That surprised me, too. TypeScript is a very poorly-congealed ("designed" seems a bit strong) language.

Of the two popular scripting languages - python and ruby - python probably makes more sense as you can compile into actual binaries if you want.

For speed and parallel processing, which I'd assume they'd want, they'd be better off with Tcl or Erlang, both of which are much much better suited to this sort of work.

Then they should have used Tcl.

JavaScript is actually a pretty interesting, powerful language, but one with quite a few problems. (I recommend the book JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford if you want to learn more about that.) TypeScript solves some, but by no means all, of those problems. From what I've heard, it's increasingly popular.

And my point - Not much of modern Linux is hampered by lack of funding. And the Linux movement has a long history of contributors who were essentially sponsored by their employers. NASA, for instance, had a few key contributors who took time form, full-time duties to make Linux much much better.

"The Spoils of War" by Andrew Cockburn. Goes way back to American soldiers having to steal boots off dead Chinese soldiers in Korea to get decent boots, their feet were freezing off.

"The Pentagon Wars" by Col. James F Burton. Burton was part of the 1980s "Fighter Mafia" who got the F-16 built, against Pentagon tendencies for every new plane to be twice the weight and twice the cost of the last one. (The F-35 continues the tradition.) They were the ones who publicized the $400 hammer and $600 toilet seat.

Cockburn laments that people thought it only applied to some things, when their point was that every $1 lightbulb on the console was $25 to replace.

Burton notes that one Army logistics guy got the price of a single uranium bullet down from $80 to $4 by whipsawing two suppliers into real competition, another reduction every purchasing round, for years. That guy gave a presentation to a roomful of Stars on it, and came back to his desk to find retirement papers waiting. Or a transfer to Thule. His choice.

Would charging for access have stopped the work on Wayland?

Remember when you could, in System 6.0.7, and still in System 7, copy a file to a floppy (in MultiFinder), then from the floppy, then back to the floppy, and so on for a few minutes, and your Mac would hard crash. Remember?

As a tech I had a few tricks to crash Macs without any software. Just stupid Mac tricks. Not overflowing a disk, either, that was a stupid Windows trick.

Macs were not and are not yet infallible. They enjoy a huge advantage over Windows - control of the hardware. Windows suffers a multitude of hardware drivers, written by who-knows, and every significant attempt by Microsoft to insulate the kernel from bad driver behavior failed up to Windows 8. Mostly.

But it's sport to bash Windows. Has been since about Linux kernel 2.0, which if you were around then, you know was the pot calling the kettle black.

Windows has many flaws to hang your beanie on, but considering the requirements, it's remarkable. Not as remarkable as Linux, which somehow has become so despite (virtually) no paid developers. And I've used Linux since Slackware something like 0.9, which was not 'officially' distributed, and sort of worked. But it hooked me on Linux. Using Windows since the Mach 20 board and Windows 2.0, I've suffered but persisted. Felt bad for WordStar, WordPerfect for Windows, and some other software that never quite made it. Anyone remember Jazz?

Still, bashing Windows is easy. Anyone care to be similarly honest about X11?

Care to share actual metrics with us?

Assuming it's remotely true (and there's good reason for thinking it isn't), it still means the FBI director was negligent in their choice of personal email provider, that the email provider had incompetent security, and that the government's failure to either have an Internet Czar (the post exists) or to enforce high standards on Internet services are a threat to the security of the nation (since we already know malware can cross airgaps through negligence, the DoD has been hit that way a few times). The FBI director could have copied unknown quantities of malware onto government machines through lax standards, any of which could have delivered classified information over the Internet (we know this because it has also happened to the DoD).

In short, the existence of the hack is a minor concern relative to every single implication that hack has.

Addiction is neurological, not chemical. Addiction is the consequence of the rewards centre of the brain becoming dependent on stimulation and that can be from anything.

Do try to make an effort.

Doesn't have to be a credit card. A class III user digital certificate requires a verification firm be certain of a person's identity through multiple proofs. If an age verification service issued such a certificate, but anonymised the name the certificate was issued to to the user's selected screen name, you now have a digital ID that proves your age and optionally can be used for encryption purposes to ensure your account is only reachable from devices you authorise.

And those come with warnings, legal penalties on vendors who sell to known addicts or children, legal penalties for abusers, financial penalties to abusers, etc. There are cars which have their own breathalisers.

So, no, society has said that the responsibility is distributed. Which is correct.

It is possible to verify age to the same degree (or better) than any "age verification service" without any sort of privacy invasion.

A six digit UID is not one that could be remotely considered "old".

*goes off grumbling and looks for anyone he can shout at to get off his lawn.

It is legitimate for any service that constitutes a "common carrier" to be free of consequences for what it carries. But Meta do not claim to be a "common carrier", and that changes the nature of the playing field substantially. As soon as a service can inspect messages and moderate, it is no longer eligible to claim that it is not responsible for what it carries.

Your counter-argument holds some merit, but runs into two problems.

First, society deems any service that monitors to be liable. That may well be unreasonable at the volumes involved, but that's irrelevant. Meta chose to monitor, knowing that this made it liable in the eyes of society. There are, of course, good reasons for that - mostly, society is sick and twisted, and criminality is encouraged as a "good thing" and "sticking it to the man". This is a very good reason to monitor. But Meta chose to have an obscenely large customer base (it didn't need to), Meta chose to monitor (it is quite capable of parking itself in a country where this isn't an obligation), and Meta chose to make the service addictive (which is a good way of encouraging criminals onto the scene, as addicts are easy prey).

Second, Meta has known there's been a problem for a very long time (depression and suicides by human moderators is a serious problem Meta has been facing for many years at this point). Meta elected to sweep the problem under the rug and create the illusion of doing something by using AI. If a serivce knows there's a problem but does nothing, and in particular a very cheap form of nothing, then one must consider the possibility said service is not solving said problem because there's more money to be made by having the abusers there than by removing them.

Can one block every criminal action? Probably not, which means that that's the wrong problem to solve. Intelligent, rational, people do not try to solve actually impossible problems. Rather, they change the problems into ones that are quite easy. This is very standard lateral thinking and anyone over the age of 10 who has not been trained in lateral thinking should sue their school for incompetence.