Those kinds of contracts should be NULL and VOID when it's a security issue impacting others around the world. Kudos to you for standing your ground, but I'm not hopeful for the future of computer security if that's the level of job security one needs to force resolutions instead of sweeping them under the rug.

The vast American corporation I just finished working for makes nearly $1 billion in profits every year from its Chinese operations, and has for nearly 25 years.
I'm not sure that fits into your list, but the shareholders seem pretty happy about it.

This was a KDE Wayland bug? I've never encountered in X11 with KDE 5.

Lets get down to the real here.

COVID eradicated HIPAA privacy protections in favor of mass hysteria profiteering, which both government and the Medical Industrial Complex gained handsomely from. Billionaire Daddy Database found flocking to the new Medical gold rush ripe for the picking to be sold to the Insurance Complex happily paying for it. All involved are Platinum members of the Donor Class ensuring corporate profits continue to be shat through a toilet plumbed in Ireland first, to rinse off any of that crappy tax obligation in favor of kicking back higher stock price returns for the lucky lawmakers bestowed with insider trading benefits.

Medical data in the US is a huge gold mine given the way COVID raped privacy, and all involved stand to become very rich from it.

And to think that’s all before we get to the COVID class-action settlements deemed Too Big To Fail. Fuck me sideways, taxpayer.

It doesn't matter how painful, no ransom should be paid. That is the ONLY way to take away the main motive to attack.

That said, it doesn't mean security isn't just as important, because attacks can also be motivated by politics or just mischief as well.

I would be one who supports laws preventing such payments. And no bailouts either- the corporation should be allowed to fail and all the stockholders will get shafted. And that is the other deterrence- pay now for security and make it count, lest you run the risk of losing everything later.

That book presented a nonstop stream of pseudoscience as if it were hard sci-fi, and it's unfortunate that it's spread so many myths as a result.

It's what everyone does. Copying isn't a problem until you're successful, at which point it's not a problem.

You're either drinking too much or not enough.

I think your confusion stems from analogy to baking clay or ceramics. But what's happening there is sintering. You have extremely fine grains, and you're leading certain crystals to soften and merge as a "glue" between grains, so that the grains stay together.

While sintering is important in the formation of some types of sedimentary rock, this has nothing whatsoever to do with igneous rock. It's already as "together" as it's ever going to be when it a lava flow solidifies. The only thing its grains can ever become is "less together".

And even ignoring that, by definition, you're not going to be sintering something that formed at Venus temperatures, by exposing them to Venus temperatures. The process of sintering requires a radical change in conditions.

How much does Texas take out of federal block grants for medicaid or whatever to use to further the police state?

Wrong. They can do that already, and I'd bet the ones with the non-competes in their employment contracts also have "I'm altering the deal" as standard boiler plate in there as well.

Yep, that's the point. Refuse to pay your employees and guess what? They'll move to greener pastures. They shouldn't be held under wage arrest or threat of lawsuit just to keep the employer's profits up. The whole point of a business is to make a profit despite the challenges of doing so. It was never supposed to be a free lunch for anyone let alone the employer whom by definition has bigger market power to absorb those costs with.

True. But this is one case where the tradeoff is obviously better. Banning former employees from working means a weaker overall labor market. That's a benefit to the employers, but by definition it's also a drawback and potential legal liability. (Lazy hiring practices, bad candidates, IP contamination, etc.) There's also the issue of misplaced trust. Why should an employer be allowed to just pass around it's secret sauce (the go to justification for these kinds of non-competes) to anyone inside it's business without a care in the world? Especially when the consequence of doing so is higher costs for society to bare. Someone has to pay for that McDonnalds worker that cannot work anywhere else in fast food for a year, and you can bet McDonnalds doesn't want to. If that's the only job the former employee is qualified for, guess who picks up the tab? Society. Sorry, but if McDonnalds wants it's non-compete it can pay for it, just like any other employer should for similar conditions.

If the bullshit hashicorp has been pulling lately towards open source projects is anything to go by, I'd say hashicorp have no problem self-enshitifying. With luck IBM will throw them in the barn with Red Hat and we might see an actual improvement in corporate behavior (red hat are no saints, but at least their lawyers are kept on a leash)

We are not capable of building anything that can withstand the surface pressures and temperatures for very long

The Venera probes have likely still not experienced any sort of crushing. You seem to be confused about how pressure works. If you don't exert stress pass the yield point of a material, the length of time until something crushes is "infinite". Which is why, say, almost all rocks buried in Earth's crust are able to remain intact over millions to billions of years.

You build of a thickness that the yield point at the design temperature is well above the amount of pressure-induced stress. The Venera probes' pressure vessels - uninsulated - hit surface temperature quite quickly (indeed, mostly during the descent itself). This did not make them crush, because their engineers were not morons who didn't do the math first when determining the probes' required specs.

All probes are designed to their environment. There is nothing magical about the nominal 92 MPa / 464 C of Venus's mean surface (note: this is for the mean surface; the highlands are significantly lower pressure and significantly cooler) that makes it impossible while, say, designing a lander to operate in the cryogenic conditions of Titan or whatnot is easy. This is 1960s tech. Steel alloys usually melt at up to 1400 C or so. Titanium at 1670 C. Tungsten at 3422 C. Some ceramics don't decompose until nearly 4000C. And pressure increases melting points. Now, it's not just the melting point that matters - higher temperatures mean lower yield strengths, so you have to design with the high temperature yield strengths in mind, not room temperature ones. But the simple fact is that various alloys and compounds can operate fine at WAY above Venus surface temperatures. It's not even close. The pressure vessel needed for the Venera probes was just a thin skin.

And to repeat: if the stress doesn't don't go above the yield point, the time to crushing is infinite. Same as any other pressure vessel, from aerosol cans to propane tanks to spacecraft in space (-1 atm).

And I'll repeat: with the same trivially-simple 1960s-tech method as the Venera probes, you can get surface residence times of a couple hours. With heat pumps, indefinitely. And "Baron_Yam at Slashdot" isn't going to override the actual NASA researchers who have worked on this topic.

The rock of Venus is dry-baked to incredible strength

The fact that you think that rock can be "baked to incredible strength" is itself a boggling concept. Not even accounting for the fact that we can literally see sand and gravel in the Venera images, and the Venera probes literally took surface samples. We can see dunes from orbit on radar. Just the very concept that you think that if you heat rock to a couple hundred celsius that makes it super hard, when the rock formed from vastly-hotter lava. Heat makes rock softer, not harder. And subliming away compounds or chemically eroding rocks makes them weaker, not stronger.

From a bulk composition perspective, Venus's surface is mostly just basalt - though there's some probable rhyolitic flows in places, possibly some unusual flows rare or nonexistent on Earth, and there's speculation that some of the highlands may contain residual granitic continental crust. The specific details of said rocks can be quite interesting, but from a bulk perspective, it's like oceanic crust. We know this because we've literally sampled it..