The real reason isn't too far off - high income countries can afford healthcare. This leads to the population in general being much healthier and living longer, and the biggest reason, lower infant mortality.

In poorer countries, you need to have multiple kids - this is a requirement because most of your kids will be dead before they reach adulthood. So you need to have multiple kids to have a chance that one of them will reach adulthood.

And moms, when they aren't having to constantly pop out kids for survival get to do other things rather than incubate babies 24/7.

Richer countries also tend to have better human rights, where the woman gets to choose in the matter of kids. Granted, this can leave the men somewhat unfulfilled once the woman calls it quits, but that's a different problem.

And the restrictions you're against aren't on the GPL code itself.

GPL only applies to the code being used, and Red Hat is providing code to you. To which you are legally allowed to get the source code per the GPL. And you are also legally allowed to distribute the source code and binaries.

Red Hat is not obligated to keep providing you new binaries through - their support agreement might say you lose access to future updates, but everything GPL you have is still yours to distribute per the GPL.

The GPL is a copyleft license. It requires copyright to work. You can choose to use the GPL or not - if you refuse the GPL, the code is provided to you under All Rights Reserved, i.e., default copyright. If you wish to use the code in your projects, you have to agree with the GPL to get those extra terms that let you create derivative works and such.

The GPL prohibits additional restrictions like saying you cannot distribute the binaries further. But you can do that with RHEL just fine - Red Hat/IBM cannot sue you for posting the SRPMS and binaries online on your filesharing site (as long as it's all GPL). They can prohibit you from obtaining future versions of RHEL but that's not a GPL issue at all, that's a business issue. They can also restrict you from posting non-GPL licensed stuff like their branding and such online, because that stuff is commercially licensed as well. But you're free to do with the GPL code what you will.

It's why people hate using Apple Subscriptions. Because Apple makes it too easy to subscribe and unsubscribe to services - you get a neat list of all your subscriptions, and you cancel by turning off that subscription. A dialog pops up to confirm, what the end date is (your subscription is active until it expires). But it's just one click, no muss, no fuss.

Of course, companies hated it because Apple kept a lot of user details private and kept them from doing "retentions". Lots of people used it even though it was a costlier option (since most companies added the Apple tax to the subscription fee if you used Apple). It was just so easy to cancel - you do it without talking to anyone or anyone trying to get you to resubscribe.

Apple made it too easy that companies hated it, so pretty much only Apple uses it.

Apparently it's leading to a renaissance in landlines. Kids will need to communicate, but they don't need a smartphone. So some parents simply get them a landline so they can make phone calls to their friends.

This works for younger kids to keep in touch, but who don't wander too far away from parents, so likely adolescents in elementary school. Instead of a smartphone, they get a landline.

Older kids like teens get old school flip or feature phones. This lets them talk to their friends, make and receive calls so parents can keep track of them, etc. They can get the smartphone once they turn 18.

Actually, Funai (the last maker of VCRs) greatly simplified the VHS tape mechanism over the 30 years they made it. The last machines they made in the 2000s are extremely simple mechanically and since Funai was the only maker of them, they are practically all identical.

So if you gather a few of the new old stock players still available you have a collection of players with spare parts. And they are very mechanically simple - sure there's some oddball shaped cogs and sprockets and gears that perform the complex operations in a simple way. but they beat what an 80s era VCR had in mechanical complexity.

The last VCRs often only had 3 motors - the one driving the rotary head, one driving the capstan roller and the takeup spools (and do the fast-forward/rewind). The final motor handles the tape insertion, loading and threading, and ejection of the tape. All of it done with precisely engineered injection molded gears designed for easy mass production.

An 80's era VCR has easily a half dozen motors more with dozens of switches, limit sensors, and other things. The gears and cogs are much simpler, but the mechanism and timings are so much more complicated and has to be coordinated by a processor.

And head cleaning is easily done with the lid off - you can easily clean the heads on the drum with a little isopropyl alcohol and a q-tip.

It's a magic of mass production that the final VCRs gave great performance and everything had been simplified to a single sided circuit board and a mechanism consisting of only a few gears and motors. The complexity of operation has been simplified to a plastic gear that choreographs the operation.

Cheating isn't irrational, it's a perfectly rational response, especially to things that are perceived as random - to reduce the risk.

Cheating in gambling games is rampant because it's rational to want to put the finger on the scale to tilt the balance in your favor, and not the house's.

Cheating in multiplayer games takes many forms - from cheating the matching algorithms so you can get cannon fodder for an opponent (this is especially if you are planning on "showing off" via streaming or other thing), so you appear better than you are to your audience who them rewards you with "chips" or other currency counterpart. Or you might cheat to get an edge by having intelligence not normally available, again making you look better.

Cheating might even help you win, providing you can avoid careful scrutiny. That's why election ballots are often counted in the presence of others and cameras to verify the vote - it's much harder to cheat when there's a lot of scrutiny that goes on.

Cheating to gain an advantage is a common rational reason to cheat, and many forms rely on sleight of hand to perform some action which might be missed by even a camera without careful observation.

The only time cheating isn't rational is to have fun. But a lot of time, fun can be hard to obtain. Even people who don't cheat, game developers often decry how people will optimize the fun out of your game.

Worse yet it's going to make glasses even more expensive.

For those not in the know, EssilorLuxottica is basically the monopoly for everything glasses related. They're the reason you spend hundreds of dollars on 2 cents of plastic for a frame, and why mass produced optical lenses cost hundreds of dollars each.

And they own the vast majority of stores that sell glasses - from the ones your optometrist sells (about 100% of them), to several huge chains like LensCrafters. Its basically a worldwide monopoly.

Sure, you can save by going to independent stores, of which there are a few chains, but they are much more limited in their offerings.

Glasses frames are just cheap pieces of injection molded plastic, or a few dollars worth of metal. They hold a lens. There's nothing high-tech about any of it, yet they cost hundreds of dollars apiece. More if you want them molded with some designer's name on it.

LIkewise, the lenses come from well known lens manufacturers - Nikon, Canon, Zeiss, etc., who make them by the millions, likely their main source of income over say, camera or projector lenses. There's no reason what is effectively a cheap piece of optical plastic coated with well known coatings (anti reflective, etc) should also cost hundreds of dollars. They don't require the precision assembly of a multi-stage camera lens which cost about the same amount of money. It's just a lens.

Granted, someone needs to cut the lens to fit the frame, but even that's generally machine controlled - the machine finds the optical center and using the lens template (the fake lens in the frame) and your prescription cuts the lens as needed. A process which may be done on site, or automated at some factory.

So yeah, it's concerning because the world doesn't need more expensive glasses. It's a pure profit item likely rivalling margins of popcorn and soda at movie theatres.

I hope it's a vulnerability in a kernel DRM component so that gamers learn to hate that bullshit more.

Gamers do hate it. It's not DRM, but anti-cheat, so it's only really accepted as a necessary evil, because cheating in online multiplayer games, especially popular ones like CoD, is rampant. Unless you can come up with a way to resolve this, it's going to be around. Network communications can be secured with TLS, but you can still cheat using hacks that don't even interact directly with a program. There are aimbots that will analyze the screen and send input making it even harder to detect.

This issue right now is a fault in the netcode of the game - apparently it's a lame buffer overrun, so you know two things - 1) it's not encrypted, and 2) it's still a buffer overflow. I don't think it's even a ROP-chained overflow, it's just a plain old overflow off the stack.

This is videogame development. You almost never have a "main" where all your games are made from - a game is a self-contained app.

Typically development starts by cloning a copy of the game engine to where you will do your development. This will go into a new tree because after the game is released, other than updates, it will never be used again. Even though you have say, Call of Duty 1 and Call of Duty 2, they are about as same as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.

So it's likely it was discovered and fixed for one game, but that fix was not propagated to other trees because well, they're pretty much all independent and to do so would require manually applying the patch.

Oh, and game developers are had pressed to churn out stuff. There almost is no time to simply go and apply random patches for security issues found in other games. It might have been on someone's to-do list but completely forgotten about because they're busy churning out code for the product.

The problem here is that people who know the exploit realize they can use it while they're playing multiplayer so they've been using the well known exploit really quickly.

Nobody is being asked to work for free. They are being asked to help out in the warehouse instead of their normal job duties.

Or more likely, "in addition to". Salaried workers, which are likely what the corporate workers are on, generally don't get overtime. So Amazon could easily ask them to work in the warehouse for an hour after their usual hours, like your boss might ask you to do some OT for free on Friday and that progress bar just doesn't want to reach 100%.

So it is technically "working for free" because you aren't getting paid more to work in the warehouse.

No need. Just increase the punishment. Right now the punishment is usually just a failed filing and attorney's fees (you wasted time and money of opposition). Just start demanding that the first person found using AI to lose the case. If you're the plaintiff, you lose and pay the defense their entire attorney's fees plus damages for bringing the defense through the hassle of a lawsuit. Add in punitive damages as well to discourage the behavior.

Likewise for the defense.

The threat of an instant-win should cause lawyers to double-check everything - the lawyers on the other side want an easy victory so they're going ot check, and the lawyers on the filing side want to prevent an easy win.

And let this apply to both civil and criminal trials. No lawyer wants to be the one who gets their client convicted for a bad filing, or let some killer go free because they made a bad filing. It would basically be the end of their career.

Finally, it's not like it takes a lot of effort - checking citations is a 5 minute job using any search engine. Google, Bing, whatever. No specialized search engine, Lexis-Nexis, etc needed. (Though if you're citing cases wrong, that's a different issue). There is no excuse - it takes 5 minutes to check all your citations. And that's assuming there's no tools you can get to do it for you automatically.

rat and roach, I see. what are the others?

yeah, don't do that.

I find most food too disgusting eat even a second time, let alone every day. At best, it would be wilted. Probably at least soggy, and, well . . .

cats & dogs have a different notion of how many times to eat the same food, though.

Of course, one could also ask about the lack of requirements for double-blind studies for things like homeopathy and for the alternatives to vaccinations he promotes.