My first CS teacher, who taught me Pascal, loved these two quotes :) [ emphasis mine ]

Oy...

Don't get me started on Pascal. It was the "heir apparent" of compiled languages before C escaped from UC Berkeley/Bell Labs and left it in the dust, for the simple reason that C was much more pleasant to use, and understood that you were programming a real machine, not some mathematically pure abstraction. (That whole thing with the semicolons really burnt my bacon...)

Sorry, I'm not clear what points you're referring to?

What would be better? If you mean more attack surface, I guess that's true if you prioritize being able to defeat DRM over being able to keep your own data safe.

I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not trying to hide things behind qualifiers like "primary". I said primary because there are many reasons. DRM hardening is not among them.

I'm not sure what you mean here? Set a vulnerable DRM against a secure what?

Interesting... what sort of abusive authority are you referring to? What's your actual concern?

What other motive is relevant to video DRM?

Microsoft weren't the only ones doing it, though. And, foreshadowing the entire history of their products, it was mid at best.

This was my favorite BASIC of the time. Of particular note:

• Multiple-line user-defined functions. Most BASICs of the time only supported DEF FN for simple, single-line algebraic expressions.
• Matrix math and manipulations.
• On-screen line editing, years before the Commodore PET did it.
• LIST output was block-indented.

Don't snark too heavily on BASIC. It's what got tens of thousands of people started on the path.

It does it in 8 parsnips

The problem is that doctors are making elementary errors, failing to verify, and putting ego and large numbers of consultations a day over and above the wellbeing of patients.

That, to me, is gross malpractice.

The correct answer is not necessarily more AI, but that might well be the end result. The correct answer is to require doctors to recertify through such test cases and withdrawing a license to practice if the success rate is under 90%.

AI is, ultimately, just using differential diagnosis, because that's how AI works. Differential diagnosis is what doctors are supposed to use. If they were, and took the time needed, their scores should be identical to AI. If it is less, then they are taking shortcuts that are medically unjustified and that should be grounds for dismissal.

Instead of higher throughput, doctors need to have higher success rates. Don't give them a choice. If that makes medicine more expensive, oh well. It's better than a bunch of dead patients.

You're close, anyway. In reality, every time Democrats talk about it, it reminds people that Trump claims that he'll be tough on border security (even though the border was actually more porous under Trump than under Obama), so it reminded the people who wanted more border enforcement to vote for Trump under the (possibly dubious) belief that he will do more about it.

Rolling my eyes here. To make a better life, these folks are swimming across razor wire traps in the Rio Grande, are getting packed into trucks by Coyotes who leave them out in the hot desert to die when the feds show up, and so on. It's not like these people "just show up". They're putting their lives on the line to come here out of desperation to get out of those "shithole parts of the world", as you put it. So your attitude towards them is more than a little bit offensive. Have some respect for the people who are still alive at the end of that process, and realize that not everybody has the good luck to be born into privilege. Some people have to risk death and *then* show up for that court date to gain that privilege, and that's for the lucky few that don't get sent back.

ROFL. Russian troll farms, at least from what I've read on the subject, do not support the left wing in the U.S. Rather, they try to maximize instability by attacking both sides, favoring only people and companies that support their interests.

The weirdness in universities is caused by most people being borderline sociopathic, and as a result, choosing to automatically believe the worst in people whenever somebody paints a picture of someone as a bad person, whether the picture is true or not. This has happened throughout all of human history — the McCarthy hearings, the Salem witch trials, the Me Too movement, etc. — destroying lives both figuratively and literally — sometimes deservedly so, but also sometimes not.

This has two unfortunate side effects.

First, people tend to easily believe false accusations of something bad (racism, sexism, antisemitism, sexual misconduct, etc.), at least when the accusations seem even remotely credible. This is doubly true if the accused seems even slightly "off" from the perspective of the listener, because people's "He/she is not like me" mentality results in the listener automatically othering the accused and giving the accused's response less credibility in their minds than the accuser's accusation.

Second, it takes an enormous effort to prove someone's innocence before those people will trust the accused, even if the accuser's claim is completely false and falls apart on closer examination. That's why most people, when accused, even if entirely innocent, try to distance themselves from everything and everyone related to the accusation. It's easier to hide from a lie than to stand up to it.

None of that has anything to do with Russian influence, of course, other than the fact that Russian influencers use their understanding of human nature to get people to believe lies and false accusations about both sides in an effort to destabilize our democracy and foment hatred among the populace.

In other words, humans' tendency towards othering behavior isn't evidence of Russian influence. It has always been that way. Russian influencers are just one of many groups who take advantage of it for their own purposes.

That wouldn't surprise me. Russia sells oil. Why would they want competition? And Russia as a country enjoys being able to invade neighboring countries without getting stomped into the ground. Why would they want that to be harder by having more western companies producing firearms? Both of those types of companies would logically be competing against the goals of Russian influencers, unlike the political left or right, who tend to be a mixed bag.

The "group buy" of microphones that I was part of a while back ended up having to go through back channels to reach a PayPal vice president to get their account reinstated. It's almost certainly not about guns, but rather about risk to the financial institution (e.g. chargebacks). I couldn't say specifically what about a gun club was considered high risk, but it seems far more likely than Russian influence. Just saying.

The US elected the US as world police.

That's how you cast yourselves, that's the world you created by becoming a superpower, in fact that's precisely what a superpower is.

Don't like it? Go back to an agrarian society.

I found the AI suggestions were wrong more than they were right and having them pop up was so distracting they slowed me down on balance. Maybe I'll try again in a year.

I think it has more to do with mobile phone OSes getting better at identifying and rejecting spam calls.

My experience is with Google Pixel devices, but I find that 75% of unwanted calls just get silently rejected and for the other 25% I see that I don't know the caller, hit the "Screen call" button and before the screening system is halfway through its spiel, the caller hangs up. Bottom line, I never actually receive any robocalls. I'm sure other devices are doing similar things.

Yes, but he was found liable by a preponderance of the evidence, not convicted beyond a reasonable doubt.

I mean, I have no doubt that he did it, and many times, but "convicted" carries a very specific meaning, and Trump hasn't been convicted of rape, or sexual assault. Could he be? Maybe. "Beyond a reasonable doubt" is a pretty high standard, and hard to reach unless there is evidence beyond the victim's testimony. The evidence in the E. Jean Carroll case could not support a conviction, I don't think, though it was good enough to convince a jury at the lower standard of a civil verdict.

billyswong didn't state his point very clearly, but it was a good point. The reason that patent holders don't have to produce a product is because it's perfectly possible for an inventor to come up with a novel and useful idea but not have access to the resources needed to make it into a product, and requiring that the inventor produce a product before they're able to litigate their patent would mean those with the resources to make products could swoop in and steal the idea, leaving the inventor with nothing for their effort. That would undermine the purpose of patents, because it would mean that only organizations with the resources to make products would bother to invent.

Worse, as billyswong pointed out, in many cases the organizations with the product development resources may have a collective monopoly on those resources, and may collude to ensure that the inventor cannot obtain what's needed to create a product. If making a product were a prerequisite to litigation, they could ensure that the patent holder cannot sue them for stealing his idea.

Also, inventors may well be people who aren't interested in or aren't good at productizing their ideas. The patent system allows them to patent their ideas and then license them to people who are good at productization. Assuming the ideas area actually good, and novel, this is a fine structure that promotes "the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

The problem with patent trolls isn't that they don't make products, the problem is that their patents aren't useful, novel or non-obvious. This is a problem with the patent system, but it's not related to who makes stuff but to the fact that so many crap patents issued.

If the patent system were working well, product development teams would be regularly searching the patent database for good ideas they can license to solve their product problems. But because so much crap is in there product teams' lawyers regularly advise them never to look at the patent database, because odds are high they'll run across something they independently invented (because it was obvious), and knowing infringement invokes treble damages.

Except in my experience as an occasional teacher, the single parents are the most conscientious and most likely to turn in work on time, followed by the parents with small children, who occasionally ask for an extension, but not often and not egregiously. The folks turning in work massively late or not at all are the ones screwing around playing video games all day and wondering why they don't have any time to get their work done. Yes, life has priorities, and learning how to choose the right priorities matters for your future success. Just saying.

Similarly, in the workplace, you can either get things done on time or you can attend thirty hours of meetings every week. You can't realistically do both. So if they want on-time performance, the leadership has to prioritize that over all the other bulls**t. If they don't, that's not an indication that the schedule was unreasonable, but rather that too much unnecessary time was spent doing things other than making progress. And that's the difference between an efficient organization and an inefficient one.

Intel's stock is crashing and their reputation is through the floor. They're on the verge of being taken over, and their latest CPU is a dud.

This is when AMD needs to push hard on both R&D and QA, to capture the marketshare that no longer trusts Intel, but is still wary of AMD because of their failings.

The two major alternatives - ARM64 and RISCV - are also chewing the scenery. Anything AMD doesn't grab will go to these.

As for the AI market, AI needs SIMD. Basically, you want processors that can digest a vector or a matrix in one go. nVidia basically started with a GPU and then bolted on bits that would boost performance for yesterday's algorithms. Meh.

A more sensible approach would be to look at SIMD and vector processing in general, and look for low-ganging fruit that nVidia hasn't considered. Bubbles burst and AMD won't conquer anything with an architecture that's overly specialised - - a mistake Intel made with their iWarp and Itanium lines, and a mistake that basically destroyed Transmeta.

No, not necessarily. It can also be the case that the person prioritized other things and therefore did not spend adequate time on the project to meet the deadline. Whether those prioritization decisions were reasonable or unreasonable largely determines whether the deadline was unreasonably early or not.