So then it's the politicians fault. Not the prisons. Vote in politicians (and justice officials) who are motivated by the idea of reforming felons and applying proportionate sentences instead of merely punishing them.

It's quite different. Anyone doing work for mossad wouldn't announce it in any way, shape or form whether they took the page down later or not. If they took the page down it might be because they are the centre of a shitstorm at the moment.. You can't rationalize around this because no rationalization makes any sense. Spy agencies would not and do not do this.

The state pays the prison to operate under certain parameters and if it so wished one of them could be recidivism rates. e.g. by requiring prisons to offer certain facilities, training, eduction and certain living standards.

So I don't it being relevant who runs the prison providing it abides by standards. What is more important is the political recognition that putting the time into ensuring people don't reoffend will pay off in the future.

I believe a far bigger issue is that the US has the most fucked up justice system anywhere in the western world.

Stop being so silly. If Mossad was involved with this software then they wouldn't scream it from an about page. There wouldn't be an about page. There wouldn't be a product at all. If they wanted to infect PCs they would do so in a targeted way and they wouldn't shout about it.

It is more likely that this guy left their services and applied some of the tricks he learned to a commercial purpose - writing a library that allows various spyware / adware libraries to hijack clicks and traffic and inject their own affiliate ids / ads / search results into the response.

No one says it's a good or honourable thing but the primary motivation appears to be money and nothing else. It's still a security threat. It's still utterly reprehensible. But it seems to be the guy enriching his own pocket.

If it was really Mossad they'd be installing the code onto PCs used by their enemies for intelligence gathering. They wouldn't be installing it onto new PCs so they could popup ads for penis enlargement pills.

The article suggests that the earth's rotation would cause the dropped to hit the wall on the way down. So why can't the tunnel curve to account for this? Presumably it would curve the other way as it exits. It also suggests that going from North to South pole wouldn't work because of their relative altitudes, but is there an antipodal point where the altitudes are close enough feasibly go from one side to another - e.g. build a tunnel / raised platform to bring each side to the same altitude. I realise this is all completely hypothetical, bad movie remakes notwithstanding.

What about a $500 wooden volume knob which claims to dampen micro vibrations?

Audiophiles are clearly idiots. A rich seam of idiots with a lot of money that companies specialise in exploiting by selling expensive tat to.

As for this Sony thing, the impression appears to be it would offer absolutely no benefit whatsoever to playback though I guess it's conceivable that recording artists and the like would find a use for it if it reduces radio interference when they're trying to record something.

How can a contract be worth any value at all if the store didn't even bother to validate the identify of the person signing? How can my signature by valid if I scrawl "Mickey Mouse" or draw a dick because they're not looking.

Whatever tenuous reason they might have for a signature, it's not a very good one. If they cared for the strength of their contract they would do the minimum necessary to verify it was the person with authorisation to use the card.

As for the cashier, that's part of the reason for chip and pin. It takes the authentication and authorisation out of their hands. Either the transaction goes through or it doesn't but at least some security is applied.

Just like bitcoin? And bitcoin is a fraud free libertarian paradise as we all know.

My typical experience as a traveller - I walk up to checkout with an item, present my card, it's swiped, I scrawl a signature on a (usually broken) digital capture device but the cashier never bothers to authenticate the card, or look at the name on it, or ask for id, or match the signature to the card. In a restaurant, the card might even be taken away to be swiped and it doesn't occur to either the restaurant or customers why this might be a bad thing.

So it's hardly surprising if the US receives the highest amount of fraud. It's trivial to skim the details because it's all stored on the magstripe, stores hold the info in arcane systems, there is no authentication and there is no financial burden on the store if fraud occurs.

Chip and pin isn't perfect but it's FAR better than the US system. In Europe every business has a chip and pin device. Restaurants have a portable chip and pin device. Supermarkets and stores have one at the cashier. You pay by sticking the card in the device and authenticating with it. There is less scope for the card to be skimmed because the card never leaves the customer's hands. There is less scope for a malicious store because authenticating and authorisation is via a secure payment system.

Ideally cards wouldn't even have a mag stripe any more. Give businesses 5 years to replace their decrepit equipment and banks to upgrade their ATMs and then get rid of them. Chip and pin and NFC cover the same use cases and provide better security into the bargain.

I expect most people if asked, if they wanted their computer to book to desktop in 15 seconds instead of 30 seconds (for example) with would pick the former. So yes they desire what systemd gives them even if they have no idea what systemd is.

The best way to get Linux accepted by the mainstream is to deliver a modern, stable, user friendly, forgiving, slick desktop which doesn't require a PHD to operate, doesn't require a terminal to be opened (ever), and offers the functionality people bought their damned computer (or tablet) for in the first place - word processing, games, browsing, streaming video etc.

The problem with the Linux community is that never seems to sink in. I watched this same thing play over and over through the years. Criticize Linux or a part thereof and the wagons circle. Suggest that an app or desktop isn't usable and the RTFM brigade leaps out to justify the brokenness. Propose or implement change and watch the reactions become outright hostile. This is most obvious with recent changes to SysV to systemd and X11 to Wayland but it's nothing new.

The Linux community can be its own worst enemy sometimes. It's like some like Linux being a niche and have the siege mentality to go with it.

They have a lot of control over their own dist. What other dists do is entirely up to them. Which is why Red Hat uses yum / rpm and other dists do their own thing.

The fact that other dists have moved to systemd may be due to the fact that SysVInit has recognized issues, particularly when supporting modern desktop / server environments and by comparison to other operating systems (Windows, Solaris etc.) and so they've chosen to switch.

The Amiga's GPU was a blitter, able to copy chunks of memory with bitplane / step / overlap / mask info over from address A to address B. Enough for moving sprites around but not much else. It also had something called copper which was a way to video interupt sync certain actions (e.g. switching the palette) but hardly meaningful by today's standards.

The Amiga only really got a proper graphics card when 3rd parties like Picasso stepped in to provide one and even then "proper" only means analogous to Cirrus Logic style cards that appeared for Windows 3.1. Hardly GPU in the modern sense.

The Amiga's Agnes GPU was a glorified blitter and the Paula audio "acceleration" was just a sound chip that had DMA so it could be kicked off to play sound stored in a memory buffer. Neither would help decompress an MP3 - the CPU would still have to decode the next chunk of audio in memory and trigger the audio chip to begin playing it. I'm not sure why anybody would want to play MP3s on an Amiga though and I very much doubt it left much CPU to do anything else, even on a 68030 or 68040 CPU.