Bell Labs was part of AT&T, AT&T was a monopoly, a legal monopoly with one limitation (that it not enter the computer business) and in return it was guaranteed a fixed profit margin.

The more money AT&T spent, the greater profit they made. AT&T was happy to fund expensive 'blue-sky' projects because the expense drove revenues up, which increased profit.

It is FAR from the only, or even majority influence/factor of Bell Labs success, but it was a very, very unique arrangement.

Sorry, I meant "Memory Sticks". Also, after reading the full summary above, I was unaware that they also used to make SD or Compact Flash cards

Forgot to add: it was Macau that was ceded to Beijing in 1999

It happened under Clinton, but the support for it then was bipartisan. At the time, though, either Zhao Xiyang or Hu Jin Tao was the leader, and at the time, China did look like on the economic front, it was willing to play by the rules. What they didn't consider was a reversion to Maoism, as is happening under Xi Jin Peng. Actually, after Tiananmen Square, China should have replaced the Soviet Union as our #1 adversary, particularly since the Soviet Union broke up 2 years later

Also, Hong Kong got transferred in 1997 rather than 1999

I do hope that Woz gets a special recognition from Apple on that anniversary day, since Jobs ain't around

Re-reading the summary, I had no idea Sony made Compact Flash or SD cards. That market used to be owned by Sandisk and Lexar

You mean their Memory Sticks, wihch was their proprietary format?

At any rate, Memory Sticks were only used in Sony gear. So if one didn't have a Sony toy, then one didn't have anything that used a Memory Stick. It was almost a BetaMax of the Flash storage segment in the 90s and 00s

I don't think the GP was including the sector where they compete w/ Disney, Warner Brothers, Universal,.....

Didn't their cellphones get subsumed by Ericsson?

I sold my last car, but had I not, I was planning to upgrade the car navigation unit w/ one that supports CarPlay and Android Auto

So basically the FCC said guys, say your really sorry and promise not do it again.

You beat me to it. They used to make Memory Cards back in the 90s & 00s, but ultimately, it was SD that won the format wars when it came to flash storage memory (apart from USB interfaced flash). I recall that Sandisk used to make flash cards of various form factors - CompactFlash, SD, Memory Cards, xD (for Fuji and Olympus) and even a SIM form factor card. Don't know if they still do, or whether most of those have been discontinued

But yeah, it's sad to see so many iconic Sony products, such as their camcorders, TVs, computers,.... all just disappear or get replaced by Chinese brands

I've seen a number of cases of people treating AI as a brain replacement. AI can be great, but lately I've found it making tons of mistakes. In some cases, the mistakes are inane, but there are many cases where you have to pay extremely close attention to spot the fallacies. And since it speaks with a very authoritative voice, people aren't generally reviewing its answers with the level of skepticism they should be using. This is causing more work to flow uphill since managers and leads have to spot the issues that the subordinates missed.

Employees have recently started using our LLM as an agent to install applications and the thing is absolutely a loose cannon. We've caught it doing things like downloading scripts from questionable sources, running them with the "at.exe" command to get them to execute as the System user, and disabling the firewall before running them. And the reports generated by our EDR solution are so complex that's it's extremely difficult to determine the original intent of the LLM prompt. I'm sure we're not the only company experiencing this and I wouldn't be surprised if the solution many other companies use is to create exceptions to consider the LLM a trusted source. It seems like only a matter of time before malware creators start using LLMs to spread their payloads since these things are already unhinged and have tons of access.

Does systemd handle the schema for user attributes? If so, that would be why it was correct to do it there. If not, I couldn't say. I'm uninterested in the systemd debate.