Common knowledge but not the sort that is actually true.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.discovermagazine.c...

But but but

Just use SDL! WxWindows! MFC if you must! No need for raw Win32!

Which means the real problem is probably around writing C/C++.

You kids get off my lawn etc.

See also Dana Lewis and the OpenAPS movement. Dana gave a talk at the NZ LinuxConf a few years back:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Dp76hGxv3-HE

I'm not sure if death cheated Stephen Hawking out of a Nobel prize, but I'm damn sure that sexism and racism have cheated dozens of women and Black people out of a Nobel prize.

Facebook is the problem; they are tapping into inbuilt behavioural hacks to encourage engagement that have a side-effect of spreading misinformation.

Arguing that the people are the problem is like building steps with 1 metre drops, then blaming the people for subsequent injuries.

Shutting down Facebook will stop the monopolisation of these hacks.

Related XKCD

Just in case this hasn't already been posted, here's the list of the top 20 (total 2019 single-use plastic waste in million metric tons):

ExxonMobil (5.9)
Dow (5.6)
Sinopec (5.3)
Indorama Ventures (4.6)
Saudi Aramco (4.3)
PetroChina (4)
LyondellBasell (3.9)
Reliance Industries (3.1)
Braskem (3)
Alpek SA de CV (2.3)
Borealis (2.2)
Lotte Chemical (2.1)
INEOS (2)
Total (1.9)
Jiangsu Hailun Petrochemical (1.6)
Far Eastern New Century (1.6)
Formosa Plastics Corporation (1.6)
China Energy Investment Group (1.5)
PTT (1.5)
China Resources (1.3)

The honorary degrees I've seen locally aren't necessarily underserved, but it's often about universities tripping over each other to be the one to award the degree. Even without a speech, they get free publicity just from a newly relatively famous person splashing that institution as part of their credentials.

On the contrary, only the US taxes corporations on income earned abroad. American companies are asking for normal treatment rather than special double taxation.

I also don't understand the rationale of taxing citizens who are living and working overseas completely outside US jurisdiction. Requiring overseas spouses of citizens to provide tax info to the US Feds, even if they've never set foot there, seems even weirder.

That said, for US-owned corporations, what's the ethical argument against taxing income earned abroad when owners are in the country of the tax jurisdiction? If most profits of a company come back to owners situated in the US, doesn't not taxing those profits (or at least to the level that they've not been taxed already) create a perverse incentive for US-run companies to shift their operations overseas, not for operational efficiency reasons, but merely to avoid a tax that competing companies which keep their operations in the local area have to pay?

If most shareholders want to live in Ireland or Bermuda or wherever else then maybe it's different, because the profits are staying in the tax jurisdiction where those who benefit from the profits also have to live.

I deleted my Facebook account and so far it's been worthwhile in a limited way, despite some isolation from some friends and organisations who tend to do most things through Facebook because that's where everyone else is. I'm still, however, living in a world where large populations of people are influenced to levels of accuracy that were unprecedented before Facebook entered the scene. This affects how populations interact, how they perceive each others opinions, what they buy or don't buy, how they see each other as threats or otherwise, how they perceive leaders and challengers and governments generally, and (in a democracy) how they vote. It's not that we didn't have an advertising industry before with radio and TV and banners and billboards, but most advertising was public and visible and could be challenged and given context. With social media, and particularly Facebook, advertising can be so targeted and privately linked to personal profiles that it's often not clearly visible to anyone except the person being affected, or outside of groups that are already strongly polarized and unlikely to be objective. Maybe this is inevitable in modern times. There's plenty of arguing to do about what's acceptable, but there's also a strong argument that simply deleting a Facebook account won't change much for the person who deletes it, besides isolate them in a world where so many other people assume you use Facebook, unless large numbers of others also delete their accounts.

Some children are also smokers. That doesn't make it a good idea to give them a kids' product designed to ease them into the addiction without technically breaking laws.

I think it comes down to what you're used to and how you're thinking about what you're trying to do. Grid patterns are great if you have an address and know where you are. They sometimes sacrifice the ability to go efficiently between two important points because there might be no way to move diagonally so you just have to go further. Cities that developed organically often have very easy ways to get between important places, but if you don't know the place then it can be more difficult to work out where things are.

As I read it, the FBI didn't acknowledge having a way to read Signal communications at all. The suspect merely used Signal to communicate with someone they trusted, but who happened to be an FBI informant, and duly informed the FBI.

I haven't had first-hand experience with RMS in this either, but I have noted (for example) that the Ars Technica thread on this is attracting some very different comments about RMS than Slashdot.

Why would you assume that someone who has had first-hand experience would file a police report in an adversarial system which typically causes ongoing stress and re-victimises victims of sexual harassment, abuse, rape, or worse for a long time, and all along with a low chance of achieving any conviction? Why would you assume the victims want to have their names put out there to be paraded in front of a crowd like Slashdot? The alternative option of just doing nothing and coping with it, getting on with life, maybe talking to friends in a safer space as an outlet, makes a classic prisoners' dilemma for the victim.

It's not fair that people get accused of stuff for which they don't always have an adequate chance to defend themselves, but it's also unfair that we have systems which end up creating a big imbalance in favour of perpetrators getting away with certain types of crime.

We live in an era when smart TVs can automatically recognize what you're watching, and TV makers are building nice ad businesses for themselves with all of the data that gets funneled in. But this felt pretty egregious even by today's standards. A random, full-on commercial just popping up in LG's app store? Is there no escape from this stuff? We're just going to cram ads into every corner of a TV's software, huh?

It's not nice, but individuals who care enough will always find ways to block or obfuscate this stuff for themselves, which is what lots of people are already talking about in this thread.

What concerns me more about seeing this stuff is how most people won't avoid it. Most people have more directly important stuff happening in their lives. Ad sellers don't care if a niche group goes out of their way to obfuscate the data collection or block the ads.

Advertising is getting increasingly personal for everyone. Data about people used to be very widely distributed, but marketing is now changing with a very small number of global corporations storing a person's email, getting into the business of watching the physical locations where people go, tracking when and where they spend their money, making the OS which run in the screens that get used to watch media and interact with others. Most or all of this data was collected previously by the banks and maybe satnav manufacturers and ISPs and phone companies and retailers and many other entities, but it was rarely or never collated so clearly against a single personal profile until recently. Then these global corporations place themselves in the industry of selling highly targeted advertising against their massive and intensively profiled user bases.

Ads being broadcast are highly targeted and less visible. Marketers can provably change society's behavior with targeted advertising in ways that simply weren't possible even a decade ago, and the ability to make use of it goes to anyone willing to pay for it. Ads don't have to be widely broadcast TV or radio commercials or giant billboards on the side of the road any more. They can as easily be specific custom messages being shown to specific groups of people whom experts reckon are most likely to respond in the wanted way to that message. It's hard for anyone to challenge ads, or even to have a chance to understand that targeted marketing might have influenced others' behavior or opinions. It's harder to realise that you own behavior might have been influenced because nobody else sees what you've seen, so criticism is less available. We argue against each other in more polarised ways because we're living in more polarised realities from each other. Is there any escape from all of this?