rswail

oops :)

I misread.

Thanks for the correction.

Good politicians do. They at least skim it to see where to add emphasis and the points they want to promote.

Really good politicians work with their speechwriters to get across exactly what they want to communicate.

Except that the purpose of patents is not to be "pro-consumer", at least in the US Constitution, it's to "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

The purpose is to provide an incentive to creators to reveal their inventions and make them available to the public and other creators, instead of keeping them as trade secrets.

The affected country ccTLDs are:

AS: American Samoa

GH: Greenland

SL: Sierra Leone

These systems have been rolling out across Asia and EU and other places.

If CCs were the system of the last 75 years to allow quick transactions, these systems are the next generation.

The US is a specific banking market that has a very embedded structure, regulation, and players. Other nations have a more flexible financial system that allows for services to develop that are better than the existing Visa/MC duopoly.

This is just the next step of allowing them to operate cross-border/jurisdiction.

The fact that you have zero interest does not mean there are many small merchants and customers that find the ability to easily transfer money instantly with very low fees and the same safety as cash is a very useful service.

This is essentially taking the equivalent of UPI EU-wide.

UPI now interoperates with other equivalent new payment platforms in Asia.

There are not many other options already besides Visa/MC for their payment network, not the branding. Interbank account transfers with instant settlement are clumsy.

The change is that newer financial systems, using ISO20022, run at bank level, allow instant net settlement between individual accounts, not just settlement at the bank level.

So the benefits to merchants/customers compared to Visa/MC:

Merchants

* Interchange is much cheaper, because the banks transact via the central clearing house which is usually sponsored by the country's reserve bank

* It allows for the merchant to set up direct debit payment structures that allow for things like subscriptions and other payments to be made with similar network and transaction fee savings

* It has all of the advantages of EFT and CC payments

* It can use QR codes, email addresses, and mobile numbers as identifiers, so it is much easier to pass on payment details. Merchants can operate with just a printed QR code, verifying payment on the customer's mobile.

Customers

* Banks can offer all of the same "perks" of credit cards, like lines of credit, branding, account holder offers.

* They can offer things like product insurance and return protection and similar consumer protections.

The "rails" are much cheaper to run and suits a 21st century financial system and is easier and more secure for consumers.

Instant settlement. The new systems usually run at the level of the reserve currency, or highest national bank.

In Australia the system is the NPP, and the public face is Osko/PayID, so you can use an email or mobile identifier to instantly transfer money between people's accounts. Australia is rolling out PayTo, which is a B2C form of direct debit, which is revocable by the customer but allows for subscriptions and other payments.

The next step will be offering a bank account with PayID/PayTo, a contactless form of payment stored in a Google/Apple/Samsung Wallet, and a line of credit.

Which is all that a credit card is.

This announcement is about similar national systems evolving into cross-European payments. So an instant payment from a French bank account to a Spanish bank account via contactless payment terminal without using the Visa/MC "rails". In Thailand it's promptpay

Considering one of my team literally was carrying a Motorola satellite phone on the NYE/D of 2000-01-01 in case our mobile or land comms went down because the public transit was running all night, we took it very bloody seriously.

If there was an interruption to services on that night in particular, that's a serious public safety issue.

We had tested our system, and integration tested with all the other systems we connected to directly, but any FMECA analysis would show you that there were failure modes that we couldn't mitigate.

So people on planes falling out of the sky? Probably no.

People being crushed in a railway station on NYE? Possible yes.

> We converted from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar 500 years ago. Surely we can handle this.

To be fair that was more of a time sync problem.

If you think of the Pope as a stratum 1 NTP clock, with bishops in each diocese acting as stratum 2 and parish priests as stratum 3.

The break between Julian and Gregorian was sort of like a UTC leap second.

On a PDP-11 there were 8 registers, R0-R7, with R6 being the (default) stack pointer and R7 being the program counter.

There were 8 address modes for each register.

So a src/dst instruction used up 12 bits for the src/dst+modes, a single register instruction used 6 bits.

You could load the registers directly at addresses 177770 through 177777 on the front panel. So if your program was 5 words long, you could load that into registers R0-R4, then load R7 with the address 177770 and execute.

Octal on a PDP-11 meant that the instruction set (16 bits) allowed two-register instructions with src/dst register and modes taking up 12 bits.

So you programmed the front panel with 3 fingers for octal instead of 4 for hex.

The first machine I ever played with was a PDP-11/10 with 16K of "core" and 3 ASR-33s & a VT52 connected by 20mA current loop serial.

Bootstrap was a small set of octal instructions on a piece of paper stuck to the front panel.

That was enough to load the "absolute loader" from paper tape on one of the ASR-33s, which then loaded blocks of BASIC from paper tape.

It was a "multi-user" BASIC that dropped string functions (except CHR$()) in exchange for allowing 3 users.

In Australia (Melbourne), EVs have taken over the taxi/Uber/DiDi services, the city is a 50km radius semicircle, and the airport is a fair distance from the CBD.

The charging network is still being built out, but for these type of services, it's a no brainer.

Just saw my first FedEx EV truck (inner city Melbourne) and all the posties use EV trikes.

You got the time arrow the wrong way around. Those mechanical digital clocks predate the LED ones by a number of years.

They worked on the same principle as the old mechanical signs at airports and train stations.

So it was mechanical first with the motors, then the LED display and then LCD and then the current TFT etc.

I got them but with a 10 second delay compared to the spacex feed, which was irritating but meant I could flip between the "official" commentary and NASASpaceflight.

There was a bit of snark from the SpaceX guy Dave about whether or not the go/no-go decision had been made and not to listen to "other broadcasters" and he was right.

But the NASASpaceFlight guys are the right kind of nerds to be commentating, because they don't have to keep up the "steel jawed rocketman" image and can just geek out on the launch.

Don't you know that it's called "Super Intelligence" or SI now because Artificial sounds fake?

His lordship announced this to the world at the UN.

Agreed, but that isn't what we're discussing.

The licensing laws around copyright have been developed over the last few centuries. They can be changed.

But until they are, the limits are what they are. Currently, Oracle can put conditions on benchmarking and publishing the results in their license and its not only legal for them to do so, but they have prevailed in court when enforcing those conditions.

I fully agree with you that governments should pass laws that restrict the rights of a copyright holder on what they are allowed to control by licensing.

However they haven't, so until they do, you're stuck with the license as is.

As for "meeting of minds" etc and exchange of value, that's irrelevant to the conditions of the license. It's not a contract. It usually starts off with something like "By using this software, you agree to the following terms...".

If you're john doe, you have exactly the same standing as a business when agreeing to and complying with the conditions of the license from a copyright owner.

It's not the government restricting your right to speak (1st amendment in the US), it's a private corporate "person".

If you don't like the conditions of the license, you can do one of three things:

1. Don't use the software

2. Use the software in violation of the license, and face the consequences if the copyright owner takes action against you.

3. Get the laws of copyright changed so that conditions about publishing benchmarks is not allowed to be removed by a license.

It's their copyright, they get to decide the conditions in the license if you want to use their software.

The EULA is enforceable because you have to agree to it to use the software, and Oracle has large and well financed legal team who will descend from a great height on you and anyone who publishes the results of you doing performance testing.

The copyright that Oracle has entitles it to offer a license with the conditions it wants. They've had that condition in their license for decades.

You are not forced to accept them.

Back in the late 90s, Oracle RDBMS was the "won't get fired for buying" RDBMS. It's been downhill ever since. Once Postgres got partitions, it was over.

Oracle still had a market for high availability clusters for a while, but the increasing performance of single servers and SANs and finally cloud services made that redundant.

So Oracle have spent the last 20 years being bastards about licensing, squeezing their existing customers while the customers do their best to migrate somewhere else.

I'm a 12/13 mini on my second refurbished 13 and a new battery. This is the first iPhone I've considered. Even so, the price is... impressive.

I want a screen that my thumb can reach from top to bottom without stretching or doing weird half-screen swipes to get at.

Also weird that they've gone back to touch ID instead of face ID to open/unlock.

But I'll definitely be looking at it.

Considering there's a Unix underneath, the logical of showing "dotfiles" that are usually hidden is possibly the connection.

But MacOS keyboard shortcuts have always been undiscoverable unless they were part of the menu, which is a problem.

One could argue that, but with a properly designed API, it could preserve anonymity while still providing businesses with the necessary validation.

The main question to government is:

1. You already know who everyone is. By definition identification as an individual is by government.

2. Why is there not a system that allows a business or other service to ask for government identification that is encrypted and only visible to government, but that allows a business to ask for certain details, required for the operation of the business (eg confirmation of driving license, or age)?

3. Why is that evidence not provided directly, but as a confirmation from the government service ("Yes, this person is over 18", not "Yes, this person is 37")?

Governments need to protect the public, not allow businesses open slather on collecting PII.

I'm against anything secret about spending on political campaigns.

Candidates should only accept funds from natural persons, that amount should be limited per person.

PACs and other candidate-adjacent activities should require 100% transparency on the source of funds and not be allowed to co-operate/co-ordinate with any candidate's campaigns. Companies can fund PACs, but they should be required to receive shareholder endorsement and not co-ordinate with their employees.

Laws impacting on the 1st amendment require strict limitation on how the government legislates and for an explicit need.

In this case, it is to ensure the integrity of the political process of selecting candidates and electing members of Congress.

You said "People" a lot in your post. Corporations are not "people".

Only natural persons should be able to contribute to political candidates.

Corporations can lobby, as a corporate person, just like a union or other organization, but not contribute.

They can run ads themselves, but there needs to be a much greater wall between PACs and candidate campaigns, with the previous restrictions now null and void due to lack of enforcement.

Roe v Wade and the resulting multi-decade clusterfuck is because your Congress are weak-willed pussies who are unable to actually work through a legislative process to find a consensus.

Yes, it took decades, but in Australia our various states have worked through the "it's criminal" -> "It's criminal but not enforced" -> "we're deliberately vague and won't prosecute doctors" -> "we have a legal framework that makes abortion legal up to {20,22,24} weeks on demand, after which it requires the consensus of two independent medical opinions".

The US needs to do the same. Yes, it will take decades. No, it shouldn't because abortion is a medical procedure, but religion is a scourge.

Not necessarily the same in every nation, but any treaty ratified by Congress in the United States has the same status as any law passed by Congress.

It is subject to judicial review, but has equal standing.

So the US cannot "violate [it] at will".