I'm very unhappy with this. Keep in mind that this was supposed to happen under Biden, so I figured the delay was the usual NASA nonsense about trying to get the risk down to zero and so on. Trump was supposed to be the space guy, the. guy who cared about space stuff and was going to get us back to the moon. Now he's just become another "Yeah, that costs money. We can't do that." guy like most in the Republican Party, with the exception of his huge "beautiful" spending bill that costs a fortune but sadly gives none of that fortune to NASA. I guess we'll all just have to hope that China can get their crap together and make a real commitment to getting to the moon and maybe that will inspire Trump or whatever dictator follows him to actually try to go.

In this case, it's not either-or but actually both of those.

Yes, it certainly is difficult to leave North Korea legally. I seem to recall reading that following a major defector in Europe bailing from a North Korean embassy with his family that now North Korea makes people who leave the country leave their families behind in North Korea. But I do want to point out something that you and maybe most Slashdotters don't understand at all.

Most people don't want to leave their country no matter how bad it gets.

Communist governments generally don't understand that, with China and maybe Vietnam being exceptions. Look at Syria (not communist but it sucks). That place is a hell hole. A lot of people left. But most people stayed. Even if they can leave, most people won't leave. I saw that in my working career too. Maybe 15 or so years ago I had a co-worker we hired from a bank that was closing down IT operations in our town and moving all IT to a distant state. Local IT employees were not given a chance to move to that distant state. So we hired that guy from the bank before they shut things down. He told us that the bank kept postponing the IT function move date and after working there maybe 2 years after the first notice that it was going to be moved out of state, he just found a job with us. We had an opening in our department and he had mentioned his co-worker at the bank and we told him to tell the guy to send us a resume. Bank dude refused. He was going to stick it out at the bank. About 6 months later, long after we filled the job we asked him to apply for, he got laid off our ot nowhere and the bank really moved his job away. He went to my co-worker and expressed and interest then in applying and we said to tell him that the job was filled and we had no current openings, nor did we anticipate having any in the near future. Dude knew at some point his job would just go away and he refused to leave it.

Calling her "unwitting" seems more like something a lawyer would say to get their client the lowest sentence possible rather than an accurate description of what was going on.

I'm not personally opposed to FreeBSD, but I worked for a company that used it and it might be worthwhile to explain why we stopped.

In the mid 2000s I joined a successful startup company. We were bought out by a Fortune 500 company. Because of a severance agreement that still has a little while left to run, I'm not going to name the company as my agreement doesn't allow me to "talk bad" about them on social media. So it's just easier to not mention their name. We were bought out because the Fortune 500 company tried to do what we did and their application sucked and ours was great, so it was just easier to buy us and layoff all their people who did what we did. At the time of the buyout, we had an assembly of Linux, FreeBSD and Ultrix servers. We had some lower management types who were IT geeks who pushed for FreeBSD so we used it some, but we didn't use it everywhere because some of our stuff was better supported under Linux. After a few years, we got all the Ultrix stuff moved to Linux. We ended up moving all the FreeBSD stuff to Linux because we had no choice. We had an unusual hardware configuration it was running on and we had a weird edge case where some of our hardware would cause FreeBSD to kernel panic and die. We reported the bug to the FreeBSD maintainers and how to trigger it. They got back to us and said that they acknowledged it was a bug exactly like we said, but they said they weren't going to fix it, maybe not ever, but certainly not any time soon. They said they didn't have the resources to fix it. So that pretty much clinched it that we had to move to Linux, which did not have this bug with our hardware. If we had had the same bug with Linux, I'm sure one way or another we could have gotten it fixed, even if we had to pay developers at a specific distribution (we were using Red Hat by the way) to fix it for us, but FreeBSD's attitude was kind of "It sux it be you". I get that we were probably the only company with the issue, but it was a very real issue for us. We couldn't have production servers getting kernel panics and dying because of it so we moved off and the application never used FreeBSD at all after that. The IT geek management types also eventually left the company and they were the ones who pushed for FreeBSD to begin with, so between lack of management support for it, the problem that wouldn't be fixed, and the advantages of just having everything under the same version of Linux, we never went back to it.

The article makes clear that part of the motivation of the game authors is to stick it to Disney. because Disney is on the "BDS list". This is a list of companies that the maintainers claim are supporting "Israel's genocide in Gaza". I'm not Jewish, but screw these guys. And I hope Disney sues them.

My most recent job was with a Fortune 500 company (bottom half of that group) that due to a severance agreement that has a bit longer left to go, I can't name. It's not secret stuff. They just don't want me talking bad about them for a while. I wasn't an IT security guy per se, but I did Linux internal support for the company and that got me in touch with various parts of the company. My experience was exactly what you said, that we had way more security problems with Windows. The most serious hacking incident of our servers during my time there happened to some Windows servers that ran a very specific ancient technology application. Those servers had to get completely rebuilt from scratch over a weekend to fix the problem.

You'll need to define "civil service". I have no idea what you think that terms covers and would be appropriate. And as far as the military goes... I refer you to a legendary hacker named Edward Snowden. Snowden went into the military after high school and while his Wikipedia page entry is now currently scrubbed of this, apparently it went off the rails really quickly and he was discharged very quickly. I'm having to work off memory here as, like I said, his Wikipedia page is now scrubbed of this and contains a lot of self-aggrandizing bs in it, but I think he lasted maybe one week and he did not get an honorable discharge, meaning he couldn't get back into the military in the future. Hacker/geek types don't do well in the military, so that is out. And as others have mentioned, he was holding the information he stole hostage for money, so it's not like he just poked around to see what was there. Every person under the age of 20 isn't necessarily a candidate for rehab.

The alternative was apparently "forever minus one day" as proposed by Jack Valenti many years ago. So it's better than that. And at least it's finally settled. But yeah, 95 years is too long. Actually, in a few cases it will end up being over 100 years due to the way the law was written, but that only applies to some music in the 1940s if I remember correctly.

As an American, I do feel qualified to speak here. So while I didn't vote for Trump, I know many who did. Trump won because Kamala Harris lost due to a thousand little cuts. A bunch of things all went against her and together it was enough to sink her. What were these?
1) The biggest was Biden allowing almost everybody who could reach the US border to claim asylum, come in, and face a court date 7+ years in the future to determine their fate. If there actually was one thing that caused Harris to lose, this was it. I am completely at a loss to explain how this happened as the "let everybody who wants to come in" stuff is really a fringe position within the Democratic Party that only the wing nuts support, but somehow somebody got to Biden and convinced him it was the greatest idea ever.
2) Over 10 million voters in 2020 simply didn't vote in 2024. This was also huge as apparently a lot of those people voted for Biden in 2020. I've never heard an explanation as to why they didn't vote.
3) About 25% of black males voted for Trump with a huge percentage of those doing simply to stop any black woman from becoming president. Black men who hate black women is a real thing.
4) Some small percentage of legal immigrants want literally all immigration into the USA stopped forever so nobody else can get in. There aren't a lot of these people but they all went for Trump to do exactly what he has been doing.
5) There was a devastating commercial on TV against Harris that showed her giving an interview around 2020 where she bragged about how prison inmates would get free, tax payer paid for gender changing surgeries because (according to her) this was just the greatest idea ever. The Democrats have a history of adopting weird, extremist positions on finge issues just to be "right" and they'd rather lose than not support the position. Few Americans are trans, even fewer are in prison, but a family complaining about high inflation at the grocery store isn't going to be moved by a candidate who would rather pay for free trans surgeries for prisoners than fix inflation.
6) And finally, some large enough minority of American voters, and this crosses all racial and gender and politcial party lines, simply don't ever want any woman to ever become president. They all voted for Trump.

Please note that about 80% of Republican voters are fully in The Cult Of Donald Trump and as long as he is alive and a candidate they can vote for, they will do so. Period.

In this very specific case, that's not exactly what's going on. Holmes has a small number of followers to whom she is sort of a cult leader. One of whom is her husband. I'm honestly pretty shocked that before she finally reported to prison that he didn't grab her and the kids and try to flee to another country and ask for asylum. Her husband's family is quoted as saying that they don't know who he is anymore. And I've also seen some venture capitalists who said they would have no problem throwing money at her again once she gets out of prison. There aren't a lot of those guys, but they definitely exist. In her case the main problem was likely not messing with rich people's money but promising a non-working health technology that would change lives for the better and refusing to admit that it didn't really work.

Of course you know that VCRs aren't being made any more, but "kids" (think Millennials and after) don't buy electronics any more. Many actually choose to watch videos on tiny laptop or, even worse, tiny phone screens. This is surely why Panasonic is having problems.

I'm NOT a lawyer. But I have a LOT of friends who are. And I ask them stuff. So I probably know more than the non-lawyers here do. Having said that, nobody should take what I say as more than an educated guess.

Yeah, this is pretty much my thought too. My guess right now is that the only reason - for now - this was allowed is that the AI pleaded for forgiveness for defendant. But my guess is also that in a very short term, the defendant's lawyer will go to court again and claim that the use of AI was highly prejudiced against his client and the only remedy is to free his client immediately. I'm not saying that a court will agree to that, but I bet it gets argued soon enough. I'm highly skeptical that going forward this kind of thing is going to be allowed because the chance for abuse and outright lying is too high. And I want to point out that religious family members who beg courts to forgive the killer of the loved ones sometimes see that rebound on them and the defendant's lawyer will ask for their client to be freed for a variety of fairly bogus reasons, throwing the mercy all back in the face of the victim's family.

And I want to point out the US courts are wildly inconsistent in what they allow and don't allow and it's all pretty much up to the personal whims of the judge. For example, it's somewhat recently been in the press that the infamous Menendez Brothers, twins who killed their parents decades ago, are trying to get out of jail. I'm OK with them being released. They admitted to the murders but they said in their first trial that their father's sexual abuse of them and their mother's refusal to help them was the biggest factor in the killing. They got a mistrial. In the next trial, the judge said basically "You can't talk about sexual abuse because it's irrelevent to the case" and they got convicted. I'm still amazed that an appellate court never ruled in favor of the brothers as it seems to me that the sexual abuse claim might be something a jury should be aware of. And in recent years it has come out that many male clients of their father have said he also sexually abused them. So that was just to show the kind of wild inconsistency in US courts. I can see that no other US court might ever allow AI "victim testimony" again and this is a weird one time thing.

So, about a week and a half ago I was at a social gathering at somebody's house and a married couple I don't know well at all was there. I was part of a conversation the wife was having. She was talking about using Duolingo to learn Spanish. I can speak Spanish at a high level, but I don't claim to be fluent. One of the guys in this conversation is a guy I know and he is fluent in Spanish. The lady said that Duolingo asked her to translate this from English into Spanish:
"There's a problem with the president's costume."

We were pretty stunned by this. I've never in my life had a situation come up where I actually needed to know how to say "costume" in Spanish so I don't know what the word is and the fluent speaker said he too had never needed to know the Spanish word for "costume" and he also didn't know it. I have to say, this was not a ringing endorsement for using Duolingo to learn another language.

There is always some risk with literally everything regarding Trump, but in this case, the risk is probably low.

1) Trump and Modi like each other and Trump needs to stop pissing off possible allies for the inevitable war with China. He needs for the other nations in the region to at least be not actively helping China to win. I suspect a lot of this kind of thinking is driving US relations with Russia - the US is trying to keep Russia from supporting China in the eventual war, but Trump is too dumb to understand that duplicity is exactly up Russia's alley.
2) It's inevitable that for a variety of reasons, including my predicted eventual war with China, that Apple has to stop making everything in China. Once the war starts, there aren't going to be any more iPhone shipments outside of China.
3) VP JD Vance has made it pretty clear that he is hugely pro-India (see who he married) and extremely anti-China. He is just one very easy to spot open manifestation of what is likely the general feeling among Trump's aides.