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Comment Re:How the heck? (Score 1) 88

Who is guilty in this case, and who is too quick to judge? In the matter of guilt, is it the public officials who have a sharply constrained budget to perform investigations, or the taxpayers who constrain the budgets of government agencies so they lack, in many cases, the resources to perform investigations that prevent miscarriages of justice? From an engineering mindset, I think it's clear that there is a tradeoff between resources allocated to services and the quality of the services that can be rendered. To perform perfect investigations in every case, the resources required will never be available. In the matter of judgement, a quick scan of a news article leading to the conclusion that everybody involved in administering justice in this case seems - perhaps - a wee bit hasty to me. I get that this is the internet, where judgyness is the norm. Nevertheless, I counsel that everybody seen to rush to judgment should be incarcerated - eye open that that cohort now includes me!

Comment Privacy Theatre (Score 5, Insightful) 233

Is there anything in USA law that would keep a USA-owned company that became the new owner of TikTok from selling the same data that USA legislators seem so concerned about to data brokers that would then resell it to Chinese-owned data consumers? I think not. Do USA-owned companies have a record of preventing harms to USA consumers in service of foreign governments? Again, no. To me, it seems like this legislation is all about creating the appearance of protecting USA interests without materially doing so.

Comment ALOHAnet (Score 2) 32

My picture of things is that Ethernet was basically ALOHAnet adapted to use the shared medium of wires rather than the shared medium of radio spectrum. I think the hard work went into creating that, and the easier work was reading the papers and seeing how it could use a different medium.

Comment block? (Score 3, Insightful) 107

Characterizing this action with a straight face as constituting "blocking" content is... disappointing. When search engines index publishers content and offer links to the orginal stories, that's - also disappointingly - characterised as "theft," yet when they fail to offer those links, that's somehow even worse. The fact is that Canadian leaders see on the one hand see the very real problem of failing Canadian media organisations and on the other an obscenely big pile of money at Google and think they've found a fix. But why the guy with the big pile of money would go along with this scheme has never been clear.

Nobody seems to ask why publishers pay big bucks on SEO schemes if they believe those hits on their content constitute theft.

Comment I canceled in 2019 with no issues (Score 1) 23

The offboarding (that a word?) process was refreshingly painless for me.

What's changed since then? Ericsson completed their purchase earlier this year, and you can imagine that the valuation was tied to the number of subscriptions that they had at the time of the sale. Ericsson is going to end up paying that $1e8 - not the departing executives. This is pure speculation on my part.

It does seem like many VOIP providers have lost interest in the consumer market - marketing seems to be all about business these days. Ooma - also.

Comment First documented fully ten years ago (Score 2) 286

The first public coverage of this issue that caught my attention was fully ten years ago, on the Living on Earth show.

https://loe.org/shows/segmentprint.html?programID=12-P13-00022&segmentID=1

That glyphosate is now also implicated is pretty terrible news - the days when it was used primarily as a weed killer are over, and it's now routinely sprayed on various food crops in USA to simplify processing. That means that it's broadly present in the food system and is very hard to avoid.

Comment Men on Mars? (Score 1, Interesting) 98

If this technology can be made portable enough, it's hard to imagine why any men would be sent to create a Mars colony - it's too expensive to ship somebody that lacks the ability to create offspring. (Even in the absence of portable IVG, it makes a lot more sense to send sperm than it does to send men.) The best investment is an 18-year-old woman with good reproductive ability and the ability to absorb a technical education once on the planet.

Practically speaking, do we need men any longer?

Submission + - EV Start-up Nikola Agrees to $125,000,000 Settlement (seattletimes.com)

bird writes: Without admitting wrong-doing, would-be electric truck maker Nikola has agree to a $125,000,000 settlement to settle charges that it defrauded investors with false claims about their EV vehicle technology. You may recall the video of a supposedly electric-powered truck that was later admitted to be powered not by a motor but rather by gravity? Nicola.

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