Yes, you can catch a few more criminals by total surveillance. But in return you violate everyone else's privacy.

Is Red Hat discontinuing RHEL? Is this is last release our merely the latest one?

Am I the only one who had to read the story to learn that Amazon is trying to buy a mobile operator rather than a C++ library?

While the study of these functions is called "trigonometry", the functions themselves are called trigonometric.

How could knowledge be erased from people's brains by a change to a code repository?

Sorry, but the term "virtual desktop" already has a meaning: it refers to having a logical screen larger than the physical screen. Microsoft is offering remote desktop functionality, not a virtual desktop.

One of the points of a properly constituted "basic income" scheme is that the income is supposed to be unconditional, exactly to remove such perverse incentives.

That you receive a rotten deal doesn't mean others should also

.

Indeed, the program imposed a 50% income tax on working participants: for any $1.00 they made working, the "basic income" was reduced $0.50. That defeats the point of the whole programme.

Cryptographically signing applications to ensure integrity and authenticity may be a good idea (as long as phone owners retain the option, existing today, of installing apps from other sources if they wish). This scheme has nothing to do with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), which is a name for methods intended to prevent users from copying works which are protected by copyright. DRM is technology that's supposed to prevent users from copying content (movies, e-books, etc), or more generally enforce whatever restrictions the supplier would like to enforce. Since DRM generally prevents users from doing things they would otherwise be able to legally do (make fair use of portions of the works; make backup copies; copy works in the public domain etc) it is justifiably considered a bad thing. I suspect that putting the DRM moniker on this possibly beneficial technology is motivated by encouraging users to think of DRM as something that protects their rights instead of something that violates them.

This is ridiculous. The claim is not that the shifts went away (that less waiting staff was needed) but that higher-rated waiters got the shifts at the expense of lower-rated waiters. In other words, this helps waiters who are liked by the customers and hurts waiters who aren't liked by the customers. From the point of view of the customers this is a positive development -- they are getting the service they want. This is also good for waiters that do what customers like -- this fact is now recognized and leading to an increase in their pay. Naturally, from the point of view of waiters that customers don't like, this is a negative development, but why should we think it a problem? It is telling the authors of the article neglected to interview the waiters who got the extra shifts or the extra tables that were taken away from the badly performing waiters. It is true that the reasons the customers like the waiters may have nothing to do with the table service as such -- for example, customers may prefer better-looking waiters, or waiters of the same race as themselves, or whatever. But regardless of the reason what happened here is that the restaurant now offers service which more conforms to what cusomters like.

There is no rule in English grammar about splitting infinitives. There is such a "rule" in Latin (where infinitives are single words and can't be split).

Why am I not surprised to discover that both the container for format (HEIF) Anna the codec (HVEC) are extensively covered by patents? This is the GIF story again, except this time done deliberately by Apple and Microsoft.

The headline is misleading -- it was Congress that wrote the law, where the term "whistleblower" is specifically defined to only include those who report misconduct to the SEC. The Supreme Court simply confirmed that we are governed by the law as written.

Note that elsewhere in Dodd–Frank (in the part dealing with reporting to the CFPB) and in Sorbanes–Oxley whistleblowers are defined differently, so that even those that only report misconduct internally are protected.

BSD has non-GPL version of libc and libm; in any case you only have to offer the source code, not to directly contribute it to the upstream project.