Is this the same guy that proved time travel was possible by generating a negative energy density gravitational lens using any common coffee maker?

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All of which would improve almost immediately with competition.

I have posted here for maybe five years. But I felt a twinge of nostalgia, so I decided to check out the latest headlines.

So I see this headline and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed about the world during my absence.

So then I see your comment and I go: This is totally crazy, so nothing has really changed in the discourse, either.

The competition-porn security blanket was a cute idea back in the early 1980s. I was there when the Apple II, the TRS-80, and Commodore Pet were busy trying to set the world on fire. And I've watched the evolution of this space very carefully ever since. As a blue-blood digital native it's the main story of my life and times. My fascination with digital electronics began in the early 1970s. My attitude when the original home-computing toys arrived wasn't: Where did this come from? No, it was: Where have you been all these long, painful, pining year?

This was all supposed to set the world free. That's the story we always tell entering into a new age.

What do I see around me now? Five or so trillion dollar corporations dictating nearly every damn thing about this technology is developed, how it is delivered, and how it is consumed.

This is the house that competition built.

What were these companies competing for all these long years? What was the final brass ring? I'll tell you, and it should be obvious: To gain the monolithic scale to collect monopoly rent not just from their products, but also from the very context in which those products are rendered relevant to our psyches.

Sure, competition is a magic growth hormone, considered narrowly. But surely there's enough water under the bridge at this point that "considered narrowly" ought to be consider harmful. No?

So let's step back and not consider competition narrowly. What are the systemic realities of naive faith in competition?

The systemic reality is that competition injected at the bottom (a good thing) merely kicks the can down the road. The corporations then compete to rise above the discipline of competition. Maybe we double down and inject competition again, this time bigger, purer, bolder than before. Then the cycle repeats again. This time with even bigger corporations competing to rise above competition as titans, behemoths, and leviathans.

Is the government succeeding at taming these giants? Do Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook practice all that much legitimate competition? Here's a skill-testing question. Which of those five corporations is not known for commanding a primary vertical? Google has search and YouTube and the gated Android store. Scratch one. Amazon has AWS and the gated Kindle store. Scratch two. Apple has the iPhone and the gated iOS app store. Scratch three. Microsoft has government workflow integration and the PC gaming community. Scratch four. Facebook has social. Scratch five.

Even to define these verticals as duopolies requires athletic feats of imagination. I happen to use YouTube as my main social platform, and I've never had an account on Facebook. Do I strike you as a typical consumer? Or the 1% of the 1%?

I'm not just speaking here in cliche. I'm extremely well versed on free market principles, free market principles, and the theory of systems, including economic systems and human discourse systems. I spent over 500 hours consuming neoliberal podcasts featuring every possible flavour of neoliberal guest.

On a parallel track, over the past year I traced pretty much the entire evolution of postmodern thought from Hegel and Marx forward to the present times. There's actually quite a lot of neoliberal theory I'm sympathetic toward. I wish I could say the same for postmodernism, but that's another can of worms.

I like much of neoliberalism, but I'm not stupid. I can see the world plainly as it exists plainly before my eyes. We injected competition, it was wonder and vigorous for many decades, but finally and we got was monopoly on a larger scale than we've ever seen before.

What do you suppose the host talks about after conducting over 500 hours of interviews with hundreds of different guests, on mostly the same small set of topics?

Here's an eternal theme: If only we did it right, this time.

You see, every attempt to reform the world that lead to the world remaining the same as ever, only more so, shared the same universal flaw: We didn't go big enough to make $purity cure $horse. This is the one true universal excuse. It was used for socialism. It was used for market capitalism. It was used for every darn thing in between.

So the silver lining in creating worse monopolies than we've ever had before is that we forced them to make us a lot of nice toys in getting there. So I guess we have actually reformed monopoly to some degree. Once upon a time, monopolies came into existence without hardly making anyone a new toy worth having.

Okay, so what's another topic that burns eternal when you discuss the same small set of neoliberal principles for 500 hours?

Education reform. Sound familiar? It surely must. You see to be an expert, with an expert diagnosis, which in your unique genius you've managed to distill down to one word. Competition. Quite the magic trick there, I must say.

Here's a small thing. Charter schools, as normally implemented, are yet another government program. It's a government program with an extra degree of freedom inside compared to the normal landscape. But it's still a government program.

How do Charter schools mainly compete? For the quality of the parents. They often say that they are neutral. But then the application process is so arduous, that only the most truly devoted 1% of parents make it all the way through. So many meeting you have to attend with the school admissions people. What kind of family can organize that? Either a family with means, or a family with fervent devotion to the educational cause.

The vast majority of superior Charter school outcomes comes from this factor alone. Education concerns human capital. Nothing improves human capital like a sorting hat that selects only the right people, for whatever metric you wish to optimize.

Actual value-add in education has mostly proven to be a long unicorn hunt. You can figure out who your best students are easily. No matter how you teach, your best students will remain your best students. For the rest of your students, things are far more hit and miss. One teaching method might connect with one student, whereas a different method might connect with a different student. Neither of these were A students to begin with. And rarely do they become A students at the end. (There are of course some spectacular exceptions if you pray at the alter of N=1.)

Because building a school with better human capital is so much easier than improved the human capital you're stuck with, almost all the best charter schools have mostly done the former. Mostly. There are marginal gains to be had by getting the rest right. Marginal.

So what happens? The schools get good at lying about the reality that they are competing for human capital, and make a big story about how they've improved the capital of their students during their time at the school.

I think it's Finland that has gone furthest in education reform. This was also a competition for human capital, but they moved this into the teaching ranks, rather than the student ranks.

Education is very nearly the hardest degree program in Finland to get into. It would be maybe a small step down from medical school. Dullard teachers in Finland are rare birds. The students have far less class time, are given far less formal homework, but they work hard anyway, and consistently score highly in the world tables.

South Korea does everything exactly the other way. Stories are written about high school students in Korea jumping out of windows. After you sleep through most of the official school day, off you go to the second, private sector school day. And all they ever graduate are narrow technocrats. It's a disaster on wheels.

Blowing smoke up the ass of competition sure beats having to know something about the real world. Makes you sound smart, without typing your fingers off, like I've just done.

Which is why I finally moved on from Slashdot to greener pastures.

Argentina is not banning emoji, Italy is not requiring all babies to be dressed in pink or blue, and Morocco is not going to require GPS to tax bicycles by the mile.

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If you don't like my source then perhaps you can provide one that is better.

I just reviewed every result on the first page of Google search for: beef greenhouse climate. EVERY SINGLE ONE explains, in one way or another, that beef has a significant and grossly disproportionate impact on the climate. The Economist, Scientific American, The Guardian, Forbes, World Resource Institute, Vox, BBC, Science(published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science), Sciencedirect, the United Nation's FAO, and countless more. Take your pick. Or you could try
Environmental impact of meat production with over 200 sources cited.

Global warming in general, and the impact of beef in particular, are all way past the point where denialism requires actively avoiding and disregard wall-to-wall sources saying the same thing.

If we are concerned about the global warming impact of eating beef then I'm thinking we did so well with the big emitters of coal, petroleum, natural gas, cement, and metal refining, that we are looking to the teeny tiny impact of beef.

If you are bleeding from multiple wounds, I'm sure you know full well that was not a valid argument AGAINST bandaging the easily fixed bleeding immediately, while experts attempt to get the more severe and difficult bleeding under control.

We have not remotely halted global warming. We have barely begun to slow it down, due to decades of sabotage by denialists. The only way we can possibly solve this problem is a few percent at a time in many different ways and many different places. As all of the top Google search results explain, reducing beef consumption is the quickest and easiest thing we can do to immediately and significantly shift things several percent in the right direction. Several percent translates into years of difference, and a lower peak temperature.

As for the rest of your post, I very carefully checked and double checked. Not one sentence was remotely addressed how much impact beef does or does not have. I'm not sure why, but you spent four paragraphs 100% dedicated to arguing that your signature is false and absurd.

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Beef is one of the top cause of climate change?

Yes.

I thought I'd look that up and a study from Oklahoma State University says beef production causes 1.9% of the CO2 emissions from human activity.

That's called confirmation bias. You went looking for a specific answer, you ignored all of the reliable sources and all of the evidence contradicting the answer you wanted, and you latched on to the first random thing that kinda-sorta looked like the answer you wanted.

In this case you quote a fragment about CO2, and you utterly disregarded methane. Methane is 25 to 80 times more powerful of a greenhouse gas than CO2, and beef production accounts for approximately one third of all human caused methane in the US.

Beef is indisputably an order of magnitude more environmentally damaging than any other category of food. You could buy anywhere from 10 to 200 pounds of virtually any non-meat food, eat one pound and literally burn all of the rest, and it would have less environmental impact than a pound of beef. Beef is obviously only one of many contributors to global warming, but it is a significant factor.

Global warming is not remotely "solved". Temperatures are rising, we haven't stopped the increase, we haven't even managed to slow the increase. Temperatures are still on a basically straight-line increase. There are various initiatives to eventually try to get things under control, but we're nowhere near achieving that. Temperatures are going to continue to rising for decades to come, because denialists have spent the last decades devoted to sabotage.

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Nvidia will reduce the number of GPUs it sells to manufacturers of graphics cards and laptops so that those manufacturers can clear out their existing inventory.

In related news, Ford has decided to reduce the number of Edsels it will sell so car dealerships can clear out their existing inventory,
Microsoft has decided to reduce the number of copies of Vista it will sell so Computer makers can can clear out their existing inventory,
CocaCola decided to reduce the number of bottles of NewCoke they sell so supermarkets can clear out their existing inventory,
and Republicans have decided to reduce the number of their voters they send to vote so that... ummm elections can clear out their inventories?

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I heard a group of Trump supporters were exposed, but the brainscans all came back negative.

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Florida governor Ron DeSantis declared this story is more fake news from the Democrats and Liberal Media.
"I am not a snail, nor do I have brain worms."

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Quoting the technical specifications: ...FDO software client is installed on the device.
A Root of Trust key (RoT) is also created inside the device to uniquely identify it. This RoT can take the form of cryptographic keys built into the silicon processor (or associated TPM)...

"TPM" is Trusted Platform Module. The "Root of Trust" is is the master security key locking the cryptography on the device - a key which are are explicitly forbidden to know or control. And of course this is the keys locked in the device must "uniquely identify" the device.

The Trust module is now being embedded inside new CPUs.

If you do not activate the Turst system, and given master control of you computer, you are locked out of the system, and locked out of any website based on the system. The next step is that you must register the unique identiy with a CetrificateAuthority/RendesvousService, and prove that the computer is secure against you. This is called "Trust" - specifically your computer is Trusted not to give you your keys, your computer is Trusted not to permit you to use those keys except as defied by them.

If you are not using an approved Operating system, you are locked out. If you have made any changes to your operating system, you are locked out. If you have not installed mandatory-updates from the operating system provider, you are locked out. Locked out of the system. Locked out of all websites based on the system. Locked out of any and all of your own files which were downloaded under this system. It's a Master DRM which owns your system, Trusted to be secure against the owner.

In case anyone hadn't noticed, Microsoft has made Trust chips (or Trust CPUs) mandatory for Windows 11.

There was outrage when Trusted Computing was announced, but they just quietly kept rolling it forwards. Baking it inside most new CPUs now. Some people tried to dismiss or deny or as hypothetical or paranoid or a conspiracy theory. Here it is, mandatory for Windows 11. And being forced out by Apple, and Google.

By the way, one of the earliest declared purposes for Trusted computing - given in a world cybersecurity forum keynote speech by the U.S. head of cybersecurity - was to force out operating system updates to protect against viruses and worms. Specifically, you would be denied internet access if your computer did not have the latest Opearting system updates. And of course, you would be denied internet access if your computer had an unapproved or unknown operating system. Microsoft built this - it's called Trusted Network Connect. Of course they're not stupid enough to roll that out - not until Trust is already mandatory in all common modern computer and phone hardware.... and inside CPUs... and major operating systems... and of course they wouldn't do that unless major websites were already making Trusted Computing mandatory. Oh wait that's what this story is announcing, making Trusted Computing mandatory in place of website passwords.

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Tip: You might want to review more carefully before posting rants, especially when the target was posted at +2 reflecting earned Karma from a history of reputable posting.

You might also want to read https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/10/22/world-end/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law. I deliberately attempted to account for Poe's Law, in that the five thousand year old quote mentions "algorithms". That should have been a clear hint.

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Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; algorithms are feeding our children pornography; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching. <ref>Assyrian clay tablet, 2800 B.C</ref>

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Are you willing to go to war with Russia over Ukraine?

Yes.

Ukraine should invite a handful of troops each from as many countries as possible, to camp along the border. If Putin breaks any of their toes then the answer to your question is yes. Putin should be well informed that every country will consider that an act of war, and that they will all immediately mobilize all forces necessary. Don't waste anyone's time explaining consequences to me, I'm not stupid. Putin is an uncivilized psychopath, but he is not stupid. If he somehow WERE that stupid, there's no point in putting that off 'til tomorrow.

23 August 1939 Russia formed a treaty with the Nazis, dividing territories of Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland into German and Soviet "spheres of influence", anticipating potential "territorial and political rearrangements" of these countries. Less than a month later Russia invaded Poland, and proceeding with annexation of Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Romanian territories.

Putin grew up as Soviet KGB, and he still thinks in archaic cold war terms. He wants to violently rebuild the Soviet Empire - if he thinks he can get away with it.

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Not to mention no dedicated hardware LED to indicate that the microphone/camera sensors have been switched by software into an active state. I generally keep my phone inside it's leather sheath and not in the same room. Close enough to reach in a few steps if it beeps, not close enough for rogue candid camera.

No one who actually cares about their privacy is using Chrome anyway.

You've missed the entire ball of wax. People care about privacy, but they get systematically priced out of the conversation.

People who "actually" care is just doublespeak for those who are too stubborn to allow themselves to get priced out of the conversation.

I've been immersed in the software profession since the 1970s. I once won a math prize. I even won a writing prize. I spent much of the 1990s reading Applied Cryptography for light entertainment. I understood that there ought to be side channels in the time domain concerning caches and speculation long before these began to emerge. (Peter Wright's book from 1988 had already impressed upon me that exploitation of side-channels was a going concern.) I figured that smarter people than me must have poked into this, so it probably wasn't as bad as it appeared to be. I was wrong. If anything, it was even worse than I intuitively suspected.

In summary, I have all the cognitive tools in the world, and security still makes my head hurt. To "actually" care is a Sisyphean standard in the modern IT landscape.

"Just" install Firefox. Seriously. That's the full cure?

If you can even do that much. I have family members who work for the government. They are only allowed to use Edge, which just Chrome with an additional layer of sheepskin, draped over top of a wolf with twice as many teeth. So they drive Edge for 35–45 hours per week at the office (only one of my four family members lucked into the nearly mythical short government work day) and then they come home to drive something completely different, just to show that the "actually" care about their privacy.

If greater society actually cared about people actually caring, then the government IT environment would permit the use of alternative browsers, at least within reason. Greater society does not actually care about people caring, so this is entirely verboten.

Unless this: German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice — 18 November 2021

How long did that last in Munich, at the other end of Germany?

LiMux was a project launched by the city of Munich in 2004 in order to migrate from Windows to a desktop infrastructure of its own, based on Linux. By 2012, the city had already migrated 12,600 of the total of 15,500 desktops, until in November 2017, the Munich City Council resolved to reverse the migration and return to Microsoft Windows-based software by 2020.

The LiMux lead on Wikipedia used to also include this sentence:

The city reports in addition to gaining freedom in software decisions and increased security, it has also saved Euros 11.7 million (US$16 million).

Now you can only find it burried deep in a ==Timeline== section, as a single line item:

23 November 2012 — Savings from LiMux environment over 10 million euros.

Ironically, there's a copy edit flag on the entire section stating that "this section is in list format but may read better as prose".

Am I going to sign up for the apparently Sisyphean task of keeping that comment about security and privacy and savings prominently displayed in the LiMux article lead, where it belongs? No, I'm not. Because I "actually" don't care, according to your doublespeak usage of the word "actually". Because to "actually" care is to have infinite resources in all directions and no concern whatsoever over painting yourself thin.

Intelligence is a dumb word. I prefer cognition. Cognition is modular. Intelligence is an attribute of the whole system. Cognition is an engineering domain. Intelligence is a judgement domain.