Yes, the government just spent $875 million to save $476 thousand... when they could have bought nearly 1.1 million $800 toilet seats instead. Your government at work, folks.

Probably Big Tobacco and Big Oil.

I'm quite serious. When the first campaigns trying to pretend AGW wasn't a thing started, someone followed the money, and found an enormous amount of it was coming from Big Tobacco. Why? Because they had a vested interest in discouraging trust in science. Scientists weren't just finding evidence that discouraged people from smoking, but politicians were noticing and were passing laws discouraging smoking and ultimately banning it in public places due to what scientists were finding out about second hand smoking. Big Tobacco could have reorganized itself to fit a world where tobacco products weren't welcome, but it was cheaper and easier to run campaigns against science in general, to try to buy time for their shareholders.

And of course Big Oil has been doing the same thing and with the same motivations. And so what was a crackpot conspiracy theory about vaccines is now suddenly a standard MAGA policy position.

I don't think nailing employees was the reason. I suspect it's the cover.

Nobody gives a rat's ass about the private lives of CEOs for the most part unless he was actively harassing women or giving them unearned promotions. Nothing has come out suggesting either. But the allegations he passed on secrets to a Chinese Spy is far, far, more concrete.

Yeah, it doesn't, because it affects only a tiny number of people. And realistically, self hosted email usually only goes "down" when the Internet connection isn't available to where-ever it is hosted, which... I mean, that's true of Outlook too. Internet down? Can't access Outlook 365 or private outlook clients. Or GMail. Or... etc.

Really, we've created this cloud-dependent bullshit because we want to save money, not because we're interested in "up time". And now we're finding out why it's so cheap.
 

Always someone out there ready to lick the boots of their glorious cloud overlords.

You know why your email being down for two days didn't make the Slashdot front page? Because it didn't affect anyone except you.

(Not that I think there aren't opportunities right now to improve self hosted email. But your snide comments about self hosting don't really work.)

My self hosted email seems to be up too.

> On a related topic, why did nobody call out the outrageous things that were happening on Epstein's island? Because the whole point was to build up a war chest of blackmail material for future leverage.

That's speculation but it's not really backed by what happened. Epstein and Maxwell do not appear to have ever blackmailed anyone, which is why the former is dead and the latter is in prison. It's not exactly hard to see a situation where both are spirited out of the country to a friendly jurisdiction when the noise becomes too loud, yet neither were able to force their connections to get them out.

My honest theory is that Epstein primarily wanted to be rich and so provided dopamine hits to his clients by providing two non-investment related "perks" of being around him: a positive one of putting billionaires in contact with charities, and a negative one that appealed to the basest instincts of the kinds of sociopaths that seem to be disproportionately represented among the rich. Epstein knew that dopamine hits, rather than competence, was the best way to get clients to stick with him and his business. Not exactly an unusual pattern, especially today.

What on Earth gives you that idea? I'm a diver, the damned thing could be upside down and it'd be still interesting. On its side is arguably optimal.

What utter bollocks. This is the type of industry that AI has no role in whatsoever. Why the fuck would you put something designed to emulate a "human" in instead of a conventional, easy to understand, algorithm that just juggles prices and flight times?

You slop-gobblers are so obsessed with your complement-toy that you've forgotten traditional processing is not merely more efficient and faster, but actually more accurate, when you have a straightforward logical query to make.

Normally I'd be skeptical of such a use of social media, but luckily Reddit has a famously-effective "no bots allowed" policy, so surely this cannot possibly go wrong.

"Return of the Return of the Living Dead" ?

Yeah, they'll recruit outrageously popular AIs to draw crowds at the cinema.

Go ahead and ruin every movie plot ever.

Well, he was accused of unauthorized access to a computer system, but the owners of the computer system involved made it emphatically clear they didn't want charges pressed. So technically you're correct, which is the best type of correct, but the nuance is that, no, the law he supposedly broke was too much for this specific case.

The other thing he was accused of was copyright infringement, but that's not illegal unless you intend to profit from it (simplification), it's normally merely a civil, not criminal, matter. And the entire point he was making was that the files shouldn't have been protected by copyright in the first place.

Swartz almost certainly had more issues than criminal charges that would inevitably have been dropped, or gone to court and been dismissed as soon as the "victim" refused to testify or testified in Swartz's favor. So while there's been a pile-on for the prosecutor in this case, I'm reluctant to join it beyond thinking she should have listened to MIT/JSTOR. People who are accused of crimes, even crimes they know are under uncontroversial laws and for which they're dead to rights, don't generally kill themselves. Rather, given his background, I suspect depression caused by you-know-what is far more likely.

macOS's Unix-like userland (ie the command line tools that weren't written for macOS, tools like "ls" and "rm") are mostly from FreeBSD (at one point I think there were some GNU tools mixed in, but I have a vague memory they started to remove those in earnest). None of the rest - the kernel, the GUI, the file systems, device drivers, the equivalent of init/systemd, et all are from BSD derived code, they're mostly proprietary Apple/NEXT.