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Comment Re: Yes (Score 1) 202

"And the UK handed you the brand new computer industry on a plate by destroying all the computers it had built during the war while not requiring that you do the same with the licensed copies you had built."

The UK decided to destroy its computers on its own, don't blame us for your idiocy. "Require"? What were you going to "require" we do? And how were you going to enforce this "requirement"?

And what licensed copies are you talking about? Britain shared the Bombe (which was basically an upgraded version of the one the Polish built, but of course Brits insist they're the geniuses who broke Enigma), but ENIAC was a US production.

Comment Silo your accounts (Score 1) 34

It can very occasionally be a pain in the butt, but I use a throwaway google account for my phone, and nothing but my phone. The only data I allow it to back up is my contacts list (even that is a stretch for me, but I got tired of re-entering all the names and numbers each time I bought a new phone or doing a manual local backup process). There are no other google accounts added to my phone. No gmail (I use a third party IMAP client for a non-google email, only two weeks of emails are kept on the server before being downloaded to my local PC and deleted.)

Depends on how much you want to sacrifice convenience for safety in terms of someone potentially having access to your entire digital history / footprint by getting a hold of your phone.

The idea is to keep a reasonable amount of stuff local-only and off the device that is easy to steal / confiscate / hack.

Comment Re:You need this for an emergency (Score 2) 196

It's not expensive to add AM coverage to the radio itself. However, many cars, especially EVs, flagrantly exceed FCC limits on RF noise pollution, and this is far worse on AM (which picks up noise as signal) than FM (which suppresses some noise and receives less due to the higher frequency). So the cost is not in the radio but in fixing the el cheapo badly filtered car power system so that the AM radio isn't wiped out by it.

Of course after you do all that almost all that's on AM is junk, lots of Rush wannabees, though there is diverse ethnic programming in some cities.

Comment Re:Celebrities [Re:Sea level rise [Re:Uh HUH]] (Score 1) 84

The question was about sea level rise.

If the rising waters coincide with other climatic events, such as rainstorms and high tides, the phenomenon could swallow beaches, chew away bluffs and coastlines

There is a narrative that oh, a few cm of sea level rise is no problem, it's just a little higher water. It isn't.

However, the kinds of multi-million-dollar mansions that celebrities buy aren't the rickety perched-on-the-edge-of-a-crumbling bluff houses built in the 30s and 40s. They tend to be built-by-high-priced-architects homes that had civil engineers to advise about the stability of the foundation.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entert...

Comment Re:Its a trap! (Score 1) 41

If AI is ruled a serious risk that requires a government kill switch you won't be running any open weights models on hardware you control. I expect that's what the FSF is afraid of. That's why they refer to it as hypothetical technology as in "assuming such a kill switch was developed".

It might seem far fetched but consider that you are probably (based on the American readership of this site):

- not permitted to buy more than a few grams of effective cold medication per day and have to show ID, which goes in a tracking system, in order to do so.

- while you are allowed to purchase microcontrollers, if you install this on them they are illegal to possess

- possession or use of all manner of chemicals, combinations of chemicals and shaped metal considered dangerous will get you prosecuted with various degrees of zeal

The big AI companies, who already possess the most effective possible actual kill switches, seem oddly enthusiastic about the whole thing.

Comment Re:If they are thermally efficient enough (Score 1) 129

Not just downlink, but the inter-satellite bandwidth and latency is also likely to be a problem. I saw an analysis of what it would take to build a big datacentre, and there the cooling really does become a problem. Not the radiators so much as the plumbing to move the heat around. So everyone is talking about lots of little satellites, but that means you're restricted to a handful of cards locally. It's going to restrict the kinds of jobs you can do when the next rack over is a thousand kilometres away.

Comment Re:Correct. And oh, no. (Score 1) 54

That's how it already works.

It's not. Full disk access is sticky. When you grant it, the app has it until you go into settings and revoke it. It's not like sudo, it's like running that app as root, with no permission required after the first time. On Linux to get the same effect you have to edit a text file with root permissions and give the program passwordless sudo privileges, which should make any competent Linux users' hair stand on end.

And the next step will be "See, we can't allow full disk access." And then macOS will cease to be usable.

People have been "predicting" this slippery slope thing for ages and it hasn't happened.

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