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Wonder why they chose a different layout for the symbols on the physical keyboard than the default keyboard for Android. I'm sure that'll confuse a lot of people considering migrating, or worse, having to switch between them.

> Automatic content recognition (ACR) is an opt-in feature according to LG, which delivers personalized content recommendations, as well as services and advertisements.

And content recommendations, services and advertisements are exactly what most customers don't want.



I have a couple of 5M DisplayPort cables that I use to put my beefy work PC at one end of the room (and under a desk, between the wall on one side and stuff to the side of it on the other) while I sit at the other end of the room. I've also got a 5M USB3 active repeater with a 4-port hub for keyboard, mouse and the 2 monitors, and a game controller plugged into one of the monitors. I've been using it every working day for over 4 years now.

Very occasionally one of the monitor glitches out for about 5 seconds (maybe happens about once every 2-3 months), and they both seem to take much longer to wake up from the lock screen, again in the order of 5 seconds. Other than that had no problems whatsoever, and definitely the sound is much reduced. I only hear it at all when the GPU is maxxed out, and it's not unbearable like it is when it's right next to you. 4 years ago, the cables were £9 each for 5M DP M-M and £10 for the 5M active USB3 cable, but it's pretty cheap for the quality of life improvement.


"your code is a trade secret protected via contracts" isn't enough to replace copyright because the contracts are only enforceable to the signing parties.

Let's say you write some software for your employer and they sell the product to several customers with a contract not to distribute it. However, the product appears on some pirate website anyway, and you can't identify who allowed the product to be leaked. Once it's there, your contracts are worthless as nobody who downloads it from the pirate site will be bound by your contract. You need copyright laws to prevent subsequent distribution.

Without copyright laws, you'd then end up in the situation where people who paid for the software then are bound by the contract and would have to keep paying, and those who just downloaded it from a pirate site would be completely fine legally and could use the software with impunity. That would create a disincentive for anybody agreeing to buy the software and entering into a contract in the first place, essentially killing the industry.

You might not see a problem with that if you believe in Open Source, but most licences require copyright laws to exist to protect the software freedoms so that people don't just take the software and close source it.


Yeah, I'm assuming most people here aren't selling proprietary code to customers directly. I assume most professionals here work somewhere that sells SaaS or uses the software they develop internally only.


If I recall correctly most software work goes to custom software. Note that in many, possibly most, cases, the (sole) customer retains the exclusive rights to the source code, making the software effectively Free per the FSF definition (because the user is free).

Almost my entire career was spent on such custom software. The rest was internal software. And even that one I was doing as a contractor, so in a way we could argue it was custom software even there.


Even if they don't sell the code to the customers directly (or even binaries, because that's what most customers actually care about), somebody in the chain is selling that software to the end customer and that money is going up the chain. It's kind of obvious really - if the work you're doing isn't creating saleable value, then your company won't be able to pay you.

But there is far, far more in the world that just SaaS or internal only software. Sure, companies are generally shifting towards SaaS (in part because it allows them another way to combat piracy, but also to extract recurring revenue rather than one off purchases), but there's still plenty of software you can go out to the shop and buy. Most of that wouldn't exist without copyright laws, because those developers would have found some other way of making a living instead.


> somebody in the chain is selling that software to the end customer

Not necessarily? Any infra software is invisible to the end consumer. It's bundled into the price the customer pays for what they see, but they themselves don't know or care about the former.

> there's still plenty of software you can go out to the shop and buy

... is there? I haven't bought software in a shop in 20 years at least. Outside of games, I don't really buy software digitally, even. It's either FOSS or it's a subscription.


From the top of my head, the easiest examples are games. Where I live at least, there are still physical stores in most malls with loads of disc-based games for sale. But also, for instance, I can go into my local computer store and pick up a boxed copy of Windows, so yes physical software sales is definitely still a thing. I personally haven't done it for a long time, but I know it exists.

But anyway, the method of software delivery is tangential to the main point. Plenty of software exists that runs locally, regardless of how is paid for - whether subscription or one-off purchases, if it runs on your computer it relies on copyright law to protect the revenue stream for the developers. Without copyright laws, if one physical sale could be freely copied with impunity, sales would be vastly diminished to the point that many developers would just not bother and find a different industry to work in to earn a salary.


That is a false assumption.


A lot depends on what you consider walking distance and also personal preferences about location and walking.

Looking at London, the top rated place is Soho. Sure, a lot of people do choose to live there, but when I moved to London, I'm so glad I had to walk across central London on a couple of occasions before I actually found a flat. I went through Soho once on a Friday night and realised there was absolutely no way I'd ever be able to sleep at night and ruled it out. The next highest place is Seven Dials, which is fine for a night out, but again I wouldn't actually want to live there.

I actually chose to live about a minute walk from Hyde Park and 5 minutes from Paddington. That scores 89, so not much below the 96-ish of those top 2, but it's around 30-45 minutes walk from both of those. I think it only scores so highly because of the food options on Edgware Road, but there's not much else to do in that area, certainly not within 10 minutes walk, and I would frequently walk into more central London to do things. My cut-off before using the tube was 60-90 minutes walk each way depending on my mood, and would only use the tube on about 10% of days and averaged probably 90 minutes total walking on normal days. I guess my idea of walking distance is much higher than the 10 minutes suggested by the article. I'd definitely choose to live there again though if I went back to London.

EDIT: I've just looked at where I live now (a long way outside London). My current place scores 38 with only 1 in nightlife (a pub) and zero in all the other categories. Ironically, it gets the same score of 38 as an adjacent tile which somehow gets 0 in all the categories even though it's closer to the pub. Another adjacent tile scores 18 with basically the same stats, seemingly losing because it has fewer marked parking spots and no park (even though that tile is on a massive area of common land, hence why it doesn't have many facilities). The centre of the town, all the tiles score 96, which is true there are more things to do, but there's very few nice places to live in any of them. The whole thing seems a little odd to me, and I certainly wouldn't use this to decide where to live.


I think it rates Soho top for going out but says to live in Deptford which is kind of interesting. I've lived around London most of my life but not hung out there.


Accepting 5V over the RJ-11 jack seems asking for trouble. Someone is going to plug it into a regular phone socket at some point, so it needs to be capable of surviving at least 60VAC. Even if a secondary pair is used, there are so many different wiring standards in use, it'll end up plugged into something live sooner or later.


Luckily telephone lines are very current limited. You'd be hard pressed to draw more than 100mA even with a dead short at ring voltages. One zener diode might be all you need.

Also not the most unusual thing I've seen over a RJ11, which includes keyboards, RS-232, other random digital IO and full USB with data. But these are normally on items that are not phones.


>"One zener diode might be all you need."

It would... if you're willing to just let the thing draw up to 0.1W all the time, and fail catastrophically if anything goes wrong with the zener or the supply is more capable than you anticipated (i.e. you plugged into a PoE jack by accident). This is a very bad idea.


also 1-Wire


Dunno about you but I don't know anyone with live RJ-11 jacks in their house anymore.


I have one. It comes from my cable modem.

We still have a landline. It's part of the cable package, but it mostly just gets robocalls.


Didn't know people still had cable packages!


Eh. My wife still watches live TV. I don't. If it were just me, I'd be Internet-only.


But live TV can be streamed via IP?


It's been a very long time since I had a cable modem that didn't have a pair of 4P4C (aka RJ11 or POTS) jacks on the back. These exist to make available the VOIP service that I haven't wanted for decades.

Others using this same enormous, American ISP probably have similarly-equipped gear.

But I must admit that it has also been a very long time since I connected anything there. I don't know if they supply 48v talk battery or not when the modem has a data-only configuration.


I've got them, powered by an Adit 600 in my basement.


What do you use that for?


Calling people and playing with phones. I have an internal Asterisk server for me and a few friends. The nicest thing is that when the phone rings, it's a person who I know, not a scam. (Unknown external numbers get direct to voicemail)

Also great for my friends' kids. They can call each other or their grandparents or whoever, without having to touch a cellphone that tries to distract them with YouTube or whatever.

My house uses mostly analog with the Adit 600 (6 lines, 3 using the 70s wiring in the wall, 3 dedicated to specific phones). Everyone else has cheap Polycom desk phones and uses SIP/RTP.


I have 4 or 6, I can't recall how many are on my Grandstream. Phones are fun!

I am not normal.


I think perhaps there's some middle ground.

Most applications don't really care about their logical address space, and also most applications probably don't actually need significantly large address space - so restricting everything to 32 bit is probably bad, but there should be ample address space in 64 bit for many applications to coexist largely in the same address space. Certain applications like databases that want to memory map files don't fit this model, but many of today's applications do.

Since the introduction of TLB tags, using segment registers as selectors does largely support this model and allowing protection between processes without requiring TLB flushes on each swap, so I don't think it's a bad compromise, except that 12-bits for processes isn't really close to being enough.


> I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books.

In the UK at least, people usually take them to a second hand / charity shop, who sort through them and send the valuable ones to auction (typically early editions, 100+ years old) and then either sell them themselves (for recent books that are easy to get rid of) or sell them to specialised second-hand bookshops.

Most of the specialised second-hand bookshops rarely throw books away, usually if nobody buys them after a couple of years they end up in the extreme discount piles (20p, 50p etc) and probably only trashed if they still don't sell from there.


So trashed, but with a bunch of extra steps then?


I would presume that the extra steps incrementally diminish the possibility of the book remaining unsold, and thus destroyed or sent elsewhere.


And it also adds costs in every step. Someone needs to move thousands of unwanted books from high end stores to lower and lower end stores. Someone needs to store them in the proper environment etc.

I do get the _idea_ of preserving books, but... people don't care. I just threw out well over a thousand books from my grandparents house this spring.

There were ~6-10 "valuable" books there. Two because I personally knew someone who wanted old war-time books and a few 100+ year old bibles. And maybe two dozen books worth saving, mostly because they were from big-name authors or had stuff that nobody would print anymore (I have detailed instructions how to make laughing gas and how to build an underground chemical lab - hobby books in the 50s were ... interesting :D )

I literally couldn't give away the rest. And I tried. It was all just "interesting, but..." - no way to justify using the shelf space for books that, realistically, nobody will actually ever read again.


I've forgotten now when it changed, but I remember older versions of Windows let you exit back to DOS once you'd finished doing GUI stuff. I'm guessing that was probably removed in Win95 as that was the first "proper" Windows that didn't rely on already having DOS (IIRC).


> I've forgotten now when it changed, but I remember older versions of Windows let you exit back to DOS once you'd finished doing GUI stuff. I'm guessing that was probably removed in Win95 as that was the first "proper" Windows that didn't rely on already having DOS (IIRC).

Until Windows 3.x this was possible (though not recommended). With Windows 95, there was a boot menu that you could access via the F8 key - my previous post should make it very clear why I still have this in my muscle memory after 20-30 years. Via this boot menu, you could boot into DOS 7.0 (or if an older DOS version was installed before the Windows 95 installation, also this older DOS version). In DOS, you could still run

> win

to get to Windows 95.


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