Long ago, the UK courts ordered all the major consumer ISPs to block The Pirate Bay along with various other popular services. Ever since, we've had to keep up to date on what the latest proxy address might be.

Of course, thanks to the new censorship laws introduced more recently, we're all on VPNs now, so as to avoid having to hand our ID to the wallet inspector for every last website we ever use. And once that was set up, it was nice to discover that the original is still in play!

Nobody does AI on Linux so it makes so much more sense to keep playing three legged racing with Microsoft tied to you. NOT.
NVidia has always been tied to MSFT and their Linux software has always looked like it was done by a single NVidia employee after hours in the basement office.
Besides, Windows is sooo 'yesterday' no matter how much Microsoft pays Qualcomm or NVidia to tie themselves up with.

LoB

The jokes about Darth Jar Jar were everywhere of course, but it could have worked. Star Wars lifted a few ideas from classic SF sources including Asimov's Foundation series - in which, we might recall, the terrifying, unstoppable galactic warlord known as The Mule was hiding in plain sight as a clown, who seemed to be merely a harmless entertainer at court. His military success was chiefly thanks to his psychic ability to manipulate others' minds to his liking - Darth Jar Jar could have done very well that way!

I saw three Star Wars movies when I was young. They were great. Mainly because I was a child and this stuff was new and fresh and exciting to me. Even the Ewoks.

I saw three more when I was not quite so young. They were... poor.

I saw a couple more when I was older. One was great, the other was okay but a retread of one of the old ones, and I never got round to seeing the rest. Didn't care enough.

Now they've got more, and apparently they're based on a TV series they did, which I didn't watch because I wasn't subscribed to that streaming platform at the time. So I'm not going to see those either. Same reason I've not seen a Marvel superhero film since the first Avengers one - just too much homework required with all the backstory. Every scene is a shout out or reference that I won't get. Every character seems to be getting ever louder and angrier and more and more of them have access to time machines. I just don't have it in me to care anymore.

I like the sound of these horror films, though. They're going to tell a complete story? In one film? With a beginning, middle and end, that don't ask me to be up to date on an entire Cinematic Universe? Sounds great, time to check where they're showing!

A modern version of GTA London would be the absolute dream. Been long enough now, you could set it in the nineties and have the same retro value to it!

... why unions aren't much more common among technology workers. Especially given what you hear about the videogame industry in particular, with that mad 'crunch time' culture in which workers are ruthlessly, well, crunched. I'd always ask, well, what does your union say about it? And what do you know, there isn't one, how about that.

Nice to hear of some progress being made, then. I suppose the risk with this for the rest of us is that GTA 6 might be late to release, but, uh, at this point I think we're over that

The problem doesn't occur if you have huge pages enabled, which is a good idea for a database machine anyway, as running without huge pages has almost as much of an impact on Postgres performance as this regression does. So no need to way for postfix to ship the spinlock bug fix.

Does anyone remember when the US State of Massachusetts went to switch to OpenOffice and the ODF file formats? The MS-MiBs were all over the place making sure MA senators got trips to One Microsoft Way for a bit of the 'flashy thing'. Then the MS-MiB sent out worldwide to MS-ISVs with checks and scripts in hand to flood the ISO in order to vote MS-OOMXL( MS-Office Open XML ) format as an international standard so the Massachusetts government could vote it as their open standards format for public documents.

The MS-MiB were sent out worldwide to shut down the One Laptop Per Child initiative so that poor children around the world wouldn't be forced to use a Linux based laptop which could operate for 8 hours on a charge, be charged with a hand crank and was readable in full sun besides having built-in mesh networking. The MS-MiB have been instrumental in other things too. Like when school districts across the US were getting notices of required district wide licensing audits costing many $10s of thousands of dollars or sign new license agreements with the MS-MiB folks. When a couple of districts rescinded their licenses and switched everything over to Linux and started to show other school districts how they too could do it. Did the MS-MiB get recalled back to One Microsoft Way.

Tucked neatly under the MS-Marketing department lives the MS-MiB offices and if they've been reduced over the recent years, surely France has given them reason to throw a few hundreds of millions of dollars into upgrading the offices.

LoB

One very interesting point by the dissenting judge is that if you accept the majority's broad interpretation of swaps, then not only are prediction markets swaps, but normal gambling is as well. Therefore all currently legal and regulated gambling is actually illegal because the CFTC has exclusive jurisdiction, not the states, and none of these gambling operations are following CFTC rules.

Why would they build a machine which just does what humans do in the field instead of building a stationary machine in a factory which builds 20' long sections which fit on a Semi trailer( 2 sections end to end and 2 sections side by side ) and then just have a standard crane on wheels run the sections out onto pre-installed posts? They are talking about "utility scale" installations so the ground has been leveled and prepped so it's not like the custom layouts needed for root-top distributed solar installations.

It seems short sighted when companies build robots which just mimic what humans do with our limited 2 short arms and 5 digit hands.

LoB

Were the product key labels fake? That wasn't stated in the brief, only that she was said to have "illegally trafficked MS product key labels".
It's more like someone purchasing a case of valid store product coupons for cheap, finding a way to market them to the public selling them for a bit more than she paid. Just look at what she was charged with, ie not providing the software with the product key labels.

This reminds me of when Microsoft send their goons after school districts across the US threatening license verification processes costing 10s of thousands of dollars or else relicense the latest versions of Microsoft software. They only stopped when a couple of school districts removed Windows and Microsoft software and installed Linux and open source software AND did a presentation at the annual schools IT conference on how they saved 100s of thousands of dollars annually by dumping Microsoft.

Hopefully she finds some lawyers willing to take up the appeal and expose how this is a corporate policy failure, not a criminal action.
LoB

Typically in sound quality tests, you tell subjects which file is the original, then have them rate how close to the original the other samples are. In this he just gave them four samples, and had them guess which was which, turning it into a more subjective test of guessing what they think the track should like. In addition, based on the table he got a total of 1-4 responses per track, which is far too low to have any statistical significance.

This was a funny joke, but not the gotcha the article played it up to be.

This drone (an MK30) is 78 pounds, and about 6 feet diameter. They could easily kill a person if they hit a them. I think this is the fourth time I've read about their drones crashing, and all the cases seemed reasonably avoidable. They are currently operating under a special FAA license that exempts them from several rules that normal drone operators have to follow, like not requiring visual line of site. Given their safety record so far, I think that license should be revoked, and they can go back to a normal commercial license, until they have proven their operations to be safe again.

Oh dear god. Now I am visualizing competitors finding ways to make their skin floppy in places so it parachutes out like a flying squirrel. Are you happy now?

> I don't see what would be different than if he'd pasted the text into Google Docs or Word 365 to make some edits.
Government employees are prohibited from using those public cloud services for OUO as well. There are separate instances of some of these services like Office 365 which can be used for OUO, but they are kept separate for defense in depth, given these services can have bugs that allowed people to access documents they should be allowed to.

Furthermore, it is worse because the TOS for ChatGPT state that they can and will use your inputs for training, unlike Google Docs or Word 365 (at least in the past - I haven't checked recently).

He had access to AI systems that were approved for OUO, and then on top of that given special permission to use the public ChatGPT for non-sensitive documents, but chose to use public ChatGPT for OUO documents. That would be a security incident for any clearance holder, and is completely inexcusable for the head of CISA.