I continue to use burned DVDs for backing up the critical stuff. Not perfect, of course, but not electromechanically-failure prone like a hard disk drive, not "terms of service" failure prone like cloud storage, and not "the charge magically held in the gate leaked away" failure prone. I have optical discs over 25 years old which are still perfectly readable.

If the hardware is still present, but is disabled, you're still carrying around the hardware. Most importantly, you're probably still powering its logic even if it's inaccessible to you.

BMW, like most German cars, is overcomplicated and overpriced garbage sold only to self-proclaimed car enthusiasts who wouldn't know how to change a tire let alone a timing chain. BMW got themselves into a bit of controversy by including heated seats which only functioned by subscription.

Now, say I had bought a BMW but didn't want the heated seats. I don't pay for the subscription. There's no additional cost to me, the purchaser of the car, because the profit from the people who do opt for the subscription are the ones paying the cost of the extra hardware in my car, correct?

Wrong. I am now carrying around an extra-beefy alternator to power the heated seats. I am now carrying around all the extra wiring to power the heated seats. All of this impacts my performance and my fuel efficiency. And all of this extra complexity adds a failure liability when something damages part of the heated seat hardware. All for a feature I specifically did not ask for by refusing the subscription.

With a disabled chunk of logic embedded in a processor, is it a negligible cost and a negligible risk? Maybe, but as the purchaser, it's crap that I didn't ask for, and you are imposing on me. If I have to carry it around and power it up, I expect to be able to use it.

If the manufacturer doesn't want to supply a feature then they should not supply the hardware. Leave the spots on the circuit board unpopulated. In the case of a chip, leave it off the die.

There's nothing like a good smack to the beitzim to stop a would-be rapist. And there's nothing like biting someone if it's all the leverage you have.

Remember, this is not a video game or a sanctioned fight in a boxing ring. This is your life versus the life of a terrorist or other attacker. Kill or be killed. Learn to fight.

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

So this is Geniza from between the First and Second Temple? Sorry, just had to ask. :)

I learned SAS In the early 80s and used it extensively. At the time, it was easily the best data analysis software available. About 15 years ago I wanted to get a few copies for my consulting team and we were looking at more than $50K / seat. Do you think Chinese users want to pay that sort of money to a US firm?

SAS sued a source compatible competitor (World Programming) out of existence some years back, to destroy competition and maintain their high prices. I had trialled the World Programming solution and it worked very nicely.

These days I use Python and a few other open-source tools. I suspect that Chinese data analysts are mostly doing the same.

The REAL headline and buried lede for the original post should be:

Trump guts nuclear safety regulations

“The president signed a pair of orders on Friday aimed at streamlining the licensing and construction of nuclear power plants — while panning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its ‘myopic’ radiation safety standards.”

We now have industry capture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Who here knows about Admiral Hyman RIckover? All of this is worth reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_record

Are You Scared Yet?

I would be.

The Department of Energy is selling off more than 40,000 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium from the Cold War arsenal to nuclear reactor startups. All of which I’m sure will be thoroughly vetted and monitored, because this is done under the direction of a former board member. Yikes!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Wright

Who IS Oklo, Inc. the "private nuclear reactor builder/operator"? Oklo is Sam Altman:

Trump Administration Providing Weapons Grade Plutonium to Sam Altman

We're in territory where weapons-grade plutonium is being given at fire-sale prices to billionaires who's ethical boundaries include creating their own demand for otherwise unnecessary, high-risk energy projects. Guys like Altman, who get their ideas from Wikipedia articles about Ayn Rand — because they are one rung lower than people who actually READ that garbage.

But I'm sure no inventory of hot nuke metal will ever go missing.

Greetings from Y2K!

Apple had a culture of authenticity. Culture dies pretty hard in most cases. I think we will see the last of that culture dissipate, as it eroded so greatly under Cook and Ive. Then the extractive, enshittifying corruption will spread from Apple, too.

There really was something, that began with Jobs and Woz. It wasn't perfect, and Jobs had a way of twisting ethical stances in ends-justifying-means sophistry. But Steve Jobs would never have prostrated before Trump, proffering a solid gold token.

Oh, you want profit? This is a surveillance spyware wrapper around the entire MacOS user experience - so if you thought Microsoft's Copilot Recall was invasive monitoring, you haven't seen anything yet.

If Apple won't monetize a user panopticon and partner with governments to do it, OpenAI will be right there, to take the cash.

I will argue against strict adherence to this statement. Gnome applications written to the project guidelines have become very fine, since the introduction of GTK-4 and libadwaita. I prefer many of these to their equivalents on MacOS.

It's true that most of these fall into a general category of "utilities", and that Windows enjoys a broader ecosystem driven by commercial incentive. But Windows programs are hardly "better' for this, and the widely varied usability is generally sub-par compared to level that's become norm for Gnome/Adwaita software.

Not paying money for Russian Linux... Or even use it free. Yikes..