disconnected

The "free press" doesn't have a "get out of jail free" card of being able to claim that they are just a "platform" and be able to dodge all responsibility for what they print like Facebook does.

If the press writes something objectively false about someone, they are starting at a defamation lawsuit. If they write something that gets someone killed, they will be staring at possible criminal liability. If they print, I dunno, a picture of a child having sex, there'll be hellfire and brimstone (both legal and social).

And no, saying "ha ha, it was just an opinion column" doesn't save them.

"Press" has perks but also has responsibilities. The free press is "ok" with these rules because they've had to follow them for decades. What they want is a level playing field.

I don't know how long it is "supposed" to take, but you can compile a Linux kernel (27.8M lines of code, though a good chunk of it probably isn't going to be compiled anyway because you don't need it, and another good chunk is architecture specific) in under 10 minutes on relatively modest (but modern) hardware.

On the other hand, something like Chromium (25M lines of code) will take about 8 hours, and bring your machine to its knees as it consumes ALL available resources (granted, last I did this I only had 8GB of RAM, and I was running my desktop at the time... including Chromium). I don't remember exactly how long Firefox takes to build, but I remember it was significantly less time (maybe 3 hours?).

So... it depends? On a lot of things?

(btw, LoC numbers were pulled from the first legitimate looking result I could find on a quick search... take with a grain of salt... also, compilation times are a rough approximation based on my observations... that it with a truckload of salt)

You don't have to be a lawyer to understand that subtraction and multiplication are two completely different operations.

The "web" is built around "human readable" technologies. Even actual implementation details that the user doesn't care about - like the application layer protocol (HTTP) and the source code for pages (HTML, CSS) - is human readable.

The "point" of the web was to serve humans, not machines. If we wanted to serve machines, we'd just throw binary blobs around, which would be orders of magnitude more efficient.

That said, I still have a bunch of "ancient" tech magazines that had directories of URLs for (then) popular websites, grouped by category. That's how we found things then.

People forget that there was a world before Google.

Software certification matters in certain industries.

In automotive and airspace, you will find that being certified opens a bunch of doors for you.

From a company's perspective, these certification don't PROVE that you know what you are doing, but at least they prove that you aren't completely in the dark with regards to all the annoying processes that exist in the industry (stuff like MISRA-C, Automotive SPICE and so on). Or at the very least, you aren't lying when you say that you've TOTALLY heard of them, honest (un-shockingly, people lie on their resumes, even about things that can be easily checked).

This might not get you hired, but it will make them consider you.

> the market has finally caught up to the fact that Tesla is years ahead of their competitors.

Incorrect. The stock value is being pushed up by:

1. Unexpected quarterly profits in October;

2. Tesla planning to open a new factory in China and securing a 1.4 Billion dollar loan to do so;

3. Apparent strong interest in the Cybertruck and the impending announcement of the Model Y;

4. USA and China are easing the trade war, which is pushing the whole stock market up (there have been "records" left and right in the past few days).

But the big one is number 2. Tesla moving into China means that they can tap into the humongous Chinese market.

sigh

That random file you downloaded off the internet was built under a specific set of assumptions - assumptions that only hold true if you are running the specific OS version they were targeting.

IF you download the .deb file for your specific OS, and IF you manually install all missing dependencies, then it works. Otherwise, you are still screwed.

At least you can extract it (IIRC, it's just a zip file anyway). But that's no different from going to sourceforge or github or whatever and getting the source tarball... and we are back where we started.

By the way, I was not complaining about "vendor lock-in". I was complaining about Debian's package management policies and how they can affect your software development process in practice - to make the case that apt is a crap replacement for a proper language/library/development/whatever oriented package management.

What's wrong with apt is that you can't get what YOU want: you can only get whatever the Debian people decided makes sense for one specific version of the OS - which usually means a 2 years out of date version of the library.

If you need a library of a version other than the Debian approved version, you are back to manually downloading source tarballs from sourceforge and figuring out their arcane build system.

Also, apt doesn't let you have two versions of the same library installed. For SOME things, they have more than one version package, but in general, you can't have STABLE_VERSION installed for your day-to-day OS usage and DEVELOPMENT_VERSION installed for your development needs. You only get one or the other (this isn't exclusive of apt - all Linux package managers do this, AFAIK).

Anyway, contrast that situation with pip (python), where you can just grab whatever version you want, have the package manager solve the dependencies for you, and slap it all into a virtualenv where it won't interfere with your system-level libraries. Heck, you can even grab versions straight from git, and it will (try to) solve the dependencies (if any).

It's a WHOLE different level of convenience.

You are missing the point.

The point is that with DDG, you have a uniform syntax for searching multiple services that doesn't require any special cooperation from your browser or those services, doesn't require any setup apart from using DDG and only requires you to learn one new concept.

And this will work anywhere where webpages work (like, say, lynx), and will work consistently. There are thousands of !bangs, from things ranging from amazon, to wikipedia, to maps, to dictionary definitions... You aren't limited to a handful of hand picked services that your browser decided to support out of the box, or that you decided to manually configure.

Also, there is generally decent support to switch languages and regions for services that support it. For example, "!w" gets you "wikipedia", "!wsimple" gets you the "Simple English" version and "!wpt" gets you the Portuguese version.

IMHO, this is all extremely convenient.

Electronic voting machines run proprietary code which, AFAIK, was never publicly audited (AFAIK, the manufacturers have resisted auditing efforts bitterly).

How can you trust that the machine will behave as you expect in a "real world" setting, when the results truly count?

IMHO, the biggest risk from electronic voting machines isn't some rando swinging the elections with their 1337 haxx0r skills: the biggest risk is that the machines basically come "pre-hacked" from the factory - either intentionally, or unintentionally (bugs happen).