gcthomas

Walmart is competing openly with the store down the street. If I have a iPhone I can't use another store — it is a lock-in.

Exactly this ^^^^.

This would not be permitted on other platforms, but mobile devices seem to have a new level of monopoly.

Apple has built itself up into a vertical monopoly, which used to be illegal. There is no good reason to allow anti-competitive behaviours. They shouldn't be allowed to host the platform and compete with applications at the same time.

If only the refrain was "EU's territory, EU's rules". No platform can operate in isolation from the laws of the places they wish to trade.

The UK Met Police have been using facial recognition systems on London without regulation for a while, under the same law, - it'd be nice for our ICO to make a ruling on it.

Vivaldi uses the Blink rendering engine from the Chromium project, itself just a fork of WebKit, but the application code is not from Chrome or Chromium (no code comes from Chrome, AFAIK.)

So 'Google Blink Vivaldi' at best.

I use !s for Startpage searches instead of !g - Google without the Google nonsense.

I watch YouTube exclusively on Firefox and never have a problem (I especially like FF's pop-out video window thing.)

It is in the UK, effectively. I have a choice from a good thirty ISPs over preexisting cable connections.

I use it to make it easy to pass the video only to OBS Studio - the video shows up as a separate window.

We get the browser for free and these are just ads, not trackers - they are not stealing our data like Chrome, FB, and the rest.

I have nothing against straight ads.

Still 38% renewable/low carbon sources, so that's not bad even with wind nearly out of the picture this afternoon.

Any machine covered by Ubuntu certified hardware seems to work very well by default, including my work Dell XPS13. Sleep/wake happens flawlessly.

Systems where there are multiple sequential collisions are not fundamentally deterministic. There are quantum-mechanical effects in the dynamics of the collisions between the electrons in the atoms, whose positions are thoroughly probabilistic in their nature.

Quantum physics is not compatible with determinism, so any dynamical system is only precisely describable in probabilistic terms,

The independent Covid Symptom Study app from Kings College, already on 3 million UK phones since March, took three days to write and largely would do that if it was more publicised by the government.

The NHSX app tried to do too much — trying to collect centralised data when one key function didn't need to be centralised was always going to be an issue when trying to get people to install it in large numbers.

Smaller samples are enough for population surveys, while high percentages are needed for the track and trace function. Mixing up the two into one app has doomed this project.

Wouldn't that require an NSA operative in that role? I'm probably mistaken, but what powers does the NSA have to force programmers to write code? National Security Letters, the ones that come with gag orders, are for requiring the handing over of surveillance data aren't they?

How would the NSA gag-order work on a Canada-based organisation with open source code worked on by devs around the world?

(Libressl is developed by OpenBsd)

I find it easier to access GOogle Scholar via DDG with !scholar than I do with Google Search.

When I do it from the UK, with localisation on I get a whole page of links on the UK Worcester, with it off the hits are mostly the US one, but the Wikipedia page like is still UK.

YMMV, of course, but this search works fine for me.

Apple fined again - but it's going to appeal because they thought the law allowed such dodgy practices.

Who'd have guessed that fixing prices with other companies to abuse your market dominance wasn't a proper way to run your company?

I don't know how you got the idea of property or lack of trust here: my family know exactly what has been done and how to bypass it — I have taught my children to break unjust rules, but obey just ones based their moral judgement. The DNS filtering is for their protection, not their control.

ps. you REALLY ought to make your children wear their seat-belts in the back of the car, freedom be damned. ;)

The second half of your comment is true, and I don't think anyone has claimed otherwise so the strength of your assertion is unnecessary.

On the first half, children need boundaries set for them. And unless you are yourself a child rebelling against parental rules, you will find yourself on the barely populated side of the argument.

It is not voluntary for my children to leave their phones downstairs and go to bed at a bedtime I picked myself, but I think that's OK.

It is entirely commonplace for a family to impose restrictions on its children — anything less is neglect.

"An empirical comparison of c, c++, java, perl, python, rexx and tcl"

Lutz Prechelt

IEEE Computer 33 (10), 23-29, 2000

80 implementations of the same set of requirements, created by 74 different programmers in various languages, are compared for several properties, such as run time, memory consumption, source text length, comment density, program structure, reliability, and the amount of effort required for writing them. The results indicate that, for the given programming problem,“scripting languages”(Perl, Python, Rexx, Tcl) are more productive than conventional languages. In terms of run time and memory consumption, they often turn out better than Java and not much worse than C or C++. In general, the differences between languages tend to be smaller than the typical differences due to different programmers within the same language.

To answer your question, Python is several times more expressive than C++ given that is is a higher level language, and since fewer lines are needed for a given program it is likely to be quicker to write.

To quote Martelli from Google talking about how the Youtube startup outran Google Video's might so much that they had to buy them:

"Eventually we bought that little start up and we found how 20 developers ran circles around our hundreds of great developers. The solution was simple! Those 20 guys were using Python. We were using C++. So, that was YouTube and still is." [1]

Google took months to copy new YouTube features, while YouTube could catch up in a week after Google innovated.

[1] Google Books, search term 'python interviews google vs youtube'

Working in an international school, I find that my German students routinely have the best formed handwriting of all. Many use Lamy pens. Chinese writing (in English) is easy to read, since they don't usually do joined up writing, and craft each letter.

> Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore.

Looking up stuff is no good if you can't integrate it with a pre-existing scaffolding of concepts and knowledge. That pre-existing knowledge is essential to being able to make use of the search results.

Yup. The target for MFA is not perfect security, but security better than passwords alone — the bar is quite low to start with. And all of the above techniques offer that to varying degrees.

I use strong passwords on all sensitive accounts, stored in a local password manager, with an authenticator app for those that don't accept my Fido2 Yubkey. Seems good enough to me.

I thought that Latex/Beamer was a default amongst certain scientific disciplines?

Cost, certainly, is not better with Office 365. And LibreOffice has versions for Linux. It's also much easier to drag and drop cells in Calc than Excel (small advantage, but with my eyes, Excel is tricky) Excel has far fewer file types it can handle (ClarisWorks, QuarkXPress anyone? Export as EPUB, and so on.) LibreOffice has a much better configurable spellchecker, six different ribbon-like interfaces, can exports bits of your spreadsheet as a JPEG file, and is free. And cost. Did I mention that? Why rent something that can be got for free?

(OK, if all you get is MS file formats, than O365 is fine, if expensive. I've been using LO for years at work in a MS shop, and had no issues for a couple of years.)