Posts by doublelayer

Marketing company chases Twitter for $7,000 over 'swag gift box for Elon'

If you pick up one from the street, maybe. If you get one from a company you already know is at whatever event you went to directly from someone who worked for them and your first step is to dd your system repair image onto it, thus obliterating any filesystem and files there might have been on there, then you're likely fine. While it's possible they've added extra sneaky code to the controller and if you're using it in a sensitive environment it's best to get fresh ones from known channels, most times I've gotten one is when a company wants to sell things to me and all they include is some PowerPoint files I don't intend to read. For the same reason, it's possible that a company-provided pen has a microphone and transmitter in it, but for most companies, it's a pen made as cheaply as possible designed to write just long enough so that you see their name while you're there if you happen to use it.

That would work if the company chose to give that. The way I read the article, Twitter asked for it and agreed to pay for it, but then didn't pay when the bill showed up. I'm guessing they wouldn't have a contract that allows any company to send them something unsolicited and expect payment.

Re: Elon

That payment was only if he couldn't get people to fund his takeover. For some reason, he managed to get multiple banks to put up piles of cash for it, so that wasn't an option. He could still have backed out, but then Twitter would have tried to sue him for significantly more. That might also have been a fun thing to watch since he signed a contract eliminating all the good excuses for walking out on the deal.

That's usually why I keep them around, then I realize that I don't do all that much painting and that at my rate of predictable clothing destruction, a couple shirts will last for a decade. I've had a slightly better record using the tiny USB disks companies often give away. For a while, I had a couple 1 GB ones that were used for my recovery Linux images because they'd be too small to be erased when I needed a different disk. It didn't do much for the companies whose names were written on the disks, but at least I found them a bit useful.

Puri.sm puts out LapDock for its Librem 5 smartphone

False praise does not help

"The era of a phone that can also be a tablet or a full computer is arriving, thanks to FOSS."

The era of a phone that can also be a tablet or a full computer already got here. Android's had support for that for a while with a few different companies' standards alongside the half-baked Google version for every device (some exceptions apply because it's Android, exceptions always apply). People don't use it.

Yes, Linux is a better desktop operating system than Android is, so a Linux phone should be better at it, and it probably will be when we have Linux phones better than this. This phone is not capable of running a desktop system very well based on its specs. From reviews, it's not that great at being a phone either. You've complimented the CPU (incorrectly, but that's for later), but there are other problems as well. Here's a simple one: 32 GB of EMMC storage. That's what you have to put your desktop operating system on: a disk that's smaller, slower, and less reliable than anything you would ordinarily use. The good news is that you can put in a Micro SD card for some expansion, but it's not going to be fast. 3 GB of RAM isn't exactly impressive by 2013 standards either, but that is less likely to be immediately problematic if you don't open too many browser tabs.

Now onto the CPU. You've told us that "it's easy to forget that even a relatively low-end smartphone is still a powerful computer by the standards of just a decade ago", but this is incorrect. Four A53s are not fast when compared to a 2013-era computer processor. I don't have good benchmark numbers for the specific SoC used in the Librem 5, but those are standard cores where performance is proportional to clock rate and memory speed (that appears to be the same), so let's look at another quad-A53 chip, specifically the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 (MSM8916). It got Passmark benchmark numbers of 424 at 1.25 GHz, so for this devices maximum 1.5 GHz (not specified how often it will operate at maximum), we'll adjust its number to 509. Let's look at some CPUs from 2012 (we're not that far into 2023 anyway) and see what their numbers are like. I don't want to use anything too powerful, so I'm looking at small laptop CPUs. How about the Core I5-3317U, a dual-core 1.7 GHz part that's far from the top of the rankings. What's its benchmark number? 1988, 291% above our adjusted Librem number. AMD hadn't ascended to its present position at that point. Let's try one of their parts. How about the low-end APU A6-3650: 2008. But that one has four cores. How about a dual-core model like the Athlon II X2 240e? This is by far the worst I found and it's number is ... 1002. Some phone processors are powerful enough to serve as laptop-class chips, but this is not one of them. You don't by a Librem 5 for the CPU. You buy it because you want open software and are willing to compromise on basically everything else to get it. People know that and it's fine. Don't pretend it's something it isn't.

I can't do that, Dave: AI drowns top sci-fi mag with story submissions

Re: "...AI could turn writing from a serious craft into a cheap commodity"

"if you read through centuries old books then you'll find that as the cost of printing was high, the quality of writing was a lot higher because editors (and the reading public) had higher expectations."

I haven't always found that. I think at least some of that may be due to the fact that we tend to know a relatively small set of classics which were better than a lot of other books written at the same time but which didn't endure as well. Comparing the best thirty books from the 1840s, or at least a selection of thirty from the good pile, with the sum of what's available in the 2010s, it wouldn't be surprising that the 1840s look better. What I tend to find in less popular older books (and even some of the popular ones) is a lot of extra loquaciousness which certainly sounds fancy, and probably it did at the time as well, but doesn't necessarily add to the quality of the book.

It is within the capabilities of any writer, if he be endowed with a thesaurus and a dictionary, and the will to act thus to make his speech in comportment with the styles of yesteryear, or perhaps a more meritorious attempt would be to render such speech in a manner that resembles his contemporaries' imaginings of such a style without a mimesis most ardent in its honesty, to adopt as his own any oddities of vocabulary or syntax that he believes will engender the accolades of which he is desirous. It doesn't make what they have to say any better just because you have to disentangle the run-ons, or worse unnecessary references to something else, to get there. I've seen people try to write that way today. They produce terrible stories and think that sounding formal will help, but they are wrong.

Re: Author's guild

The low-quality stuff you can find now is at least mostly the kind of low-quality junk that can be produced by someone actually trying to write and who probably thinks they created something at least mediocre. Imagine what heights of junk can be created by someone turning on an automatic random word generator and not bothering to check the results. Imagine how much harder it will be to find something you want to read when there's ten times as much junk you have to get past in order to find it.

Can YouTube be held liable for pushing terror vids? Asking for a Supreme Court...

Re: YouTube doesn't deserve section 230

"They found it offensive that someone was sticking their tongue out in the thumbnail on a video about hot sauces. If that's not "exercising editorial control" I don't know what is."

I don't know for sure what that is, but I have a guess. Maybe they used some kind of machine learning model to guess whether something was offensive and it messed it up. Annoying for the creator, I'm sure, but not the heavy-handed censorship you make out. If you're posting here, you should already know that these programs are unreliable and that they are necessary. Ever had an email accidentally routed to the spam folder or dropped altogether by your mailserver? Did you turn off your spam filters altogether and remove the verification systems on the server? Me too and me neither, respectively.

Re: Disappointed with the author's description

What part of the provided information was wrong? Was it not a terrorist attack? Was it not in Paris?

There were other attacks there as well, but they aren't relevant to this article. That doesn't mean that they were worth forgetting or that the victims of them shouldn't be remembered, but the legal case which is the subject of this article is not related to them. If the other attacks have to be listed because they involved more victims, why not include other attacks that killed even more? Many countries have faced attacks that killed even more people, and those attacks are important too. They're not mentioned because they're not related to the news the article is talking about, and the other 2015 attacks are not either. It is no disrespect to the victims there.

Results are in for biggest 4-day work week trial ever: 92% sticking with it

Re: Surrendipitous Interactions?

"The idea that "serendipitous interactions" In the office lead to creative ideas has been so thoroughly debunked, I'm surprised we keep seeing this old trope dragged out over and over again"

I've not seen it debunked. All I've seen is a lot of people, usually ones who like WFH, saying it isn't true. I can't call something disproved on the basis of "a lot of people don't think it is true". Neither does that prove that it is true after all. I've seen no useful data to making a factual statement about it, and given that it would require some objective judgement on how creative an idea was and how the idea came to exist in someone's head, it might not be possible to prove it either way definitively.

Re: Short-term observations

I agree, unfortunately. I'd really like a four-day week, and if my employer did this maybe we'd try cutting back on the pointless meetings and make processes more efficient. However, there's a reason it got this inefficient in the first place, so if we were permanently on a four-day week, they'd start reintroducing the sources of the problems and productivity would fall again. Companies have many incentives to cut inefficient processes like too many meetings, but so few of them do it. I don't think shrinking the work week will make them do it.

99 year old man says cryptocurrency is for idiots

Re: BTC working well, Western Union angry

"Prior to adoption of BTC, Salvador didn’t actually have its own currency, it used the US dollar, which it felt was demeaning and an expression of US imperialism."

What rubbish. They chose to use the dollar, and they were free not to when they did and have remained free to change that whenever they like. Incidentally, the dollar is still used there as one of two official currencies. The United States did not make them do it. Nor was it even a desperation measure from a failing currency; the colón was quite stable. El Salvador chose to do it because they thought it would help expand their economy if they had easier access to markets that used the dollar, including the United States and a few of their neighbors that had either adopted it entirely (Panama) or partially (Belize, Costa Rica). This hasn't entirely worked out the way they hoped in the late 1990s, but I must reiterate that the Salvadorian government decided to do it without any pressure, they didn't and don't say that it was anything to do with imperialism, and that they were and are free to change it whenever they want.

It's sometimes fun to watch the ravings of a supporter of the Chinese government's system. Kind of like how entertaining one flat Earth guy can be, or better yet, two of them who can't agree on things like how exactly the sun's movement works with time zones. That is until you remember that, unless they're just trolling, they actually believe this crap. The post isn't annoying enough to definitely be a troll, so I'm afraid there's another person who thinks that the individual citizens get to choose their local leaders, and that the local leaders have any choice who is going to run the country. Not that it would be a good system if it worked like that, but it certainly doesn't work like that.

Re: Value

It's not helping your point, if I can even correctly assume your point, that you don't know the country. The country you were trying to name is Costa Rica, and it's not them. It's El Salvador, and although the president is an adherent, Salvadoran citizens not so much. It has caused a number of problems just getting started, and is in low usage despite the Salvadoran government wasting lots of money on the project.

"He didn't say China was perfect, just that they're better at protecting democracy than other countries."

I don't think he said that, which is good because it would be ridiculously wrong. He doesn't like cryptocurrency, China banned cryptocurrency, he doesn't really understand the actual state of cryptocurrency in China so he thinks the ban is total, and he thinks such a ban is a good thing. That's not the same as saying China protects democracy, which they obviously do not seeing as they don't give their citizens any rights and have worked to erode democracy elsewhere.

Re: Value

"In fact, there are concepts for economic systems that manage without money and replace it with a distribution of resources and goods according to base-democratic principles, by agreement. At least they are conceivable."

They are conceivable, but my conception of them doesn't involve them working very well. In fact, my conception involves people hiding things so they're not distributed, getting into fights about who needs what and whether they deserve it, finding people they don't like and voting for them to lose all they have and get nothing more ... maybe I'm just too cynical for these concepts.

It might be. Salt has been used for money in a number of places for that reason alone. The reason I'm not sure about it in a post-apocalypse situation is that, depending on what happened to cause the apocalypse, you can probably go get the salt that has already been made. It is very cheap and shelf-stable, and I bet you'll think to do it before many others do. Others might raid the food stores for stuff they can eat today, but the salt shelf will probably be fine.

I stand corrected, but not by much. I don't count the internal alpha version of TCP/IP though, since a non-research user would not be using it. My point stands that fourteen years from the start of something that, if it's going to continue, would be a large change is not a lot of years.

When cars were 14 years old, they were still very new. For context, I'm using 1888 as the starting year where there was commercial production and sale of some automobiles, so we're talking about 1902. Cars weren't mass market items at that point, and plenty of the panic about them was still in the future. Fourteen years from the introduction of the telephones, there weren't many telephones around. Fourteen years after the invention of the internet, we still didn't have TCP/IP yet and they were just getting past manually making hosts files. Fourteen years after the invention of the computer, it was mostly being talked about by science fiction writers, several of which kept sticking -ac on the end of the computer names because they'd only heard of ENIAC and UNIVAC. For something that radically changes a large part of how people can do things, such as transportation or finances, it takes longer for the effects to become known and the novelty to end. This doesn't mean that pointing out that cryptocurrency frequently fails at its goals and doesn't try on our goals is wrong; it's worth considering all its faults of which it has so many I don't recommend you use it. That doesn't stop it still being novel at this point.

Amazon mandates return to office for 300,000 corporate staff

Re: Creepy

I'm still not seeing any inappropriate abuse of a relationship here. I'm seeing two things:

1. The friend told the poster about the job opportunity, and they applied to it even though they wouldn't have found it in a manual search. This is not inappropriate.

2. The friend told the employer about the qualifications of the poster which may have helped. This is not only not inappropriate, but it's also common practice to ask for and get references from former colleagues.

The part you quoted clearly says "I got an interview", which means they had to prove themselves for the job. It wasn't just handed to them. I'd have agreed with you if they said "One of them put a word in for me at their new employer and I got the job right then", but they didn't say that.

"Are you implying that people want to WFH because they don't like their office": Not at all. I am not implying that, I'm stating it outright. Lots of people, including me, avoid unpleasant offices, and fewer people will avoid nice ones.

"and if only employer could make a place employees "don't hate going", then that would end WFH?": No, I didn't say that. I said that it might help people who hate the office to not hate it so much, and then they might be happier about going there. That doesn't mean they'll always want to, just that hopefully it will be nicer.

"How employer is going to create an office better than one's home or private office?": That depends on what your home or private office is like. I didn't work from home at the start of the pandemic, so at the beginning, my home office wasn't a perfect one. It was a desk I used to build projects on that had my peripherals. My projects got evicted and that became the office. If you live in a house with an extra room you can turn into an office, it's better than if you have a small place or one with a lot of other people living in it. Maybe your home office is nicer than mine; it wouldn't surprise me. In any case, the work office doesn't have to be better than everyone's home setups. It could just be better than what it is now.

Re: Creepy

I'm not fishing for personal information. We talk to each other and reveal it. To be clear, I'm looking for extremely private details such as whether they commute by bicycle because they like cycling or just because it's convenient, information which I would later use to invite them to a cycling event if their response was that they like to do it in their free time as well. Or, in another case, to reveal that I have hobbies involving embedded hardware and so does that guy, so when I hear that that guy wants to build something in his spare time, I ask if he'd like my help building the OS image for it. Sometimes they agree, sometimes they pass, and sometimes they're the people inviting me to do something and asking me some intensely personal questions like "I have two dogs. Do you like dogs?". The horror.

I'm beginning to wonder what your colleagues think of you. You appear to view your employer as an enemy and any possibility of social interaction of a very basic kind as a risk to be avoided. I don't reveal private information to acquaintances and you don't have to either to know them a little.

Re: Creepy

That is what I said. Giving jobs to people you know, not recommending you apply. It is not nepotism if I still have to compete in the interview process and am treated with the same standards that would affect a candidate they didn't know. Here's a quick summary:

Why did I get the job:

Nepotism: Because my brother owns the company.

Not nepotism: Because my brother told me the company was looking for someone with my experience and I applied and interviewed normally.

Nepotism: Because my friend didn't want to interview anybody so just went with me.

Not nepotism: Because my friend thought I'd enjoy the company and suggested it, then I applied and interviewed normally.

You see the important point here? Do you have any evidence that the original poster didn't apply and interview normally after being told about the job?

Re: 300k

They only have about a hundred different cloud services, and although I'm not sure whether people use all of them, they have to have maintenance teams for all of that and then add more teams for the interaction and management of those services. Then financial and legal staff for all the countries in which their cloud and/or store operates. They also have a publishing system and manufacture ereaders. This might include the staff for all their subsidiaries as well. I'm not that surprised by the number.

Re: Creepy

What you've said is not what the quote says. That you have some bond with your colleagues does not mean that you have no bonds of friendship outside work, or even that the bond with your colleagues is the same strength as the ones you have with your friends. It is just a connection, and on that basis, I think it is correct (although I would phrase it in a more informal, non-corporate way).

When I've worked with people for a while, I come to know a lot about how they work. I know who is a good person to ask questions, how their work styles compare to one another, if there are significant differences in the kind of tasks they do well, etc. This helps me to complete things more successfully. It's not just work-related things either. I also start to know things like what they're interested in outside work, how they live, how friendly they are, and those things can help as well. For example, I would know who among my colleagues might be interested in working with me on a project outside work, which people I can ask for help if I need it, or who isn't happy with the job and wants to move, and I have helped colleagues leave when I knew they wanted something else. Some of those people have had so much in common that we have had a friendship that lasted even after one or more of us left the job, but many others don't. When we're working so closely together, that kind of connection is useful to everyone and, as we're social animals, is almost automatically built if the information is available. Anecdotally, I've come to know such things more quickly when I was physically close to the people concerned than when I'm doing it all from a video meeting, but this may not be universal.

Re: Creepy

I see we're adding "nepotism" to the list of words you don't know. Nepotism is if I get a job because I have some relationship to the hiring business. It is not that I apply to a job because I know the person and am then considered fairly. People don't always look at every company in existence when they're considering where to go, but if a friend says that an employer is good to work for and is looking for someone with your skills, it's worth considering them.

I think the issues you raised are the most important. I see a lot of people who like either WFH or the office and want to prove that it is always better under all conditions for every person. Most of those people also think "prove" is the same as "shout repeatedly without even trying for evidence". I don't have evidence because I haven't studied it, but there are very noticeable differences in productivity depending on what kind of office you're working in, how easily a team has productive, non-rigid discussions when they're working remotely, and whether they have methods of getting new hires added in that rely on a lot of communication between team members. There will be a different answer for a lot of groups, but even despite this, a company can use those details to adjust the situation for what they want to do. For example, if a company wants everyone to come into the office for whatever reason, they could at least make the office a place employees don't hate going. In case any companies are reading this, this means walls so you're not inundated by everyone's noises and can have some degree of separation between groups.

What Mary, Queen of Scots, can teach today’s cybersec royalty

One time pads: one more thing

"Conversely, the poor cipher used to try and hide the content of messages could have been rendered totally uncrackable, even at the time, by one-time pads, which just need dice, paper and pencil."

They need one more thing: a completely safe communication channel, even if it's later broken. If I make a set of pads and send them to you, and someone copies them in between, then our communications are wide open again. Unless I can hand them to you and both of us never have our pads copied, that system is not uncrackable. Cryptography isn't only dependent on the calculations. It is also, in fact it is more dependent on the pathways the data uses and the trustworthiness of anyone in the position to copy or read the communications. In the modern day, although one-time pads are used, it's usually only one of multiple algorithms used on the same piece of data.

Heads to roll at Lenovo amid 'severe downturn' in PC sales

Re: Renewal are due about now

My employers, however, aren't charities and also hang onto them until they're broken. The only difference is that they don't try very hard to repair them at that point. I was given a secondhand laptop when I started, and it didn't have any warranty I know about on it. I don't know how common that is, and they can be reasonably certain that I could take another laptop from the stores and get it set up for work quickly enough, so waiting for this one to keel over isn't a problem.

Re: Perceptiveness

"I think AMD with Zen 3 have put a lot of pressure on Intel, in some ways Intel probably needs to discontinue their bottom-end processor ranges..."

I doubt it. AMD's lower-end CPUs aren't that plentiful, whereas the former Celerons can be found anywhere you want them. For many cases, this isn't that interesting, but it does mean that Intel can get almost total market share in low-power, cheap CPUs that can run Windows and generic X86 Linux. Not only can you get a bunch of cheap small desktops using such chips, but they're also very popular for people building custom systems that use an AMD64 processor as the main chip but don't need fast performance. They're also capable for basic desktop use (as long as you're careful not to skimp on the RAM as well if you're running Windows), which can open an area of cheap computers for users that don't need too much.

In fact, the higher-end Intel parts are the ones that interest me less. Sure, a 24-core chip with heterogeneous core types can get some nice benchmark numbers and would probably be nice for parallelized compile runs, but I don't spend much of my day doing those and the rest of the time, the chip consumes a lot of power. They're also quite expensive. I bet they sell more chips like the Pentium N6005 than the I9-13900K.

Re: Renewal are due about now

"Most of the customers I deal with replace their kit when the warranty expires."

They are not like the people I deal with. I probably deal with far fewer organizations than you do since you describe them as customers and I just do it to volunteer for a couple charities. In the set of companies I know about, including those charities and companies that have employed me, all of them replace laptops only when they don't turn on or there are bits dangling off them on wires. I do some repairs when possible when it's a charity and my employer tends not to bother for some reason, but none will discard a computer that's working and none of them cares about it not being on warranty.

I can answer that one: not at all. Windows 11 is basically irrelevant to most device purchases. It won't encourage anyone at least until 2025 and probably not much then either, and it won't dissuade them. It won't even dissuade people who hate Windows, because they don't care whether it's Windows 10 or 11 they wipe out before installing the thing they're interested in.

The reason for the decline isn't Windows 11. It's because coincidentally, a while before Windows 11 came out, people had to buy a ton of laptops to deal with pandemic situations that required them, and all of those work just fine. A lot of demand got consolidated from last year and this year and dumped onto 2020. All those are capable of running Windows 11 for those who want it, although the last time this paper had an adoption statistics article, that wasn't a lot of people. Combine that with the fact that an old laptop is usually fine and you have a recipe for falling demand no matter what the software is.

SpaceX threatened with $175,000 fine for Starlink crash risk paperwork blunder

Re: The Register has asked the company for comment. ®...

The fine level is chosen by the enforcing organization, up to the cap. They likely reserve the highest fines for things like repeat offenses or ones where they've had less cooperation. I'm not sure if they've had to fine them for this specifically before, but that might be why the fine isn't set at the maximum.

The quest to make Linux bulletproof

Re: probably involves a web browser for some reason no one seems to be able to adequately explain.

No, by "not install" they mean to have no persistence. Pulling down a bunch of JS can, if it doesn't use some of the new filesystem APIs that are in browsers for some reason it's better not to think about, run an application while not having any permanent effect on the system after the application closes. There are times when that is desirable. There are a lot of times where it isn't, which is useful to keep in mind, but not every web-based application would be better as a client program.

More victims of fake crypto investor scam speak to The Register

Re: A fool and his money, indeed...

This is unfortunately a hubris I've seen far too often from technical people. The number of technical people who assume that they will never fall for a scam is surprisingly high. People complain when somebody sends out a phishing test that doesn't have all the words misspelled because you know all scammers do that, and they assume that they'd always check every possible indicator. It's the same problem that results in programmers who are good at writing code that achieves the goal in an efficient way assuming that it's necessarily the secure way, often reacting with outrage if anyone suggests that a vulnerability could exist.

I work in security, which means I have seen more attempts at attacks but I've also seen enough smart people be successfully conned that I am not confident that I can spot one. All I can say is that I'm reasonably confident that it hasn't happened yet. It can happen to anybody (you, me, the best programmer you can think of) because it already has happened to someone like you. Finding a reason that you sort above whatever victim you recently heard about will not protect you. It didn't happen because they're stupid. It happened because their defenses failed, but that's not the same thing.

Tesla fires gigafactory staff after someone made the mistake of mentioning unions

Re: policy

The policy is set up so they can have someone say something like "If you do anything like that you will be fired immediately and we have the ability to alter your performance history to indicate misconduct then have lawyers pursue you for it", or likely a less intense version of the above threat. Employee-hostile companies have perfected the art of threatening people without making it too obvious that's what they're doing. Nobody can get evidence of that statement, so in the NLRB meeting they can say that the reporting employee (fired by now, of course) was just making it up. It wouldn't stop me from recording anyway if I thought such a statement would be made, but if they announce a policy like this, people may think it's legally binding.

Outage-ous: Twitter OKs cannabis ads, then goes up in smoke

Re: decriminalisation

"Decriminalization means it’s not legal, but if you get found with a joint in your pocket you’ll get a court summons and a fine. Like a parking ticket."

This is incorrect. In order for the government to assess a fine, the action must be recorded as illegal, I.E. a crime. It can be downgraded from a crime that earns a prison sentence to one that earns a fine, but it's still a crime in that case. Parking tickets are crimes, although the word is often not used because it sounds too severe. While less negative words like "infraction" or "offense" may be used, the law says you shouldn't do it and can be punished for it.

The word is used instead of legalization in this case because it is not legal by federal rules, which apply anywhere in the country, and thus any user is still committing a crime as far as the federal government is concerned. Some have also used "decriminalization" to mean "a relaxation of restrictions", but this usually doesn't make sense because the thing is still a crime but people are just punished less often.

Re: Toxic

Just as "intoxication" doesn't mean "toxic", it also doesn't mean "not possible to obtain toxic level of". It is basically unrelated to toxic levels. It is true that, if you can become intoxicated by something, you can probably die from consuming too much of it that's a smaller quantity than for things that don't intoxicate you, but as I noted, this is not always the case for poisons that don't affect mental function before they kill you.

Re: Toxic

I am not arguing for or against alcohol or cannabis. I am stating the definition of intoxication and of toxicity, noting that they are different, and stopping there. The rest of the argument is up to you.

Re: decriminalisation

Part of the distinction is due to the multiple levels of US government. States can remove cannabis use from their list of crimes, which means that state law enforcement won't arrest you for having or selling it, which is what decriminalization has come to mean. The federal government still prohibits it and could arrest you if they wanted, but most of the time they would expect state law enforcement to do that and don't do anything if they're not. This leaves cannabis in a weird place where the state says it's allowed and may in fact have regulations that say that outright while the federal government says its illegal and can change its mind about ignoring the use any time it likes.

From a strict definition of the terms, decriminalization and legalization are the same, and you can say that the state government has legalized it and the federal government has not.

Re: Toxic

And if we're having a contest of what people should do, you should read the definition for "intoxication" and compare it to the definition for "toxic". You can become intoxicated, I.E. with mental effects usually with decrease in mental function, including a temporary decrease, from consumption of a substance, using a variety of things including many prescribed for medical use and some allowed for recreational use. Alcohol, for example, is also intoxicating. It does not mean poisonous, although some poisons will produce intoxication before they produce death (notably, not all do).

Also, it's worth keeping in mind that this was likely quoted from Google's restrictions, but using only a few words instead of quoting the whole sentence.

Meta cranks Zuckerberg's personal security budget to $14m while cutting everything else

Re: how about

I like the idea, but if you were still a nice person but with tons of money, there still might be a need for security. I don't have a bunch of money, so I don't know this personally, but I can imagine the possible rewards drawing in risks from people who wouldn't target a normal person. Either that or all the rich people are just paranoid.

This app could block text-to-image AI models from ripping off artists

Re: A potential wokable solution?

The first suggestion is already illegal as fraud (except possibly the corner case where the person named was the one operating the software to produce the image, but if it was just "in the style of X" then selling it as by X would certainly be fraud).

The other two sound good, but may not be enough to ease the fears of the people who created the works in the first place. I don't have a solution to that, so for now I suggest we use yours and see what happens, but people may still object to the use of images generated from their work even if no copyright is claimed. For example, such images could still be used in advertising of something else or could be put on sale with the assumption that buyers will assume they're copyrighted while never actually saying they are, and both approaches could still generate a profit.

Re: Perforce, old assumptions must be discarded

"Each instance [of a physical medium] exists uniquely in time and place. The number of instances created is finite (e.g. printed copies of a book). These substrates can be construed as property"

Except, of course, the the number of instances isn't finite because anyone can make a copy of a book. Even three centuries ago, if I owned printing equipment, I could get someone else's book and churn out more copies. The laws weren't applied because I couldn't make another copy, but because it wasn't good for me to be able to make copies of someone else's work without allowing the person who created the work to profit from their work. Copyright exists to protect the creative person's effort from someone who can just copy.

"There is but one valid economic model encompassing monetisation of idea creation. That consists of a market made up from creative individuals and groups (plus requisite skills) competing for attention from prospective sources of funding for their next project. The underlying source of funding is voluntary patronage."

Yes, that's always nice, but it won't go very far when the only way to do anything expensive is to find people who give out donations. I have a project I want to build because it's useful. Does anyone want to just hand me their money without getting any back? Usually, the answer is no, and especially when the project concerned generates a profit anyway. Incidentally, there's another market for at least some copyrighted works, which is an increasing effort spent on DRM technology. If it's legal for you to take the data I made for any purpose and I can't penalize you for doing so, then I'm incentivized to make it hard for you to copy it successfully. For the same reason, if it was legal for anyone to come attack you if they felt like it, you'd probably invest more in making it hard for people to break into your house, but if an attacker would go to jail for doing it, you may not need a fortress to protect yourself.

Uncle Sam backs right-to-repair battle against Big Ag's John Deere

Re: It’s about increased profits, of course

"Wouldn’t you sell more base units if they could be repaired by anyone?"

If there are only a few manufacturers of such things anyway, you're likely to sell a lot of units whatever you do. Unlike cars where you have a bunch of choices if you decide a specific company's not good enough, there aren't so many options when you need a specific piece of agricultural equipment, especially if finances aren't unlimited and you need to care about which one is cheaper or better supported in the short term. It's when they already have this barrier to losing sales that they start to expand where they hope to get profit from the buyers.

"Didn't immediately" is not the same as "did, but not immediately". It is also compatible with "didn't" and "hasn't yet", which are the available options in this situation. Other options that could happen are "won't" and "won't and they say so". Time will tell which one it is.

Gen Z lingo and search engines: A Millennial Odyssey

Re: Baseline

Seems obvious. Just take all these wonderful examples we've been given and mix them together, aiming to never use any noun more than once (and not even once if you can). That way, GPT won't have a clue what you're saying, and as a bonus, your writing will be indistinguishable from output from a crazed chatbot anyway so nobody will have to know a human wrote it.

Musk's view count antics are perfect cover for Twitter's paid API failure

Re: Algorithms

Well corrected. I'm tempted to claim that my poor formatting is because it can help when hiding code to give the reviewer something else to correct, but in fact I just typed it quickly. Have an upvote. And if anyone wants the better-formatted version, it's as follows:

MuskImpressionCount = (RealImpressionCount * 1000000) + (DaysSinceTweet * 100000) + (SecondsSinceTweet % 86400)

Make Linux safer… or die trying

And if it's a closed-source commercial application, they can do that. If it's an open source application, they may not want to build their own repository system for every distribution that has ever existed, but they still might want the nontechnical user to be able to install it on everything. Portability isn't just on the developer; it can also be on the OS provider.

The last thing I want to say to someone I've introduced to Linux is "yes I know you can download basically any Windows or Mac OS application off the internet and just run it, but for that one you want I'll need to repackage it because it wasn't built for your distro. Yes, your distro, it's a collection of components around Linux. Yes, you're running Linux but not all Linux systems are the same. No, there's not a true Linux that has the right version of everything, it's just lots of choices and they don't always work together. Yes, if you were still using Windows you could download that Windows file and just click on it. Never touch your computer again? If you say so." That doesn't instill confidence, and Linux doesn't deserve that when it can be solved. Again, if you don't want to use any of these packaging systems, feel free not to, but they do solve a problem for some people.

The alternative in the closed Windows or Mac environments is essentially "Throw away your equipment and buy new stuff".

No it isn't, and you know that. The alternative in the Windows world is "bring your DLLs with you and don't put them in C:\Windows anymore". Programs were terrible for violating that a couple decades ago. Not so much now (yes, there are always exceptions, but it's a lot more common to have self-contained program directories now). Apple has the same thing in the form of app bundles, which works better for GUI applications than for CLI ones. The point is that if some application needs a specific version of something and can't accept the OS-provided one, it brings that version and it stores it in such a way that it won't override anyone else's copy.

I don't know where you got the "throw away your equipment" part of this, as even the most polluted Windows or Mac OS installation, and for that matter Linux or BSD installation, can be wiped and reinstalled from scratch without having to do anything to the hardware. The benefit of packaging things with lots of dependencies is that that pollution is harder to build up.