It's been a sh*show beyond belief with the applets, JNLP, stuff requiring older Java, browsers disabling support and all kinds of ancillary nonsense. Office for NT 4.2 (the first 32 bit one) runs on modern Windows with no shenanigans and it comes from more than 30 years ago. But nope, some older java is blocked beyond belief. They pulled even the Internet Exploder from Windows 10 with some update (WTF?).

Eventually the most straightforward way to run some Java code needed to manipulate some hardware ended up being a Windows 7 machine. Which then I replaced with a Windows 98 one which is spooky how quick and light it is, and bonus it doesn't have any security prompts you can't disable (no, I don't need to be told 1000 times that if some code comes over http it's unsafe, it was unsafe too the first time I clicked yes).

Absolutely, it's not even a set fee for whatever purpose, you're basically engaging in a global bidding war to push your transaction. And even so, higher fees don't translate into any higher capacity at all, and these kinds of transactions are just the ones that are bound to come in insane bursts when the market shifts, it is hard to imagine something worse than blockchain for the stock market.

There's no difference, the blockchain is just a very inefficient database. It uses generally an ungodly amount of resources, has HUGE latencies and extremely low, unscalable transactions per second capacity.

Better question is if you can drop a letter-shaped parcel to some post but not actually post-office and have it delivered to someone (ideally still to the post box, but it'll be the letter-shaped-parcels box I guess). And if you can how's that different from a regular letter, except that it's handled by that company.

Actually that's the proper way to design these, of course with some kind of backup way in (usually via a PIN). Only emergency exits and similar should "fall open" in case of outages and even there of course great care should be taken so this can't be easily exploited.

You'll probably need a man purse to carry the second more usable device than this 4.5" square screen thing.

Way back I had a running joke in the office that the singularity already happened and the AI already took over, we just never noticed, and all the inefficiencies and bugs and chasing our tails and nobody being able to write software efficiently and securely is just the AI keeping us on our toes while giving it resources to do whatever it might want to do without much bother. Mind you that was way before https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftonsky.me%2Fblog%2Fdisench... .

This definitely sounds like the next escalation, the AI not being content with sipping 99% of our computing capacity from the regular devices now needs to step up the total capacity with a few orders of magnitude.

This is will only make all the people that know you not able to contact you (well, you might consider that a feature, but let's say this isn't what you're going for). First you'll have to contact each of them and go through the whole "who are you?" dance, that is if you don't fall into one of the many options that makes them ignore unknown numbers in the first place, and even if they see your chat or call don't take one of the other deny/ignore/report whatever option, especially after the scary "be careful with unknown numbers like this" message. And then after you iron out who you are with each and every person you might want to chat in the future with 90% won't even save your "alternate" to their address book, and from the remaining 10% if they don't contact you often enough to be at the top it'll be 50/50 chance next time when they try to do something to be on the right number (as it's not a special address book, but the one that's shared for everything, including regular calls and SMS).

Wouldn't it be easier in the first place to not post your status like "I'm off to Maldives with my secretary, losers" and a similar profile picture (switched to "visible to everyone") if you don't want that info to be public?

Also what has anything to do with the tablets? You can have a second (and a third, and a fourth) "linked" device beside the main one. These can be other phones, tablets, desktop apps, or logged in browsers. That changes nothing, it's the same account, with the same things visible (or not), etc. If you meant to take even ONE MORE number for the tablet that's bad, for the reasons above.

They TRIED numbers and sometimes got pictures or status or whatever else people might have set to be visible for everyone (I think only the "hey there I'm using Whatsapp" thing is public by default).

The only way to prevent this was to have enough bits in the account definition, but that isn't the case with phone numbers, plus most are taken and most do have WhatsApp so the attacker won't waste orders of magnitude more efforts to span the whole possible space. What's more if one needs this information for any nefarious or semi-nefarious purposes from spam to political whatever they usually care only about local users, be it from Canada or from Quatar (for example), they don't need to brute force billions, possibly tens of billions of possible phone numbers for everyone in the world starting at the top with India.

It's daft on multiple layers, first these countries surely could get directly a list with the verification SMSes from the provider and won't have to go only for the subset of people that have a "Hey there! I am using Whatsapp" status and it's public for anyone to see (especially if this is a thing that carries heavy penalties).

This reminds me of Home Alone voicemail, except worse, just setting the message to "We're the McCallisters and will be in Paris for the holidays" but for a modern experience doing it on Meta's platform and then of course complain it's someone else's fault for the info getting public.

Huh? This is literally your public WhatsApp profile (if you want it public in the first place). It's like https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FCrist... complaining OMG everyone can see the picture that I'm showing there and I set to be visible to everyone, and the name even if I didn't give it to anyone someone figured out ..../Cristiano/... is a likely page and got my picture !

I mean probably Meta/Facebook/Whatsapp itself might not be happy if with themselves if they don't like people crawling and gathering this data, but it's not something that can easily be prevented. There are SIM farms that have 100k + 200k SIM cards, and that's only what law enforcement caught in one case in one place https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fnews%2Ff... . Also, most people are directly concerned with people they know, and they should know better that if they put "I want to hurt my boss, XXX YYY" or a picture with a person they want to hide that they're with, AND make their profile public to everyone, then not too good things will be happening to them. Or, well, if they don't know there isn't much to be done to help them.

Of course any revenue, including the shadiest one would be used to fund the expenses, but why not say that it paid dividends or bonuses for the execs or whatever lobby they're doing (I assume there's a fund for that (I mean a publicly known one).