One risk is that non-discriminatory bandwidth management (eg, the stuff the bufferbloat team does, like fq_codel and CAKE) will not be easy to distinguish from the discriminatory stuff that enables the ISP to demand kickback and/or being paid extra by the provider of the service. That would result in shitty service for everyone and, perversely, more motivation to pay the ISP to work around the rules.

How about the 'natural experiment' of people having 40 year old CDs and 27 year old DVDs that work just fine?

Given that the page referenced claims that DVD-R will last 50-100 years, but factory pressed DVDs will last 10-20, I think there's a typo for the factory pressed ones.

So far in my life, I've had exactly one optical disc go bad that wasn't explained by severe scuffing or physically breaking it, and that was Kentucky Fried Movie. And that was a manufacturing issue.

I have CDs from the 80s that still play fine, and DVDs from the late 90s.

If your local copy is the same bitrate and sound codecs as the 4k UHD blu ray, great.

But if it's a streaming 4k webrip, the blu ray is still going to be way higher quality.

It's this. It's from the era when it was common to leave your root password open so that friendly other people could log into your server and fix issues for you. Because the only other people on the network that any bad actor could be easily identified by name and job location.

I was at a security presentation, oh, about five, maybe seven years back, by a company trying to sell, basically, SS7 firewalls, and advocating for basic security ideas that the Internet went through thirty years ago. "Hey, maybe do the equivalent of filtering your routes so people can't use phone numbers not actually registered to your network" and things like that.

The response you point out was exactly the ones that all of the big boys had; 'we don't need security, we just need to get back to closing SS7 to everybody that isn't one of the big boys.'

And the point the presenters were trying to make was 'that ship has sailed, you can get access to the network and start spamming SMS about as easily as you can get a gym membership these days, so stop living in the past.'

This is the point that I keep coming back to; imagine if the anorexia craze back in the 80s and 90s had been treated with 'affirmative care.'

"Oh, sweetie, yes you ARE fat! HUGE! Lets get you some ozempic right away, and schedule your middle surgery. No, we don't have to tell your parents, sweetie, but if they find out and object, we'll just tell them that you'll kill yourself without this treatment to affirm your belief that you're disgustingly fat."

What an odd take to say that the first Matrix movie wasn't 'woke' when it was clearly and explicitly a metaphor for gender transition.

There's a reason that both Neo and Trinity are androgynous. There's a reason they're being chased down by literal personifications of conformity.

The only way they could have made it more explicit was the original plan to have Switch be one gender in the real world, and a different gender in the Matrix, instead of just also androgynous.

Yup. "This shit isn't deep. It's a superhero movie with a lot of PVC. It's embarrassing how many of you are absolutely floored by babby's first philosophy lesson."

My dude, you have violated Wheaton's Law.

Don't be a dick.

Creative integrity doesn't pay the bills.

Maybe something like NSA funded and developed SELinux? Maybe they should have kept developing it and the rest of the government should have considered using it for security sensitive systems. Or all of their systems.
LoB

I have fond memories of Activision being weirdly proud of builiding memory management into the game engine for Heavy Gear 2 instead of just crashing to desktop, and it being somehow revelatory and revolutionary.

At the heart of this engine was a rock-solid memory management and leak-tracking class. Yes, that's right. Before anyone ever dreamed of fancy graphics or stunning game play, we had to deal with this mundane task. Every C++ class and structure used by the Darkside engine had roots within this base class. This architecture allowed to us to detect memory leaks and overwrites as soon as they appeared in a given day's build, which allowed us to address problems immediately rather than during a grueling cycle at the end of the project. I cannot stress the importance of this type of planning and execution enough for teams who want to craft a state-of-the-art game engine. Focusing on the reliability of the application will also greatly increase the immersion factor of any game that's created with it. After all, what destroys immersion more than a hard system crash? Hats off to our lead who took us down this path.

Also, I miss the days of this kind of open-the-robe post mortem.

They don't need to be 'good' products; they need to be 'good enough' products. And guess what? They're good enough.

And here I was thinking it was the practical application of a rather new technology, Radar, that warned the RAF fighters suddenly long before the German planes crossed the channel to do their attacking. Instead of reacting close-by or over Britain, now a lot of battles could already play out over the Channel. And it is also a lot easier to planes around when and where they are actually needed. That increases the success rate of defending airspace tremendously.

What's all this then? Radar? No such thing, chap, we just give our costal watchmen more carrots, turns out vitamin A does wonders for eyesight, what? Anyway, why don't you come with these friendly military police and we'll get this all straightened out, there's a good lad.