No thanks on the light-up Apple logo for me. I think it started with the Powerbook G3 (I had one, it was a great computer) and it was sort of obnoxious even then. I'm not paid to be a light-up billboard everywhere I go.

No thanks on the laptop touchscreen, either. I understand it on something like a Surface tablet -- almost -- but most of the time I used my Surface with a keyboard, like a regular laptop, and never touched the screen. I think ramming touchscreens down everybody's throats was just a gimmick Microsoft came up with, both to A.) convince everybody that Windows 8 worked equally well on laptops and tablets (it sure did); and B.) once again, everybody needed to go out and buy a new laptop, even though their current one worked and served their needs just fine.

I have to think a bit to organize why and advantages and disadvantages of this, so I thought I'd share.

I define "tokenizing shares" as using a distributed blockchain with universal ability to transact as a way to trade shares.

Advantages of tokenizing shares:

* Universal access to fractional trading, not just inside a single trading platform. (Most likely, anyway.)
* Near zero transaction costs outside the spread. There are trading platforms that offer $0 commissions for regular retail customers, but there's still regulatory fees and these could potentially be skipped. (NOTE: There is likely a larger spread on a distributed ledger than a regular exchange, due to slower transactions. See below.)
* Ability to trade 24h
* Access to purchasers that don't want to or cannot use traditional platforms (e.g, crypto fans, people in developing countries). This may be stopped by "Permissioned ledgers", where there contracts that stop the transfer of stocks into a wallet unless it's on a whitelist.
* Resistance to total failure (due to the distributed nature of the setup)

Changes with good and bad sides:

* Slower trades; expect max speed of milliseconds rather than 1us
* Thus, a loss of the ability to do HFT (High Frequency Trading), which means that we lose the information transmission and market making ability of HFTs, but we also lose their ability to do front-running and decrease their ability to cause flash crashes and similar
* Loss of ability to shut down the trading. This remove an abusable tool of power, but it also lose a tool used to stop bad situation (like flash crashes), which is used to deal with bad market situations (like flash crashes due to trading software bugs), to avoid insider trading when major news is about to hit, and to deal with regulatory concerns.
* All trades are final. In the regular market, trades can be reversed by the courts or banks if done quickly (clearing in the US is in one business day, in Europe it's mostly two business days); in an anonymous, immediate clearing system based on a final distributed ledger, trades can't be reversed. This removes some types of risk, but adds in risks of theft (as we've seen with cryptocurrency) and makes mistakes more difficult to reverse.

Disadvantage if both on a regular exchange and a blockchain:

* The slower trades on the blockchain will lead to latency arbitrage. To avoid losses from price sniping, the blockchain market has to have wider spreads. Market makers will also typically provide limited liquidity in the slower market, to minimize the amount of loss the times they do get sniped.

Disadvantages of stocks on a blockchain in general:

* The distributed nature of the blockchain will allow frontrunning: A retail investor place an order in a market, and a frontrunning company with faster routing setup will then buy the stock elsewhere at a lower price, and re-sell it to the investor at the higher price. If there are distributed validators for transaction order, frontrunners may instead use techniques to bribe the validators (e.g, they may run validators themselves, and have their purchase jump the queue). The net result of both is that instead of negative spread going as profit to the retail investors, it goes to the frontrunners.
* It provides larger liquidity pools for criminals and terrorist organizations to do money laundering; e.g. Russia may be able to move billions around outside sanctions (though there are protocols in place that try to stop this)

Disadvantages for this particular blockchain at this time, for the companies that are resistant to getting on it:

* It is cheap to say no now, and they can't say no later
* There is little time to evaluate
* There is likely some level of legal risk

That's a quick attempt to sort my thoughts - they're not strongly researched for this particular blockchain, though I did a couple of searches to fill in details that I wasn't certain about.

That's nowhere near true. The current system is administered by regulated entities that have a decent amount of information about most owners. Are there ways to play the system? Yes. But it's nowhere near the same level of anonymity and flexibility as making stocks into tokens that can be freely transferred to anonymous accounts.

> Also, it was pretty racist with the whole English thing.

The "whole English thing" is about having someone that it is possible to communicate with in English. I'm fairly sure they would be OK with speaking English through a translation system, as long as it didn't get in the way of the communication.

Also, as someone that is from a non-English-speaking country: Somebody that isn't able to operate in English is unlikely to be able to do good open source work. English is the language that is used to communicate about programming globally, and anybody that does not tap into that communication is at a very large disadvantage. The overall situation is unfortunate, and it can be argued that the situation is systemically racist - but it isn't individually racist to require the ability to operate in English. Fortunately, AI tools are continually making it easier to operate in languages you don't speak, so this disadvantage will become less and less of a problem.

Again being the size it is the government Denmark can start with publishing all of its forms in ODF format, no more DOCX; also use open/free fonts. This makes it a MS problems if they do not render properly -- people will start blaming MS for errors not the other way round. Thus industry and people at home will start using LibreOffice (what is in Collabora).

Next they need to push schools & tech colleges to use ODF, too many of them train students to learn how to use Microsoft products, they graduate and expect to use MS in their jobs. Actually: it would be nice if schools were to train people properly, most teachers do not know how to use style sheets, etc, and, eg, will make columns line up by pressing spaces rather than setting tabs/whatever. Start by teaching teachers (harder than you think).

if it does not do what you want take the damned source and add what is missing and everyone will benefit. If you do not have the expertise then pay the developers or someone to do it for you. Yes: it will cost but to an entity the size of the Danish government the cost will be less than the cost of licensing MS Office for another year or so. Once this development cost is paid it does not need to be paid again next year - unlike a license fee.

If the various EU governments each pay to fix whatever itch scratches for them then you quickly end up with better packages; as well as regaining digital sovereignty etc. This must be obvious to almost everybody, or it is being used as an excuse to do nothing or maybe keep the brown envelopes coming ?

One-third the cost of an iPhone Duo.
Also probably foldable.
Once.

You do realise that the request for an extension came from both candidates?

eMudhra is exiting the global SSL/TLS certificate business and is offering customers Sectigo-issued replacements [ ... ]

...Sectigo? Née Comodo? They haven't always been the sharpest tools in the shed, either.

You know, if you had looked at media outlets such as ABC News you would have found that both candidates teams asked for extensions.

If you actually look at reports from some of the more reputable media, both Lula's and Bolsanoro's teams asked for the extension.

The Guardian turning on Labour for being unelectable under Jeremy Corbyn is an honesty. He was an antisemite who let antisemitsim grow and fester in the Labour party. Besides, his policies and lack of leadership made him unelectable and unappealing to the majority of voters, so Labour were better without him. If you want to make a difference, you have to be able to form a government, and the Corbyn fans never understood that. It's been very entertaining watching him try to form a new party and seeing the kind of people it's attracting as its candidates and just how unelectable it is too.

So you can't (or won't) give your opinion on which newspapers we should trust, not do you present any evidence as to why we should not trust the Guardian.

Given this, is there any reason that we should take your opinion seriously?

So which publications do you deem "unbiased and balanced" sources of news?

As David Hume showed long ago, the fact that something happened regularly in the past is not a guarantee that it will happen in the future.

Lula secured 51.79% of the votes compared with Bolsonaro’s 48.21%, according to Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court – about 4.4m more votes. If, according to you, this warrants scrutiny then presumably if Lula had won 48.21% and Bolsanaro 51.79% then this too would warrant scruting...