I can think of a lot of potential uses. The big one (commercially) would be fleet communications. Pretty much any large company with a fleet of vehicles has a system for communicating with the vehicles, but it either depends on cell networks or uses a slower satellite system. Cell networks are non-existent in much of the country and definitely bad in the mountains.

I used to work for a company that provided remote health care to people who couldn't get in to the clinics. We mostly dealt with the VA providing care for veterans, but we were very interested in working with the Indian Health Service in the more remote areas of reservations. At the time, they had a weather balloon based data network for some of the areas, but some solar panels and satellite data could help a lot.

That said, I think StarLink has enough problems that relying too heavily on it at this point could be a mistake. I am not sure what they can do about weather interference, but they need to be technically sound before anyone can really bank on them.

When they can get Bootcamp running (unlikely) or Parallels gets a production version that works on the M1, it is a no-go for me. I can do damn near everything on a Mac these days, since everyone seems to be going to .Net Core or other multi-platform solutions (Hell, I can even run SQL Server in Docker), but every once in a while I still hit something that still requires Windows.

Other than that, I am getting pretty tired of having to wonder if I can play the latest games (in Bootcamp). The real solution for that is to get a gaming PC, but I don't want to take up that kind of space.

On the flip side, I have owned Macintoshes since the LCIII. At this point, however, I am seriously considering just switching to Windows. I am tired of having to find ways to expand non-expandable systems. Sure, I can add external drives and sometimes update the RAM, but unless I want to go with an eGPU, I am stuck with whatever middle of the road GPU that Apple picked back when they were designing the project. It is very likely that the GPU is already out of date by the time the machine ships.

They don't need to go for a low-end system. But I would probably be very happy with a $2k tower.

The problem with working at home is that you are considered to be reachable 24 hours a day. There is never a "quitting time". With the kids home I am working a normal shift, then helping the kids with school work, cooking supper, taking the dog for a walk, and then answering emails from management before going to bed to start it all again the next day. I can't wait to get back to the office.

I can't imagine the content quality of most of the videos getting any lower.

Unless they are addressing a particular technique used in the calls, they have a lot of prior art to overcome.

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

Supposedly, the exploit works on the 5c, but wouldn't work on the 6. It should not be that hard for Apple to check the design history to see what holes they plugged between those designs.

Apple pretty much has to cooperate with the governments of places where it wants to do business. That is why they keep trying to make a phone that even they can't hack. A government can demand anything it likes, but they can't make Apple do the impossible.

If you are worried about your data getting out, it pays to find out which features to turn off and which to turn on to protect yourself. Apple is just an electronics company.

I don't think there are a lot of qualified programers working as teachers these days. Back in the day, I took a COBOL class in high school, but had to leave the class after two weeks because the instructor only knew the language up to the point of reading data out of a file. Once I wanted to write data to the file, she was over her head.

I think a section of a Math class on programming would be interesting.

You might think that, but I just discovered that the 5-year-old software that I am working on was converting times from UTC by getting the current offset from UTC. No consideration was made for the actual date being converted. The people who wrote this weren't stupid, they just didn't really think through the problem. That, and the company had no culture of code reviews or even documented designs. The times, they are a changing.

Seriously, though, getting the current time is easy. Converting an arbitrary datetime for an arbitrary location involves a bit of thought. This is especially true when you have to deal with Arizona. And, that is without having to consider the conversion of historical data that occurred during different DST rules.

Even digital data uses a carrier wave.

The problem with this idea is that the human brain does not react well to large amounts of negative data. Eventually, the mental "squelch" of the viewer will drop to the point where they will see a pattern whether one exists or not.

I could see sending flagged data to humans, but this project is in "real-time". I think this is just a publicity gimmick.

I once had a game on my Mac called "Victory at Sea" (pre-OSX days). The game was buggy as hell, but the game was researched by Jim Dunnigan and Albert Nofi. They created a book of the same name from the research they had assembled.

Great research, crappy game (because it was unplayable).

Ahhh, Usenet...

I remember when someone spammed ads in the groups. There was a huge uproar over the notion that someone would attempt to use the Internet for commercial purposes.