This. The problem isn't the technology; that can demonstrably be shown to work in models and simulations because of things like - as you say - needing less space between vehicles, and also more complex things like reducing capillary action in the overall traffic flow (the stop-start effect you often get in heavy traffic). The reason why you don't see those benefits is the growing number of entitled drivers who ignore the signage in the hope of gaming the system for personal gain (e.g. shorter travel time), so you do need robust enforcement with stricter tolerances and more punitive fines to try and deter that.

It's the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. The best solution for the greater good is to obey the signage, but the best solution for the individual is almost always to look out for Number One. Smart traffic flow systems do still seem to improve things, despite entitled drivers, although that's probably more down to the enforcement measures keeping those bending the rules from bending them as far as they'd like to.

This surely is old news.

There is an old war movie (I forgot the name) in which a bunch of people get stranded after their plane crash lands in North Africa during WW2. A few of them set out to go "somewhere" in a certain given direction, but eventually stumble onto their own plane again. One of the characters (if I recall correctly, one who did not join the expedition and who possibly is the usual German bad guy) then explains that "humans tend to walk in a wide counterclockwise circle, because their right leg is slightly stronger/longer than their left." If my memory serves me right, he even adds that good soldiers are normally trained to compensate for that.

Of course that's a movie and as such not a good reference in se, but even so: someone must have expressed that theory/suspicion/fact before, as otherwise it can't be in the move script.

No, I'm pointing out where the slippery slope goes. The US has its approach to business ownership and control, China has theirs, the rest is semantics.

Functionally, there is not a lot of difference between a company with direct ties to the Chinese government that is obligated to share data on the QT, because that is what Chinese law says they have to do, and a US one that receives a National Security Letter and does the same, because that's what US law says they have to do. It's pretty much an open secret at this point that the NSA et al are plugged into most of the big tech companies and have been for ages (cf. Room 641a), so if the US and China were to end up in a game of tit-for-tat on this and don't hit the brakes it could go an awfully long way in directions that might not be immediately apparent, and that will have repercussions elsewhere in the world as well.

By your powers combined, I am... the British Colonies!

ALL of them, from the tech giants all the way down to the smallest of "Mom & Pop" stores. They pay their taxes (mostly), then Congress allocates a proportion of those taxes to the DoD's budget, which then spends them on the MIC. Pretty much the same as any country, including China.

The US is stepping onto a very slippery slope here, and if the Chinese start to respond in kind then it's an awfully long way down given it's pretty clear by now that Trump has no clue that playing tit-for-tat isn't a good strategy. They could legitimately start with Boeing and the like, of course, because they directly manufacture military hardware, then move onto the service/support part of the MIC and companies like Microsoft and OpenAI, and if things really get out of control into the supply chain, then that's an awfully big web that is going to reach into some very unexpected places, including some of those "Mom & Pops". The rest of the world will quite naturally want no part of that trade war (which is what this really is), so don't be surprised if this kind of thing just accelerates their on-going pivot away from US suppliers to reduce the impact of any blowback.

Fortunately, as we saw with tariffs, Xi Jinping (and just about everyone else) does seem to realise that is a poor strategy though, so it might not be a fast decent into chaos before sanity prevails, but that also just buys more time for the smarter players to make their pivot towards alternative supply chains.

Linux and ARM would disagree. Probably loads more too.

The main aim of Stop Killing Games is to ensure the practice of rug-pulling eventually comes to an end. They are not trying to save MMOs, for example.

Moreover they don't demand that every game currently on the market comply with open-sourcing requirements: at a minimum, companies always have the option of simply providing customers with adequate notice before shutdown. Open-sourcing the server would be nice, but it's hardly the only way to protect consumers' interests. Scott has, for example, suggested game boxes being marked with an estimated expiry date for online service functionality.

But most importantly: because this is about future games, not the present, the market has time to change. If studios and publishers are designing their games with a fair EOL in mind, then they can make decisions from the get-go to avoid licensing dependencies that they won't be able to release in a possible 'afterlife' version of the game. As suggested by your example of GameSpy in C&C: Generals, when a commercial dependency is crucial to a game's success, it tends to be a client-side library, but typically the problematic dependencies aren't crucial; they're e.g. add-ons for Unity or Unreal that the studio bought to save time. In a world with SKG laws, the providers of these dependencies aren't going to be a stagnant target either—demand for compliant libraries will motivate development of open-source versions.

Interestingly, the will for doing this does exist among game developers; they just need the institutional support from legislation to twist the arms of the studios and publishers. Ross Scott has talked to a lot of devs who are burnt out from having their projects cancelled, leaving them with huge gaping holes in their resumes and portfolios where they've spent years on unreleased projects that are stuck under NDA. In general they tend to see SKG as a path to ensuring the games that do see the light of day aren't also scrapped, which would erode their work histories even further. (Apparently it also just plain feels bad to have your work erased from history. Shocking, I know.)

Fear not! It's entirely possible the category was chosen by an AI. Editorial automation would probably reduce the error rate here.

I'm assuming that when they do one of those distribution plots of the output values (the ones that show clear patterns for pseudo random generators when run for long enough) they can prove that the distribution is totally uniform, and with time as a further axis, every attempt achieves that even distribution in a different sequence. That implies they can account for, or negate the impact of, every potential variable in the system.

Lava lamps (like Cloudflare actually use as part of their RNG, IIRC) might be just as good, but mathematically proving that could be a little more challenging, and there may be any number of corner case effects, such as the temperature on either side of the glass or minute variations in the heating coils, that cause an almost imperceptable bias towards the denser coloured fluid in the lamp being in certain parts of the lamp than others for short periods of time.

As to whether we need this, quite probably not. However, TFS does propose use as a kind of "master clock" to regulate other systems that would be less precise (or random, in this case) on their own. Whether that's more cost effective or practical than just combining multiple sources of randomness together to get a single output data stream I guess will be determined by any users that really, really, need a truly random data stream, and how the realities of a post-quantum world eventually play out. If you are in some kind of situation where an adversary can keep retrying at a suitable rate and only needs to predict/guess the next in sequence correctly once to "win", then perfect randomness over a sufficiently large search area is something you are going to be all over.

Not strictly true, historically. What we will probably see is the death of is 200-man IT projects. But they always failed anyway and were wasteful garbage so good riddance.

See my post above for a bit more detail, but this looks like it could be an SPF include failure. They have included "_spf-ssg-a.microsoft.com" in the SPF, which in turn includes "spf.protection.outlook.com". AFAIK, that's basically the Outlook.com webmail service, so quite possibly at least some, and possibly any, users of that service could impersonate "microsoftonline.com" and get an SPF pass.

If so then yeah, that's *totally* the kind of lack of attention to detail you tend to expect from Microsoft.

It was (and still is), but this is the problem that SPF was designed to solve (as opposed to being the FUSSP some made it out to be). If you have a critical domain that you use for sensitive stuff, like "microsoftonline.com", or any bank's domain, etc, then you need to be very specific on your SPF record's contents and make sure it has an "-all" in there to force a reject for failures, rather than the looser "~all" or (heaven forbid) "+all" which is really only intended for testing. Spammers know this, and seldom waste their time trying to spoof domains that will cause a failure; every domain I have setup SPF with "-all" on has seen Joe-Job bounces drop to zero pretty much overnight. DKIM works slightly differently, but adds another layer to this. Microsoft for sure knows this too and does indeed do both, but that doesn't mean you can't slip up and leave a hole somewhere.

So, taking a quick look, as things stand, the SPF record for "microsoftonline.com" is:

"v=spf1 ip4:216.32.180.228 include:spfa.microsoftonline.com include:spf-exacttarget.microsoftonline.com include:spf-msods.microsoftonline.com include:spf-mfa.microsoftonline.com include:_spf-ssg-a.microsoft.com -all"

They've got the "-all" in there, which is good, but also a whole bunch of "include" directives, including one that refers to ExactTarget a third party MSP, but the one that appears like it could possibly be the problem is the last one. That contains a further include, and in there is "spf.protection.outlook.com". All the includes do have "-all" but, AFAIK, that domain covers the outbound mail gateways for a least some parts of the Outlook.com webmail service, so if the spammers have been able to a suitable account using a server within one of the many IP ranges listed in that include that doesn't properly restrict the domains able to send their mail, then they are good to go.

It's all a small price to pay for Eat Your Veggies.

No, it is not the beginning. That happened many years ago, when they first started to betray their original USP feature: just a simple textbox on a white page that searched very well and did nothing else. Add to that their massive Google Analytics privacy invasions and Google landed in my hate box a long time ago. I've basically dumped them (with the exception of maps) back when DuckDuckGo was first announced. For a while, I did still fall back on Google if I DDG didn't give me what I wanted fast enough, but over time I've just completely stopped using Google for search. The thought of maybe trying them when a search doesn't do what I want fast enough doesn't even come up anymore.

And yes, I also hate that even DDG has been adding crap extra features. Whenever they do, I disable those as well.

I did have a rarely used (i.e. secondary) Google e-mail address at one point, a couple of centuries ago. However, I dropped that as well around 2012 or so and I never looked back. I don't want them auto-reading my e-mail for their own nefarious purposes.