Comment Re:Separation of concerns, mofo! (Score 1) 16
Why not? If they can get a better deal using one provider or source than another, why not take it? Or do you want them to just spend their money like a drunk sailor like most Americans do?
Comment Re:Before someone says it (Score 1) 130
The only way it could work fairly is by having an independent unbiased group making the determination on what was clearly misinformation.
That would be ideal, but I don't think it's really necessary. Just keeping the list a subject of public debate is sufficient to prevent things from getting too skewed.
Comment Re:Before someone says it (Score 1) 130
That basically all of the people in the Western governments turned out to be raping minors and eating children
There is zero evidence of this, and the fact that you seem to believe it makes me dismiss everything else you might say out of hand, because you clearly either lack or don't engage critical thinking skills.
Comment Re:Before someone says it (Score 1) 130
That's the thing though. The biggest source of misinformation in ol' Blighty is Nr.10.
I don't think that would matter in practice. This law wouldn't let them specify what *news* is allowed, only what news sources, and there would be a huge stink if they tried to block the major real news outlets. They'd like to, I'm sure, but I really doubt that they'd succeed.
Comment Re:Before someone says it (Score 2, Informative) 130
It does demonstrate the problem with "misinformation" though. Some people will continue to insist it was true even years after it was proven false.
Russiagate was absolutely not "proven false". Mueller's report and both the House and Senate reports (from committees led by Republicans) thoroughly verified it.
Submission + - Europe: The World's Fastest-warming Continent (barrons.com)
fjo3 writes: The latest heatwave sweeping across Europe is a stark reminder that it is the world's fastest-warming continent, stretching into an Arctic that is heating at an even greater pace.
Britain, France, Italy and Spain have issued red alerts and health warnings for much of their territory this week as the region endures its second heat episode since May.
Britain, France, Italy and Spain have issued red alerts and health warnings for much of their territory this week as the region endures its second heat episode since May.
Comment Re:The purpose of a factory is not to provide jobs (Score 4, Insightful) 191
The purpose of a factory is not to provide jobs.
It's intended to made widgets that can then be sold at a profit.
It's not a social welfare program.
The way things are headed, the only way people are going to be able to obtain money to pay for those widgets is via social welfare programs.
Comment Re:You'll end up with an empty repository (Score 1) 168
All true - but also a young arrogant engineer who completely failed to read and learn from people who have entire closets full of computing awards (including Turing Awards) for a reason.
Well, not just one young arrogant engineer, also most of the maintainers of the major Linux distros in the world.
If it's really a bad idea, the blame doesn't really fall on Poettering. Many young, arrogant engineers have built things that were stupid, and their things got ignored by the world. Some smaller number of young, arrogant engineers have built things that were stupid but were able to convince their PHBs that they weren't stupid and they got deployed. I don't think that's how I'd characterize the leadership at Red Hat (I never worked there, but I have good friends who did), but let's suppose that they were clueless and that's why they deployed Poettering's stupid idea.
But then how do you explain why so many others looked at it, experimented with it for a few years, and then decided to adopt it, and even extend it?
The systemd opponents are loud and forceful on social media. The people who actually build the systems, however, disagree. And It's not just one or two groups who are somehow beholden to Poettering, nor is it people who don't know anything or have no technical stake in the decision.
You might want to consider whether you're living up to your nick here.
I don't personally care that much. I find it mildly annoying that the old scripts my finger muscle memory still wants to type by default don't always work... but honestly I rarely need them any more, because my systems Just Work. And I have to consider the possibility that systemd is part of the reason Linux requires so much less maintenance than it used to. There are multiple contributors here. A lot of it is that drivers have gotten a lot better and other aspects of the system have matured (like the audio subsystem
But given its broad adoption by nearly all open source and commercial Linux distros, Occam's razor says that it's probably better than sysvinit. Or BSD init. Or Upstart. Or OpenRC, or... <insert favorite system manager here>.
Submission + - Helion says the 1st fusion power plant is coming soon. A cofounder isn't so sure (scientificamerican.com)
tedlistens writes: The startup backed by Sam Altman recently raised $465 million, tripling it's valuation as it races to build what it says will be the world's first fusion power plant, supplying Microsoft with carbon-free electricity in 2028.
But one of its founders—the plasma scientist whose research inspired its reactor design—has serious doubts.
But one of its founders—the plasma scientist whose research inspired its reactor design—has serious doubts.
Comment Re:Don't Bot Farms... (Score 1) 25
I don't know how they manage to mux all that I/O. It must be several hundred phones (maybe thousands) all connected to one computer.
The one you saw is probably the fake one. However, Chinese phone farms do exist and they advertise in the open.
The one you saw is probably the fake one. However, Chinese phone farms do exist and they advertise in the open.
Comment Re:Does this mean Sam Altman's going to prison? (Score 2) 72
Please, find me an example of this fantasy.
Here you go.
For a slightly less gruesome story, this guy misrepresened himself for years, lying about his credentials.
Here you go.
For a slightly less gruesome story, this guy misrepresened himself for years, lying about his credentials.
Comment Re: Cool Cool (Score 1) 87
Necessary? I thought we were talking about what was legal. My mistake.
Appropriateness of the response to the emergency is part of the legal considerations. Congress granted the power for a reason. Taking that and assuming it means arbitrary power is not operating within the law, not for Trump, not for Biden.
And you clearly misremember the legal posture of suspended payments and interest.
In what way? Please correct me.
Comment Re:The standard pro self-driving argument (Score 1) 59
If you want to make it a scientific number, you need to compare like against like. Same driving times, same driving conditions, same driving speeds, same roads (for example, Waymo avoids tricky intersections)
Bah. If a human driver increased their safety and reliability by avoiding certain situations, would you call them a worse driver for it?
Waymo would have to be transparent and open with their data.
They provide full access to the regulators, and they've allowed academic researchers full access. Putting it all online would be more transparent, but they're a business and they have up and coming competitors.
Submission + - Bypass the polirical parties, add a new feedback to Congress (taxnvote.org)
SysEngineer writes: How would you change the US Federal budget? TaxNVote.org allows you to adjust 9 or 1000 categories of the next federal budget. The default form shows nine top-level categories (Defense, VA, Education, Health, Infrastructure, Science, Environment, DHS, Other); expand any line and you can allocate down to individual federal accounts — NASA, the National Park Service, specific research agencies, anything Congress votes on. Takes about five minutes at the top level, longer if you want the detail.
Tax N Vote (TNV) is a proposal to add a new feedback channel to the federal budget process. At tax filing each year, every taxpayer optionally submits a Tax Dollar — one person, one allocation. The IRS anonymizes submissions; the Census Bureau processes and stores them (where you can verify your own); the CBO aggregates one-person-one-vote between April 16 and May 1 and publishes "The People's Budget." A third reference point alongside the two party platforms — measurable, granular, and updated annually. Congress is not bound by it; what changes is that deviations from constituent preferences become documented, attributable, and electorally citable. The argument is system-dynamics, not partisan: changing the color of the players doesn't change the system. A simulation of the mechanism shows convergence toward whatever the People's Budget turns out to be, in both ideological directions tested. There will be a talk on the model at ISDC 2026 in Delft.
The Government-side processing of Tax Dollar documents is written in Rust — memory safety and predictable performance for government data handling. The browser-side allocation engine is a Rust WASM module inside a Vue frontend, so the math you see in the app is the same math the aggregator uses. Processing is divided across agencies that already exist; marginal cost to the government is less than renaming the Department of War.
Open source end to end. The Tax Dollar format is open, the reference implementation is at github.com/greenpdx/TaxNVote26, and anyone can build their own client, audit the aggregator, or publish pre-filled template budgets that citizens adopt with one click. Go build a budget: TaxNVote.org.
Tax N Vote (TNV) is a proposal to add a new feedback channel to the federal budget process. At tax filing each year, every taxpayer optionally submits a Tax Dollar — one person, one allocation. The IRS anonymizes submissions; the Census Bureau processes and stores them (where you can verify your own); the CBO aggregates one-person-one-vote between April 16 and May 1 and publishes "The People's Budget." A third reference point alongside the two party platforms — measurable, granular, and updated annually. Congress is not bound by it; what changes is that deviations from constituent preferences become documented, attributable, and electorally citable. The argument is system-dynamics, not partisan: changing the color of the players doesn't change the system. A simulation of the mechanism shows convergence toward whatever the People's Budget turns out to be, in both ideological directions tested. There will be a talk on the model at ISDC 2026 in Delft.
The Government-side processing of Tax Dollar documents is written in Rust — memory safety and predictable performance for government data handling. The browser-side allocation engine is a Rust WASM module inside a Vue frontend, so the math you see in the app is the same math the aggregator uses. Processing is divided across agencies that already exist; marginal cost to the government is less than renaming the Department of War.
Open source end to end. The Tax Dollar format is open, the reference implementation is at github.com/greenpdx/TaxNVote26, and anyone can build their own client, audit the aggregator, or publish pre-filled template budgets that citizens adopt with one click. Go build a budget: TaxNVote.org.
Comment Re: strncpy never made sense (Score 3, Insightful) 40
strncpy() was not intended for null-terminated strings at all. It should have been named copy_null_padded_buffer(). Then its operation would have made sense to almost anyone. People wouldn't have minded the longer name much either, because hardly anybody uses null-padded buffers in modern software.
Note that a null-padded buffer that is completely full doesn't have any nulls in it at all. That's why strncpy() doesn't necessarily add a null termination. It also fills the entire destination buffer with nulls after the end of a short copy, which can be very inefficient when used with null-terminated strings.
TL;DR: don't use strncpy(). It doesn't do what anybody thinks it does.
