Posts by doublelayer 9378 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
Molecules in a breath can be estimated by measuring a bunch of different people for their breath volume and humidity, then calculate the amount of gasses based on volume and pressure and assume that the non-gasses are mostly water.
As for estimating how many stars there are, I'll defer to the ESA on that one.
If I had my way, I'd prefer to do any repartitioning myself. However, if that is not an option and I really have to choose between talking someone through a repartition task using CLI or GUI tools, I'm going with the GUI. This is despite the fact that if I was doing it myself, I'd probably use the CLI tools.
The GUI has more convenience functions for slightly less tech-literate people. Instead of device identifiers, you get disk model numbers and volume names. That removes one step, the one where I try to get them to properly associate a name with an identifier and can only guess whether they've done it right. There are a few more sanity tests built into many GUI tools. This may identify a mistake before its made, and even if it doesn't, getting some warning messages might cause the user to be more deliberate than the no warning messages generated by the CLI tools (yes, there is one but I'm not sure they'll remember that fdisk told them to "Be careful before using the write command." at the beginning of the process).
Maybe this is due to bad experiences I've had reading things out. Only recently, I was reading a password over the phone and had to stop the user several times from capitalizing random letters for no good reason. I've gotten someone else to execute an rm * by reciting a command, though I was pretty clear that there was not supposed to be a space between the * and the rest of the pattern. After that occasion, I started being very specific about whitespace, which makes reciting commands slower "d d, space, i f equals sign slash d e v--no, there is not supposed to be a space between the i and the f, I spelled it out because it doesn't actually mean if. Hang on what does your command look like right now? Let's start over.". I don't know whether this is due to a failing on my part or just general confusion that everyone will encounter from time to time, but I tend to provide written instructions first and talk them through executing them rather than speaking the commands.
And where it gets frustrating:
Me: I want you to type c d, then space, then slash t m p.
Them: Okay.
Me: Did it do anything?
Them: No, it didn't.
Me: Do you have a new line at the bottom of your window?
Them: Yes, it's different.
Me: Type pwd and tell me what it says.
Them: It doesn't say anything.
Me: What does the bottom line of your window say?
Them: It says user@macbook:~% cd/tmppwd
Yes, part of that is on me for not being explicit about pressing enter. However, it makes me dubious about dictating commands that could do any damage. Okay, just execute the command df -h and tell me what disks you have before we repartition one of them. No, I think I want to be doing that one myself.
I generally don't trust it, nor do I use it. However, one of the reason why some people do trust it is that, if it's something that people asked often enough while it was being trained, it will generally get it correct. So if they're trying to figure out something they should be easily able to remember anyway, then the answer they get is likely correct. This will work until they ask something that's actually tricky or is related to something small or new. Then they'll get equally plausible-looking instructions that probably don't work.
Because printers are somehow still awful to connect to, and to try to help this which sometimes works, they've included lots of hacks to make them automatically discoverable and usable. Otherwise, people who haven't gotten the full printer setup from IT tend to have a hard time using the printers at all unless they're still able to just plug in a USB cable, and sometimes not even then if the operating system can't find or doesn't agree about the driver required. When you consider offices where there is no real IT, or the IT person is not concerned with printers because they got lucky, this automatic setup is often the simplest way to get most of the people printing. That doesn't mean it's the right way, but printers mostly gave up on doing things the right way.
And if someone nasty gets on your local network? For example, getting one device in your home or office network with malware on it which can now spread to any computer with this installed and run as root, you're fine with this? It only becomes a problem when the attacker can skip the first part?
The pervasiveness of the vulnerable component was overstated. The badness of the bug was not. I don't want that running on my machines. Fortunately for me, it wasn't. That is not the same thing as this not being important at all.
The general policy is to release the patch, but not talk about it except in release notes. Attackers have to monitor for code changes to see that a bug exists if they hadn't already found it themselves. Once it is available, then you tell people about the vulnerability and tell them to patch. Once people who see advisories and patch have had a bit to do that, then you release the proof of concept code. There are times when being ignored for long enough justifies announcing anyway, but three weeks while discussions on Github occur is not the same thing.
There are a few services that I would accept as included in "every linux system in the past decade" even if they're not the kernel. It wouldn't be literally every system, but if it was something that ran on most of them, I'd still accept it. In that list I might include SSH, iptables (related services rather than the binary that iptables typically refers to), Systemd, or the very common core libraries. If, for example, someone managed to get a bug into glibc which somehow attached to any network stream established by a program that used glibc, then that would be pretty bad even though there are some Linux systems that don't use it. To qualify as every one in the last decade, though, it couldn't have been a recent regression.
CUPS is not in that list.
They can't prohibit WPE from using their software without changing their license and making it no longer the GPL and no longer free or open. That doesn't extend to using their website. There is nothing in the terms that forbids them from doing what they have done. As long as WPE can get the source to the software they already have, which they have already because it's PHP, the license is not violated. The spirit is in many ways, but the letter of the license has been followed. Depending on the market, that could be illegal for other reasons. For instance, if Word Press were large enough, this could be considered anticompetitive action that is prohibited. I doubt this applies either, but if it does, it is unrelated to the code license.
Word Press or any other project can put their code under whatever license they want. If, at the beginning, they wanted to put their software under a license that demanded payment from everyone, or demanded payment from some people while not to others, they could do that. They can, though I would dislike, change their license now. They chose not to and benefited by doing so. They can hardly blame anyone else when people use the terms they chose to apply to their code.
As for the FUTO license, it's a perfectly valid choice for FUTO or others to use. It's their code. They can do whatever they want. It will likely restrict development in some ways because it makes reproduction and modification harder. If I get the code to one of their products and modify it, I may not be allowed to use my own code in something commercial without paying them, whereas they may not be able to use my code in their version without paying me. We'd have to have a separate agreement assigning copyright or giving each other dispensations from the license terms in order to accomplish that. That kind of term can add a lot of friction to an open source community. I respect FUTO a lot for trying to thread that needle, whereas a lot of faux-open licenses have taken the freedoms that free software has entailed and trampled on them while pretending they didn't. I think the people who came up with this have the best of intentions, unlike some others, and I think they're motivated to fix problems. However, I'm not confident that their license succeeds at that and would act with caution if someone else owned code under that license.
There are a lot of managed hosting companies out there. Companies that will update their own servers, or at least you can't, so they had better be doing so. Many of them will also automatically update Word Press for you. Hopefully that is a good thing. The prices for such things are all over the place, including some who have a low-storage option below the cost of the typical entry-level VPS, usually because you're not getting your own VM but have to share with other users. I wouldn't be surprised that both of the hosting services mentioned aren't doing that and are quite expensive. I won't do a full comparison because I prefer to self-host and self-manage.
I have a feeling they think they can work around this. I.E. if someone is really important but will leave without remote working, they'll tell their manager, their manager will tell their manager, and eventually that person will get an exception and stay on. Of course, that doesn't actually happen because, even if exceptions are permitted, it's unofficial and quiet. Every time someone goes one level up in the tree, they have a chance for the manager they're talking to to decide it's not worth pursuing or to not know that such an option exists in the first place. The same way that Twitter fired everyone who wouldn't agree to ludicrous terms with almost no notice, then realized that they didn't want to fire some of those people, companies trying a blanket policy will lose people who assume they won't be listened to, aren't listened to, or can't get the company to respond quickly enough for their confidence.
It's not a very useful comment in most cases, and it doesn't really work here because who is supposed to stop whining? Is it the worker whining about not wanting to go in, or is it Amazon whining about the people who don't want to come in? There are some people who could come in easily and just don't want to, but there are others who have reasonably expected that they can work from a different location, having either been hired there or given permission to be there for whom the new policy requires significant changes. If this is your blanket policy for any policy change, it isn't a very useful one.
I was speaking sarcastically. I think those works should be protected and OpenAI and any other company that wants a license should pay for that license. That will expire at some point. If you've actually been building the dictionary for over a century, then the oldest versions will be in the public domain and deserve no protection. The stuff you did recently does.
So when OpenAI has already gathered it, it must be protected at all costs because it's their sensitive property. When other people created it, it's free for anyone to use, even over the protests of those who actually wrote it. Seems fair.
If their code ever gets leaked, I hope they use the same terms: I can do whatever I like with it with no restrictions whatsoever, but anyone proving whether I did must never tell the world that I did it.
I think they're trying to find people who are more likely to listen to the recruiting message and eliminate people they wouldn't accept. Theoretically, if you could find people who are more likely to agree and who you would accept if they did, then you could spend more time convincing those people rather than going for mass campaigns. That could lead to hiring more people with the same recruiting budget. I doubt the AI they've got will actually give them that though.
The blog post from Mozilla, which most people wouldn't have known to read in the first place, provides some useful details about how this system works. I'm inclined to trust them on that part. What it doesn't say is why it was worth doing this. They describe the technology they've built and just stop, as if we already understand why such a thing was needed. Since I don't think such a thing is needed, because advertisers can already track the success of their ads by looking at their server logs for which links someone clicked on, and because I don't care about whether they have the tools they want or not, I am still in the dark about why this was worth Mozilla's time.
The question is not whether it is theoretically possible to manufacture five Starships and fire them at Mars. People who have watched these more might have some idea how possible it would be to attempt and what would happen if you tried. It can be interesting to discuss. It is not the right response to this. The reason is that they're not going to manufacture five Starships and fire them at Mars. That would cost a lot of money and get you nothing at all. Not only are they not going to do it that quickly, they probably won't try to do it at all. They'll do actual tests on Starship, tests that don't involve going anywhere near Mars, because those have some conceivable benefit. Thus, promising to do something that is not going to be tried will get the cynicism because we know it's not an honest expression of expected actions, and we know that because we've seen it over and over again from the same source.
In a lot of cases, they're applying to companies that are strongly remote. They might not have an office in the first place. In any case, I think most companies have stopped getting candidates to come interview in person. It's expensive for the company if it involves a flight and accommodations, it's hard for the candidate if they're working elsewhere, and therefore it restricts the number of candidates you can actually interview. Bringing them somewhere for an in person onboarding could be quite useful, though, as you only have one person you have to do that with. Refusing to turn on a camera, while I can see a few possible valid reasons, would raise a lot of red flags I'd want addressed before hiring someone.
Most of your other points would work well, although you could get around the traceroute by using a KVM instead of remote access software installed on the laptop. The article suggests checking for ones explicitly intended to route signals over the internet, but I could easily hide that so it looks like a simple local KVM with cheap commodity hardware (if North Korea is reading this, let me know, I'm sure we can work something out and there definitely won't be anything sneaky in the hardware you buy from me). Biometrics would probably lock the laptop to a person and require the person to be nearby, but they might be unpopular. Although fingerprint authentication has been an option on work laptops I've had, I've opted for non-biometric keys and prefer to do so.
Every time this topic comes up, you can be relied upon to make incorrect statements about what North Korea does and attempt to excuse their actions. Often, your incorrect statements are trivially disproved by reading the article, such as:
"I'd guess that the poor, duped, employer thinks they're actually employing a cut price someone in China or Russia -- with an emphasis on 'cut price'."
Maybe the pretending to be a local with a citizen's identity, local address, shipping the laptop to another local address where it remains, which is checked by the employer albeit insufficiently, didn't tip you off that the people concerned are not pretending to be Russian or Chinese outsourcers. They're pretending to be remote-working locals.
"The primary driver of insecurity is money, not ideology."
And the primary driver of the fake workers scheme is also money. That's why the work is often poor, because they're trying to get as much money as possible, and why sometimes, those companies get infected with ransomware or have money stolen. In principle, your comment is correct because someone could do that from any country. However, North Korea has an organized system of doing this, meaning that you're virtually guaranteed to get that if you end up hiring someone from there. They have such a system because this is one way they try to earn money for their government, rather than the average scammer who is only in it for themself.
It sounds like the kind of fight that gets very boring very fast. A group is profiting off open source and returning very little of that profit to the creators although they're not required to return anything, old story. The other group is making unclear threats against them. Also an old story, and to the extent that we understand the threats, it's pointing out and criticizing configuration choices which people either changed to their liking or don't pay attention to. In the middle, we have something about trademarks which could conceivably be either misuse to suggest endorsement or weaponization to penalize a competitor, but is probably right in the middle where there's a little of both but so little that nobody else really cares. I expect that learning more about the facts would push me to sympathize with one of them more than the other, but I don't think we'll find a bombshell hidden in it.
Not really. If you're getting the password from an HTML form, then it comes through as HTTP post data. The memory for that request is automatically allocated. In most backend languages, you don't have to allocate memory for a string because it's already there. If you're using something where you ordinarily would, C for instance, you still don't have to allocate a buffer because you can just update the hash in a loop, assuming that your hash algorithm is like a lot of others and allows this. There would still be a limit, but it would be whatever your server sets as the maximum size of a post request before it rejects it which is often at least a megabyte.
I don't object to a limit intended to prevent a password from being ludicrously long. 32 characters, almost certainly implemented as 32 bytes and Unicode...well who knows if it works or not, is not that.
It is my automatic fear as well. I have a feeling that many sites with a limit are properly hashing them, rather than storing in plain text or symmetrically encrypting them, but there is no way to know that. We also know that many bad sites do one of those things. The other clue that makes me assume that is if they say that some characters are not allowed in a password. If it's non-ASCII characters, then fair enough I am willing to assume that the developer was worried about Unicode encoding and probably didn't have to. If it's trailing or leading whitespace or unprintable characters, I can understand that. If it's ', ", ?, or *, I'm concerned now.
Or until it breaks. There was a site I used. It stored financial data, so I wanted a good password on that. At one point, they simply changed their length limit without telling anyone, but they didn't change it on the login page. While new accounts could not be registered with a password longer than twenty characters, my longer one could still be used to log in. So naturally, I didn't notice that they had done this until some time later when someone put the same limit on the login page's password field. Even now, I don't know if that was intentional or not because their page does not say "maximum of twenty characters" it just stops accepting new characters when you've typed twenty.
Unless, of course, you're dealing with large numbers. In many calculations, you don't deal with more than six significant figures. Until you have a hundred thousand units of it, in which case you're at six without any decimal places. Let me guess. Do the calculations on one, then multiply by your number of units? There are two problems with that:
1. By all rules of mathematics, there should be no difference to the result if you do this or do not. People who aren't programmers do not and should not have to understand why there is any difference. We do not teach our children in mathematics that multiplication and division are reverses of one another, except if you are doing calculations with floating point numbers because you were supposed to know which ones the computer was going to do wrong and not done them.
2. While it may not be necessary, we do frequently have situations where we actually have that much precision available. I'm trying to estimate the speed of an operation. I've done millions of operations. I have the time taken to do those down to the microsecond. Both of those have over six figures. In many cases, using the floating point and ignoring the error is sufficient for my uses, but nothing prevents me from having and using more precision than that.
In many cases, the lower precision is justifiable in order to get faster computation. Programmers who are writing calculations into their software should be considering this. They don't get to tell their users that their calculations are wrong when the users demand more precision or different handling, such as an integer number of pennies (plan for what happens if fractional pennies are used, because that happens in some cases). There are also situations where speed is not important. One really important one is in a calculator. You're not doing millions of operations per second on a calculator. The calculation they entered is the only one to work on right now. There is no reason not to use something that answers correctly.
I think it represents that I have 1234567890 of something. Maybe that's a number of people, and I want to know how many would be in a certain group. Maybe it's a number of liters of a material and I'm trying to divide it among multiple containers. The answer to any division with that as the dividend does not vary based on the units involved. Whether I choose to do the calculation that way probably does depend on the units, which is when you would want a calculator to actually calculate using the number you entered.
Your answer ends up simplifying to "you shouldn't need more than 24 bits (7.224 digits) of precision". Sometimes, you do, as I demonstrated with a 10-digit number. Sometimes, just going to double precision isn't good enough. You can solve this by just increasing the precision over and over again or by using something other than floating point to do the calculations. People who use calculators expect and rightly so that you have done this for them. They don't care how you divide the number. They care whether the result is right. If you use 32-bit floats and excuse the incorrect results as the user was calculating the wrong things, you're making a bad product.
"If going from single to double precision makes a difference…..then you are running your calculations in a numerically unstable way. Fix that."
Sorry, I'm one of those young stupid people. Maybe you can help me fix this:
1234567890.0/10.0 = 123456792
Hmm. That's not the answer generated by my brain, and I've run it passed an 80-year-old person so my brain is probably right. Why did that happen? Maybe the compiler can help make it clear. If I don't put on the .0s, Clang helpfully tells me this:
warning: implicit conversion from 'int' to 'float' changes value from 1234567890 to 1234567936
Well, that's a lot closer to the number, although we still have the 92 instead of the 93.6 at the end. I'm sure the proper analysis would have fixed that. Sometimes, a number is more precise than a 32-bit float. That ten-digit number is not ridiculously high for calculations. The calculation I used to demonstrate this is trivial to do mentally, but a very similar one could be entirely doable with paper and pencil but people don't want to. A user of a calculator who expects it to be able to divide a ten-digit number should not be told that their calculation is the problem and they deserve the wrong answer.
There's no reason why we can't. I know a few open source programs that have built in data collection of some kind. Nearly every time that got added, there was a lot of discussion about whether this was a problem with lots of people quite angry about it. I'm not going to put telemetry into my own open source work. I will try to collect that data through surveys or monitoring of emails sent to the project, and if people don't do either of those things, I'll just have to live with it.
This is a bad idea. Open source exists for many good reasons, including the deduplication of effort so that wheels don't have to be reinvented and so that, if one person stops working on it, it doesn't prevent the rest of the world from continuing on. Trying to prevent people from doing things for free would probably not be possible and would, if you got it, create a lot more problems than it fixes. Nobody needs to work for free. Everyone is free to decide whether they are willing to do so or not, and crucially, when they draw that line. Users of the software should respond to this by doing things (paying) to ensure the continued availability of stuff they rely on, and if they don't, they will only have themselves to blame when problems arise.
Probably nothing prevents them. I'm not sure which direction they would try to influence the software in. I could see them trying something bad if, for example, Signal received funding as an open source program. That could be a challenge if this was a general FOSS fund for anything considered open source, but such a general fund seems incredibly unlikely and, if it happened, there are lots of other problems that would probably come up first. If it's specifically for software which the government uses, then there's less of a risk. If government gets its database bugs fixed faster than someone else, that's not a major concern as those bugs likely affect lots of other people anyway. Everywhere in the government that relies on open source cryptographic software also knows why you can't put a back door in it, so I'm not sure politicians will be any more dangerous when funding it than they can be on their own.
Legal: none, unless they signed a specific contract in exchange for the funding. If it's just a donation, none at all.
Moral: In my opinion, spending their donations on something related to the project, meaning that if the developer spends it, they continue to work on the project at least a bit more. That's what I have done, anyway, trying to respect the fact that the donation was received not as a gift, but as support for something. But moral requirements will only ever be an opinion and everyone will have different ones.
It is important not to take a moral opinion and make it a legal requirement. It is why I disagree with people trying to mandate payment for open source, and it is also why I disagree with people trying to force developers of open source to do certain things. A good developer will fix a lot of bugs just because they are bugs, but that doesn't mean that they are now responsible for fixing any bug a user finds. A company can get their changes done faster by a) paying the existing programmers to do it, b) paying one of their employees to do it and upstreaming the code, or c) having some kind of bounty for whoever adds this thing. If they don't think it's going to happen already, they should do one of those things, and if they choose option A which is one of the fastest ways to do it, the programmers can and probably should add some extra maintenance cost to the cost charged.
I can't say I've recognized a pattern with what people are willing to say on it. Plenty of informal things happened on Teams when I used it. I have worked in multiple places where Slack was used. One of them used it pretty much just for work stuff, which was manageable. The ones where it was also used for informal stuff were a bit annoying. I'm not sure if there is an alternative that still lets people do what they're intending, but staying on top of many work-related chats and channels and subchannels and threads while trying not to be distracted by large informal channels, but still being on the informal channels because sometimes important things that weren't work related would be posted there and I wouldn't find out for days was not very helpful to productivity.
There was always a challenge figuring out which channels were monitored and which ones were not. You'd have thought that message frequency would be a good enough indicator of that, but it wasn't because the channels that people weren't watching could sometimes be because a subset of people had taken to using it for communication other people didn't care about.
That seems like a good place to do that when you're starting to try to use Teams properly. You already have a team, it already has people on it, when you click on it, there is a chat window, so surely that's where chats should happen. It's a mess. Not that Slack is better. It's just a different collection of annoyances. If pressed, I'd have to take Teams, but neither of them is winning any awards with me.
Without any information, it's hard to know what led to that, but I'm inclined to think there was not an excuse for it. If this was a potential harassment, public comments are not as good as actually telling someone in authority who can investigate it, especially when those comments allege consent and, by definition, you're suggesting there wasn't. There's also a possibility that no relationship existed and this comment was intended to cause suspicion and discord. That doesn't mean that the person should not be allowed to say it, but just that I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it was honest and meritorious to do so.
And this varies a lot by country. Since they specified euros for the price, some of the countries that could apply to are The Netherlands (93% urban), France (82% urban), Spain (82% urban), Germany (78% urban), Italy (72% urban), Ireland (65% urban). Yes, a lot of people live in the wilds, but probably not where that person lives.
I don't have any reason to distrust your numbers. Nor do I really care enough to do the complete analysis. I did look up a few of them, though. For instance, your 100 Gb/s figure for Hughesnet satellites appears to be correct, but North America is also served by Viasat, which has Viasat 1 (130 Gb/s), Viasat 2 (260 Gb/s) and Viasat 3 (1 Tbps). The bandwidth difference is lower than you describe. Most of this is irrelevant to me, and not just because I'm not a customer. The capacity is not the largest issue, and much of the capacity that we're comparing it with would include wired and fixed wireless network capacity which varies based on the user's location.
As for the equipment prices, I've now done some searches and still don't have an answer. The latest information on production prices I found was from 2021 when SpaceX claimed they cost $1500 US to make, having saved some money by mass production and some more by removing the automatic position adjustment. Meanwhile, I see that they can be bought in the US for $300 or $500 depending on location. In order to think that they're not selling these below cost, I have to assume that they've made another 80% manufacturing saving in the past three years, or two if we're considering time between those two news articles. I can't prove either way whether they have.
The business model of selling something below cost and making it up on the subscription works better with a contract but it does not require one, especially when you have a large sunk cost to keep people wanting to spend. A business model of using Starlink availability to discourage the availability of competitive wired service is also a plausible way to make good profits in the long term. From a business perspective, it's actually quite a smart plan. Again, I can't prove whether it's actually their plan, but it would make sense if it were. That wouldn't require running a big loss. I expect that, even if they are selling the terminals below cost, almost all the people who buy it do continue to make monthly payments long enough to pay it off. I wouldn't guess what their accounting looks like, but a small profit or a small loss seems like the most likely result of Starlink service, and I have reason to think the profit will grow in the future.
I don't think they're making a huge loss, but part of the reason I think the situation may be different than you describe is related to statements you've made that have been contradicted before. For example:
"The cost of terminals is covered by the up-front fees.": I've heard, from Musk and from users, that these are sold below cost to be made up later, at least for individuals. I don't know which is true. That they would be is quite logical, because there are many people who would balk at an even higher up front cost who might be willing to pay more per month.
"To give SpaceX money you have to buy out an existing investor because the number of investors is limited. You must also qualify as being both rich and financially competent.": I'm not sure why you would have to be financially competent. I think rich would probably suffice. Few investors would have a problem selling me their shares if I came to them and said "I have no clue whether this is a good investment, but your stake is valued at $100 million and I am willing to give you $1 billion for it"*. Many investors who were rich and supposedly competent have regretted choosing to invest in Twitter, but that hasn't stopped Musk from doing what he likes with it.
This doesn't mean I think they're making a loss, but that without more complete information, I am not certain that they are making a profit. There are many reasons why they might not, for example trying to strengthen their position in the satellite and rural internet market, thereby limiting their competitors. That's a popular tactic for a startup business, with the next step being increasing the prices when people are considered likely to continue paying for a service they have become used to and don't have a good replacement for. See also basically every delivery app that got popular in the last decade. I don't know how much of the true business model is shared with investors, and I'm pretty sure most of that is not shared with the public.
* Okay, there are tax reasons or if they think a > 1000% growth is likely, but you get the idea.
We probably won't know. It is likely that Starlink's profits will grow as they add more regions. There has been proven demand in many parts of Africa that they don't serve, so that will probably help them if they can add those regions. They're also clearly banking on the connection to phones being profitable, although I doubt it will end up being popular because I expect it to cost a large amount, only allow you to send a few text messages, or both, and I doubt many people will buy that.
In the US, Starlink may be able to sustain their profits by joining other ISPs to prevent the FCC from trying to improve the state of rural broadband. Starlink stands to gain even more than other companies because those ISPs can continue to collect their subsidies, but Starlink can provide service that people want to buy if they can afford it. While Starlink is not very competitive if you have fast wired internet, there are lots of places that don't have that. If they can prevent wires from being installed and keep expanding into those regions, it could make them plenty of money. I'm less convinced that it's making them that much money now, Musk's claims notwithstanding.
If you bought it from the Mercedes Killycar line, specially designed to hit the person you wanted to hit as quickly as possible and cause the specific damage you desire to your victim, yes, yes I would. That's kind of like asking whether the people who write ransomware software are criminals even if they never run it against victims, just knowingly designing and writing it and selling it to the people who do.
By all means. Implement this change, start offering your services on the block you don't have permission to use, and react with surprise when nobody can access your server. It's relevant because the job of IANA and the regional organizations is trying to make sure the internet works, rather than making IPV4 addresses slightly cheaper. If the block isn't supported by a lot of devices, then that needs to be fixed before they start using them. By the way, that's not just a lot of home ISP modems. It is also plenty of other hardware which would need updating, so even if you turn yours on, there is no guarantee that the ISPs between you and some other server will pass on that traffic.
But you don't have to care. Nothing stops you from trying to use the block anyway. Some companies have used it for an even larger private address space. Go ahead and see if it does what you want.
My point was that the change isn't a switch on the web UI. It's not a line in a config file. In many cases, it's a kernel code change, which isn't that many lines of code but still requires recompiling the kernel and pushing out that update. Most devices that ISPs provide don't get new kernels from them. New kernels come from the manufacturer who has forgotten all about these boxes years ago. In many cases, the update files don't even change the kernel, just the configs and libraries, making applying kernel updates a more involved process.
There are some other devices which have separate hardware for routing which may have that rule coded in, and in that case, the change is bigger. Again, not that many lines of code to remove the logic, but a lot of stages required to get someone to make that change and get it installed on all the equipment in which that hardware exists. If you think ISPs have the ability to simply make any change of this magnitude, I'm surprised to see you constantly annoyed at IPV6; all they'd have to do is push a kernel version with the existing IPV6 support turned on, after all. That is a lot of work too, but at least a lot of it has already been done. When my ISP didn't offer IPV6, their hardware (optional) had the support. They just didn't give out addresses. Now, they do support it and most modern routers, including their pre-switch hardware, will just connect and use that.
So that you could send arbitrary messages, rather than ones you had already planned out. Coded messages are fine if you only have a set list of messages to send, but if you want to deliver a message with specific details that you don't have listed beforehand, delivering them with code but without encryption is often trickier than putting some encryption on your text. A preset code will certainly have a code for "abort everything and go to prearranged backup procedure", but probably doesn't have a prearranged code for "adjust what you are going to do, continue doing most of it, but skip step 12", nor for "abort everything but do not use prearranged backup procedure because someone has a copy of that".
There's nothing indicating that they didn't do that, but if they did, they'd have had to get people to copy an encrypted pager message to something else to decrypt it which is inconvenient. Of course, there are codes that can carry arbitrary messages without encryption, but they're weaker than actual encryption and prone to misinterpretation.
Since few cheap radios will have their own encryption anyway since it's not allowed on amateur bands, I would probably try to bolt it on. In that case, it wouldn't really matter whether they were digital or not as long as I could patch into the audio connection. However, that sounds like more work than they were doing. Maybe they just didn't think it through or valued being able to receive signals from any radio over keeping their signals encrypted. For the same reason, if I was using pagers, they would only send encrypted messages, but that's probably not what they were doing either.
I know, I know. You would somehow ask for operating system providers to not allow users to use screenshots without first getting the approval of any application on screen, or maybe just any application at all. That's the only way they can try to do that and similar to anti-screenshot mechanisms they try to use on phones which only work because they can interfere with things they shouldn't be able to interfere with. Not that it would work either. It will always be relatively easy to copy something that appears in plain text on a screen, and they should give up on preventing that rather than try to make it impossible by imposing their control on everything else a computer can do.
You can, but only if you're willing for them to say that you're now forbidden from selling or marketing your software/product/service in the US because you didn't contest their action. It also requires you to demonstrate that their patent really doesn't apply where you are. I would prefer for useless patents to be invalid everywhere, which requires the US, primarily, to do a better job of throwing out invalid patents before they are granted.
"I take pride in crafting the most efficient code I can."
But using what metric for efficiency? Because if you're basing your pride on using the fewest possible bytes of RAM, you may be writing inefficiently in so many other ways. Old programmers know this as well if not better than anyone, because sometimes that has to be balanced against the also restricted CPU cycles. In many other cases, programming time or ease of maintenance should take precedence. While there is lots of inefficient code, not everything that uses lots of RAM is inefficient. Quite a lot of it is properly optimized for a world where RAM is cheap and programmer time is not.
As an example, I've written a program that uses about ten gigabytes of RAM. It doesn't have to do that. About 9.9 of those gigabytes are a lot of caches. I could quite easily load that from disk when needed and run in 100 MB. I don't because runtime is better with that caching. Of that 100 MB, I could probably cut that to 10-20 MB. I don't because the benefit of writing quickly without worrying about the 80 MB is more efficient when I have at least 16 GB in my laptop than spending time optimizing, and because I change this program often. It rarely runs exactly the same way from month to month, so adding extra functions is worth the cost to make that fast.
I had to do it more often, which is how I know that in Word 2003, you could also highlight the text and press control++. You can subscript with control+-. Maybe those still work in modern Office. There were various techniques available for making the operation faster which didn't require moving everything.
I've said this before, but it's worth repeating. That will just annoy people who do an "rm -r" and it gets turned into an "rm -i -r" that warns on every file in the directory. To get around that, they'll do an "rm -rf" which stops that. This has two bad consequences: they're not going to see the things normal rm would warn about because they put in a -f, and they're now starting to build -f into their instinctual use of rm.
Independent of their bad reasons for wanting it, the other problem is that their request is not feasible. It is impossible for you to determine whether I wrote this comment or had an LLM write it. Sure, you can guess that, because it makes sense (I hope it makes sense), an LLM probably didn't. However, I could write many prompts and choose the most coherent response to post, and many LLMs are good at writing superficially plausible paragraphs. You could do an analysis of previous posts I've written and try to identify linguistic patterns and match them to this one, but I could have trained an LLM on previous writing or a lot of those could also have been LLM-generated. Whether or not we think this is a good idea, I don't think we're likely to get it.
The only way of getting close is to require that every post is trackable to its origin and can be compared against everyone else's posts to identify the spread of something AI-generated. Even that won't do a great job, though it would be a privacy nightmare. We can agree with China's stated goals, but in addition to disagreeing with their actual goals, we probably have to use different methods if we actually want to come close to achieving something. I'm not sure any methods will work, but I'm quite confident that theirs will not. Most likely, they won't bother to enforce this stuff because it isn't really feasible to guess whether every video on the internet has some AI-generated content in it, but they can have it in the toolbox if they want something to punish one of their tech companies with. This is a pattern that has applied to many of their regulations before; most of the things that are illegal elsewhere are illegal in China, but they only enforce that if they have another reason to do so.
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