I have been back in the office since May 2020. At first it was just 3 days a week and then by July it was every day as per normal. Here in Perth, lockdown was just 6 weeks and thankfully we have kept it at bay since then.

As long as this nasty UK strain stays away, we should be able to avoid another lockdown and keep going.

This doesn't make sense. When you enter your CC details into the form they haven't left your browser, unless there is some Javascript grabbing those details. If that is the case then the site has been compromised.

You could easily argue that it was a coincidence. This was also the post-WWII period, when much of Europe's industrial capability had been blasted to smithereens. There was a huge boost in demand and we were the country with the infrastructure in place to handle it.

Anyway, my point is not about the income tax rate. It's about the laughable idea that it punishes Mr. Big at the top. $90 million is nothing to the real players in and out of government who pull the strings. An absolute joke. And giving the money TO the government is just handing it to many of the same players. And the government has ZERO accountability to make productive use of the money.

And also, it's about the fact that the debt-based economy is a bigger tax than the income tax, and no one realizes it.

You really think that would change anything? Hey, let's take Mr. Evil Corporate Guy's money and give it to the government! Who do you think runs the government? Who do you think Equifax is? It's essentially a wing of the government already, and it was intended that way from the start.

Ask yourself why an Equifax should have such a say in the average American's life? Why do we live in a society where 99% of the people are in debt their whole lives?

I absolutely agree anyone is free to set up a free website and pay for it with their own money... and many do. I also agree that anyone is free to go to a website that supports itself with ads. And any website that uses an *honest* ad system (I.E. serving them from their own server) can't even be subverted by Brave.

And, anyone is free to keep on supporting the current web, disaster that it is. We all have choice, at this stage of the game. I'm saying Brave is the only sane choice for the greater commercial web. I'm all for community wireless and all that sort of stuff. It's not going to scale. It's not going to replace the big web. Commerce happens. Call it greed all you want, that won't change how life works. I prefer a consumer-choice based approach that lets us at least reign in the corporate insanities, which is what Eich is trying to do.

It's actually the only sane approach to the modern web. The web can't be "free". Someone's got to pay the bills. It either has to be ad-supported or subscription-based. Think about it: if you go subscription-based for everything you are MUCH more trackable than an ad-based web.

The current ad-based web is an absolute nightmare. The average person who doesn't know the magical combination of browser add-ons ends up with a frozen browser several times a day. Try to even have 6-7 tabs open in Chrome or Firefox and you end up with problems.

Not to mention, the current ad-based web is scary intrusive.

If you read the details on Eich's approach:

1. He is protecting your privacy. Ad impressions are guaranteed on the buyer side, but your identity is protected. That is built in.
2. He is not "choosing" the ads you see. You get to choose the type of ads you will see, based on a blind profile that doesn't reveal your identity to the advertiser
3. It places sane limits on the number and placement of the ads.

I've been on the web since day one. I never minded a moderate amount of advertising. Anyone who does is a ridiculous sourpuss of a human being. What I mind is them ferreting out my identity, and ruining decent websites with ads that pop up, or under, or run extravagant javascript code that crashes my browser, or... Flash, just anything Flash, or auto-playing video and audio, etc... If we can get rid of that, I'm all for it.

I have had exactly the opposite experience as this "journalist". Upon re-watching Episode 4 after more than 20 years, I was struck by how superior the set design and and acting was to the prequels. Yes, it's nowhere near as glamorous or sheened to perfection by CGI, WHICH IS EXACTLY THE POINT. Everything had an authentic air to it that you just don't get later on. And this magic is strongest in the first two movies.

I Tor'd the original Han-shot-first edition, of course, and watched it looking intently for any real gaps in continuity or jarring inconsistencies in the sets, costumes, etc... none. It really was a work of art, top to bottom, in spite of the low budget.

Wow, I have heard of not reading the article (that is par for the course!), but not even reading the summary?

The people who wish to access these services don't have devices that are compatible or have very limited network speeds which aren't sufficient. Bozza is targeting this gap in the market and using various methods to make content available to these basic devices.

I mean insanely more complicated than jails, not insanely more complicated than other standard VMs. Have you used jails? I was on a project to deploy Docker instances on a large scale, and it took me 6 months to create an infrastructure that could have been done in 1 month with jails. I will agree that Docker has some nice abstractions, but the details and special cases and workarounds were endless. And I still don't see the actual advantages over FreeBSD. There's simply nothing stopping one from creating a few shell scripts to spin up thousands of BSD jails, mapping drive storage and networking however you want. A lot of this stuff the Linux guys are thumping their chests over now was in mass deployment over a decade ago in certain BSD hosting companies.

Yes, that's a good start, but remember that Docker also has a... social landscape I guess we could call it. There's a central website and blog, and then there's the all-important Docker Registry where you can search for existing images, and build your own images on top of base images you download. And Docker has a built-in feature to fetch images right from the registry. Makes it very easy to experiment and toy around with images.

Docker made these seemingly superficial things priorities from day one, sometimes at the expense of good architecture and security. For example, earlier versions (as of 1.2 AFAIR) did not have an easy way to delete built-up cruft from images you had imported.

So the challenge would be to accomplish these benefits without some of the huge gaping security/stability/malware holes that Docker has had to deal with.

Sounds like a thing that needs doing. Where do we start?

So what we have is an insanely more complicated way to manage your "VM-ish" things, a really, really odd way of approaching your containerized system where it doesn't actually get to have a full userland (no SSHd, etc...) unless you do all sorts of insane tweaks (believe me, I know because I spent the better part of last year doing this), and in the end the only real advantage of Docker over jails has nothing to do with the intrinsic design of the system, but the build infrastructure surrounding it?

That sound about right. All FreeBSD needs to compete with Linux containers is an image repository and a Git-like method for managing and building images. There are already tons of jail management tools for snapshotting, migrating, moving, templating, etc... And given that jails have a much longer history and are likely to be much more stable and easy to manage, it seems like a natural next step, BSD guys. Hint, hint...

Of course you have to have built on things throughout your career TANSTAAFL and all that. Point being, think strategically. Play to your strengths and to the true underlying needs you can meet, rather than chasing after the hot new technology trend that can have you chasing your tail.

But age is not the whole story. I didn't become any kind of developer until around 33, and certainly had no serious understanding of databases until my late 30s. And yet, here I am, a very much in-demand expert.

Bingo. The real key is to go deep on something and specialize. As a web application developer approaching 50 who did a lot of database work, I realized I had put serious time into learning the ins and outs of the relational model, SQL, business rules thinking, etc... and I had also put lots of time into understanding Linux. Turns out database and Linux skills are in high demand. So I've dropped most of the web app programming (Honestly, in that domain you are competing with a worldwide talent pool, most of whom are willing to work cheaper than you) and really strengthened my enterprise database skills. I now do PostgreSQL consulting almost full-time, and really it is a pleasure to do more serious knowledge work instead of constantly scrambling for scut-level web application work.

Also as you age, put more time into the things that change least. SQL isn't going away anytime soon. Ditto for Linux. Web app frameworks change every freaking *year*. Leave that stuff to the young guys.

And this is why I never bothered with a SmartTV. Aside from the HD TV tuner, I prefer my TV to be just a monitor. Give me ports and let me plug in other devices which provide smart functionality like a Raspberry Pi or Chromecast or console, etc.

I watch YouTube on my TV. Find the video via the Android App, share it with the Kodi remote app and it starts playing on my TV. Easy.