Back in, oh I dunno, 2007 or 2008, I was taking a class on Portuguese at a local community college, and in that class was a guy who worked for one of the major investment banks, I forget which. He was learning Portuguese because his job was to go to Brazil to negotiate long term land leases with the government on behalf of big oil.

The scam was that the oil company would buy a long-term lease on unusable land "to prevent development," and for that they could get a carbon credit to sell. Of course, nobody was ever going to develop that land, and there was never going to be any carbon emissions from that development, so absolutely no emissions were prevented, and absolutely no additional carbon was captured, but big oil still got a nice juicy carbon credit to sell on the carbon offset markets.

That's funny, because I am also a ham radio operator and an electrical engineer and I have never once been able to detect any appreciable emissions from an EV, including my EV, in the Amateur bands.

This has fuckall to do with safety and everything to do with making sure boomers can listen to the party talking points on political radio shows, which only exist on AM radio because only AM radio stations are desperate enough to carry them.

It was less than a year ago that KB5026372 was breaking VPN connections; and now they've broken them again?

We're taking pious lectures about excessive attack surface and too many features from the systemd guy?

There, FIFY.

It's illegal in Europe to work people like people are worked in the US. That's why Americans are worked so much harder than Europeans.

Do these chemicals pose an actual, realized risk? Or do they only present risk on models or in lab environments, and they're extrapolating?

How many annual deaths can be directly attributed to these chemicals - as in, these chemicals were the root cause of death?

I'm a little confused by who is supposed to be caving to the threat here. It's a paid database, so I assume that Thompson-Reuters/Refinitiv aren't thrilled; but it was apparently stolen from one of their customers, not directly from them, so their reputation for security competence isn't really affected; and I suspect that most of the people paying for access to this sort of database need something authoritative that ticks the "I'm really trying to know my customer, really" box when feds or auditors come around; so even a reasonably fresh and reasonably large leak is still of limited value("So, you decided to reduce costs by basing your compliance efforts on data of unknown completeness, potentially subject to unknown modifications, sourced from unknown criminals? Very interesting...") as an alternative to continuing to subscribe.

If anything, it seems like its release would be largely positive: probably lots of interesting leads to be followed up, both with regard to what the creepy data broker types know and the things they know about the people they consider relevant, by people who are in no position to afford access normally(if it's even something you can just purchase if your money is green enough; rather than being offered specifically to potential customers known to be in financial services; not just anyone with a checkbook).

Heâ(TM)s arguably not wrong that VMwareâ(TM)s offerings outside of their core product are kind of inchoate(though, in fairness, itâ(TM)s not like the âhyperscale cloudâ(TM) guys donâ(TM)t all have a stable of shit thrown at the wall to see what sticks that surrounds the core of services that people actually care about or trust); but that seems like a pretty shabby excuse in this context; where it would have been trivial to just not fuck with what people were using and liked while making the alleged investments in glorious future VMware; then letting the value proposition of that help sell it.

As it is, itâ(TM)s hard to read this as anything other than an awkward(and almost certainly temporary, nobody ever genuinely stops trying to boil the frog once they start); climbdown after recklessly spooking more customers, harder, than intended.

If you are trying to explain why we haven't detected any aliens, how is "they were massacred by even more advanced aliens" a remotely adequate answer? That just leaves you with "why haven't we detected the even more advanced aliens?". The question was never "why do we detect so many deathbots and so few little green men?"

If anything, superintelligences are presumably more capable of doing high-visibility things(if they want to) by virtue of being more advanced; and, while they could all be carefully hiding because they're paranoid that same explanation would hold for standard aliens as well.

Seems like an awful lot of hypothesis to explain nothing.

They also aren't cheap even if the knowledge problem is solved. Something like a roomba lives in a special case where being more or less a toy RC car is enough robotics to actually attack a real-world cleaning problem(on reasonably uncluttered flat floors).

If you want "look for missing items, get things out of the refrigerator, scrub the kitchen floor, clean the toilets, and vacuum" you are suddenly talking about a *lot* more robot. Not necessarily 'call Boston Dynamics for their most humanoid biped', you might be able to get away with some sort of wheeled platform with robot arms since the arms count for more than the legs(as long as you can reach things that are a meter plus away from the floor); but you are definitely talking a much more involved piece of hardware with considerably more fiddly moving parts; especially if you don't want to overhaul your entire house.

âoeDonâ(TM)t just read the slide deckâ is more or less rule #1 of not completely ruining a presentation. Is there any room for optimism about the results of a tool that generates video of you reading the slide deck? Even if itâ(TM)s a goddamn miracle on a technical level it seems like a fundamentally mal-suited tool for the job. If anything, the better it works the worse it will likely be, since it will just be doing the wrong thing more attractively and easily.

I'd agree that a production system that actually relies on actual floppies would be rolling the dice in a deeply uncomfortable way at this point; but I'm a little puzzled by the extent of the fuss given that(admittedly, more for hobbyist and niche stuff, retrocomputers and synths from the floppy era, that sort of thing) the practice of emulating floppy drives is quite well established and, thanks to the age and (low) speed of the busses in question, pretty technically undemanding.

If I had a floppy-dependent system I'd have wanted people evaluating commercially available floppy emulators starting 10 years ago; potentially trying to push specific developments if my system requires things that the retrocomputing guys don't(whether in terms of features or in terms of not being hand-built in small runs by hobbyists); but, barring some especially esoteric complication I'm not thinking of, slapping floppy emulators into a floppy-based system and bringing it right up to the present day in terms of media seems like it would be both a relatively simple project and much, much cheaper, lower risk, and more predictable than a full 'upgrade' that promises to rip out the old system and replace it with a full new glorious IoT something something.