
TLDR
I was going to write a long and vitriolic screed about all this, but after stepping back for a moment and taking a couple of deep breaths, I realised that what I wanted to say would condense down to:
"Just Fuck Off, Elon Musk."
715 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Aug 2007
One of my 'Yes!'s is that ARM could offer its design to Raspberry Pi for a reduced fee or even free, keeping the board price down. Indeed, ARM could consider this discount / free license a marketing cost, as Raspberry Pi's very existence as a powerful computer that needs little electricity because it uses ARM is quite the marketing message.
Not now ARM has shareholder interests to prioritise. By which I obviously mean short-term shareholder interests, which invariably results in the business being squeezed for as much profit as possible as quickly as possible.
By sheer coincidence I ran across this in my YouTube feed yesterday:
The EU should also be imposing hefty punitive damage fines on top of the basic financial penalties in all these cases against giant tech companies of whatever stripe, for whom a €350 million fine is pocket change.
Something like €10 billion to start with, and a sliding upwards scale from there on. After all, it seems to be the only language these people understand.
You reminded me of this, which was written in 1961 by a sociologist, and references an old but timeless joke (attributed variously and incorrectly to George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, W.C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson and others):
To put this in a different way, all our actions have a price. It is we who decide at what point we agree to be bought. As in the story of a conversation between a very sophisticated gentleman and a very respectable lady at a party. They are talking about prostitution, “Well,” says the gentleman, “just for the sake of our argument, suppose I offered you $1000—would you spend the night with me?” The lady, smiling coquettishly: “Who knows—I might very well!” The gentleman: “Now suppose I offer you $10 for the night?” The lady: “But what do you think I am?” The gentleman: “We’ve already established what you are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.”
... although I'd genuinely love to know the full, unvarnished truth behind the Irish DPC's attitude and decisions concerning Zuckerberg and all his little shit-weasels.
Hopefully in due time a (team of) plucky investigative reporter(s) will uncover and publish the facts - and also before any relevant statues of limitation expire.
... see also 'tipping point' and 'cascade effect'.
The important point is that a lot of that pocket money was lent to him by other people.
Unless the principal condition of the loans was "Musk, you've got one month to permanently destroy Twitter's value, userbase and ability to function as an ongoing business", I imagine that Musk's secretaries are rather busy at the moment answering the phonecalls of some very angry bankers and oil sheikhs.
It seems that a large number of people believe that 'Freedom Of Speech' also magically comes with 'Freedom From Consequences'. *
The realisation that it doesn't can often be somewhat of a surprise...
* (edit - not that I am in any way defending Musk's actions. The man's a tool.)
I'll be surprised if Twitter lasts six months at this rate. The vast debt that Musk has now saddled the business with and the haemorrhaging income stream that only looks set to get worse by the week may well result in a queue of angry bankers stripping the company for parts.
Still, the silver lining of Musk being sued to pennilessness by shareholders for destroying their investments will be an entertaining spectacle.
Who needs windows?
https://cdn.airplane-pictures.net/images/uploaded-images/2016/10/18/795406.jpg
This is an excellent and highly instructive video about the problems the wasps cause, how the Brisbane Airport authorities decided to manage those problems, how standard procedures can still be flawed and can cause horrendous subsequent difficulties with aircraft, and how excellently-trained flight crew can save the day (and the lives of the aircraft's passengers and crew).
My biggest issue with OneDrive happens to also be a magnificent example of the frankly insane thinking that occasionally crawls into the light at micros~1.
Let's say that your current OneDrive content is perilously close to your storage limit. One obvious way of reducing this is to stop syncing unneccesary folders - for example in my case, all the VST subfolders sitting inside my Documents folder.
Yet OneDrive's behaviour on deselecting folders to sync is to keep the files in the Cloud and delete the folders on your PC.
I can see that under certain circumstances taking that approach makes sense, but I also believe that the alternative method is the one that the vast majority of customers would choose to use, but which isn't even a possibility according to the big brains in Redmond.
I have a vague memory of the aircraft in question being a B-17, if we're both thinking about the same quality publication.
And here's the story, although the aeroplane is simply described as an 'American World War 2 bomber'.
If, somehow, I managed to miss the astounding news of a Lancaster being found on the Moon as well, I'll be profoundly grateful for any links to the full story.
Also this:
"We have developed the spacecraft and the onboard software in particular to be able to detect failures, to isolate failures and to reconfigure them from failures," explains Cavel.
Expect JUICE to send this message at some point during Jupiter approach:
"I just picked up a fault in the AE-35 Unit."
I'm reminded of a tale I heard many years ago, from an entirely unreliable source, and about which I can find absolutely no evidence.
Nevertheless, the story goes that Khrushchev was giving his leader's speech to the Party Congress, and illustrating the vanguard of Soviet technology.
"Comrades," he concluded, "why should these computers of the decadent western imperialists concern us, when it is the Soviet Union that produces the largest microchips in the world?"