> We actually need this in the UK because we donâ(TM)t have any other means of recognising who is allowed to work and who is not.

Uh-hum.

> This is why so many migrants are attracted to the UK from safe countries like France.

Damn those Frenchies taking all of your jobs!

What about letting people work if they're qualified to do the job? They'll generate wealth and create even more jobs in the process. A win-win situation, if you're not looking for excuses to hate immigrants.

If you are, then you're probably going to buy the logic that somehow people working reduces jobs. Odd how the same people who argue this have no problems with those citizens who are actively hoarding wealth. Is it because they want to believe the worst of immigrants, or is it that the wealth hoarders own a media that's all too happy to point the finger at scapegoats to draw attention from themselves?

Why do you so easily believe, despite no economists backing you up, that the most powerless people on Earth are the ones who are harming you?

Walmart?

Just did a search, indicated I wanted stuff that's in stock at my local Walmart, and they sell a whole bunch of ONN (their house electronics brand) CD radio combos. Two even have cassette players which I find interesting. Prices are about $30.

> elections every two years for the oldest serving member

I should clarify this, even though the "like the Senate" thing probably makes it clear what I meant. I meant "oldest serving term" or something like that. Basically everyone gets a six year term, and the terms are staggered.

Although some might argue age ought to be a factor too. That's just not my proposal.

I don't read the GP as asking for centralization.

I think there are multiple approaches that can be made to make it less of an issue:

1. Split the presidency into a triumvirate, with elections every two years for the oldest serving member (like the Senate) - this way you reduce the power of those elected, making it easier to get rid of them in the event of a corruption scandal. Right now, for understandable reasons, the President is considered above the law because of the sheer logistics of having the country have unbroken governance in the event of an arrest. I'm not suggesting members of the triumvirate should be arrestable for unpaid parking tickets, but making it easier for Congress to deal with corruption without feeling there'd be a "constitutional crisis" or that they'd lose a figurehead they've based their entire identity around if they did would be a massive improvement.

(As an aside, a triumvirate would reduce the attraction of the presidency for those not interested in public service.)

2. Create an absolute code of ethics. Have Congress mandate the IRS release tax returns of all candidates for Federal elected office. Require all elected officials place their estates in the hands of independent groups for while they're in office. (Don't like it? Don't run for f---ing office! You're supposed to be making the people rich, not yourself.) Make this a requirement before anyone is even presented to them as "elected to office" - ie if you don't do it the date you'd normally be sworn in, you're treated as someone who already resigned from office.

3. Give all elected officials a salary that's high enough to sustain a comfortable DC residence and a local residence, and an expenses system that allows them to travel, have a reasonable level of staffing, and so on, so they have zero need for outside income for anything other than campaigning. The fewer excuses an elected official can have for receiving and spending money, the easier it is to catch them when they're caught.

These three changes would be unpopular in some quarters, but I've yet to hear a coherent argument as to why an investor who plans to continue running investment companies for another 40 years is somehow a better politician than a community organizer.

I wouldn't say pragmatic, no. He's tried it, found it works, and now won't listen to the people pointing out the numerous problems with it.

The slopped Linux kernel may well be a violation of the copyrights of several unknowns in Europe, for example. If you're not planning to build a Linux-based product in Europe, not a big issue I guess. Not an issue in the US. But it's amazing how many people think US copyright law is the only type of copyright law.

And that's before we get to changing the entire nature of Linux so it's no longer a project understood by human beings.

This is Bitkeeper all over again. That was the last time Torvalds made a "pragmatic" decision, effectively locking out a large number of kernel devs from kernel development, until he was forced to build Git to replace it.

Oh, until I read the last word I thought you were talking about the US.

I used to be largely anti-piracy. The fact the corps have decided to abuse copyright at a level I never thought was possible means I don't give a stuff any more. Especially about movies, where the participants were paid already.

Pass the rum.

If they want to continue this "Digital downloads" shit, they can find a way to make it absolutely impossible for anyone to remove something from a library that was sold as being there indefinitely. Maybe allow people to download an encrypted version and put the key in escrow.

I'm not expecting that to happen, Joe Smartphone would never understand it, and the big corps very, very, clearly hate their customers now, I'm just listing it as what would be needed for me to buy them, and why I'll be buying the occasional DVD and downloading the matching HD rip in future (DVD is so I can have the 5.1 soundtrack.)

Attempts to anonymize data in the past have ended badly. I don't think this is as practical as the EU thinks.

Also, frankly, I don't want Google providing data to third parties. Period. And I don't think we need competition in the AI space, we need the space either shut down completely or regulated. This isn't the EU protecting citizens, it's it applying its boilerplate "Competition is always good" policies to a technology it doesn't understand is actively harmful.

Regulate it to a point it's either a net good with virtually no downsides - the Sloptavists about to reply to this will claim this is somehow possible, so they'll surely (sarcasm) support this kind of regulation - and deal with Google's monopoly position in general by reducing their power, maybe through regulation, maybe by making them sell off their email, Android and AI assets to separate independent companies.

But this? I've never seen such a fucking stupid set of policies in my life. This is the same crap that happened to Bernie, who also became enamoured by the hype. They need to be taking this in a completely different direction.

I've said it before but if the EU had to deal with Mafia protection rackets, instead of shutting down the protection rackets, they'd demand the Mafia split into rival protection rackets to protect competition. This is so ridiculous.

> So, any news source that makes a sincere effort at being unbiased will be distrusted by viewers at least half the time

I disagree with that. In general the left is more likely to consider centrist or center right media trustworthy. How many on the left do you think like MSNow? It's fewer than you think.

I'm not saying it's impossible to produce an openly left wing news outlet that the left finds credible, look at the Alan Rusbridger Guardian, for example, as a paper that did its best to have integrity while focusing on issues important to the left. But this cable-news shit is killing everyone. I'm not interested in Trump's gaffes, There's more important things this administration is doing the media - all of it - needs to cover. And do so objectively - but not in a bipartisan way, which isn't the same thing at all.

> That is a complete fluke, an accident

Are you sure about that?

The legal stuff was sorted out before either became popular, and BSD had the benefit of name recognition, 20 years of development (and thus a mature base), familiarity by academics across the world, and so on. While Linux was some hobby project written by an unknown programmer as a quick and dirty 32 bit replacement for the MINIX kernel so he could run MINIX with applications able to access gigabytes of RAM and be completely secured from one another.

The quick and dirty MINIX replacement somehow became the most popular operating system on Earth. While BSD was basically dead in the water by the early 2000s.

Is it just possible that the development environment mattered? That people contributed to Linux, causing it to become the universal OS compatible with almost every hardware environment with the RAM and processing power necessary, because they knew that their contributions would be more meaningful in an environment where people could copy it but never, ever, hide it and claim it as their own?

> That's why many commercial companies like to base their systems on FreeBSD.

Oh you were doing so well until then...

Curious actually to know whether FreeBSD is being used anywhere these days in a finished product? IIRC there was some firewall/router software based on it but for the most part everything, even the crap in your router, your phone, your SCSI controller, etc, is Linux.

> Or maybe people just don't agree with you? Or maybe you also didn't read the article title? The plan was to KEEP DST, so winter is unchanged.

I misparsed his comment too.

He's saying it's bad to have DST during the Winter. So KEEPing DST all year around is EXACTLY what he's saying is bad. Because then we'll have DST during the winter.

And I agree with him FWIW. Let's just have standard time during the entire year, so noon is (timezone sizes obviously not withstanding) as close an approximation to midday as possible. If we want to go to work later during the winter, and earlier during the summer, we can encourage businesses to cater for that, who'll see benefits in implementing it as a gradual time shift (say, over a period of a month, each week opening 15 minutes earlier), rather than doing everything at once like we do now.

DST is just plain dumb: sleep deprivation for once a year with very little beyond "But I can go to the park at 9pm rather than 8pm in July!" as the supposed benefit. It's nice to have more time after work in daylight, but DST is absolutely the worst way to do it. And the only thing even worse is subjecting everyone to DST during the winter.

I wish people would just have permanent standard time, rather than DT. Changing the time so you can have marginally more daylight in the evenings during the summer where you're already getting more daylight in the evenings anyway seems absurd to me, and not worth the impact it has on people's sleeping patterns. And nothing stops businesses from adjusting to a more reasonable set of opening patterns, maybe even changing it on a week by week basis so nobody has to wake up an hour early at an arbitrary point each year.

Nope, Intel has made ARM chips before, remember StrongARM? It just couldn't sell them.

Right now Intel is making its variant of an AMD CPU design after trying for several years to make variants of an HP design while reluctantly selling a 32 bit chip based on an 8 bit chip (the 8008) it built for a terminal manufacturer in the 1970s, in much greater quantities. I think you severely overestimate how enthusiastic Intel is about the CPUs it sells. Intel has repeatedly tried to come up with better designs than its popular products and the market has consistently rejected them, from the iAPX 432 in the 1980s to Itanium.

It's more than happy to rent fab space to Apple if Apple ponies up. Especially right now when RAM prices are killing the market for new PCs.

"These days"

They've all been engineered since Heaven's Gate bombed, and certain franchises have always been engineered. There was even a book on how to write generic blockbuster, called Save The Cat!, that became an industry bible in the early 2000s, with scripts being rejected if they didn't follow the formula, which gave a page by page description of what needed to be there.

But... complaining they're engineered is like complaining that rollercoasters are engineered. Nobody goes into a MCU or Bond or even a John Wick movie expecting some amazing piece of meaningful artistry. Hell, if they did, the number of people interested in them would reduce dramatically, because the last thing most of us want to do after writing Java for 5 days and trying to relax on a Friday evening is to think. People want fun escapism sometimes, because life right now sucks more than it's done in 30 years for most people.

"Are they worth saving?" So you're telling me that you feel that giving a group of billionaires more control over what you watch and what information you get because you don't see any cultural or entertainment value in The Beekeeper? That's your argument?

Really?