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Comment Re:Repeal the law! (Score 2, Interesting) 149

by johnnys (#63789282) Attached to: Trudeau Denounces Meta's News Block As Fires Force Evacuations

Don't believe the narrative being peddled here!!

What is really happening is that the "Liberal" government of Canada got caught trying to scam Meta and Google into paying a huge amount of money to the government's favourite news outlets. You know, the ones that only report on stories that make the government look good!

Background:

The fact is that most "news organizations" benefit in one important way from the platforms built by Meta and Google, in that platforms used to directly and indirectly provide exposure to those news organizations by allowing posts of links to those news sites by their customers or by third party or platform-provided news aggregators. So in this way, the benefit of the platforms to the news organizations is positive and it makes no sense to "charge" the platform for posting news links. Indeed, there are multiple "news organizations" that have stated they will go under if the platforms start blocking the posting of their links.

The problem is that there IS an area where the platforms have caused severe cash flow problems for the news organizations, and that area is advertising. Advertisers see little benefit in paying news organizations for posting ads when the platforms can provide them with much better exposure for their ads. Historically, the news organizations have been funded by their advertising, and the new reality is that particular financial model no longer works for them. Revenue from advertising has dried up and the platforms are happily eating the news organizations' lunches.

So, just like a buggy whip company demanding government assistance when everybody drives cars, the news organizations are desperate to find a new revenue source. Somehow the LPC government has decided that they can go after the platforms on behalf of the news organizations in exchange for positive coverage from those news organizations. (Oops, was I not supposed to say that part out loud?) The only reason we're hearing whining from the LPC talking heads about "stealing" and "paying their fair share" is because the LPC has learned that if you tell a lie loud enough and often enough, it eventually starts to be believed.

What's happened here is that the strategy to shake down the platforms for money has failed as they are not willing to play ball. Now the LPC government looks like the incompetent grifters they are, as the platforms simply (and rightly!) refuse to pay the extortion fees.

Bottom line is that the news organizations need to understand that the old business model is gone and is not coming back, and trying to lobby the government to keep them afloat is reprehensible and will never work.

What this means:

So how does that relate to what is happening here?

This is all smoke and mirrors to cover up the grift of the JustInept Tru-D'OH government.

1) JustInept is implying that Canadians are so stupid that they can't get their news from any site except Google or Facebook. This is the sort of contempt for Canadians that this government holds for its own citizens.

2) JustInept thinks that he can keep screaming about how the platforms are "bad" and don't "pay their fair share" and instead of the government actually effectively communicating directly with the citizens, it's somehow the fault of Meta and Google that the government can't effectively communicate.

3) Nobody likes the platforms or thinks that they have the best interests of their users at heart, But, in THIS case, they are not the villains .The idiocy of the pathetic current Canadian government is the real cause of all this nonsense.

Submission + - Russia's bid to return to the Moon comes to an ignominious end (economist.com)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: A rash of small, fresh craters across the lunar surface testifies to the international rush to return to the Moon by means of robot spacecraft. In April 2019 the gyroscopes on Beresheet, built by a public-private Israeli partnership, failed during the craft’s descent towards a patch of Mare Serenitatis, causing it to crash. In September that year Chandrayaan-2, a mission by the Indian space agency, ISRO, departed from trajectory towards its landing site, not far from the Moon’s south pole. The result was what ISRO’s chief called “a hard landing”—one sufficiently hard for the probe to have never been heard from again. This April a mission by ispace, a Japanese company, ended shortly after the HAKUTO-R spacecraft decided that it had reached the surface of Mare Frigoris while still 5km above it, and turned off its engines. The Moon’s gravity is weaker than the Earth’s, but not by so much that a spacecraft can weather a fall from that distance.

On the morning of August 20th Russia announced that it had joined the ranks of the new crater-makers. Its Luna 25 mission, launched on August 11th, entered orbit around the Moon on August 16th. It was due to undertake its landing five days later. But on August 19th, just after its controllers had told it to adjust its orbit in preparation, contact with the probe was lost. On the morning of August 20th Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, announced that “a deviation between the actual and calculated parameters of the propulsion manoeuvre led the Luna 25 spacecraft to enter an undesignated orbit and it ceased to exist following a collision with the surface of the Moon”.

The Russian failure has to be seen as far more embarrassing than those that came before it. Though the Soviet Union, from which Russia’s space programme derives, never landed people on the Moon, as America did, it was capable of mounting sophisticated missions involving long-duration rovers and rockets that would return samples of the lunar surface to Earth. For Russia to be unable to manage a much simpler mission 50 years later—indeed, for it not even to get to the difficult descent stage, but to mess things up in orbit—shows how far its capabilities have fallen.

Nor is this a one-off. Russia has failed to mount any successful missions beyond Earth’s orbit since the fall of the Soviet Union. Its space programme has other problems, too. Long a supplier of relatively cheap, reliable launches for commercial satellites, Russia struggled to compete with the rise of SpaceX and its highly dependable, reusable rockets even before its invasion of Ukraine subjected it to international sanctions. And when SpaceX demonstrated the capacity to fly astronauts in its Dragon 2 spacecraft, Russia’s role as the only country with the wherewithal to get people to and from the International Space Station went by the wayside.

Comment Re:Unintended but totally predictable consequences (Score 5, Insightful) 170

by johnnys (#63778992) Attached to: Canada Demands Meta Lift News Ban To Allow Wildfire Info Sharing

Speaking as an adult Canadian, I can confirm that what Lord Kano says is absolutely TRUE. The idiocy of the current JustInept Tru-D'oh! "LPC" government is clear:

The fact is that most "news organizations" benefit in one important way from the platforms built by Meta and Google, in that platforms (currently) directly and indirectly provide exposure to those news organizations by allowing posts of links to those news sites by their customers or by third party or platform-provided news aggregators. So in this way, the benefit of the platforms to the news organizations is positive and it makes no sense to "charge" the platform for posting news links. Indeed, there are multiple "news organizations" that have stated they will go under if the platforms start blocking the posting of their links.

The problem is that there IS an area where the platforms have caused severe cash flow problems for the news organizations, and that area is advertising. Advertisers see little benefit in paying news organizations for posting ads when the platforms can provide them with much better exposure for their ads. Historically, the news organizations have been funded by their advertising, and the new reality is that particular financial model no longer works for them. Revenue from advertising has dried up and the platforms are happily eating the news organizations' lunches.

So, just like a buggy whip company demanding government assistance when everybody drives cars, the news organizations are desperate to find a new revenue source. Somehow the LPC government has decided that they can go after the platforms on behalf of the news organizations in exchange for positive coverage from those news organizations. (Oops, was I not supposed to say that part out loud?) The only reason we're hearing whining from the LPC talking heads about "stealing" and "paying their fair share" is because the LPC has learned that if you tell a lie loud enough and often enough, it eventually starts to be believed.

What's happened here is that the strategy to shake down the platforms for money has failed as they are not willing to play ball. Now the LPC government looks like the incompetent grifters they are, as the platforms simply (and rightly!) refuse to pay the extortion fees.

Bottom line is that the news organizations need to understand that the old business model is gone and is not coming back, and trying to lobby the government to keep them afloat is reprehensible and will never work.

It's really sad.

Comment Re: Respect or lack of (Score 1, Informative) 62

"extremely unpopular *BSD operating systems"?

At risk of triggering the infamously tedious "BSD is dead" zombie troll army, the various BSDs are NOT "extremely unpopular" at all. They are in widespread use in embedded systems, enterprise-grade firewalls and other hardware, as well as having a very large Internet presence.

Besides that, the BSDs and their communities have been major contributors to many of the tools and systems vital to modern cyber infrastructure. Look at the list of important software created just by OpenBSD and its community here: https://www.openbsd.org/innova...

As for FreeBSD "If you stream movies via Netflix, chat with friends on WhatsApp, or play the latest PlayStation 4 game sensation, you're already using FreeBSD. " Ref: https://freebsdfoundation.org/...

Note: credit to OSNews for publishing the OpenBSD link here: https://www.osnews.com/story/1...

"extremely unpopular"? NAFC

Comment Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score 3, Interesting) 141

by johnnys (#63573819) Attached to: Red Hat is Dropping Its Support for LibreOffice

If the "office suite" has moved to the cloud, that's going to be a problem in multiple industries, particularly any work that not only needs to be secure, but needs to be able to "prove" it was secure.

Can a lawyer use an online tool to create, manage and record sensitive client data? Is that the best service a lawyer can provide, where the sensitive data is put in the hands of cloud providers who may or may not be doing their security properly?

If an investigator investigating a crime, or a witness in a trial has used online tools to record, save and/or prepare evidence into exhibits, how do they "prove" the integrity and confidentiality of the exhibits? Is the presenter of the exhibit going to have to attest to the confidentiality and integrity of "the cloud"? Because that's really not possible.

Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your data in your own hands!

Comment Re:What? (Score 5, Insightful) 195

This is a strawman argument.

There's two scenarios here:

(1) Ubuntu openly ASKS PERMISSION to send a single report ONE time to Ubuntu, while publicly publishing the code for the report generator on Github AND publishing statistics generated from the data sent to Ubuntu for public use. The data collected only includes hardware and configuration information available during the initial installation of the OS.

(2) Microsoft surreptitiously collects data CONTINUALLY from the user and sells it to anyone who will pay for it. That information can include ANYTHING on the computer, including hardware, software and any personal data or information. There is no way to know what is being collected and sent, and there is NO way to definitively STOP OR MONITOR this process.

I have issues with Ubuntu but ongoing, privacy-destroying, and surreptitious telemetry is not one of them.

Comment Re:Helium manufacturing (Score 2) 130

by johnnys (#63011181) Attached to: The World Is Running Out of Helium. Why Doctors are Worried

Absolutely agree. I have been waiting for someone to make this point.

Here in NA, there is an ongoing problem in many houses with too much radon in the basement, caused by better air sealing around windows in an effort to improve energy efficiency. And when radon decays, it commonly (but not always) decays by by emitting an "alpha particle". And an alpha particle is simply the nucleus of a helium atom. So helium is continually being created in well-sealed basements!

The reason this is useful info is that it demonstrates that the actual "helium production" from the Earth is quite prolific: the current reservoirs of helium (primarily oil and natural gas fields) will continue to replenish their helium content for the foreseeable future.

All we need to do is properly husband the existing helium resources and we will have enough helium for as long as we care to have it available.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Comment Re:subject (Score 1) 362

by johnnys (#62533934) Attached to: Nuclear Energy: the Case Against
Look up "STOWAWAY" and "THROWAWAY". Back in the 1960s the technology for a "slow breeder reactor" was under understood and available for providing fission power for many generations, not just 150 years.

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