In most of the world you choose a phone and then hop between carriers as you wish. The US market is not very representative.

For those if you who don't understand what I'm on about: in the US it's fairly normal that the carrier will provide you with the phone and the access to the network. This is called a "locked phone" arrangement.

Correct. SS7 is ancient, and was never created with security in mind. Bell created it in the 1970s, and very idea that security was needed would not even have been in the engineers' world view.

This is a protocol only meant for phone companies, and Bell was still a monolith back then. Similar to the early internet in the 1970s where only the military and a few computer scientists even had access.

Actually, producing shoddy code is precisely what Microsoft is know for. All they are interested in is locking people into their ecosystem, and producing good code is a disadvantage in that business model. The worse their code is, the more difficult it is for users to step away. User lock-in has always been their goal, and they don't even lie about it. This moat strategy is arguably the most deliberate and consistent part of the company's history.

For instance, they created the SMB file protocol not from computer science first principles, but as a hack. And so everyone who wants to interoperate with it (e.g. Samba) is then locked in a decade long attempt to reproduce every single bug in their own code.

Mars also has a large amounts of sugar, and we're more likely to get there in our lifetime!

Murder is a crime too you know.

Isn't the whole point of having human beings in the loop that they can deal with limited information and still draw correct conclusions?

If your entire behaviour is guided by that license plate number then your focus should be on getting your facts straight. Sure, confirmation bias is a thing, but especially police officers should be trained to beware of confirmation bias and so check and recheck before engaging in a stop that could endanger people.

You monster! Won't anyone think of the stockh^H^H^H^H^Hchildren!

I honestly don't see the problem here. They did homework, cheated. Then they got the real test and failed.

So the system worked!

I assume you're one of those people who buys products - a consumer. In that case you're likely handing a significant part of your income over to that country.

Apparently it's OK to buy Chinese products (or Saudi, or ...), or to watch the Olympics or F1 or whatever in one of those countries. But when scientists in the US are no longer able to publish in peer reviewed journals if they receive Federal grants (yh, that's actually true), and they opt out and go work somewhere else, they're somehow evil?

It's not scientists and the left who have created a situation where human rights are flushed down the drain. As long as the fascists are winning ground world wide, all we can do is try and change the situation with our votes and our voices. Don't blame us for other people's mistakes, we're in the minority.

They own all the patents.

This would be similar to the ion drive. A small but continuous thrust is extremely effective. For unmanned flights, time is less of a factor anyway. This is an important technology and real use cases IMO.

Wasn't that after they had first claimed the include files were copyrighted?

I never understood why that Unix version was supposedly alien.

God no. I remember this Simpsons episode where Springfield needs to be moved after Homer causes the entire town to become a dump. The dump was full of AOL CDs.

At the time it felt like the skies came crashing down... Perspective gained :).