"Wow, selection bias much? Talk about skewed." - Now go back to my comment and re-read it, especially the last paragraph - and thanks for restating my point.

A personal circle of friends is not a good model of the market, especially a global market. Depending on where you live, who you hang out with and so on you're going to get very different results. To the point where for example WhatsApp can range from "THE chat" through "very popular", "a niche app" to "noone uses that". You may see it as absolutely dominant, fine. Where I live it's just very popular. Which I accept as a fact, even though my personal observations absolutely do not confirm it - as I said, noone, I repeat, noone I know uses it, even occasionally.

On the other hand, you see SMS as dead - I guess it's a US thing, because that's just not true here, in any group. Everybody knows it's just THE thing to use when you want to be absolutely sure you will reach the person you text without knowing their app preferences.

Yeah, right, Facebook. Sorry, your view is skewed by the biased selection of friends. At most 10% of the people I know use Messenger. NOONE I know uses WhatsApp. At least 50% use Skype at work to some extent, ~10% use it a lot, maybe 30% in private life as well.

Depends on the group. Most of the people I know don't even have an FB account and strongly refuse to create one, so Messenger is not even an option. WhatsApp... Does that even have a desktop version? Without it it won't matter much in a business context for at least a few years. If it does, it's not advertised enough.

Yeah, my study group is biased just as well. But I acknowledge that and do not try to draw absolute conclusions like you do, because those would be "Messenger is niche, WhatsApp is completely irrelevant (why is it even alive? Teens?) and Skype trumps both, with old-school SMS texts, Slack, etc. covering the rest of the market." Not very convincing, right?.

So, you're a paying customer of the strongest commercial backer of systemd? Did you let them know about this? Did you complain about losses and asked for explanation on plans to correct the problems, in order to decide on your way forward, including whether or not to stay on their solution?

Because that is the only meaningful way of influencing their decisions. If customers are angry, then s..t like this either gets fixed or rolled back (note - you don't get to choose the option, they do; you should only care if it works or not). If not, then it's business as usual.

I used a Lumia for well over a year, then switched to Android because of a required app. Yeah, I could keep both, but carry both every day? No, thanks. Honestly? I still miss the Lumia. For me it was much, much better in everyday use, the new one seems like a halfhearted attempt at making a mobile OS. Note: this should be surprising - the new phone is upper-mid range, the Lumia was low-end, plus I absolutely hate Windows 8/10 on desktop. Guess what, on a phone it's actually great, at least for some users, including me. It might depend on your preferences, if you're mostly using different apps, the phone's interface may not matter. I use apps when I need them, 90% of the time I use only the phone, texting, scheduling and notes (yes, even Symbian did that well enough).

You're right, it's the apps. They started too late, they had no chance without a full compatibility layer for one of the Big Two early in the race. Noone is seriously going to support an additional version of an app if it gets just 5% of the market, the income doesn't really cover the cost. So to become a third significant player you need to... already be it. Now it's too late - once you're percieved as irrelevant, nothing really helps.

Too bad. Android could learn from Windows how to make a practical smartphone interface.

Backup. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think.

If you automatically overwrite previous data with no way to restore some older state, meaning that at a given moment you may only have a copy a few minutes old and no older state - it's not backup. It's just a secondary remote copy. Useful against heavy physical damage to the primary storage (or the whole machine), but nothing else. If it's not even remote, it's not useful for anything.

UFO = Unidentifed Flying Object. It is an object that flies, but has not been successfully identified. Where does "collective psyche" come into this?

Ah, you mean aliens. Sorry, but that does not directly follow from the UFO term. So far, UFOs either get identified as something natural or man-made or stay unidentified, which simply means lack of information. You added the aliens to it. It's just your own bias.

Another example - the TCP-based internet. The (early) TCP traffic control algorithms are an engineers creation - things that looked like a good idea. They make sense. They just were not verified mathematically. There was no guarantee that connections would share the backbone even remotely fairly. Yet the Internet did work for years. First good theoretical models I've seen that show it can plausibly work with large-scale multiplexing are all XXI century (it's NOT exactly easy to model - the early algorithms are surprisingly complex from the system model point of view). TCP moved forward in the meantime, but the fact is: for years we've been using a network without a proper theoretical model. We treated it empirically. It worked but we couldn't really say with full certainty WHY. I'm not 100% sure we know now - I've changed research fields and several algorithms are in active use...

A bit of understatement. At these prices they could manufacture them in orbit and still stay marginally profitable.

You use the words "algorithm based in big data" as if they had intrinsic value. They don't, period. The data - a great foundation, but the algorithm is human-made.

Afraid of machines? Not really. We're not really making any progress towards machines having any sort of free will. I'm afraid of generation gap.

At the moment we have a certain view of the world. This shapes our goals and interpretations. That shapes the algorithms we create. Goal functions. Criteria. Queries.

Now, bugs aside, those algorithms will do exactly what they were designed to do. The point is, we're not nearly infallible. The goals we set now are our best current guesses about what matters. If we're short-term satisfied with the results of passing the responsibility for something to computers, we're going to just let them do it and never look back.

Now, the world of the next generation (not really, could be 5 years apart) includes goals of the previous one implemented as core services, as the ground truth. Any mistakes of the previous one become hard to fix - you'd have to deactivate something that by now is a crucial service and rebuild it from scratch, with new goals. Not likely, there are layers and layers of useful utilities built on this, revenue streams, etc.

In short - passing decisions to algorithms working on big data restricts our future flexibility. The algorithms are there as decision support, that's how it should be. Do not automate strategic decision making. Humans can realize they are wrong, algorithms can't, because, really, they're not - they do what they were designed to do, period. With our tendency to build new technology, processes, etc. on existing solutions if they seem to work well, that creates future dependencies which make error correction very difficult and costly.

The science-fiction scenarios about humans as slaves to machines are likely pure fantasy. Slaves to ancient ideas of how things should be, enforced by machines... now that's much more realistic.

Completely wrong. Reason no. 1: this will not help you ride without a headlight much, it's much too dim. Reason no.2: headlights are directional, this is much better on curves and works better at a distance.

BTW: riding at night without a headlight is just stupid, we fully agree on that.

Yeah, you're probably right. Still, no difference - the major goal is not portable batteries, but large storage, enough to stabilize the grid. Whether it's at big plants, individual generators or at individual homes, factories, etc. is secondary.

Battery-powered devices are not the most important application. The current batteries are good enough to make them usable. It's not the real goal of this research. Just look at the list - can you imagine a flywheel-powered phone?

The real goal is large-scale energy storage. Cheap per kW solutions with a long life (no, a few thousand charge cycles is not good). That's when "decarbonization" becomes possible. The goal is storage which scales to MWh locally and GWh globally, making unreliable power sources actually useful.

Currently the production and consumption in the grid must match. This is difficult and costly. Burning stuff is the only way to build large powerplant which can quickly adapt to changes in demand. You need to be able to compensate when the demand rises, when it drops it's even worse. That's why solar or wind power are so difficult to add to the system on a large scale. In dynamic systems terms - not enough I in PID...

Large storage is the solution. We have some now - I'm not sure about the English name, but these are hydro plants with pumps (pump at oversupply, dump when demand rises). Problem is, they do not respond that quickly, cost a lot and waste a lot of energy.

Now imagine battery stacks large enough to power a large part of the grid for, say, an hour, or smaller ones at each generator, providing stable output for at least several minutes even when production stops. Suddenly you can run eg. entirely on solar and wind as long as the average production per hour in the entire grid is higher that the average demand per hour even at peak times. Transfer, even on long distances, is easier too - you can plan it, build local reserves over time where the need is expected in a few hours, etc.

That's the holy grail of power grids. And yes, we can actually do this now, it's just much, much too expensive to build solutions that survive long term heavy use, don't explode easily, don't contain lots of acid, etc.

Hey, take back "defended it"! I wasn't defending anything, I was stating a fact and presenting the reasoning behind it. Sure, the more this happens, the more machines go unpatched with serious vulnerabilities due to incompetent or heavily understaffed IT. This was much less of a problem a year ago, when in the same situation such companies just applied all important patches. That trust is now gone and that is entirely MS fault.

Seriously, years of work to get to a situation where either IT has the knowledge and resources to control the patches (a good idea) or the machines autoupdate (worse, but still good)... all wasted in a few months, leading to a situation where IT unable to do the former may actually feel like turning off the latter is better than the alternative. Who cares if they're right or wrong, the point is it used to be very rare and now it really happens. Nightmare.

That's one thing. The other one is:

"The reason the two Microsoft researchers disclosed this variation of the original attack is to make companies understand the need to keep their systems up to date at all times."

At least one company I know blocked all updates for two reasons entirely under MS control. 1: Win10 is not cleared for use yet for many reasons, updates pushed GWX. 2: High priority updates containing nothing but telemetry. Not enough resources to test & review everything. That's one company looking for other options. Probable outcome - Win cleared for VM use only, under a different host.

MS's feet are like a sieve from all the self-shooting. Future is not looking all that bright. Surprisingly, it's not due to buggy software - they're doing their best ever in that category. That's the price of allowing marketing&sales to touch the security feed.

More alike in Poland, I think. The e-court handles small, simple civil cases, purely electronically. Main result - great, huge acceleration of the process, a lot of simple cases solved quickly.

Downside? You really DO want to have an account. This court is used by crooks to collect on nonexistent debts, such as invoces which were already paid - there were too many such cases to consider this rare. It's enough to sue giving a slightly wrong address of the defendant... and the defendant won't even know about the case until the bailiff finds him to collect (by name and PESEL number). By then it's very difficult to fight. If you have the account and a case matching your key ID data is filed, you will at least be notified electronically, even if the address given was wrong. Then it's easy - you protest (electronically), the case is rejected with the option to move to a normal court, the crook usually drops the case at this point.

So... Yeah, it does a lot of good, but many people get screwed. Especially the less-informed ones. I'm not sure about the balance - I think I'd prefer if the e-court didn't exist, but I don't own a company with many small cases to process, so... YMMV. Just be aware of the risks.