dingaling

The idea of overthrowing a vicious dictator can't really be wrong in any moral sense.

In terms of realpolitik or execution it can be.

There's no reason Section 75 protections couldn't be extended to debit cards, except that in the mid-1970s banks were lobbying very hard for credit cards to become more legitimised and S75 was the successful result.

The banks took on a little bit of risk and in return unlocked a free money generator.

On the contrary debit cards are revenue-neutral or even loss-making for them

> A lot of human writing was always trash.

Yes, several history authors come to mind who over several decades never broke out of the style of "this happened, then they moved to here, then this happened.". Their entire book could just be summarised in a table instead of prose.

LLMs seem to be stuck at the same stage, telling us 'what' but not 'why' and 'so what.'

You omitted to mention that the Irish state broadcaster, RTE, actually implemented voice restrictions before the UK did:

https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2024/0119/1217560-section-31-b...

Israel has a very productive and and capable arms industry that could probably survive a US embargo,and its own self-contained intelligence gathering network, so beyond cutting FMS funding the US has very few levers to pull

Do you apply this rule in reverse? If you need to speak to someone who isn't wearing earphones, do you wave at them first or do you just start talking to them?

I suspect the latter.

> I wish Firefox would just give a mild warning for a recently expired certificate

Nope, if the SSL industry continues to insist on increasingly short cert lifetimes then I want Firefox to give no quarter when a cert expires.

Play by their rules and fall by their rules too.

> A pyramid scheme can run out of people to keep it going

And then you describe how the secondary stock market requires 'fresh blood' to whom to sell stock to cash-out.

It's precisely a legalised pyramid scheme that always needs someone to come in at the bottom hold the bag to let someone else cash-out. In turn they need someone to come in 30 years later. That's exactly how a pyramid scheme works.

> The logic is that the markets will almost certainly go up

The markets go up because people buy expecting that the markets will go up, which causes sellers to increase their price because they expect people will pay more because of FOMO, which people still buy because they expect the market to go up further.

The snake somehow keeps eating its tail.

I suppose it's the juxtaposition of saying "I think open source is important" and then building your business criticality on the least open software systems on Earth.

In most organisations which are building on open source there's a pragmatism that some elements ( routers, BIOS, phones ) won't adhere to the philosophy. But it's completely different to make unknowable, solidly opaque systems the core tools of a business.

Even that's revisionist.

Originally a zero-day exploit was one that was found by crackers on the first day of release of a software product. Like finding a licence crack for a new Microsoft program on the day it went on sale.

There used to be fierce competition to find such an exploit within those 24 hours, and great kudos for those who did.

Nowadays a zero-day can apparently be found years after release, which makes no sense.

I have no sympathy, and even less respect, for people who choose to fly with Ryanair and then complain about these patterns.

After 32 years of Ryanair in its current incarnation nobody can claim naivety. Dance with the devil and he pipes the tune.

> Except that there were no global standards at the time

England had a patent system from the mid 15th Century which emigrants to the New World brazenly ignored in order to set up their own industry.

Of course, they then pulled the ladder up behind themselves in 1790 with the establishment of their own patent system...

Pi hasn't been a hobbyist computer since they were prioritised for large-volume business purchasers during COVID.

As for the education market, that's a long forgotten pipedream.

> companies are supposed to be profitable!

No, companies are meant to be successful.

"Profit" is surplus money that could have been invested earlier in R&D, product development, employee benefits or customer service.

Instead, many companies decide to forego developing themselves for the 'advantage' of a 'record profits' headline and the privilege of giving a quarter of the surplus away as tax.

> The value of the stock is your share in the underlying business.

Which for most investors with Class C/D shares is... the square root of zero.

They assert no control over the business, the only way to benefit from the stock is to find another shmuck to buy it at a higher price.

The novel aspect is that it is being conducted by a satellite, rather than a ground station. Which is an escalation in sophistication which makes counter-jamming much more difficult and also gives global reach to the jammer.

> As long as they provide their own power

How is running local gas turbines more efficient than relying on centralised power generation?

Even the transport costs of getting kerosene to them is considerable.

> Rather, if you list a price for various packages, people get scared off

Yet somehow other businesses manage to convey tiered pricing without scaring customers.

Imagine trying to book a hotel room but were told to contact them because they have a range of rooms from single bed to honeymoon suite. "We couldn't possibly list all the packages, it would confuse you!"

Or try to buy a car, but the dealer refused to list a base price because "we have so many options it's meaningless".

Withholding guideline or indicative pricing is a deliberate obfuscation designed to increase friction and reduce choice.

Not 'entirely', the 6500's wings are made in Japan, the rear fuselage and tail in Northern Ireland and the engines in England.

"Gell-Man" is an unfounded toy theory invented by an author without any research, using a colleague's name without permission to make it sound more authorative. It's hokum.

> "less space than a Nomad"

I actually thought that was a valid comment, more so than the Dropbox one. The contemporaneous iPod _was_ technically and acoustically inferior to the Nomad.

The iPod "won" on account of fashion, style and marketing. Yes, the Slashdot comment was naive in underestimating or ignoring the power of Apple, but objectively it wasn't wrong. Apple released an inferior product and used out-of-band techniques to sell it.

The non-programmer decomposition of that joke was painful to read.

Particularly from those outside the domain who criticised it as a 'not a very good joke' because they didn't understand it, which I think summarises the entitled mindset of many people these days.

> The word "live" is doing a lot of work here

A latency of a few seconds for streaming video compared to several months for a still photo from the Shuttle seems an entirely valid use of 'live'.

> It's reduced technical debt

I think that's a misunderstanding of the phrase.

AI may have reduced your immediate technical burden.

However AI, if not carefully used, increases technical debt because it builds up a vast heap of code and business logic that nobody understands. The agent that created it forgets about it once it's out of its context window, the programmer that scripted it just knows it passed some tests.

In two, five, ten years from now trying to maintain that vibe-coded slop will be a battle between various agents making conflicting changes and some poor human trying to get it into a shippable state.

> This is the reason I only _ever_ spend money on credit cards

Which illustrates one of the most prolific examples of regulatory capture.

Credit cards became mainstream because of that protection, which was a triumph for the payment processors. Whatever they spent on lobbying was a bargain.

> Altavista had exactly the same function as google

I disagree, Alta Vista had excellent an excellent search UI with Boolean logic. Google discarded that because it thought it 'knew better' in terms of Page Rank.

A-V could be fine-tuned to find a page with exactly the search terms, Google just gave fuzzy approximations from a very large search set.

Having failed to ratify UNCLOS, Iran is entitled to claim only 3nm of territorial water.

That's international law, as it stands.

Iran passed its own law in 2003 claiming 12nm. They can only assert that claim through violence.

A good secretary is huge force-multiplier.

Seniors in my org still have them and they make things happen, partly through being able to use the senior's name to open doors and force action but mostly though their deep organisational knowledge.

All a boss has to say is "I need everyone involved in Project X in a meeting in London next week" and it's done, the boss just gets told when and where to get into a car.

> You start with the very end of the chain

No, that's just taking a quick win and kicking the can down the road.

Data migration and hosting is comparatively quick and easy. It can be done any time.

What takes huge lead-times is re-establishing a chip-making industry; not just the fabs but also the raw material contracts, materials processing etc

I'd argue that achieving data sovereignity first is counter-productive because we know the politicians will relax once the easy bit is done. The actual hardware hard-work will never get funded, especially after a new US President takes office in 2029. Europe will sigh in relief and go back to its wilfull ignorance of the risks of dependency'