Universities stopped being centers for actual education a long time ago. They are not institutions of higher education, they are institutions of higher degrees. About 98% of anything I learned that is useful, I taught myself.

The reason the elite send their kids to schools is the continuing status symbol that an expensive university is. It's still the masonic handshake. The expensive schools are more about making business connections and about the ones with real money finding talent to exploit than it is about any sort of actual education.

Well, I can't know that, can I? All I can see is the "by Anonymous Coward" you're hiding behind.

But to answer your allegation anyway, no, I haven't watched it. It's a little too close to home. There is a child prone to tantrums that was given the button to nuclear weapons parked just south of me. You'll forgive me if I exercise a modicum of "head in the sand" and not watch a movie depicting what I am genuinely worried about.

Ah. So I take it that comment hit the mark. Right on both counts? (far from civilization and a trump supporter).

Just to put all replies in a single place, this is to one a few messages up...

Well, one might hope that the mid-terms will pull his teeth, but he's a) spent two years pushing the boundaries of what a president can do without legislative authority, and b) shown a willingness to park troops in your own cities and has openly threatened to use them if local votes don't go his way. A poor showing mid-term and/or lead-up polls that suggest this is coming might just accelerate the timeline I proposed.

At 3% uptake, this doesn't surprise me about TS's user demographic. We all know that in the USA there is a direct correlation between distance from civilization and odds of being a rabid republican. What pleasantly surprised me was how low the Truth Social (read Kool Aid) uptake was among even the 50-ish percent that voted for him.

I still believe there will be a coup attempt at the end of his term. Or rather, a more serious one than last time. Rising possibly to the level of a short civil war (depending on how many unit commanders ignore those 'ilegal' orders spoken of recently). But this low uptake gives me hope that if actual violence breaks out that it will be short, and that the good guys will win it the end. And that it might not spill over here. Here's hoping.

I find it actually comforting that Truth Social is only at 3%. As an outsider, it's hard to tell just how large a base the truly rabid crazies have. DT seems to only make announcements there, and he pushed it pretty hard, so to see it only has a 3% uptake makes me have more genuine hope for my southern neighbour than I have had in a long time.

Sounds like Zorin's success is primarily due to marketing. "Hey Windows Users, Come Here" worked.

Though, I will add, caring about work flows and little details, like serving up little things in ways that people actually use, is genuinely helpful. Mint started innovating like that in the beginning, but it has ossified and no one there cares about actual work flows.

But about 99% of what Zorin does, Mint does too. Just Mint doesn't draw flashy arrows around it. Marketing works.

Perhaps I've been living under a rock, I had no idea what this was. After reading the article and, now, a few others, I still can't figure out what exactly he's trying to do or why. What is the problem he's triying to solve... does he or anyone else seriously believe there is a real danger for someone not to be able to distinguish AI from a human? It seems like a made up solution to solve a made up problem and mostly a tempest in a teapot.

I'm not feeling it either... what I am is feeling shocked that so many people actually dish money to Youtube. Are there really that many paying customers (read suckers) giving money to Google for that?

If I were Disney, I'd move everything to Disney+ and tell Google to suck...er...eggs.

!

This is actually in Visa's best interests. What is going to happen is the cards with yearly fees will have the lowest per-merchant charge, which will let Visa start leveraging people into those cards. Just watch Visa debit start charging merchants more just to entice merchants not to accept them. This is nothing to do with being a concession Visa is making to merchants, and everything to do with using merchants as a weapon against their own customers to make them accept higher interest rate and higher-fee cards.

Why even CarPlay or Android Auto? Those are not the dubious features we should be scrambling to get "back". Both of those were bad choices to begin with, handing Google and Apple control of our in-car experience, sending them our location at all times to be sold to the highest bidder. I chose not them, and certainly not to let the car manufacturers get their drool-covered mitts on my experience.

I'd rather have a very good, solid phone holder I can slip my phone into and control everything myself. I have my own satnav I can trust (Osmand). My own music player over vanilla bluetooth. Nothing to tell me when and how I can interact with my device. No "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that while I'm moving". I choose when I'm safe. Hell, when I'm waiting in a car wash lineup, I can play a movie from my VPN'ed home server. My phone holder is solid with aluminum clamp arms repurposed from a motorcycle, clamped to my Jeep's driver-side grab handle, which I don't need because I have the steering wheel. With an integrated magnetic couple charger, I am set.

Why are people so interested in handing this functionality over to their car? Or to Google? My experience is easy to interact with, feature rich, liberating, and ad and surveillance free.

The real irony is treating it like it is some new discovery, or like it's some ancient sacred knowledge dug up out of the sands of time on clay tablets and painstakingly translated out of cuneiform.

Think about it.

Have you thought about it yet?

The statement means exactly nothing. At some point in any given 5 year time there will always be a "this is the most/highest/greatest ______ of the last five years". By itself it's a meaningless metric without knowing is the trend generally (by that meaning over a longer period) rising or falling. It doesn't have to be a "every five years" statement for the statement to be inherently periodic without more data.

By definition it happens every five years.

New Delhi Pollution Hits Five-Year High

... is, by definition, something that happens once every five years.

Snap is the wrong solution to the problem, and every time some big project switches to it (or any of the other awful systems like Flatpak and AppImage), I shake my head.

The problem of the balkanization of Linux distributions isn't solved by an app system that takes away all the best parts of Linux. The great thing about Linux is that you didn't need fifty copies of every DLL, that you could fit an entire working system with complete office software, in a tenth the space of a similarly "capable" Windows system. Making a system that essentially wraps everything an app needs in its own little mini-distro is awful. It costs storage space. And it costs RAM. Each application needs to instantiate its own set of every shared library it uses, so you can end up with ten instances of the same shared object in ram. Even to multiple libc's.

The FHS then LSB were the correct answers. The answer was and still is standardization on the back end. Standardize the basic system and libraries, standardize where packages are installed to, then keep going and standardize the way packages are installed. The distros can keep their rpm and apt/dpkg, I don't care about the command name or its command line switches. But each of them can and should call a more basic level library whose API is the same for every distributions to do the final work.

The problem is there is too much money on the Red-Hat esque side of the fence interested in making it NON-compliant with any standard. And, in fact, in pulling it back from even being open source as much as possible. The rest of the Linux ecosystem, though, needs to hang its head in shame for allowing distro balkanization to happen to this extent.

Any big-name software projects needs to just say no to the bandaid "solutions" like snap flatpak, and appimage that apply just enough bandage to the situation to keep the incentive away from fixing the problem properly.

The problem isn't building a QC that can crack 2048-bit RSA. That is actually hard. The problem is that building a QC that can crack 128-bit ECC is comparatively a cakewalk.

If current crypto was still using RSA, I wouldn't worry about PQ. But it's not. Besides a few TLS certificates, you have a hard time finding RSA anywhere now. You can't even force SSH to use RSA for anything except a host key.

The funny thing is that of all classic PKC currently in use, the one which was presented as being the most vulnerable to quantum computing was RSA, and it is actually the most resistant. And it's the one you almost can't find today.