ahje

According to https://www.staples.com/sbd/cre/marketing/technology-researc... I could read War and Peace in a little over 24 hours, and English is my third language. That should be quite doable over a period of 2 weeks.

The idea is that the fines as supposed to act as a deterrent, but unfortunately there's been a shitload of really bad practices stemming from the fact that many consultants have drawn the erroneous conclusion that pre-ticked opt-in boxes are legal. Fines were handed out regarding a few specific cases, but very few businesses know about this and most of the ones that do claim it doesn't concern them for whatever reason. Furthermore, the Danish authorities set a very dangerous precedent when they refused to take on Google with the sole reason that Google are to big and that someone else have to do it.

But yes, until the situation has stabilized and someone has gotten very badly hurt from a financial perspective, the only sensible thing is to block non-HTML content by default and only whitelist the stuff you actually want to run.

The LGBTQ-movement, for example, is extremely vocal about any technique that could potentially be used to determine the sexual orientation of a person. They've spent a huge amount of time and resources in order to get society to redefine homosexuality from an illness and into a personal matter which should be included in societal norms.

If someone discovered a reliable way to detect the future sexuality of a child then those efforts would suddenly be contradicted, because 1) it would be harder to argue that it's not just a condition, and 2) no matter how controversial, there would be a demand for such screenings, and the LGBTQ-community would most likely interpret it as an existential threat.

Obviously, I chose sexuality as an example as it's an easy metaphor that most people get, but this reasoning can be applied to quite a few other things that are (possibly) caused by genetical factors and where there's a community involved. As an example, I've heard people mention an on-going "genocide" of people with Downs syndrome, simply because pre-natal screenings are quite effective at detecting it and that parents therefore terminate the pregnancy instead of having a child with Downs.

EDIT: Simply put: If you start screening for X, thereby allowing it to be prevented or treated in any way, then you imply that the X is something negative. People with X might take offence to that.

But not all good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene#Ecotox...

You're right, there are definitely people who choose a specific lifestyle willingly and by all means let them do so.

We shouldn't assume it applies to anyone just because it applies to some indivuduals though.

I get what you mean and I do sympathize somewhat.

The fact is, however, that modern society doesn't fit everyone. Since we won't allow people to withdraw from society that means we're actively forcing people to live a specific way of life that some simply cannot handle.

Simply putting more pressure on those groups will result in the forming of parallel societies and in the long run that means that those parallel societies will form a separate culture and try to secede. If we stop that there will be conflict. History tells us such conflict will be very bloody, no matter who ends up on top.

This is a cycle that Western Civilization has dealt with for thousands of years. Personally, I wouldn't mind trying to break it this time.

So increased inequality on a local level is good as long as the global average goes down? I thought the idea was to make _everyone's_ lives better.

I'm hopeful that the research might bear fruit at some point, so I am glad to see it continue. We definitely shouldn't put all eggs in one basket, though.

We don't have a finished design yet, so who knows what parts are needed (yeah, a turbine is a given, but still...)?

That's indeed a big if, but even if it ends up being cheaper to use solar for most applications I can imagine fusion power would be a nice thing to have locally around major production centres where the power demand is much higher.

Solar is great for decentralized grids where one's neighbour basically buys excess power from you, but transferring gigawatts of power from a large amount of solar panels to something like a major industrial area /might/ be trickier.

> If you build a house on rotten stilts, and some neighborhood kid comes and kicks one of them, it's not the kid's fault when the house collapses.

If you build a house that isn't fire proofed properly and a pyromaniac sets fire to it then you won't blame the contractor, even if the house wasn't properly built. Sure, there might be fines involved for breaking rules etc. but the blame for the fire is still attributed to the person who lit it.

Soros and his associates did this to a number of countries, includingMalaysia, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand and others; this is not about a single incident where someone used a small loop hole to make some profit -- it's about the financial sector deliberately playing nation states for massive profits, affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people in those countries.

Should the banks have been better prepared? Yes, definitely. Does that in anyway shift the blame for playing with the livelihood of millions in order to turn a profit? Not a chance.

Yes, and yes. I saw some video of it once, so it can be done.

> how was it solved in 18th century Paris?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution

It sounds more like it's akin to wage slavery rather than blindly following orders. Assuming there aren't other jobs for those workers then they most likely have to chose between that job and a meagre existence based on government subsidies and goodwill of others.

My first thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallocain

> Both are really good plans if you want to get 0wned.

It is wise to point that out; running an old OS on old equipment or in a VM is perfectly viable, but one should NEVER connect those machines to the open Internet.

I still have a very old USB key with Puppy Linux on it from, back a darker time when I didn't have my own computer.

I've booted quite a few very old systems with it, probably down to Pentium-era machines, and things usually ran well. I do remember it was quite RAM intensive due to having a relatively large filesystem in RAM. I'd say 64 MB is a minimum if you actually want to use it for anything.

As most who's ever worked with web hosting can confirm, small business customers often have no idea of what they're doing, and I've talked to many people who switched providers after seeing an ad for cheap hosting, without realising that they have to a) wait for the DNS changes to propagate, b) that they have to actually move their web site from one provider to another.

Subsequently, my previous employer lowered the default TTL simply because it got rid of all the bad Trustpilot ratings about customers being "prevented from leaving", and started offering a "move my WordPress site for me" service to profit from all the panicking new-comers who had no idea about how to do trivial things like importing/exporting a database and transferring files.

Fair enough! Link to the rant, just for the record: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21419274

I doubt the methane concentration is high enough for that. The seas tend to be quite windy.

If you truly want to prepare for an apocalyptic event then you need to start building a community, acquiring survival skills, learning how to produce food and to communicate with other members of your local community without using modern means.

Sure, the land you bought might end up prime real estate sometime in the future, and that means that everyone will know it and flock there, regardless of how remote it is.

No, a strong state ensures that the regulations are in place. A _nation_ is an identity assumed by a group of people.

If we'd be talking about any category other than "the old Internet", I'd say you were absolutely right. In this case, though, we are specifically talking old-school web sites and I therefore maintain that RSS should be included. :)

This. Also, make sure you have an RSS feed on your site. RSS helps people get back to your site for new content later on.

The ones that have come true can pretty much be summed up by "shitty weather". Shitty weather is quite capable of wreaking havoc upon human food production and infrastructure though, so the future could be quite scary even if the more alarmist reports are exaggerated.

I've never encountered an Android device that didn't allow me to install an APK. Is that an actual thing?

> can the app really be spreading that fast, if people are having to download it from github, and override their devices security settings to install it?

I suspect widespread public dissent does require quite a lot of motivation. Sending an APK file over Bluetooth or a web link is most likely not that much of a hassle in that situation.

> Also the words "serious public disorder" send chills down my spine for some reason. It sounds like it's right out of some dystopian movie.

Yeah, it's outright scary, and the fact that the local news outlets here barely mentions it doesn't make that feeling any better. I'm sure there's a rational explanation but it still feels... disturbing...

I doubt we'll ever get the full story of what happened, and how much Nokia told Microsoft of the state of the business that changed hands. But you are, of course, right; it could just as well have been a really, really bad business deal for Microsoft.

Meta data from regular operation, combined with data from apps, and OS telemetry is probably be such a treasure trove that backdooring the baseband processor is probably overkill in most cases, and while I suspect there are phones backdoored in this manner the real threat will not likely be government agencies for most people; it's the risk that non-government actors discovers it and abuses it for criminal purposes.

I suspect various alphabet agencies are perfectly aware of this, and that they're actively avoiding such measures unless they're considered strictly neccesary. After all, imagine the media shit-storm if some North-Korean hacker group managed to start mining bitcoin with 2 billion Android devices and it turns out that NSA put in the back door that allowed it.

> a belief that Nokia scammed Microsoft in that sale

That's what I've heard too -- They knew they were going down and simply took the opportunity to dump the handset business on Microsoft while securing funding to allow the network business to grow.

Where I live, cheap cassette players where _everywhere_ in the 80's. Most people had record players too, and getting the sounds to a tape would be the easy part.

C64's on the other hand, was much less common, but if someone had a cassette deck, a record player AND a C64, you can bet that he/she would have had a cassette player for the C64 as well.