I'm not convinced capital punishment is a sound choice, but why do they make such a big deal about it? there are opioids that would cause prompt and relatively peaceful death, not to mention extremely powerful muscle-relaxants.

with spinning rust, you might re-engineer the bulk process that coats your disks, but the boost in recording density depends on changing the parameters of the head. bulk process and one device. compare to flash, where to boost density, you have to tweak each storage cell, controlling for defects and manufacturing flaws, where the yield of each cell multiplies, so defects are exponentially likely.

disks (and to some extent tape) will always have scaling advantages over litho-fabed storage.

you can certainly argue that latency and bandwidth also suffer by the same process - but for the most part, disk performance really is fast enough for most uses. it's a bit surprising that more disk vendors haven't tossed onboard a small flash chip (to all lines of HDs).

"Intellectual Property" that is, not Internet Protocol. IETF succeeded when participants were motivated by something other than staking out as much turf to monetize. The basic premise of modern business is "do whatever it takes to get away with as much as possible", which is emphatically not part of the thought process that brought us TCP/IP, SMTP, SSH, HTTP, etc.

The problem is lawyers and MBA weasels who tell everyone that monetization is their primary duty, and that lockin and the resulting "rentier" revenue streams are the ideal course.

lockin/networkeffect is so much easier a business model than competing based on excellence.

it's an interesting question to ponder: at what level of clue do customers begin to care? does the mass market ever reach that level? implicitly, sure - a service won't succeed which can't interoperate at least well enough. but how many customers really understand the concept of protocol or API - understand it well enough to realize that it permits vendor-independent services?

Obviously, this kind of thought-control, especially when combined with state capitalism/oligarchy/kleptocracy, is what we in the west would call Fascist. It is perhaps an interesting real-life demonstration of newspeak that much of Putin's fervor, at least for public consumption, is directed *against* Fascists in Ukraine. For him, the f-word means neo-nazi, or perhaps just ultra-nationalist for any nation other than greater Russia. It's really weird and mindbending, but you can find a lot of his undiluted propaganda on the web (rt.com, plenty in youtube, and planted comments on just about any relevant news article in any media...)

I find this fascists calling each other fascists thing quite interesting, but it seems to depend on a highly prepared political environment. The ex-USSR population seems to be uniquely primed to equate fascist=nazi, with all the baggage of WW2 (including the meme that the hard part was fought in Russia, not western europe, and that the cold war was essentially a continuation of WW2, with nazi-derived forces still conspiring against The Fatherland.) I imagine that works best for the older generation, but surely any Russian under 30 must look at the internet and see something closer to the truth...

IETF made everything possible, but has unfortunately been somewhat abandoned, or at least isn't functioning as a mooring-of-sanity as it used to. In some ways, this is inevitable, since the e-world is big enough that even a small company can do its own thing, and still succeed big.

This matters for IoT, since most cloud-enabled IoT devices do totally random things: poke through firewalls with UPNP, shove your private data into some random website, potentially over insecure protocols. (Or protocols that could be secure, but are implemented poorly or are simply in need of an update.) At some level, the problem is really that the easy path, for any given cloud vendor, is to set up their own cloud infrastructure (though it might be layered on Amazon, etc). This is bad for the customer because what happens when the company crashes, or gets bought and dissolved, or when the company just decides to stop supporting the device?

IETF should be thinking along the lines of a *local* data hub that you own, that your devices talk to over a simpler, standard protocol. Not that security can be ignored just because traffic is local, but an extra level of indirection makes all the difference in hardware as well as software. Whether that local hub is intelligent, whether it has storage - open question. And maybe devices need to fall back to trying to talk to the external cloud. But customers will eventually realize that they should want their own data to at least potentially be under their own control, not inherently subject to the vagaries of some whispy, transient external cloud. You don't want your fire alarm dependent on random external sites, or your internet-enabled door locks, or your thermostat, etc.

People often confuse systematicity with science. Which means they don't really get the point of science, of course. But this also explains things like Kabala, Homeopoathy, betting systems, orthodox religion, some diets, as well as the astrology thing.

let people perform whatever edits they want, but track the provenance of *everything*. let readers select some function of provenance as a rendering option, with the default being provenance of a pretty high standard of quality and non-conflicted-interest. letting people attach endorsements or upvotes is a pretty valuable kind of metadata anyway.

the problem seems to be the very idea that wikipedia should present a single, canonical version. absolutes are only found in faith, not the real world...

He played an important part in the history of open source, but the movement is well-enough established that ideological purity is no longer necessary.

the big problem is that all this desktop crap doesn't matter. oh, sure, it's pretty. does it get work done? compared to, say, OLVWM from ages ago. sure, I think wiggly windows are a cool hack, and like to use a GPU to make things smoother. but most of this desktop stuff is just masturbation-by-coding. dbus, systemd, wayland, most of gnome, any form of skinning, etc.

yes, X-over-ssh is non-negotiable. it would be great if the X-now-wayland wankers did their wanking on some more-async, lower-bandwidth interface that didn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. VNC, I think not. Xcb was about the last good idea to come from these people...

pretty soon desktops will be completely irrelevant, since the only GUI of the future is html*.

They're treating the symptoms of the problem, not the cause. This is usually a bad idea.

No, this is not clickbait.

Normal, mentally-healthy humans have a lot of empathy - otherwise we're psychopaths. Sure, the amount of empathy varies - mainly as a function of whether the animal in question tends to act human-like. We should embrace this, not cynically write it off - empathy *IS* humanity.

Yes, that also means that anyone who is intelligent and reflective will be uncomfortable with eating meat, concerned how the animal died, and of course what kind of animal it was. This is basically orthogonal to issues of environmental or ecological impact.