because they're vulnerable and they offered help when you needed it most.

The repulican party recently recruited disaffected (young) men who see all the movies and expect women to be subservient to them because all the movies and books and other things they indulge in always shows the man being the hero and the women fawning for them so they can be dominated by them. And the materials they consume show how women love to be dominated. Of course, this is pure fiction - sure the "traditional wife" do exist to fawn over their man, but those are generally not quite like the fiction plays out, but usually because there are attractive qualities in their man they love. So those people, after being rejected by women over and over, well, the republicans blame DEI, woke, feminists, the left, etc for conditioning women to be not like the fantasy. And those men lap it up openly - thinking the problem isn't them, it's women and all they need to do is fix the women and they will be able to dominate them.

Of course, we know it isn't true, and all the laws taking away autonomy from women will likely have the opposite effect - as in driving women away from those kind of men even more so.

Cults work by preying on the vulnerable. That's one of the reasons why depression is a mental illness - you're not in a mental state where you can make rational thoughts, so you sign up to be republican, or a scientologist because you aren't able to rationally think it through.

Elon is reacting because he's finally realized Trump is a grifter and anyone who befriends him ends up broke and decrepit.

See what happened to his biggest supporters from his first term - like Rudy Giuliani, or even the My Pillow guy Mike Lindell. His biggest supporters, but after they stopped being useful to Trump, Trump ditched them to fight their own wars.

Elon was useful to Trump, and now that he's stopped being so useful Trump is threatening to cut him off like he's cut off all previously-useful people. Trump uses people then dumps them.

Elon just learned that fact, and now he's scrambling to save his companies before they go the way of My Pillow. But chances are they're going to circle the drain - Trump will use the BBB as an excuse to kill subsidies to Tesla, and cuts at NASA will basically kill SpaceX.

The problem is that recipes are generally non-copyrightable, so recipe sites are doing all that fluff just to have content they could claim copyright on. Just providing the recipe means users can copy it somewhere else and then that's it for the site.

So yes, they deliberately obfuscate the recipe intentionally because they don't want you to just get it and leave and never come back.

Answer In Progress did a video about recipe sites... https://youtu.be/ZvC2jtmVAMs?s...