Age-verification at OS levels was always a terrible idea. It's difficult to see under what rationale Linux should be granted an exception for this dumb idea. The solution is just to repeal the law and flog the sponsors.

Well, the problem is age verification to begin with. But since we have some states wanting age verification, it's a privacy nightmare. OS based age verification seems to solve the largest problem of all - needing to submit to a third party your ID information to confirm your age. Because they've all been hacked and that ID leaked But if you can embed that in the OS - and Apple and Microsoft know information about you to get a good estimate (e.g., if you have a credit card), then it can be used to attest your age instead of having to submit to the third party.

That's why they don't mind doing the Linux exception - because if the OS doesn't want to do it, then those users can rely on the third party services. Those third party services will exist anyways to handle the many OSes that won't work.

If you think the CloudFlare interrogation is bad now when you use a VPN...

In unemployment figures don't show actual unemployment, but deliberately excludes groups for the purpose of keeping the figure low (and the UK was very explicit that this was the purpose when Thatcher's government sliced several million off the official figures, less sure if the US was as honest) then it's hard to call it anything else.

Smokers are deprioritised on lung transplant lists. Foreigners have to pay. So we've already got differential service. We just say that sportsfolk who knowingly and deliberately inflict damage on themselves in such contests get lower priority on medical procedure lists as well.

Not removed - they've paid national insurance - but all procedures are on a prioritised queue already, just given them a low priority. (No, not in the UNIX sense.)

They'll get seen to, when service permits. Of course, there'd be more service if the rich paid more taxes, but that's between the sports stars and the rich. They can take care of that dispute between themselves.

Probably it will be a posthumous Darwin award.

I don't think there have been any Darwin awards that were not awarded posthumously. The award requires you to have removed yourself from the gene pool in order to be considered for the award.

Well, technically that is the entire point of some of the major sports in the world, and it would be problematic to say that deliberately causing brain damage for competition is ok in one sport but not in another.

On the other hand, I am not altogether convinced it should be openly encouraged in any sport.

This is a tricky one, because I would also argue that I should have no say in what a person does to their own body for their own reasons, that my firm belief that people should have bodily autonomy when it causes no actual harm to others does not permit me to condemn others for doing stuff to their own body for their own reasons when it does no actual harm to others even if it's a context I don't agree with.

Given that (ethically) I cannot condone wilful irreversable damage but (ethically) cannot condemn personal choises that harm nobody else, the obvious conclusion is that I don't believe such sports should be actively promoted or encouraged, but that what individuals do in the privacy of a private sporting event should not concern those outside until or unless actual harm outside of those events occurs.

I do love it when malware advert javascripts can upload random new firmware updates into my mouse and keyboard turning them into stealth keyloggers. This is great.

This feels like when Flash sandbox breaks became a thing, but worse. At least in those days we got smooth fullscreen vector animations and games to enjoy. I'd rather Flash had just been bloody fixed instead of browsers themselves becoming Shit Flash But Holy Cow It Runs Worse And Gets Worse.

You'd have to really be terrible to let it happen. First, you have to authorize the device to be accessed - and almost always web serial devices are using libusb. They have to as no OS allows direct access to USB devices - you must always go through a driver. Libusb is the only thing that really pipes a USB device through to userspace. And if you're using libusb, the OS driver is not running.

And to accomplish this, you almost always have to override the OS settings to prevent loading the OS driver over libusb, especially for things like keyboards and mice. It's possible, but it's complex, and it's why in the early days, you had many peripherals saying "do not plug in without installing driver".

Honestly, it's far easier to develop just a malware program in general than to try to break out via web serial. And if you already have the user to run the malware, why bother with web serial at all?

Also, it's a permission you need to give a website, and almost none request it because it's only for web=based IDEs to program embedded things.

You want a larger surface area, you attack things like WebGL, which you'd want to do as there are performance critical paths in getting from the browser to the GPU, and many of those paths are not protected very well

Treadmill? That can be optimistic.

One place I worked for, I was hired to do DB and coding. Sped their database up by a factor of 60, and resolved tickets efficiently.

Another place I worked for, I was hired to do QA. Found numerous performance issues and dangerous security holes.

Didn't last in either, because politics are more important than people, and revenue is more important than wages. Once all the factors that seriously impacted profit were removed, keeping me would merely have meant a better product, not more cash. The market is only so big, and once you've taken all the share you're going to, being better won't increase it. Companies don't think beyond the next quarter.

Two other places I worked for, the CEO was using it to scam money off investors and get cheaper healthcare. They never intended to produce a product.

If you're forced to treat employees well, these things will still happen but they'll happen less often. Because the risks are higher, the payoff is lower, and penalties for getting caught are a whole lot worse.

That's how it works in a coupled system.

Agreed. There's deliberate undercounting for the long-term unemployed, and a failure to account for the fact that firing seasoned workers with acquired skills isn't the same as hiring inexperienced yoofs who have no meaningful experience in producing robust, high quality products. Although, to be fair, corporations don't seem keen on producing those.

However, there's another factor to consider. The number of retirees is smaller than the number of people entering work for the first time. Due to Covid, a LOT smaller than usual. This means that the markets are expanding. If the markets are expanding but the numer of people being added is only keeping pace with job circulation and retirement, then the job market (as a percentage of those who can work) must be smaller relative to both the markets and the work that needs to be done.

This is the most misleading part of employment statistics. Whilst total unemployment is important (but only useful if not deliberately undercounted), you also need to know the employment:activity ratio and the employment:expected employment in a fully functional market of that size ratio.

Then again, how many projects use Xilinx parts?

Most FPGA projects are using Intel/Altera parts - MiSTer, etc.

FFT didn't exist for another decade.

On what basis do you draw that conclusion?

On the basis that a woman from the Radiophonics Workshop innovated a technique?

Perhaps you are going to argue Einstein was a moron because Noether figured out the relationships between symmetry and conservation laws.

I know there are some idiots here, but frankly you are one of the worst.

No they aren't "guesses", and nobody goes by what a single model predicts. That's not the way you use models in this sort of simulation.

Climate latency is around 40 years, so if 2025 is when the climate trajectory passed the point of no return, then the actual prediction is that Miami will be in serious trouble by 2065 and that no viable path to Miami recovering will exist, that CO2 won't drop to levels that permit such a recovery within the remaining lifespan of any part of Miami.