I'm a huge fan of Firefox but an LWN comment just pointed out that they've been paying Mitchell Baker 2.5 million USD per year.

https://assets.mozilla.net/ann...

I was going to sign up for their VPN service as a way to support them (and I probably stil will) but damn this makes me feel like a punk.

The article doesn't mention the patent number nor jurisdiction (US, India, other). I can't find any records at the USPTO that match PepsiCo, FC5 or seem to have anything to do with potatoes.

Any other details?

"Privacy is a top concern" is exactly the kind of thing that people unconcerned with privacy say.

This is an evil product.

I'd agree. In my experience, as well as in lots of news stories, the reaction of most companies to ai "failures" would be to threaten prosecution of anyone (especially employees) who releases the information to the public. They and probably the courts would all agree that such info is and should be trade secrets and proprietary.

Oh, jeez; they did it again. The preview even showed my text as paragraphs, exactly as I'd typed them. Then when I submit it, my text appears on my screen as one giant paragraph. Anyone know how to reliably get the paragraph into through to a /. reader now? The method I was using before has totally failed.

My question would be whether they'll help solve an ongoing problem for performers: It can be very difficult to learn who wrote a tune or song, who owns the rights to it, etc. The "business" sources for this info are often incomplete, or just wrong. To see the problem, try searching for the composer of songs. You tend to get links to sites that say things of the form "[Song Title] by [Person]". But when you investigate, you find that "by" usually means "performed by" or "recorded by". They rarely distinguish this from "composed by", and very rarely is the actual composer mentioned. The main problem is that song and tune titles are often different, and over the years different songs/tunes have been written with the same (or very similar) titles. If they were written in different countries, it can be very difficult to straighten out the mess. Sometimes a title belongs to dozens (or hundreds) of different musical works. A slightly less important problem is that several composers may have the same name. One of the fun conversations I've had with a number of publishers is asking them how I can figure out which tunes (or songs) they own the publishing rights to. When they say I can look up the titles in their indexes, I have to point out what they certainly know, that most of those titles are not unique to them, and other companies have published different works with the same titles. Their final answer is always the same: All I have to do is buy a copy of every (musical) publication in their catalog. Yeah, and when I've done that for every publisher in every country, and bought a new house big enough to hold them all, I'll have the info. But I'll have a slight problem: Each answer will be inside millions of printed books, which will take me years to search for each title. But this does get across why the system is so messed up and unusable: Publishers (and composers) have a financial interest in making the information difficult to find. The only way that's actually workable is to publish your own version of a musical work, and wait until someone sues you. This has some subtle problems of its own, of course, but it's what maximizes the actual publishers' incomes. ;-) Somehow, I sorta doubt that youtube will ever figure out how to put correct composer info with every song in every video. Or even in a minority subset of them. They certainly won't get the correct names from many of the people making the videos; they'll just get "by [Performer Name]".

Yeah, it used to be the beavers' job in the ecosystem to impound and preserve the world's fresh water. But we humans killed most of them some time back, so now it's up to us to do the job. Too bad we're generally not as good at it as they were. But give us a few million more years, and maybe we'll get better at it. ;-)

Now can we all stop worrying about security and NPPI since it's all out there anyway?

It's futures-based, so I don't think they have to actually hold any bitcoin.

How do you know that? Where is the real document that proved that?

Quick! Everybody download it before Trump deletes it from the internet archive!

In the decades I've worked as a software developer, I've almost never had a boss who cared at all for "perfect". OTOH, I can think of many times when I was explicitly ordered to not implement something correctly. Normally, their only concern is getting deliveries to customers, which involves satisfying sales people and customer people who usually have no clue at all about software quality, and are primarily concerned with money issues.

Granted, I have had a few cases where, years after my job was terminated, I received some nice messages saying that nobody had ever found a bug in any of the sofware that I wrote. But this is after the fact; while working they were never particularly interested in high-quality code. And they had no way of judging it except by waiting for years and counting the reported bugs.

So I'd predict that most educators and employers will be pleased by the "hour of code" concept, and will push for its adoption. Then they'll work out the bugs in the approach in the future, as the bugs make themselves known.

Not always. For example, I've been experimenting with portables to see how usable they are for displaying music. (Not playing music; I'm talking about readable "sheet" music".) Scenario: I'm going to an event like a jam session, my phone/tablet/whatever may not have Web access there, so I'd like to pre-load a lot of likely pages that I and a lot of other musical friends have put online.

But when I get there and wake up my gadget, most of the browsers instantly attempt to reload all those pages, find they can't, and display their "not available" message instead of the page they were showing. The buttons showing never include a "show the previous version from cache" choice; the info is just gone. I do a lot of web testing, so I have at least a dozen of the most "popular" browsers loaded on each. So far, the only browser I've found that doesn't fail this way has been Firefox, which just simply wakes up and continues where it was. So it's the only one I use to pre-load things for an event.

I've found it fairly easy to demo this at home. I just load up a few pages into a few browsers, show people that they all work when I switch between the browsers, etc. I suggest that others do the same on their cell phones. Then I invite people to join me on a short walk. When I get about a block away from home, my home wifi is out of range, all the other wifis have passwords, and I show them the screen, which shows an error message rather than the music it had a few seconds earlier. As we walk, the others also show the same thing happening in the browsers on their screens.

The vendors (especially Apple) reply that we should just use their apps, which can be set to not screw up that way. But to test my stuff on all those apps, I'd have to get a whole pile of cell phones and tablets, and also pay for service for all of them, which would cost me more money than I have. So I only test with browsers, which the vendors have (knowingly and with malice aforethought .-) set up to fail this way.

It's weird that Opera also fails this way. You'd think they'd be different. And maybe Opera and/or other browsers have a setting to turn off this automatic reloading. If so, I've never found it. Or, in a couple of cases, I found it in an early release, but it was gone after an upgrade.

Anyone know a general way to turn off this automatic reloading? I do suspect that it's possible with some browsers, but they do a good job of hiding it or renaming it so it isn't very recognizable.

In any case, notice that none of the "pages" I'm talking about are "live". They're just pages of sheet music, that stay the same until edited by a human. So there's no need to reload them at all. And discarding a page because there's no wifi service is inexcusable in any case. It's just pure user-hostility on the part of the vendors.

"Proportional" doesn't mean "identical".

Remember when Kissinger cut the Soviet's legs out from under them with an intelligence briefing to communist China? Look it up. It was devastating to Soviet strategy.

There's lots of embarrassing data we have on Putin and lots of ways it can be easily used to hurt him.

Now finding someone in the administration clever enough to use it... that may be difficult.

How do you know that?

I honestly can't decide whether I think he's a hero or a villain because we just don't know if he took it with him or if he limited the scope of what he stole to only data about domestic spying.