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Comment Re:Justice delayed is justice denied (Score 1) 60

That timeframe is ridiculous. There's no reason why the courts can't operate more efficiently than they do other than that the lawyers and judges have no incentive to move things along.

Tell us you don't know how courts operate without telling us you don't know how courts operate.

The parties have to file the appropriate paperwork and there are specified timeframes when they have to be done. For example, the plaintiff files to start the case, the defendant generally has 20 - 30 days to respond. Then the plaintiff has additional days to respond to the defendant's response. And so on. This doesn't even take into consideration the discovery process. Just getting to the point to start a trial can take up to a year with all the back and forth filings, motions, and so on. In many cases, one or both parties will wait until the last moment to file just under the last possible filing date to drag things out.

Then the court has to schedule the case in between all the other cases they're dealing with. The parties may be ready to go to trial on April 1st, but if the first available slot in the court's docket isn't until June 1st, guess when the trial starts.

Comment Re:Sojust like every other tech growth story (Score 1) 180

Most of the R&D in China is done with private money. The government does contribute, but it's more long term guarantees than it is cash.

In a democracy, policy can change ever 4-5 years. Look at the US, it's been alternating between pushing renewables to banning them to pushing them to banning them again, over the last 4 administrations. If you were a company developing renewable technology, would you have faith that your investment in R&D wouldn't be banned by the time it reaches market? Doesn't even have to be a ban, just an administration that is hostile to your business, and an electorate that would rather roll coal than see a wind turbine 20km off-shore.

The Chinese government said that EVs were the future and it would ensure that future came quickly and stuck around. It made sure the infrastructure was installed, and promoted them to consumers as a way to reduce pollution. Loans for development were made available. And it stuck to that for the long term, not just the next 4-5 years.

Democracy can do that too, but not in a two party system. Look at European democracies where coalition governments are the norm, where the system is designed to prevent any one party gaining complete power. Planning is longer term, and there is more certainty in future policy direction.

Comment Re:Sojust like every other tech growth story (Score 5, Interesting) 180

From Europe we look at Americans that way too. Long hours, ridiculously little holiday entitlement (I just booked flights for my six week break over the new year, and I've still got time off to spare), and a billionaire-Epstien ruling class who live in luxury. Only they also get pollution, mass deportations, bankrupted by healthcare costs, school shootings, and so on.

China is far from perfect, but it also doesn't compare that badly.

Comment Re:I just had to replace a phone for a family memb (Score 1) 44

The usual way of fixing it is to designate those products as critically important and put in a mandate for making them available. Take water, for example. Data centres need it, humans need it, farms need it. If it was just sold to the highest bidder we would be in trouble.

I'm hoping that Chinese manufacturers step up to increase supply, because they will be less concerned about demand drying up. They have both a rapidly expanding domestic market, and the longer term goal to out-compete rivals on price. CXMT is unfortunately allocating a lot of production to AI as well, but they aren't the only ones. Hopefully NAND flash production also ramps up very quickly.

Comment Re: online petitions mean shit (Score 1) 100

- in comparable population sizes that would mean Canada is roughly equivalent to Connecticut compared to California in the US. If electoral college votes translated to parliamentary seats

Bad comparison. California has 54 electoral college votes and Connecticut has 7 or about 13% as much as California. On the other hand California has 39.5 million people and Connecticut has about 3.6 million or about 9% as much as California. The American system is rigged to allow tyranny of the minority. Low population states get disproportionally high representation in elected positions. If their representation was proportional using Connecticut as the base Florida would have 77-78 electoral college votes.

Comment Re: Instead, it plans to develop a voluntary indus (Score 3, Insightful) 100

When it's codified into the highest law of the land and doesn't work, and suggestions to do so voluntarily can't work to the point of being laughable, what options do we have left?

There's always Nancy Reagan's catchphrase: Just Say No.

Any particular game is expendable. You won't miss out on anything. Games don't even have the network effects and lockin that you get with other types of software; it's a part of the economy where Just Saying No is easiest of all.

Don't like the quality? Don't spend your money. They have no power over us except what we give them. Stop being so selflessly altruistic when it comes to actively supporting your own abuse.

It's so damn easy, and there's already hundreds of years worth of hassle-free game-playing available to spend the few remaining seconds of your life on.

Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)

smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.

“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”

Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”

The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.

This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”

Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

Comment Re: online petitions mean shit (Score 5, Informative) 100

The European Commission is the EU's civil service. Petitioning it was always a long shot, because for them to act you have to convince them that there is a good case within existing EU rules. They aren't there to make new rules, they are there to enforce the existing ones.

They have effectively said that existing consumer protection rules don't extend far enough to force publishers to make offline patches and server code available, but in their opinion do offer some of the things being asked for already and so the petitioners should contact their state consumer rights body.

To get a change in the rules, it needs to go through the European Parliament and the elected MEPs. That's how democracy works. Elected officials make the rules, civil servants enforce them.

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