In fairness, while America may lose a Nobel prize winning chemist, they'll pick up several South African Nazis.

I didn't see a 5.6 option on the Windows client last night.

Haa anyone else observed 5.6 in the wild?

Trump doesn't need to have power, he only needs to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Companies are risk-averse, which is why Anthropic pulled their AI model for a while.

You can get Veracrypt to work with the Mac, via FUSE, but I don't know how safe/robust that is. It's probably more secure than anything Apple has. It's certainly more secure than anything Microspot has.

But, yeah, it's getting extremely irritating that useful stuff is being taken out of commercial OS' and junk put in.

There's no known client, but there is a very good unknown client:
(For those familiar with Kenny Everett...)

https://dev.to/jfscoertzen/cha...
https://snapcraft.io/chatgpt-d...

Whether it has all the official features, I don't know. But that's your best bet.

RFS is dead. Like his wife.

What could possibly go wrong?

Apple is becoming more MS every day.

Oh, also I have a pair of Coofandy 'business' drawstring pants. They're absolutely fucking comfortable and fit well.

"Yutianhome"

See there is the trick, find companies out there that actually TRY to be human sounding instead of just random grouping of letters and numbers. This is usually the first sign that you're more likely to encounter legit yet cheap product. Vevor is... eh kinda easy to remember and their product listing prices look more like what an actual manufacturer would be charging to retailers buying their stock.

that phrase has no meaning, especially in this context. Who is dying of thirst in a desert and is forced to pay a huge premium not to die? Samsung should absolutely get as much money now as it possibly can, eventually the profits will reduce to a trickle, they will need all of this extra fat to survive, good for them. You can build your own memory manufacturing plant if you don't like the prices and think you can sell memory cheaper in this current market, go, do it.

"Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time"

Its called fingerprinting, and it has been going on a very long time, using techniques that go back decades. This just makes it more persistent and spans attempts to obfuscate fingerprinting in easier ways.

If you want to avoid this, work from a non-persistent VM that is created and destroyed every online session, using no identifiable information (no-logins ever).

Security isn't convenient.

The DoD is known for viruses transporting payloads across airgaps onto Internet-connected machines. One thing it isn't is "so secure".

But, to the extent that it IS secure, it uses pretty much what I outlined. They use Class 3 certs for all users and all machines, and have done since about 2001. The US Navy got to trial run thei system to shake down the defects in the design, before they rolled it out to everyone. Beyond that, they use segregated networks (in principle, physical separation rather than logical separation, but who knows?) and encrypted communications.

What I've done above is take what the US DoD uses today, threw in what the US DoD recommended but never actually implemented in the 70s to fill in some of the gaps, and also included what the US DoD implemented and actually used in the way of Trusted OS deisgns in the 70s and 80s. The NSA and IRS likely use some variants on the same techniques.

So, what I've got above is pretty much why the DoD is as secure as it is.

What I've done is augmented it to handle the fact that you need to verify the hardware and not just the endpoint, and that you need to verify the physical host independently of the logical host. But that's pretty much it.

By David Goodstein, then vice-provost of Caltech in 1994, pointing to a long need for systemic change: https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever.
        I think we have our work cut out for us."

That said, I am all for lots more funding of science and technological research (especially small-scale projects)!

Also on how this continues to play out, by Philip Greenspun:
https://philip.greenspun.com/c...
        "Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog:
        "A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?"
        Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for men going into science is the following:
* young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
* men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
        Consider Albert Q. Mathnerd, a math undergrad at MIT ("Course 18" we call it). He works hard and beats his chest to demonstrate that he is the best math nerd at MIT. This is important to Albert because most of his friends are math majors and the rest of his friends are in wimpier departments, impressed that Albert has even taken on such demanding classes. Albert never reflects on the fact that the guy who was the best math undergrad at MIT 20 years ago is now an entry-level public school teacher in Nebraska, having failed to get tenure at a 2nd tier university. ...
        It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom one meets in the university science halls.
        What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory. ..."

Frankly, as a science&technology-inspired once-upon-a-time mathnerd (i.e. similar to many here on Slashdot), who thinks our global society desperately needs better technology appropriate to small-scale locally-controlled sustainable living (while also needing better social sciences to support better ways of collaborating productively), this state of affairs saddens me. Bbut I can't deny the truth of a lot of what David Goostein and Philip Greenspun wrote.

Yes there is some demand for trained people in industry with PhDs. But technical workers in big corporations is not what the academic system historically is set up to produce. And the results are a lot of unhappiness and dissatisfaction all around.

Another piece of the unhappiness puzzle:
"Disciplined Minds"
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
        In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
        The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
        Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

But the whole work system in general is broken and full of needless suffering: https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "It is now possible to abolish work and replace it, insofar as it serves useful purposes, with a multitude of new kinds of free activities. To abolish work requires going at it from two directions, quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, on the quantitative side, we have to cut down massively on the amount of work being done. At present most work is useless or worse and we should simply get rid of it. On the other hand -- and I think this is the crux of the matter and the revolutionary new departure -- we have to take what useful work remains and transform it into a pleasing variety of game-like and craft-like pastimes, indistinguishable from other pleasurable pastimes except that they happen to yield useful end-products. Surely that wouldn't make them less enticing to do. Then all the artificial barriers of power and property could come down. Creation could become recreation. And we could all stop being afraid of each other.
        I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes. ..."

Examples of sci-fi stories envisioning something better include The Skills of Xanadu, Voyage form Yesteryear, and Manna.