They already have by far the best remote-desktop service. [1]

A screen-recording tool just needs to be able to serialize the stream that RDP uses to disk - very efficient, very conservative of space. I can't believe that the Linux RDP tools don't already do this.

[1] "Best" as in - works, works well, has low latency and the tools are easy to get hold of and set up.

NX or whatever it has evolved into was very good in terms of performance, raw X11 blows over a network (which is ironic given that's part of it's design brief and one of the principle things holding back the Linux desktop environment for so long). Neither are easy to set up or use.

Stronger for everyone except them, perhaps.

They did something similar, put a couple of specific constants, into the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. It was later shown that they amounted to a skeleton key - if you knew the numbers used to derive the constants, you could predict the future output of a given RNG instance with only a small amount of sample data. So any encryption based on Dual_EC_DRBG could be considered to be broken by the NSA (somewhat conveniently, in a way that only the NSA could actually prove).

Despite the poor performance of this algorithm which lead most implementers to ignore it, it managed to end up as the default in the product of one of the most trusted vendors, RSA. There was speculation that the NSA bribed them to make this design choice. [1]

Unsurprisingly, it was withdrawn from the standard in 2014.

[1] The only comment on that story makes the same point - that the NSA, in the past, had reinforced weaknesses in DES. In the light of the later evidence about Dual_EC_DRBG, that may bear further examination - if the change was the tweaking of constants, it's entirely possible that this reinforced the standard for everyone but the NSA.

People use the engine behind LDAP servers as a database.

LMDB

This has been true in the past, but now automation is improving faster than people can retrain and the economy can expand.

The most common job in the USA at present? Truck driver. (well, maybe not, but still, 2.8M truck drivers - 1.5% of the entire working age population in the USA, earning an average of $51,000 apiece)

Imagine how that one's going to go down when automated trucks are viable. Haulage firms will push HARD to get them approved to run on the road - they're already running them on private land (like in the Alberta tar sands, where the robot trucks are safer and require less maintenance and burn 25% less fuel, aside from working all day and all night and saving the company millions in wages).

Almost overnight, unemployment will bump another 1.5% in the USA, and all that money that was going into the economy via truck driver's wages will initially go into the pockets of very rich people before prices adjust.

What are the truck drivers going to do instead? Their life of sitting in a cab knowing the best route and which diners have the best cheese-steak sandwiches isn't going to prepare them for a life in many other professions, definitely not any that are paid as well as $51,000 ; they're certainly not going to get jobs building robot trucks (by definition - if the number of people you're employing to make a more complex and expensive machine is anywhere close to the number of people the machine replaces, then it's not economically viable - so even if someone invents an edumacatatron to fill their heads with robotics engineering, ain't gonna happen).

They won't even get jobs as greeters in WalMart because those jobs are so hotly contested by old folks.

AirBNB has more rooms on offer than Hilton. Hilton employs 152,000 people, AirBNB employs 800.

The trucking industry will likely in the next decade go from having 2.8M drivers in the USA, to zero, and maybe 100,000 or so skilled robot repair mechanics.

Amazon will go from using people as robots in it's warehouses, to just using robots.

Even if people eventually benefit from all this, there are going to be some dark times.

No commercials on Netflix here in the UK - I guess having an ad-free public broadcaster of world-renowned quality forces the other market players to raise their game (we have an average of 12 minutes per hour rather than 18 on our other FTA networks).

Given that most of the costs must be for content, imagine what the USA could have with a similarly funded ($19 a month) public broadcaster...

McDonald's have experimented with this - people forced to clock out when the restaurant was empty because "they weren't working".

"Fairtax" is regressive. The rich love it, because it's a sales-only tax, and they spend less as a proportion of their income than anyone else. Who spends more? The poor.

We've had periods where McDonald's employees were directed to clock out if there were no customers in the restaurant, because they "weren't working", so it's almost literally true.

And there's definitely no cliché of the starving actor at all.

This is why I refer to it as MOO-XML, keeps it in mind that it belongs to Microsoft.

MOO-XML

The deranged presentation is genius. It takes what would otherwise be a very dry, academic, and accurate dissection of the complete turds that are the three prequel movies and manages to make it entertaining.

It's a sign that you're not being paid enough. Despite the overwhelmingly positive public opinion that any family with a full-time worker should not be in poverty and be comfortable, it isn't true.

Just anecdotally, my ex-wife (a paediatric oncologist) considers the only real excuse for not working to be "death". Although I imagine she does actually take time off if she's infectious, because many of her patients have a weakened immune system.

I don't think it's something limited to doctors. In the States, where you have a lot of "at will" employment contracts and can be fired without reason, I'm sure that many people work when they are sick just because they are afraid to get the sack.

Yeah, what I've wanted for a long while is basically "X Box OS for Desktops" (but hopefully without the advertising bloatware...)