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throwaway373438

Re:YouTube-dl's repository has been restored on Monday November 16, 2020 @11:57AM (#25113964)
They are suggesting lobbying to change the law, rather than struggling with current law in court.
Re:My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @03:45PM (#25051671)
Whenever discussing the US flag code it's important to mention that the statute is unconstitutional as determined in United States v. Eichman.

What the flag code says about clothing is as irrelevant as any other hot take on the issue.

Re:American Airlines Is Quietly Bringing Back the 737Max on Tuesday November 10, 2020 @01:57PM (#25049788)
Why would you care about per-journey statistics? Surely all that's demonstrating is that cars are often used for very brief, non-highway travel.

When the question is of how to travel between cities or states, why do you find the relative safety of low speed non-highway driving to be relevant?

Re:Confusing Grep Mistakes I've Made on Thursday November 05, 2020 @06:44PM (#25003367)
Others have commented that many of these are general shell or terminal quoting problems.

Something that stood out for me is that the author did not mention ^V, which is very useful in quoting metacharacters. Take the tab example: The author seems to imply that PCRE is needed to match a tab because there is no \t escape sequence in BRE/ERE. Presumably he cannot just type in a tab because he's using a shell like bash, and tab has a special interpretation and cannot be typed in as a string literal.

The way around this is to use ^V as a terminal escape sequence, followed by simply pressing the tab key. This technique can be used to insert other control characters as string literals in arguments. Want to grep for EOF? "grep ^V^D" will get you there.

Re:I reverse engineered McDonalds’ internal API on Thursday October 22, 2020 @08:42PM (#24864961)
The answer to #4 is probably that the goal isn't to always have ice cream. The goal is to run a profitable business.

Doubling the cost of the ice cream infrastructure to avoid a 25% downtime may not be a profitable venture -- especially if the downtime is scheduled to occur while the store is closed.

Re:Why mmap is faster than system calls (2019) on Wednesday October 21, 2020 @01:48PM (#24850258)
Ah, I see your point.

Here's the catch: Large buffer sizes only increase efficiency for sequential reads. mmap() is still much faster for random access within a file. Doubly so, because we need to not just read() but also lseek() for every read.

The inefficiencies of read() can be minimized in the sequential case only.

Re:Why mmap is faster than system calls (2019) on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @08:36PM (#24843790)
Yes, the overhead is per-syscall. The number of read() syscalls shrinks as the per-call buffer grows.

With mmap() of course we only ever have one syscall to create the initial mapping. Everything else is a memory read.

We can get read() down to just one syscall too, with a 4G buffer ;) I can't recall if GB sized buffers are possible, but I have certainly used MB sized read buffers for exactly this reason.

Re:Zoom Rolling Out End-to-End Encryption Offering on Wednesday October 14, 2020 @01:34PM (#24779267)
Kind of. The real problem is that E2E means losing all server-side videoconferencing features - very few people actually want E2E.

It's not an add-on feature. The ramifications are a completely different way of shuttling the data between endpoints.

Re:Removing Holocaust Denial Content on Monday October 12, 2020 @12:52PM (#24756453)
Well, we generally do not prohibit abusive speech.

What's prohibited is targeting people with speech who do not wish to participate (or who cannot, statutorily). Plenty of adults freely choose to engage in abusive relationships with one another and of course they are free to do so provided the other party is a willing participant.

The same is true of non-abusive language. Consider a simple romantic overture.

The lines are drawn around consent. Not content.

Re:Removing Holocaust Denial Content on Monday October 12, 2020 @12:23PM (#24756088)
I don't think the person you're replying to is being dishonest. You've simply listed reasons as to why this content isn't acceptable. Of course there are often reasons why content and beliefs might be rejected by mainstream thought -- "it's a pack of lies" is chief among them.

There's a definition problem here. We could use "no one is talking about removing the content" as a rubric to determine whether content is truly outside of mainstream thought for example.

Pointing out that there's diversity among mainstream thought is not at all the same as tolerating dissent.

Program identifiers use exact matches. The analogy works fine understanding this context.

It's possible to extend any analogy in a way that doesn't make sense, which is what you've done.

It seems like your complaint may be that you simply don't like, or perhaps don't understand, analogies in general.

It sounds like the original analogy is apt, and your followup analogy isn't.
What does "1 inch narrower" mean to you, in the context of this analogy? Are you suggesting the interfaces have different names? Different sized arguments?

None of those things would work.

Besides, creating minor differences do not solve this problem as they would still be derivative works.

And this is why Google had to copy the interface -- otherwise their runtime would not operate with other existing products. As you can see given your example, the analogy is a perfect fit.

Your argument that the copying is once-removed is unfortunately irrelevant to copyright law.

The car's width is absolutely its interface with respect to roadway interoperability.

We aren't talking about user interfaces here. This lawsuit does not involve UX. We are talking about interfaces between functional components. The analogy is spot on.

Home depot will rent you a pickup for an hour for $20. And you can drive it to pick up at stores that aren't Home Depot.

There's also the idea of making friends with someone who has a larger vehicle. Minivans work almost just as well and are more commonly available.

Re:Six months in, N95 mask shortages persist on Thursday September 17, 2020 @12:06PM (#24506347)
Requiring employers to fund PPE purchases seems like a reasonable answer to this problem. $10/day/employee is a modest cost of doing business when compared with other labor expenses.

We have made other mandated changes which have been vastly more expensive.

It seems crazy we don't have cameras recording at all times on airplanes. Even cars have dashcams.
Re:I accidentally built a nudity/porn platform on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @11:17AM (#24121190)
The model used by https://lobste.rs/about#invitations seems to work well. Create a graph.
Re:CEO of Uber: Gig Workers Deserve Better on Monday August 10, 2020 @12:20PM (#24110914)
"But the full-time drivers are the one stakeholder class that created much of Uber's value"

This is not a true statement. Uber is not worth $55b because they have performed a lot of driving work. Uber is worth $55b because they have constructed a system in which driving work can be easily scheduled and allocated.

The value is the system and the system was not created by drivers.

The system was created to serve drivers and riders together.

"yet receive very little of the value they created."

They have received all of the value from the driving work they performed, in the form of a 1099 paycheck. There is a fairly clear market rate for driving work.

They did not contribute to the construction of the $55b system.

"How much of Uber's value do they deserve? "

None.

Re:Interview with Bill Gates on Covid, social media on Sunday August 09, 2020 @06:04PM (#24103345)
You may want to re-evaluate your opinion. The "tracking microchip" conspiracies mostly stem from tracking chips (dumb RFID) used to tag wildlife.

These people don't know how the technology works, but they do know that we tag and track animals. They're not wrong that we use microchips in this fashion.

It's already 54% for folks with a 7 figure income deriving their income from short term investments (say, stock options). This is almost always the case in tech.

37% federal

13.3% state

3.8% Net Investment Income Tax

54.1% total, before this new tax.

Re:Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture on Wednesday July 15, 2020 @10:29AM (#23845660)
" you need a complete lack of labor rights."

What on earth does a lack of labor rights have to do with capitalism?

Labor can be -- and often is -- unprotected in all economic structures. A laborer in a communist state has historically had very few labor protections.

Re:Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera on Saturday July 11, 2020 @02:47AM (#23800128)
"If you manage to find a vulnerability in this system, I don't think I even mind, "

Taking a quick photo doesn't illuminate the LED for long enough for a human to reliably notice.

"because you've also broken physics "

Or merely recognized the role of the human element. A shame, Apple was once good at this.

Re:Redis Core Team Update on Friday July 10, 2020 @12:49AM (#23788246)
It's often hard to find anyone of any characteristic for many projects so it shouldn't be surprising that it's also hard to find people of a specific sub-group.
I agree that a business folding is a bad outcome. I think the goal is to have the business not fold at all, paying back the investment. Open question how many businesses will ultimately fold or survive -- no way to know yet, right?
It's true that bad debt isn't paid back, but in a bankruptcy the investors are wiped out so it would be disingenuous to frame those monies as "corporate bailouts." The funds will have gone to sustaining the business and employing the employees -- not to shareholders.

The tax change isn't a reduction per se, it's a change in the way we account for losses across multiple years. It's also very new -- it's removing a new carryover rule that was added in 2017. I think it's also disingenuous to frame this as a reduction as the losses would be carried forward anyway. It is, like most of the other "corporate handouts," more of a shift in when the money is paid rather than a change in the amount.

A debt purchase and unemployment are very different things.

Unemployment is money given away to another. It's a permanent giveaway.

A debt purchase is either money that was given to you, that you're now returning (Treasury securities) or money that you're giving to others which will be returned (corporate bonds). It's not a giveaway at all - the net exchange is $0.

These cannot be compared as equivalent.

The tax reduction changes the way loss is calculated to better capture the reality of the economy falling apart in one year, letting losses be deducted from income generated in past years. There's a tax savings, but it's reflective of real loss incurred by business.

That's more or less correct. The relevant Kconfig is:

  if MACINTOSH_DRIVERS

  config ADB
        bool "Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) support"
        depends on MAC || (PPC_PMAC && PPC32)
        help
          Apple Desktop Bus (ADB) support is for support of devices which
          are connected to an ADB port.  ADB devices tend to have 4 pins.
          If you have an Apple Macintosh prior to the iMac, an iBook or
          PowerBook, or a "Blue and White G3", you probably want to say Y
          here.  Otherwise say N.


In other words, the code is only built into the kernel on architectures where it is useful.
Re:Perl 7 is going to be Perl 5.32, mostly on Thursday June 25, 2020 @02:16PM (#23643738)
Every language in this category will have bindings to domain specific high performance modules. This is part of why performance doesn't matter all that much - we can always push hot operations into another language.

Perl generally outperforms python in core language features.

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