Unfortunately the decisions were made out of fear by the faculty
rather than any actual caring about issues.

Nobody actually thinks they are striking a blow for assault victims or anything like that.
They are eating their own in an attempt to placate a vocal minority intent on
bringing their issue to the forefront, for reasons not of human safety or bettering society,
but only to satisfy their own sense of righteousness, which apparently can not stand on its own,
but must be vindicated by the sacrifice and destruction of anyone not agreeing wholeheartedly
with the most base and derisive rhetoric.

Sympathy being weaponized against opponents has been a political tactic used since
David & Goliath days, but this new incarnation uses scapegoats as fuel for the fire, and
it is assumed no one will investigate whether it is warranted or not, or they will be consumed by
the flames as well.
Well we have been through that before, and it never ends well. Something like 50 newspapers
called for Bill Clinton's immediate resignation back in the day, including liberal ones. Would we
look back in appreciation now if they had succeeded? Are those newspapers proud of their
decision now and do they stand by it? I think not.

The idea of "Sending a Message" and destroying people to send a message is a fascist tactic
from the last century in Europe, and a racist tactic in this country from way back. It never ends up
working in the end, and only leaves broken people on both sides, no "progress" toward a better society.

So knowing this, it becomes incumbent on us all, each individually, to evaluate if these culture warriors
sending people to the cultural trash heap to be shunned and denigrated and disenfranchised, are really
aiming to "better living conditions" or just hoist their own star over the top of the heap by burying someone else's. A clue is when as in this case that someone not involved in the action, only commenting on it, becomes a casualty in the wars of righteousness or whatever they are calling it.

#MeToo has become #YouToo , as is if you don't kowtow to our party line, and let us get on with our crusade without any criticism, then You Too Shall Burn in the flames of expiation, regardless of your guilt, innocence, indifference, or intellectual argument in our way.

This is how the actual good ideas of "hey rape and sexual coercion is a problem and we need to talk about it and take action to prevent it, and we start by getting justice for the victims, exposing it as institutional, and so on" become "He's Not One of US! Get Him! Destroy all his work! Put him in the Dungeon, never let him out! Who cares if he never did the terrible things -- punish him anyway and convict him by proxy, by association."

Guilt by Association is a standard mechanism of totalitarian states to get rid of populations, and especially for purges based on religious bigotry. Because the 'taint' of association generates an animal revulsion at a gut level, far below an intellectual analysis of actual facts. In the course of 'growing up' we are supposed to learn to outgrow the urge to paint people and organizations peripheral to the one we are targeting to be the bad guy, but it usually not a grown up decision, it is a transactional one. OJ Simpson killed his wife, but somehow that did not cause a widespread rejection of NFL athletes -- We like football too much. Athletes do horrific and craven and despicable acts all the time, but we separate them out from their sport, because we want to keep the good parts, and there are millions of dollars involved.

But apparently MIT does not. They are too afraid of outside "social influencers" that will somehow
"take them down" on the internet (really? take down MIT? from Youtube and Twitter?) that they make
bad decisions and arbitrary decisions. It is a moral failure on their part, not RMS's.

The consequences going forward may be seriously deleterious for the institution, as they have now
set a precedent as to what to do in these weird non-factual cases. Anyone with any personal beef against
their faculty is now under the gun, the enshrined institution of tenure is now made moot, and nothing can
stand against a determined pissed off Youtuber and a feckless, quaking-with-fear administration.

RMS may or may not bounce back from this; I would bet on him coming out on top, as he has his wits about him where it seems the University has lost theirs.
I personally would like to see him retire from politics and develop the HURD concept and OS to a shining success, or maybe come up with something completely new.

Shame to begging math text that teach the digits
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0.

That is were this crap comes from.

I have seen many many math equations
where there is a 0 underscore in a sequence.

Many calculus and discrete operations start at 0
and accumultate to N.

Should exponents start at 1 or at 0?

The zeroth element is extremely convenient in a hardware-facing (compiled) language, as its address offset of of 0 points directly to the first data element in an array.

1-based indexing works fine for 100% logical processing of arrays above hardware/device level, and if you never use X_0 in a calculation then you may go ahead. However modeling
algorithms with 1-based indexes necessitates positing the existence of the the end of the collection being a non-data object, an extra.

C++ STL iteration has begin and end iterators for its collections, where end is one past the last element, but iterators are separate values with their own allocation. Special access is required to change begin and end markers of a collection as
they are intrinsic and private to the class of container, so algorithms have to get friend status to mess with them. It is a compromise.

The hardware performance hack of having the label of an array at the same address as the first element is worth it for most languages.

The X client cannot run without the X Server,
but the X server runs without any clients.

The mental model is short circuited because
the X server considers every client as remote,
local or across a network. It hands off control
of the video stuff to local modules now, for speed,
but basically it is a managing container.

Windows and mac users never thought of their
display server as a server because it was never
presented to them as one.

Similarly, people think of their browser as a client,
not as a display server, when these days most of the
rendering and live logic is done by the browser in real time.

The trouble comes when something goes wrong.
It is hard for a user without privileges and admin
experience to diagnose where the problem is with
an X session. X has no "wizard" that pops up to
help with debugging the connection, just 40 year old
error log messages in cryptic terseness.

I have toyed with the idea of an X "connector helper"
program to manage the launching of binaries local and remote.
It gets out of the way if nothing bad happens and a session is
established for the client, but tries to diagnose common problems
if not. It could be a pair of programs, running on both machines.
Compression X protocol programs used to do this -- ssh/sshd do this.

was a wonderful baby that was born sick and was then strangled
in its crib before it could barely walk.
I had one as a university admin for the CS department in the 90s,
and it was 10 times more reliable than the wintel machines.
The alphas were beautifully designed, though not hardware agnostic
like the PC clones, you had to shell out big $$ to DEC to get hard drives
and expansion cards. DECnet was still a big thing in universities, most
campus networks used DECnet or Novell NetWare (IPX) , NT used NetBIOS
over NetWare mostly, but we had a bunch of DEC Unix at the CS dept, so we
juggled TCP/IP along with all that. The University gobbled up the Community
College whole, so inherited a huge VAX/VMS network with it, so integration
got really messy, but DEC Unix Alpha was a good bridge there, until all
the old KayPro machines got swapped out for cheap Dells and Gateway 2000s
running Windows 98 with NT login. The CS dept held out until Win XP machines
were cheap and available, and the CS student enrollment tripled after the 2000s.

NT Alphas chugged along for about 8 years before they started dying and you
could not get parts or disks, and DECnet networks were just a wind whistling through
the digital Graveyard. When NetWare was phased out, Only NT Intel servers existed,
Except the VAX mini machine, which carried on for 20 more years! Indeed, it was actually
replaced by another mini running OpenVMS around 2010....!

I think you may have hit on something here, but your delivery of your point
is too filled with sarcasm and dark emotional aspect to be accepted as technical.

I am not sure I have ever heard of embedded chromium as the attack vector
for malware, but I know that Google disavows any responsibility for machine-local
attacks. It is the game itself that would have to replace files via downloading, I do not
think chromium will do that.
It is just good code hygiene not to download executable content and run it before a
malware check. Games that do that should have a sandbox system anyway (Don't they?)

Thank you though for bringing This to my attention. I had overlooked it as a "thing"
that companies are doing.

I am interested as to how you would go about solving this version and duplication
clash problem in a safe way.

Ambulant not ambient.
Computing has gone mobile, it has become physically portable.
It has grown wheels and legs, and wings, and hands.
It has become wireless.

The inevitability that matter will have the power of a mind is
manifesting before out very eyes. Right now we consider
computers as "smart tools" for our use, but soon that moniker
will be put back on us by the machines. We will be the "smart tools"
with limited uses for furthering their objectives.

We throw around the term "AI" like a comic book superhero,
not having much idea about it. But we need to change AI to
Evolving, Adaptive, Responsive, Purposeful, Mobile, Manipulative, or something
to more accurately describe the Ambulant and Self-Governing nature
of the Semi-Autonomous hypersmart machines in our near future.

Spybots are already here, roaming around electronically scooping
up data from fixed locations, and a small percentage can fly or creep around
on wheels. Experimental mini spybots are insect-like with legs or snake-like
with articulating skeletons and the mechanical equivalent of muscles.

Expectations towards machines are still in the stage where
people do not expect a machine to order them around.
We are still at the stage where there is almost always
a way to get around a machines decisions by talking to
a real person with "higher authority" than the computer.
But unless we make it a law, and soon, that that will always
be the case, it won't always be the case.
When there is no way to get around a machine's decision
we can't live with, there will be a wake-up call.
When a doctor-bot refuses to treat an influential human
for some machine-derived reason, there will be hell to pay
and a re-think of the machine-man relationship. Hopefully
it will not be too late by then.

First is the actual cameras that record the video
For movies >2010 this is usually pretty good,
But a lot of film conversions to digital are not so great.
Live events are all over the place, but 1080p is usually
pretty good except for a glare problem of bright lights
either directly or reflected of surfaces.
Dramatic light shows with swirling colors and so on
are hard to render without washing out colors and some
tearing and blending.
What you want is life-like skin texture on people.
But that is also dependent on the makeup they wear.
TV shows that are interviews under lights are terrible about this.

There will always be some compression in the transport
which leads to "smoothing" of subtle texture changes and
exaggeration of sharp lines, especially straight lines, and
deepening of shadows with less detail in dark areas.

The settings and capabilities of the device(s) that render the video
to final pixels on the screen are mostly about the same quality for
the same resolution, though I have found older (2010 - 2016) Vizio
units are very clear (to my eyes) compared to Sony or Panasonic or whatever.

Cable boxes HD looks worse than Blu-Ray because of the compression,
And American HD TV shows are terrible compared to UK HD.

The test is to take a streamed movie, and a HD 4K movie on Blu-ray,
and play them side-by-side on two monitors of the same brand, and if
the streamed looks bad, start reducing the res on the Blue-ray monitor output
until it looks the same. Try to match the brightness, intensity, and contrast
after every change, or put the same signal into both units and fiddle with them
until they have the best picture and both look identical.
Your mission, should you accept it, is to
take notes of everything, take pictures, and report back the results.

The moral Failure is thinking it is OK to do this to "immigrants" because it is OK to abuse immigrants.
Every bad thing, every obstacle to life improvement, every hatred-based action
will be visited upon ourselves if we allow it to go forward against others.

This kind of antipersonnel tactic may be effective in preventing a few people
from going somewhere, but if it is it will be universally adopted to stop anyone
and blow back upon the population. Especially in this right wing regime currently
remaking the government in its corporate image.

Credit rating is an arbitrary number that is a blunt instrument, based on
records with upwards of 80% innaccurate data, that is designed to only hurt
consumers of financial services, never to help them. That is you. Your credit rating
is a sword of Damocles, only there to scare you, only there to fall on you, and destroy your life.

So the idea is to only let people with money in? Treat people different, with different rights,
based on a financial incentive to the banks? Because only the banks get anything from
credit ratings. Only banks benefit from denying loans, charging usurious rates for low credit rated
customers, etc. It is by definition the most elitist oligarchic plan to limit immigration based on finances.

And let us remember this debate about immigration policy is separate from debates about
asylum policy. That is getting lost -- refugees mostly have nothing at all left. This seems like
a calculated maneuver to refuse the poor, and people from poor regions.

It is so bad that people even her in the USA look down on people with bad credit
like they have the plague or something. I understand credit rating is a factor in a lot
of hiring as well -- that should be illegal, or require written permission from the applicant.

To make it a government requirement for services that a rating be at a certain level
is a kind of discrimination from an Aldous Huxley book. Because realize the policies
perpetrated on the "outsiders" always get turned inward and used on whomever allows
them.

Perhaps not so popular after all.

Is about the level of understanding here.
The Internet and indeed every single piece of computing hardware above a
calculator is done in C. So are all the other languages such as Java, Python, etc.
This is ridiculous and I know the publishers of /. are NOT THAT DUMB.

Or at least they used to be.

Buffer overflows and Null pointer exploits are avoidable, but
eliminating the benefits of direct memory access will cripple
everything going on right now in hardware, as well as the entire
infrastructure of the internet as it has evolved.

The only significant size difference is the addressing.
Hard coded memory locations only make up a tiny portion of a program;
the majority of code is instructions (which remain the same size)
and things like text, icons, numbers.
The 64-bit version of a program is only slightly larger by a few K.

The size of a shared-library has to be divided amongst all the
programs on a machine that use it to gauge its bloat/usefulness/space efficiency.

Also there might not be a choice of to use a smaller architecture.

The Ford Mustang was the most popular model for Ford ever at the time and for many years.
It vaulted Ford to the leader of the Big 3 automakers and revitalized the industry.
Even now the Mustang cachet lives on the mind of the American Male, up there with Steve McQueen and
The dream of being a better mechanic than the guy at the shop.

And people seek out vintage versions of Mustangs, not so with software in any great numbers.

Perhaps there is a shadow market in debugged versions of old software -- but it is a shadow market.

We have CHEAP, FAST, GOOD, and SMALL FOOTPRINT.

Pick 1 and for an extra 17% you get 1/2 of another.

In the UK,

Does the Suspect have the right to remain silent?

Does the Suspect have the right refuse to self-incriminate?

Does the suspect have the right to refuse unwarranted search and seizure
of property and personal information?

Are matters of National Security or immediate loss of life or property involved?

It sounds like they caught a killer/rapist and are trying to leverage
a way to destroy citizen rights & protections by making the argument
that those rights & protections are bad because the bad man has them
and bad people shouldn't have rights, so we are going to take them away
from everyone, OK?