Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: The long-term impact of this on the US (Score 1) 153

Wait... you're going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture (founded in 2003, signed into law by George W. Bush) and you're shocked that there was - somewhere in the 400k square foot building - a chart of stereotypes about white people next to a chart of stereotypes about black people?

Comment Re:Single dumbest way? (Score 1) 70

The logic is economic autarky -- the belief that we're always better off having complete political sovereignty over every part of our supply chains than having to depend on imports for anything.

This is likely also behind Trump's trade war with Canada. His demands with Canada aren't about discirimatory tariffs -- those were negotiated away with NAFTA then re-negotiated in his first term. His demands are now infringe on Canadian sovereignty, to give US control of Canada's external trade policy, and even on its internal markets (e.g., the use of French in Canadian internal commerce). Symbolically, that's why he wants to rename Lake Ontario to "Lake America". HIs establishment of US control over the Venezuelan oil industry is his greatest foreign policy achievement -- although it's not clear he understands the legal limits on what he can do with their money.

There's a foreign and military policy angle to this too: Taiwan is absolutely critical to the US economy, so we are absolutely committed to defend them if China invades. Semiconductor autarky would mean it's not our problem.

The problem with autarky is that even if it's a good idea (which economists don't believe), you can't conjure it into existence overnight. It will take many years, possibly decades for the US to replace the Taiwan's semiconductor industry. In effect, the administration is proposing to inflict the very damage on the US economy that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would inflict.

And, once the US has voluntarily self-inflicted that damage, China would be free to invade Taiwan.

Comment Re: Putin (Score 1) 153

I'm sure you'd be welcome if you ever wanted to - you're already ideologically highly aligned (and never really were with the US...) :) Honestly, economically and geopolitically it'd be a very strong alliance for both parties, as what Canada offers vs. what it needs is a good match for what the EU offers vs. what it needs. Though admittedly both parties need to rearm fast - but the EU has a lot more resources to do that than Canada has on its own. Canada has raw materials, EU needs them. Canadian automakers/parts suppliers need an alternative market, EU can provide it, etc.

Shifting eastward wouldn't be frictionless - for example, your oil infrastructure is designed to send it south, not to ports that can export it to the east, and European refineries would need to set up to process it, for example. But it's pretty clear that the current status quo can no longer be relied on, as the US is intent on extortion.

Comment Re:The long-term impact of this on the US (Score 5, Insightful) 153

They're certainly trying. I was listening to an exoplanets researcher the other day (in response to "How are scientists adjusting the way they work during the Trump administration?") grumble about how they're afraid to use the phrase "diversity of exoplanets" in their work because of a (well-grounded) fear that having the word "diversity" will get their paper flagged for rejection. This sort of environment is toxic.

(My favourite response was "Spell it 'divers' and throw in the occasional 'thou art' and 'exeunt' " ;) )

Comment The only books they're destroying... (Score 4, Informative) 105

....are books that they can buy by the meter, for pennies on the dollar, if that much. These are surplus books that publishers - the world's leading destroyers of books - would have to destroy anyway.

Trainers can't afford to buy actually rare, desirable books.

It's a shame that all of this data is locked up on private servers, but that's really more of a problem of the copyright system than anything else. Anyone who scanned these books would be banned from making it public.

Comment I'm curious. (Score 4, Interesting) 39

This sounds like it was written by someone who actually knows what they are doing, so I assume that they know better than I; but I am surprised to hear that it is impersonating a system dll; since (in all comparatively recent windows versions) system components are signed. Absolutely tons of fuckery you can do to them and around them; but if dpapi.dll doesn't have a signature that checks out the mechanisms that try to keep OSes up and running on marginal hardware subject to random power loss will likely eventually object and attempt a repair, even if there isn't any more paranoid EDR tooling in place.

Is the on-disk copy of dpapi.dll untouched and only the in-memory instance tampered with?

Slashdot Top Deals

Real Programmers don't write in PL/I. PL/I is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.

Working...