I do think you should open your mind a bit. Smart TVs are pretty terrific, I can just cast whatever I want across the room and bam, it's on the TV. Friends can come over and share the input. I can lay in bed with nothing but a remote and browse my plex library.
I used to go along this line of thinking, and had a "dumb" TV for a long time. I would spend hundreds of hours trying to get a PC/xbmc/kodi setup with a remote control to be comfortable, but always required a keyboard and mouse next to the TV. In the end it was a waste of time and I wasn't enjoying my TV as an entertainment device.
When I finish work, I want to sit down and just have everything work. I don't want to have to keep getting up and pressing buttons and messing around to get a myriad of supplemental devices of varying quality to work. I just want one single device, on the wall, with a remote.
What you didn't include: the data gathering and the ads. tons of ads. I interacted with smart TVs before, but when i pay for it and it displays me ads in the UI, its an instant return. I'll have none of that shit.
And don't get me started on weird bugs that i can't even fix myself. Stuff like my dad's TV randomly outputting 1-2 seconds of audio of the last selected sender /while being turned off/. Audio only, with the screen turned off. Just a few moments. Nightmare fuel when its dark and you are sleeping in the same room.
I don't experience ads with my TV. I don't understand why this is an often repeated point. I've had three so far (due to moving countries), and never experienced this "tons and tons of ads" thing I see people complain about. It's always just been a UI and some apps.
Regarding data collection, who cares? Just get a pi hole if you really care about that.
Also you are describing a fault that can occur with a dumb tv.
Dumb TV + Streaming stick is the way to go. Bundling your TV (hardware) with your smart TV (software) is a recipe for disappointment and frustration 2-3 years down the road when the tech evolved and your TV manufacturer has lost interest in supporting your model (looking at you LG)
I don't completely disagree. VGA should have been removed from monitors 10 years ago. Some companies still buy new monitors and hook them up via VGA. That should be prohibited by labour laws. The image quality wasn't good enough to be used for an entire work day in 2010 and it certainly isn't acceptable today.
Tens years ago I argued with a previous boss that it didn't matter how cheap the monitor was, he shouldn't force anyone to use a VGA monitor and hurt their eyes when DVI was available and only slight more expensive.
That being said, if you need a VGA monitor, perhaps for some retro computing or a system that only supports VGA for some reason, it's better and cheaper to just fix it, if possible.
I think with VGA, being analog, the image quality depends on the specific hardware. I've used monitors on 1080p 60Hz using VGA cable and it's been fine. On the other hand, I've also had poor image quality (ghosting) at the same resolution with a different cable and monitor. So it is possible to have decent quality on VGA, but not guaranteed.
I think these days that you don't really pay extra to have an HDMI port on a monitor. As HDMI is signal compatible with DVI, you can just use a passive adapter if your computer only has a DVI output.
I have considered digital inputs (DVI, HDMI or DP) mandatory for any monitor I have purchased for myself since 2010 and when people ask me for advice on monitors I advise the same.
> or a system that only supports VGA for some reason
AFAIK, nearly all modern servers only have VGA, serial, network, and a couple of USB ports, so it's much more common than you think. Of course, most of the time you'll be configuring them through the dedicated management network interface, so the VGA and serial outputs are mostly a fallback.
The anti Facebook slant of the mass media is appalling. A gazillion words to explain that content reported by users is then judged by the company as abusive or not.
>Even if you don’t engage with Newsnight’s coverage of the Namibian Presidential Election6, or you don’t tune in to hear what the fishing conditions are like in the North Sea, it’s good that at least someone, somewhere is being paid to care about these things.
> News should not be entertainment. News should not be for profit.
But why?
If "news" isn't profitable or entertaining (and FWIW I agree those shouldn't be preconditions for quality news), then it will have to be subsidized by someone. Who will do that? What is their reason for putting up that money? And - most importantly - who decides whether the end product is "good enough", and what changes can they demand for the subsidy to continue?
I think its a fair question and wanted to respond. I don't think people should just downvote.
There are a lot of things that we as a society have decided we need, and that everybody should contribute to paying for whether we like it or not.
We pay police salaries to try and prevent crime. We all pay to have waste collected regularly.
But lets be clear, we are not talking all that much money. Australia's ABC runs on about 7c a day per taxpayer. I would happily pay 10 times that.
I think the question of what is "good enough" and how the organization should be run, and how independent it is, are all good questions and something we should all have a say in.
> Democracy should not be entertainment. Democracy should not be for profit.
But why?
If "democracy" isn't profitable or entertaining (and FWIW I agree those shouldn't be preconditions for quality democracy), then it will have to be subsidized by someone. Who will do that? What is their reason for putting up that money? And - most importantly - who decides whether the end product is "good enough", and what changes can they demand for the subsidy to continue?
You’re being downvoted but I think this is a fair question. I don’t accept this assertion as true at face value. Presumably the BBC, as with any other government-controlled revenue source, acts as some sort of patronage mechanism, and a lot of these roles exist as a jobs program rather than something the taxpayers actually extract a benefit from.
The BBC is government-controlled in that its money is collected by the government, which can punish people for not paying, and organizations know where their funds are coming from and attempt to prevent those funds from being stopped.
>The BBC is government-controlled in that its money is collected by the government
No, the licence fee is collected by the BBC, by law.
Section 365(2) of the Communications Act 2003:
>Sums which a person is liable to pay by virtue of regulations under subsection (1) must be paid to the BBC and are to be recoverable by them accordingly.
Reread. I used the word "intended" deliberately. There are many indirect mechanisms, that are open to abuse. You described one. It's not the same though as direct control.
There's still kids eating and playing in the dirt and there's still outside of school interactions going on. Plenty of kids not washing hands.
Wearing masks in school reduces the severity of an outbreak so that hospitals do not get overwhelmed. After all kids can get vaccinated that will help reduce hospitalizations too.
If you have access to the message, you can do whatever you want with it. There is no way around that. End-to-end encryption is like a mathematically sealed envelop and only prevents seeing the message in transit. What sender or receiver choose to do is always up to them.
I read somewhere that WhatsApp uses some AI to detect CSAM and send content automatically and without user consent to Facebook for review. Has this been confirmed?
^ This is the Head of WhatsApp at Facebook specifically calling out Apple for their client-side scanning, pointing out that Apple should instead have a way to report content; so, while he technically could be lying, I doubt that's true.
The wired/gizmodo article tries its best to imply that it does.
the main claim comes from one of the moderators saying that: "the ai keeps sending us mundane pictures, like kids in bathtubs". This has allowed people to claim that facebook are scanning every image/message. Where as, obviously given the paltry number of moderators, your going to us AI to triage messages. Otherwise you'd have to spend more cash on staff
I think there is another bit where someone says they can trace the journey of the image. Its pretty trivial to do this with metadata, given that whatsapp leaks a fair bit of metadata its not suprising.
