Do you think that Microsoft has any real leverage against the Chinese government? Or do you think Microsoft desperately wants a share of that market?

I'm of the opinion that is Microsoft tried that with China they might not like what happened.

There must be a revolving door between federal prosecutors and banks. If the prosecutors leave the banks alone or just fine them a couple of months profits, they will have a lucrative job waiting for them when they leave the government.

There's more truth to that than you might realize:

The people who have been setting government economic policy for the last two decades are usually drawn from the financial industry which almost destroyed the global economy.

So, the lying, cheating bastards who got us into this mess, are the lying, cheating bastards in charge of deciding what to do next.

At which point you more or less assume the whole system has been corrupted to be in the hands of the financial industry. Leaving them free to come up with more policies which favor them, and remove even more regulations which were intended to stop this stuff in the first place.

Which some of us will argue has been the intent for the last half century.

Because some people believe what is good for the crony-capitalists is good for society. Or, at least they believe if they can keep telling us that lie sooner or later it will be too damned late to do anything about it.

Ten years ago I would have said you were a crank.

In all honesty, ten years ago I would have said I'm a crank.

But, the reality is, over the last bunch of years, we're seeing much more "victory at any costs" coming both from the legal system and the politicians. Facts and the law are secondary to agendas and posturing.

We're seeing more and more examples of "the law and your rights are too damned inconvenient so we're going to ignore them".

We see Federal law enforcement lying about their secret spying capacity and going to great lengths to conceal it.

We see those same entities writing a hand book for how to commit perjury to about where they got their evidence in order to get a conviction and gloss over some of the shadier bits about how they operate. Effectively it's a "how to frame someone we believe is guilty but didn't legally obtain the evidence".

The companies who caused the economic meltdown? Bailed out, and forgiven so we don't introduce any more instability, totally ignoring what amounted to billions of dollars worth of Ponzi schemes.

The legal system has been co-opted to serve the interests of commercial entities, who more or less write laws which governments pass for them.

And, increasingly, we see the governments of Western nations getting together to do this shit to all of us.

So, yeah ... not so long ago I would have been a crank. But, not so long ago, none of this stuff was real, it was the stuff of fiction.

I keep saying, what was fantastical fiction 10-15 years ago is commonplace. And if it keeps going that way, we're pretty much fucked.

In my mind, we've pretty much reached the point where the surveillance state being in partnership with (and in some cases working for) an oligarchy or corporations who don't give a shit about anything but their own profits, and who have the means to change and control anything which they find inconvenient.

It doesn't seem like there's enough tinfoil on the entire fucking planet to NOT end up sounding like a paranoid loon when you look at what's actually happening.

I'd like to go back to a nice normal "slightly crazy" like before. But the world doesn't seem like it's trending in that direction.

Prosecutors are no longer interested in evenly applying the law in a sane manner.

They're interested in high profile retribution which is intended to send a message which says "don't mess with us, or we'll do this to you".

And, somehow, at the CEO level when there's massive fraud and malfeasance ... absolutely nothing happens.

Because the justice system is dependent on how much money is in your bank account, and who your friends are.

LOL ... well, the modern definition of "successful businesspersons and leaders of industry" is measured as "hasn't been indicted yet".

She was a largely incompetent CEO.

WTF skills does she thinks she brings to the table as a fscking President?

Pretty much her entire time at HP was marked with terrible decisions, bad planning, and disastrous outcomes.

Well, I guess that's no different from Presidents, really.

That of course assumes that any government would pass a law allowing this kind of thing.

Governments don't tend to do that kind of thing. In fact, they tend to give themselves exemptions.

Can God create a disk wipe so secure even He could not recover the data?

Dude, pass whatever you're smoking down the left hand side. ;-)

Yes, he's ill. But the OS he wrote is better than any I've written so far--how about you?

Not sure, it's been a while ... message-passing, multi-tasking microkernel in the early 90s. Hand-rolled bare-metal HD drive controller and interrupt stack, with full ability to read and write FAT filesystems from reading the specs from the technical manual.

Haven't felt the need since OS class.

I have no idea what his does, I had to block the image of the scrolling glimpse into the abyss which was the screenshot of the OS before it induced a seizure.

Crazy doesn't mean stupid.

Nor does it mean "newsworthy".

I've known a couple of schizophrenics and various people with varying degrees mental illness. What I would not do is subject most of them to the interwebs without a buffer between them and what happens.

Does pandering to showing the OS someone with schizophrenia wrote help them in any way? Is what he writes actually healthy for him? Or does it just let him wallow in some of his obsessions?

So, sure, it's definitely blinking and flashing. Does it actually do anything other than embed his own rituals? I have no idea.

While this is creepy, and might be interesting in a clinical sense ... why have we started covering the crazy end of the tech spectrum?

I'm afraid this just reads like "batshit crazy guy writes gibberish OS, come look at our ads".

Oh, great, now we need to get WADA and all them looking in high end gaming to see if people are using Performance Enhancing Devices.

Now, here's a shock: people will always cheat if it gives them an advantage.

I'm totally crushed.

My view is that there isn't a particularly good reason to act right now. But with a few decades of experience we should be able to tell if global warming is a serious problem or not.

Ah, the ostrich algorithm.

Do nothing, pretend like there's no problem, keep on with the status quo for now.

I'm sure that's great for the fossil fuel industry. Maybe not so good for future generations

But, hey, as long as quarterly profits and executive bonuses stay high, it's all good, right?

Unfortunately it means the rest of the world is paying the price for the profits of these industries while they pretend they're not having a negative impact on the world.

I'm less willing to think that corporations deserve the benefit of the doubt here. Because all they care about is their own profits, and spend great scads of money to try to convince us nothing bad is happening.

And, of course, there's the massive subsidies to fossil fuel companies.

When you're giving money to the people who produce the fossil fuels, are you really ever going to take meaningful steps to fight climate change?

The government is proportionally spending MUCH more money on maintaining the fossil fuel industry than it is on alternatives.

Stop subsidizing the oil companies. See how things change.

So, two guys gave up after four years or study and conclude the whole thing is futile?

Sure, they're probably smart guys. But, their inability to solve a decades old problem in a few years doesn't mean anything more than they didn't come up with a magic bullet.

Maybe the problem is the arrogance of Google engineers who think they're going to solve something like this is a short period of time where nobody else has succeeded.

So, you'll excuse me if I take their sweeping proclamation with a giant grain of salt.