hyperman1

It's German, not British. When Belgium was founded, the fear was it would immediately try to join France. So when a French noble was offered the throne, he actually said no, quite a blemish for the young nation. A surplus German noble was crowned, which was palatable to the English as it balanced things out a bit.

Every popular language has a cultural part to it. Java was famous for its enterprisey verbose code, even if nothing in the language requires it. PHP tends the opposite way, writing organically grown underengineered messes, even if the language allows for reasonable code. Cobol has its 10 000 line single program functions.

When you choose a language, you chose to hire the programmers for it. They will have read the same blogs, seen the same examples, made the same architectural choices.

Long term, when you choose node, you get zillions of tiny dependencies.

I'm not a drawing person. I wish I could draw a lot better. I used to try once in a while, and the results were universally bad.

So a few years ago, I took a drawing course, and pushed it as fas as I could. The results were the best I ever did in my life, and not terrible, but still far from good. At this point, I've decided this is as good as things will get, and I should stop spending effort and focus on other things that I am good in.

If I happen to find myself in a situation that requires me to draw, I will make a honest effort. Maybe something will happen that makes me grow. But I have decided that for the forseeable future I am not a drawing person and that's fine.

You have to read the news from someone, and each one has its own bias. State news has a well known failure mode as propaganda. But commercial news turns out to have its own failure mode, where emotion inducing content has bigger gains for lower cost.

The best advice I can give here is to mix different sources. As a Belgian, I have a few local newspapers and the VRT news for Belgium, NOS, BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, which are all checked at least weekly. Each one has its own blatant biases and blind spots. There are still big missing gaps, e.g. a Chinese and an African perspective. There is clearly Gell Mann Amnesia going on. Even so, I started to look very different to the world.

The reason of copyright has always been to protect the current powers. To promote usefull arts has always been a whitewash. Here's e.g. wikipedia on that topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright

  ... works of dissent and criticism could also circulate rapidly. As a consequence, governments established controls over printers ...

"To protect the children, ...."

If this happens without clicking I agree, the software is not covered under any EULA and you're allowed to do whatever you want, right?

Seconded. I talk to my cats, to the software I'm troubleshooting, to my tools, sometimes even to my dishwasher while filling it. Presumably none of them cares, but every reaction is a training, so I want to train in the right direction.

My mom walked into a table and absent mindedly said sorry. Some salesman noticed. She said she talked to everything. He responded: As long as the table doesn't answer, everything is allright.

Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated. The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.

I always wonder if the internet is thesurvivor of the networking cambrian explosion, with a slight roll of the dice making another candidate the winner.

It might be more of a weakened immune system thing. Everyone gets small lightning strikes all the times, but our defences stop it before it gets too bad. So when defences are failing, you see a long string of random unlucky stuff happening .

Same for computer services going down regularly, or sequences of small industrial accidents, or even humans being non-stop unlucky.

As an EUian,I've never given one care about my credit rating. I don't even know if I have one.

They can cause a long drawn out court battle, and abuse your data. Noyb is the real-world example here. Most companies depend on not being sued, and will fold if a regulater sends them notice.

I did read the book, and know enough people who did. Now I may have weird interests, but that describes basically half the inhabitants of this site.

BTW, as non-USAian, I never saw Cosmos and never heard of NDT.

There was a time where Hawking's A brief history of time gave a decent overview of the universe to beginners. Does anyone know how well it holds up today and if anything better exists?

In the EU, anyone can legally get a second hand LTSC license. See e.g.

https://en.windowsnoticias.com/Where-to-get-cheap-and-offici...

I've always wondered if adding your own dots would throw it off

One part of this is how hard it is to translate the impact to now-scientists.

E.g. 2 degrees temperature raise did not sound bad to me, untill someone explained to me this is from ground to space, and the actual raise is double or triple that. Then we looked on a map and found current day Morocco seems close to what my Belgium is expected to become in that scenario. I still am not capable of deciding how realistic this is.

So you made me surf to amocscenarios.org, and even if this thing is reliable, it still is hard to interprete. My winter goes from -5 every decade to -18. I've never had either in my life. What does this even mean? Can my ww2 rebuilt house deal with -5, as it supposedly already did? What to do forcdealing with -18?

And that's the opinion of someone knowing a little bit. Now go to someone who has to managed 10 of life's disasters over his lifetime and explain how bad this really is.

In my corner of the world, credit cards were for buying stuff on the internet and travelling outside the EU. Now the net has evelved enough to accept our normal means of payment. I always feel insecure when using a credit card.

I love my Roomba 600 so much that I bought a new Roomba a few months ago. Unfortunately, it is a strictly inferior product on just about any point.

You're proposing encrypting the only thing that merits recovery?

There is a midterm comming up in the USA. If you're living there and you're now not going to vote,I'm sorry but you're complicit. They might make it inconvenient, but you all still got some power left over there.

Afaik, either a few traditional red states turn blue and make it clear there is a limit to what's politically possible, or you're a dictatorship.

This is not the correct model. For a typical user, they can bring the laptop to someone knowledgeable, who will pop out the drive for them.

The main question is: What is the biggest risk: theft or data corruption.

In my experience, corruption and ransomware is more common so FDE should be off for households desktops or laptops, as these rarely leave the house. A business tends to have managed devices and data loss is a legal nightmare, so FDE should be on. The main thing is: people should be able to choose.

Basically, the whole protestant faction. A sibling comment mentions Lutheran (German) and Mennonites (Dutch). There is of course catholicism from the Irish, but the Anglicans are suspiciously small.

I've always thought of the USA as the east Roman Empire of the British Empire. The seat of the throne moved to the white house, but the USA is still culturally close to the UK. Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.

Around here, I've never seen an ebike without speedometer, and everyone on the street should respect street signs and red lights. I see no reason to ignore red lights or stop signs just because you're powering yourself.

Belgian view here. Flanders is slowly getting the Dutch cycling culture. E-bikes are forbidden from assisting above 25 km/h. You can go faster, but you will be providing the power yourself.

Something changed on the biking paths when e-bikes became the norm. Average speed went from 15 km/h to 25 km/h. This, combined with the heavyer weight of these bikes, created new dangers. A big ebike bike hitting a pedestrian routinely throws the pedestrian in the hospital and with life long damage. The fat bikes, some esteps and the food delivery people are worse. They tend to drive asocial, and are commonly illegally modified for higher speeds. The law is behind, and stupid politicians make it worse by stopping the police checking the bikes.

Meanwhile, bike paths are a lot busier, and if near pedestrians, things are getting dangerous by default. I've decided for myself to limit my speed to 20 km/h in the city centers or at schools, and commonly go even lower. 25 is only for the ebike 'highways' next to secondary roads.

I am pro stricter regulation and follow-up for my ebike. Belgium famously only implemented laws against drunk driving after an idiot killed a whole class at once. Let's not wait for an ebike equivalent. Better to do this calmly and thoughtfully now.

There is this feeling where it's futile to do anything, the world is big and miserable and you're small and insignificant.

I'm slowly getting convinced that some political players are spreading this view on purpose. It is an easy way to block people who try to stop the erosion of society.

It also isn't true. You can easily improve the world on a small scale by doing anything positive. On world scale, trying to change things is like buying into a lottery. Most attempts will fail, but the more stakes you have, the bigger the chance of winning.

In my corner of the world, over my life, I saw flemish people, woman, LGBTQ, vegetarians all stand up and demand the rest of the world treat them as equals. They all started tiny and were laughed at for the futility of their dreams. But I speak dutch, woman go to universities, gays are holding hands publicly and getting married, and vegetarian options are normal in restaurants. These causes won, because lots of little nameless people fought for it, even if there are still haters pushing back each of them.

I would not describe it as incompetence, more as

1) current encryption not available in the 1990's. These are the age of DES and weapon-grade vs commercial encryption. There was a legal cost blocking strong encryption.

2) Manufacturers were not as strongly opposed to people touching the internals. After WW2, most people could fix anything, because survival depended on it. Even in the 60's radios etc. came with schematics, and building your own was normal and cost-effective. The shift happened in the '90s, with governements requiring licensing for everything, and mass manufacturing making repair less cost effective than buying a new one.

Our current culture where only people blessed by the manufacturer are allowed to do anything is very recent.

Right now, software is protected by the attacker not having enough competence. If that's over, the logical next step is using real encryption.

E.g. a synth has a public key embedded. To change settings, you upload them to the vendor, who blesses them with their private key.

Hacking such a synth requires either jailbreaking the synth, or the vendor losing their key . Both can be mitigated with tamper resistant hardware.

We're well ahead on this path already, I assume AI will accellerate it. This is very bad news for the right to repair.

As an older generation man, I've tried to understand the touchiness here. This is dangerous territory, so I hope you try to read my intent here, even if the packaging is not as strong as I want it to be.

The best analogy I can come up with is the smurf village: Every smurf has an identity, describing a bunch of mannerism. Baker smurf, strong smurf, joke smurf ... The smurfette is both the only adult female and a separate identity. Her existence in a children's story serves to demonstrate to young humans how the female identity is supposed to work.

I think the smurf village echos a deep human archetype. A man is someone who can choose his identity. He is unbound. A woman is a man with an already fixed identity. She can't choose to be e.g. a baker as primary identity, her choice is made already.

While simplified, there is some truth in this worldview, and people, especially woman, are correct to protest teaching this archetype to new generations.

In the same way, the poster above uses 'Be a man' to probably mean something like: 'Be brave enough to choose a new identity'. Which is a valid message, but needs an implied ([*] woman are also men here) when this archetype is considered.

Re Onedrive, as someone who left windows ages ago: Why not just create folders outside your user home? Create some junctions from the inside. Then onedrive gets to sync only your desktop wallpaper and any random stuf apps drop in there, and your real data is safe outside its reach.