I was told by a car dealer service guy that if the touch screen went on the blink, the car would be totaled. (Since replacing it cost more than the car was worth.)
I've often thought the touch screen should be replaced by a socket that accepts an iPad, and put the auto custom software on that. Why reinvent the hardware?
Because you can choose to leave your phone at home and are travel everywhere by car if you don't want to be tracked. But you can't leave your car at home and travel anywhere.
It is true that we don't need cars sending telemetry to track us since there is a conveniently placed identification number on the front and rear of the car, the number plate (used by government), but this is physically broadcasted and that limits its reach.
So why should the manufacturer of my car have access (and the right to sell) a lot of my personal data like location, weight, age indefinitely just because I own a product manufactured by them?
It is an unnecessary overreach on very sensitive data and I can't really opt out (if buying a modern car) since all manufacturers are doing it.
Yes I also carried a phone everywhere the last 20years, but that doesn't make the tracking right (also on phone I think we should be tracked less).
I understand and agree in general, but the root issue is in the laws and what's permitted to companies. Giving your data to car manufacturers and 3rd parties should be mandated to be disabled by default by law and only enabled with proper informed consent.
My car does not have a cellular modem in it, and my phone runs GrapheneOS. I use airplane mode extensively and rotate SIMs regularly. Data brokers aren't getting any anything from me.
Funny that you say that because of all the big tech companies, Apple has the best track record at fighting for consumer privacy. And you certainly cannot say that for any of the car makers that currently have an EV lineup.
Apple has a terrible reputation if you don't cherrypick news. Most of their 'security' stuff is PR work. Its just that rest of competition is even worse.
The power of a tablet is far more than is required for an infotainment system. Make a standard, like we used to have for radios and regulate everything to expose all the controls via a standard connection. Standard parts for replacing and sizes for fitting.
The only way we can have nice things is by regulating. I don't want proprietary tyres either.
Yes. I add that google says: "controlling for substance abuse reduces the gap by about 60% for men and 36% for women". I couldn't get it to quantify the effect of obesity.
There are other imponderable factors at work. For example, does not-wealthy cause substance abuse or does substance abuse cause not-wealthy?
> Western corruption mostly concerns about the powerful and rich making friendly mutual agreements to bend the governing bodies and law to enable themselves become more powerful and richer.
There's an awful lot of low level corruption in the form of NGOs who receive government funding with no accountability for what the funds are spent on.
The NGOs find ways to route the received money back to the politicians in the form of campaign donations, or having a politician's friend/relative being an executive at the NGO.
The NGOs also subcontract to other NGOs, who take their cut, and eventually just a trickle winds up going to the purpose of giving money to the NGO.
The first part sounds like it's US-specific; campaign donations are less of a thing, and more strongly controlled, in Europe. The second could happen here too, though, and probably does.
The two aren't really separate, because the grifters who are on the receiving end also often end up being ones "donating" to the corrupt politicians who select their organizations to receive money.
How is it an accessibility issue? HTML allows things like little gif files. I've done this myself when I wrote text that contained Egyptian hieroglyphs. It works just fine!
Then use words. Or tooltips (HTML supports that). I use tooltips on my web pages to support accessibility for screen readers. Unicode should not be attempting to badly reinvent HTML.
Unicode should be for visible characters. Invisible characters are an abomination. So are ways to hide text by using Unicode so-called "characters" to cause the cursor to go backwards.
Things that vanish on a printout should not be in Unicode.
That's a very narrow view of the world. One example: In the past I have handled bilingual english-arabic files with switches within the same line and Arabic is written from left to right.
There are also languages that are written from to to bottom.
Unicode is not exclusively for coding, to the contrary, pretty sure it's only a small fraction of how Unicode is used.
> Somehow people didn't need invisible characters when printing books.
They didn't need computers either so "was seemingly not needed in the past" is not a good argument.
Yes, it is. Unicode has undergone major mission creep, thinking it is now a font language and a formatting language. Naturally, this has lead to making it a vector for malicious actors. (The direction reversing thing has been used to insert malicious text that isn't visible to the reader.)
> Unicode is not exclusively for coding
I never mentioned coding.
> They didn't need computers
Unicode is for characters, not formatting. Formatting is what HTML is for, and many other formatting standards. Neither is it for meaning.
The fact is that there were so many character sets in use before Unicode because all these things were needed or at least wanted by a lot of people. Here's a great blog post by Nikita Prokopov about it: https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode/
Of course! I bet there are tons of ideas that didn't make it into Unicode, for better of worse. Where you draw the line is kind of arbitrary. You, personally, can of course opt out of all of that by restricting yourself to ASCII only, for example. But the rest of the world will continue to use Unicode.
My early compilers used code pages to work with Japanese, French and German customers. The original idea of Unicode was absolutely brilliant and I was all for it. D was an early total adopter of Unicode (C and C++ followed years later). I rejected code page support for D.
It's mission was to support all the letters in all the languages, which was a good straightforward mission. But then came fonts, formatting, layout, rendering, casing, sort ordering, normalization, combining, vote-for-my-letter-and-Ill-vote-for-yours, emoji, icons, semantic meanings, elvish, people who invent things and campaign to put them in so they'll leave a mark in history, ...
True. And nearly all of them are obsolete. Many were intended for control flow on an interactive terminal, which have long since passed into obsolescence. When was the last time you embedded a CTRL-C in text? The only ones that matter any more are newline and space.
So we need a new standard problem due to the complexity of the last standard? Isn't unicode supposed to be a superset of ASCII, which already has control characters like new space, CR, and new lines? xD
The only ones people use any more are newline and space. A tab key is fine in your editor, but it's been more or less abandoned as a character. I haven't used a form feed character since the 1970s.
That ship has sailed, but I consider Unicode a good thing, yet I consider it problematic to support Unicode in every domain.
I should be able to use Ü as a cursed smiley in text, and many more writing systems supported by Unicode support even more funny things. That's a good thing.
On the other hand, if technical and display file names (to GUI users) were separate, my need for crazy characters in file names, code bases and such are very limited. Lower ASCII for actual file names consumed by technical people is sufficient to me.
If anything, Unicode should have had more disambiguated characters. Han unification was a mistake, and lower case dotted Turkish i and upper case dotless Turkish I should exist so that toUpper and toLower didn't need to know/guess at a locale to work correctly.
And that's where it went off the rails into lala land. 'a' can have all kinds of distinct meanings. How are you going to make that work? It's hopeless.
a) it's a bullet point
b) a+b means a is a variable
c) apple means a means the sound "aaaah"
d) ape means a means the sound "aye"
e) 0xa means a means "10"
f) "a" on my test paper means I did well on it
g) grade "a" means I bought the good bolts
h) "achtung" means it's a German "a"
I didn't need 8 different Unicode characters. And so on.
Your trolling is really rock bottom. All this already works fine. Millions of times, each day. Just once a week it fails because someone messed up. Not an issue.
I showed that there is no need for semantic information about the glyphs. It's more compelling to demonstrate a need for semantic information rather than just asserting it.
But these characters only look identical in some fonts. Are you saying that if you change font, some characters in a string should change appearance and others should not?
And what about the round-trip rule?
And ligatures? Aren't those a semantic distinction?
I don't think that would help much. There are also characters which are similar but not the same and I don't think humans can spot the differences unless they are actively looking for them which most of the time people are not. If only one of two glyphs which are similar appear in the text nobody would likely notice, expectation bias will fuck you over.
Fraktur (font) and italic (rendering) are in the Unicode standard, although Hackernews will not render them. (I suspect that the Hackernews software filters out the nuttier Unicode stuff.)
No need to remove them. Just make them visible for applications that don't need to render every language. Make that behavior optional as well in case you really want to name characters with Hangul or Tibetan.
Some middle ground so that you can use greek letters in Julia might be nice as well.
But I don't see any purpose in using the Personal Use Areas (PUA) in programming.
You're talking about a subset of ASCII then. Unicode is supposed to support different languages and advanced typography, for which those characters are necessary. You can't write e.g. Arabic or Hebrew without those "unnecessary" invisible characters.
if you write كلب which is an arabic word written right to left in the middle of an english sentence, you want to preserve the order of the characters in the stream for computer processing purposes. meaning the chararacter ك must come before the ل and after the e and the space with respect to the memory layout. whereas when displayed, it must be inverted to be legible. the solution is to have an invisible character that indicates a switch in text direction. if you were wondering, the situation where you want to write text in a foreign language within your text is very common outside english speaking countries.
Look I'm writing sdrawkcab (amazingly, I did it without using Unicode!). Layout is the job of your text formatting program. It's easy to fix a text editor to support right-to-left text entry.
The switch in text direction has resulted in malicious code injection attacks, as the reversed text becomes invisible. I had to change my compiler to reject those Unicode characters for that reason. It can be used in other cases to have hidden, malicious text.
Have you checked your SQL code for invisible backwards text that injects malware?
Besides, SpaceX could launch more sats to even lower orbits (where they wouldn't last long just due to atmospheric drag) during a conflict -- enough to win, then we can figure out how to get all that debris cleared out.
You may want to read an actual study about it. And this doesn't even consider the possibility that militarization of starlink satellites may cause them to get taken out, which will trigger the KS the same way.
I've often thought the touch screen should be replaced by a socket that accepts an iPad, and put the auto custom software on that. Why reinvent the hardware?
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