When the tech is this awesome, the answer is always "of COURSE we should!!!"

You know, like this.

Same goes with CRISPR. The moment we CAN use it to create mosquitoes and ticks that don't suck blood, yellowjackets that don't sting you for no reason at all, Humans with three eyes for full trinocular depth perception, humans with gills for breathing underwater, humans with gorilla strength, and human-spider hybrids, we absolutely should. In fact, I don't understand why we don't have government funding on these projects already.

Yeah. I'd expect journalists to know basic grammar and not use present tense when talking about last year.

On my Firefox Nightly I have an extension to set Yandex as an allowed default search engine. Makes it easier to pop up another browser for a session.

Somebody fix that extension to work on mobile, eh?

They don't - something like this needs an Act or Congress.

SCOTUS made up some BS "Chevron Deference" in the 80's which has been abused like this since.

The current /Maine Fisheries/ case should dissolve Chevron deference.

We may like the FTC proposal on this one but with that kind of power and no representation it's only counting the days until they do something we absolutely detest. And then there's no effective recourse.

Weren't the founders and top management of Google citizens of Israel?

It dozen't seem all surprising from that perspective.

These protesters should have gone back to writing code to surveil Americans, I guess?

Sometimes a Good paperback at ThriftBooks is $1 less than a new one at Amazon so I just get the new one.

Weird market!

PS unless the recent printings have been Trust & Safety'ed.

The belief that old technicians are unwilling/unable to update their skillset is largely false. Only the bottom-tier of technical talent has such a learning disability. Most technicians can do this easily.

This false belief is used to justify ageism of course, but the real reason motivating ageism is the very true fact that young technicians are much more willing to harmfully overwork themselves than old technicians. New technicians naively believe that all that overwork proves their importance to their employer and secures them a high salary and a secure job. These things are entirely false, and come at a cost of health and life-enjoyment. By the time they learn these lessons the hard way, they have become old technicians who are no longer wanted.

As an aside...

Over the course of my career, I saw businesses adopting technologies which are not very portable and not likely to live very long. The reason is....it was new, cool, trendy, sounded good in marketing, easier to draw tech talent that knows it and wants to work on it. The downside is...they now have a very large application written in technology that has been killed by its own vendor, and the path to upgrading to the new tech is very expensive.

It is still entirely possible to build super-fast, responsive, immersive websites today using ancient tech like the Common Gateway Interface, Apache, HTML/Javascript/CSS, with C++ on the back end. Tech written that way, and written well, can run circles around the bloated third-party-heavy slopped together crap that gets churned out for most websites. BUT nobody wants to use that old tech because it is harder to use (especially C++), takes longer to implement, harder to find talent who are willing to use it, and doesn't confer any buzzword bingo benefits to the marketing team.

So it IS true that tech gets reinvented every few years, and it IS true that everything that was written on the latest tech now needs to be re-written, but it is NOT true that things have to be that way (as there IS a category of old tech that would totally work and work well for these purposes and would avoid the need for re-writes every few years). Most companies just don't have the will to take that kind of long-term view.

It's not morons.

It's people overwhelmed with multiple crisis scenarios that they can't handle. Most of us wish for a stable society and environment because it makes it easier to plan a future. You wouldn't build a house if you're not sure it's still going to be there in five years.

Calling people morons instead of understanding the actual problem is also a way to avoid looking at it too closely, probably because the complexity is overwhelming to you, too. Easier to just call people morons and be done with it.

Climate change is very much a social, cultural and political problem and the scientists have only looked at the meteorological and biological side of it.

We don't.

It's just not necessary in 90% of Europe. We didn't build mega-cities in near tropical climate. A week or two of really hot weather during the summer is not a problem and you wouldn't install an AC just for that.

Maybe some are, but both in my place and where my parents live (1200 km away, that's 750 miles for the metrically challenged) temperatures have plummeted to near freezing at night and single-digits during the day (in Celsius, that's the 35 to 45 range in Fahrenheit for the temperature scale challenged).

I don't doubt climate change at all. But shoddy journalism that creates headlines where those allegedly affected go "what? not at all, why are you lying?" only helps the deniers.

If you look at a weather map of Europe, like this one stuck in the early 2000s - https://www.weatheronline.co.u... - you'll see that at least right now only the very, very southern tips of Europe (in Spain and Greece, that's in the bottom-left corner and the bottom-right corner, no not the very corner that's already Africa, damn where were you in geography?) has temperatures above 20ÂC predicted for today, and that's not unusually hot for those regions.

We did have unusually hot weather 2-3 weeks ago, but they were unusual only for the season and still well below ordinary summer days.

Please get your reporting right, or you're only feeding the trolls that claim climate change is made up.

I wish, and I would welcome it if they did.

However, as one of the foremost SELinux advocates in its early days, I doubt that the government of all places has the capability to do so. Few sysadmins can configure SELinux halfway decently (i.e. beyond the default policies) and the government (outside the military and secret services) isn't a good tech employer.

Also, MS is far more than the OS. With Office and a bunch of other tools, plus lots of custom software made only for Windows, the entrechnment is really, really deep.

Good flick if you want to get a feel for how Pharma sales work.

I'm surprised it hasn't be Pfbanned yet based on who it highlights.

They always rant about Wayland, systemd, Pulse/Pipewire, devops, dkms, quic, zfs, etc.

I used to wonder why they don't just not upgrade their os, but then I realized they are lazy and want somebody else to maintain their old system for them.

I mean, even compiling gentoo with the right use set is too hard for these bellyachers.

Yet the humility never occurs to them that the non-lazy people who actually build distros are embracing the newer technology.

Instead the Old Farts case aspersions and ad-hominems at these hard workers. It's pathetic.

I'm done with their BS and won't help them understand anymore - the arguments are almost universally in bad faith.

Because otherwise they would just not upgrade. I have some Infomagic Slackware CD's from 1993 they might be interested in. Yeah, my first Linux box was over 30 years ago and I competently run all those technologies now. I don't fear change even though understanding new tech takes work and I can't just rest on my laurels.

In some states, if you witness a crime you have a legal mandate to report. That's it though, you don't have a legal mandate to intervene. Furthermore, in many places you have a legal mandate to flee as well.

Even if there is neither a legal mandate to flee nor to report, if you remain at a party where rape is going on, you are still putting yourself at great legal risk since you could very easily get included in the subsequent round of accusations even if you were not involved. So, even if you broke no laws, you could be found guilty of some by an imperfect legal system. It is therefore in your best interest to get the hell out (and to report as that is likely going to reduce the risk of you being falsely accused as one of the perpetrators).

You, however, seem to be talking about some sort of social/moral obligation to intervene. Is that true? I apologize in advance if I am misunderstanding your post. So from a social/moral perspective I say you still don't have an obligation to intervene unless you have overtly accepted a role of bodyguard. There is no holy law that requires you to risk yourself helping someone else. There may be consequences to inaction, of course. As you said, you cannot "hope it will go away." Hope will have no beneficial outcome. If you want the activity to stop then you have your own incentive to do something about it. And, on the other hand, if you do nothing at all you might wind up with a reputation as a non-hero. But even that doesn't obligate you to do anything at all. It is up to you to decide what outcomes you would prefer, what consequences you are willing to accept, and what risks you are willing to take.

There are ways of protesting genocide that do not involve disrupting business and possibly breaking the law. Such disruptive actions certainly get attention, but they do so at the cost of potential harm to other innocent parties, and so they are not always the best option. The protestors could have chosen peaceful and non-disruptive protests. You are free to praise their obnoxious behavior and consider it justified if you like, but again there is no social obligation for anyone to join you in holding those opinions.

The Geneva Convention does not require any free person to "do everything within our power to stop it."

Nor should it. Even if there are crimes against humanity happening somewhere in the world, I don't owe those victims my life. That's what freedom means. I am not required to stand up and sacrifice myself, my resources, or my efforts on their behalf. The word "duty" is popularly used to manipulate other people to do things. But duty is accepted, not imposed*. Your personal belief that people "should" get involved does not, in fact, obligate anyone to get involved.
Simply put, we do not have such a duty. If we choose to stop something, it is because we have decided for our own reasons to go above-and-beyond on someone else's behalf.

*Governments create laws that require their citizens to do things, and often use the word "duty" to describe that. In these cases, the more accurate term is "legal mandate." But "duty" is used instead as a synonym. This results in equivocation with such uses as "moral duty" or "social duty," which are cases where there is no legal authority imposing the duty and as such individuals are not beholden to it unless they explicitly accept it.