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Comment Re:The fusion delusion strikes again (Score 2) 42

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

Comment Re:Good! (Score 1) 46

Mostly just in the bulk, low barriers to entry, and pervasiveness(like a lot of things social media). The case of actors actually goes back a long way; state laws regarding compensation of child actors were spurred by the case of one who was popular in the 1920s and litigated with his parents over where the money wasn't in 1939. That case doesn't provide for takedowns; but it's also the case that filmmakers are normally looking for children to play characters; rather than to do 'candid' intense documentaries of them at home; so the degree of public exposure of private life is presumably deemed to be less; with the main issue being children who were...definitely...getting a solid education while on stage finding that all the money was gone when it became their problem.

Child-blogging, by contrast, seems to reward verisimilitude (if not necessarily truth) and invasiveness, relatively pervasive in-home mining for 'content', so presumably seems better served by removal-focused options; though there has definitely been talk about covering the economic angle in line with child actors.

I don't even know what the deal is with child beauty pageants, or how something you'd assume is a salacious bit of slander about what pedophile cabals are totally doing, somewhere, is actually a thing a slice of parents are into, way, way, into. Apparently that's a third rail to someone, though, as the only jurisdiction I'm aware of with significant restrictions on them is France.

Comment Re:The Horse is Already Gone (Score 1) 61

Unless quantum computing becomes cheap and comparatively widely available quite quickly after becoming viable passwords seem like they'll be a manageable problem. Nobody likes rotating them; but it's merely tedious to do and the passwords themselves are of zero interest unless they are still being accepted. If it does go from 'not possible' to 'so cheap we can just go through through in bulk' overnight that could ruin some people's days; but if there's any interval of 'nope, the fancy physics machine in the dilution refrigerator is currently booked by someone with a nation state intelligence budget' you can just rotate older credentials.

Now, if you were hoping that encryption was going to save any secrets that are interesting in and of themselves that got out in encrypted form; then you have a problem. Those can't be readily changed and will just be waiting.

Comment Re: smug Linux user enters the chat (Score 3, Informative) 174

You just conflated desktop environments with a specific application. Linux has probably a dozen desktop environments that are superior to Windows.

Linux does not have a raster image program on par with Photoshop, but that is probably why you do not see any graphic designers using Linux. It is easy to take shots at GIMP because this community developed program cannot match up, feature for feature, with a multi-billion dollar Photoshop. But there are a great number of community led projects that blow their proprietary counterparts out of the water.

Comment Re:ed-tech (Score 1) 88

Plus the whole 'fucking dystopian' angle. On the one hand we've got people bitching about 'civilizational decline'; but we want 'robot philosophers' teaching children? I'm not against the occasional scantronned multiple choice test; but outsourcing philosophy to save on those oh-so-expensive adjuncts seems like the sort of thing you only do to children being groomed for mindless servitude or because you've entirely given up on humanity as anything but an ingredient in pump and dump schemes.

Comment Re:Cisco vs. TP-Link (Score 1) 180

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

Comment Re: a corporation gave some money... (Score 3, Insightful) 31

Let me translate:

"... it often depends heavily on external crates, which can introduce complexity and auditing challenges, especially in enterprise environments."

"If you write code in rust, you may link to a library in your code. I think this is somehow unique to rust, but I have no experience in software development. That makes rust more challenging in Enterprise environments."

The difference is that everything is statically linked in Rust. This isn't a problem if you rebuild the universe and release every day anyway, fix the library and everything will pick it up.

But it's an issue for Canonical (and Debian) because they don't rebuild every one of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of packages for each update of the Release file. And this would have to include older releases too that are still supported.

With many languages, if you rebuild the .so then that's all that is needed. Sure end users need to restart processes to be sure of picking up the fix but that's all. Debian tries quite hard to avoid library bundling where possible but rust sort of makes it implicit anyway.

The downside of the shared library model is that any and every incompatible library change requires a soname bump. ABI stability is critical to the .so model.

Comment Re:You're Absolutely Right! (Score 2) 116

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

Comment Re:How does Brazil plan on fining linux distros? (Score 2) 69

Certainly. But then, those non-Brazilian companies can mock-comply. Then Brazilians will continue using them all the same, in standard Brazilian fashion, with companies and people pretending to obey the law, the government pretending to enforce it, and everyone knowing everyone else is pretending but having no way to prove it.

Case in point, those external companies seem to be using Cloudflare's georestriction rules, which is fine with us, as everyone is quickly learning to use VPNs.

Comment Re:How does Brazil plan on fining linux distros? (Score 3, Interesting) 69

if you think us "first world" countries lack people who skirt the law, you idealise us. :D

No, that's not it. It's a cultural difference. In first world countries skirting the law is something people do exceptionally. In countries such as mine, it's a way of life and survival, everyone skirting the laws because the laws aren't really meant to be followed in full, they're mean to be tool the government uses when it deems useful. If someone were to try, they'd be crippled to such an extent they'd be barely able to do anything, at all.

First world countries are so, in great part, because most laws are sane, mean to be followed by everyone, and most everyone does so. Although, granted, there's nowadays a level of "third-world-ization" going on there, what with more and more laws being approved that are similar to our more than they are to your old laws. I hope this process may stop and reverse at some point, but if not, well, once your legal system is fully corrupted, we'll be able to provide you with plenty of suggestions, tips, and tricks, on how to evade unjust laws, as we have literal centuries of experience doing so.

Comment Re:How does Brazil plan on fining linux distros? (Score 4, Interesting) 69

I'm Brazilian. The law has an article that allows regulatory bodies to define something as not being affected by the law if that's in the public interest, so it's likely the government will use that to classify everything they have no means to actually police as being fine. Which means this law can be actively enabled or disable to affect anyone the government wants affected, meaning mostly companies with deep pockets who can be fined for lack of compliance. Going after those without any money would be a waste of time for enforcers.

Also, Brazil has something first world countries lack: a population used to disregarding laws we dislike. People here have already developed plenty of workarounds for age verification in websites, and once it starts popping up on phones and PCs, will do the same. Since most already use a pirated Windows, they'll simply have that pirated Windows come without age verification.

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