Don't care. If your shit shows me ads, it's not getting into my kitchen. Note to self: Don't buy appliances from Samsung anymore.

Yes, I am vocal in how much I hate ads. I believe the CEOs of advertising companies should get one hit with a stick for every time their ad bothered someone even in the slightest.

Exactly what I'm saying.

The fact that users and enterprise customers are not demanding better software from Microsoft with the same fervor their ancestors demanded that the witch be burnt speaks volumes.

And I'm specifically talking about operating systems here. Software can crash for all I care. I'm fine software quality being all over the place, the market can sort that out. But operating systems are natural monopolies and the foundation for everything else. We should not accept shoddy quality there.

Yup. I know teachers whose districts have all sorts of "safety" controls in place for computers the kids use; all that does is make it harder for teachers to go to sites they use and are approved while the kids access porn and anything else they want. The stupid get caught, like the one that thought it was a good idea to print the porn on the schools printer...

Anyone can click yes a question, or put in a fake birthdate. Scanning a drivers license would work, but not everyone has a license and using someone else's or a fake one (depending on if it uses a barcode) is pretty easy. So, how do you really effectively?

Oracle issued an out of band patch to fix a CVE. Nothing about that points to wider issues. Microsoft issued a patch to fix a buggy patch which followed another buggy patch. It has the marking of Monty Python's "We have sacked those responsible for the sacking."

I’d argue that slavery wasn’t “legal because nobody banned it.” It was legal because there were explicit laws that created, defined, and enforced the institution.

There were statutes specifying who could be held as slaves, rules that the child of an enslaved woman was automatically a slave, procedures for manumission, regulations on how slaves could be bought, sold, punished, or inherited, and laws requiring that escaped slaves be returned. That’s not a legal vacuum, that’s a full legal framework.

It’s similar to how segregation laws later forced discrimination on people who might not have engaged in it otherwise. The state wasn’t passively allowing something; it was actively mandating and structuring it.

Slavery existed because the law built and maintained it, not because the law failed to forbid it.

I remember those days where it would warn if there was any scripting at all, rather than look for dangerous commands first.
Just as a thought, not bothering if the script cannot reach outside of the document itself. Functions that access other files or documents, email functionality, and such triggering the warning instead would have been more effective.

You're holding you wrong. Congrats on your relative positive baseline perception of life. Next, tell people with chronic fatigue about what energizes you, those with diabetes about the "natural sugars" you consume, and those with paraplegia about the pleasure you get from thought experiments.

Pro tip for Amazon or any sales link: Immediately re-sort reviews by time. Interesting how this one had a middling review recently and ~40 5-star reviews without comments within a couple months of the book's 2024 release.

Clicking on it it is not the goal,seeing it is so that the product registers in your mind. Clicks are just a bonus.

Doesn't work that way at AWS. All anyone in the company sees is a blob of encrypted bits to which they have no access unless the customer shares the key with them for some reason. If they have to move the data from one location to another or back it up they have to do the entire blob (that's what the data techs refer to it as, a "blob"), they have no ability to see what's in it. It's not like your local drive where the administrator can take ownership and view whatever they want. Go to AWS with a court order and they'll have to hand over the entire encrypted blob.

Part of it is probably how inconsistent and confusing Windows group policy is designed and phrased. There are so many policies where the setting is not enable or disable with one of those as default. Rather the options are "do not allow" or "not (do not allow)" with the default unclear as to what it does. I swear sometimes the option has to be read as a triple negative.

This data is coming from workplace computers. Users get whatever the company buys and do not always get many choices. Generally business machines are a little better than consumer versions.

Yea, 100 billion in Treasury Notes at 3.6 would be 36 billion. That's a high hurdle rate and basically zero risk; I'm guessing their hurdle rate is much higher and will be tough to clear.

I am not a fan of ads, but will tolerate them if I find the content worthwhile and it is free, as in someone else is buying the beer. There are sites I like and do not block ads because I want them to be around, and in the end they either need to paywall or run ads to stay in business. If I pay for a site, then I want it ad free. That's the deal.

For sites like Netflix, with ads + subscription price, I need to decide where the value/cost trade off occurs. For some sites, it's cancel and forget about them, others pay at some level.

Unfortunately, ads are here to stay. The days of Archie, Veronica, Lynx are long gone...

Users should never be able to do things that cause crashes in the same way that drivers should not ever be able to press any button or press any pedal that causes the engine to spontaneously burst into flames.

I'm also a Mac user, but let's not boast here, shall we?