> Google has risked regulatory wrath by special-casing their own user-tracking and ad cookies while blocking other third-party cookies.
Google is too big a company to let something this essential slip through. Therefore the only reasonable position is to assume it's intentional, unless somehow proven that it was just incompetence.
If intentional, that would count as a repeat offense. I hope EU regulators throw a crack team of coders/researchers at this, disassemble every last bit of binaries involved, check history of changes, turn Google offices upside down for relevant internal docs/memo's etc. The works.
Then -unless proven to be an honest mistake- fire up another anti-trust case. But this time tripling or x5 the fine.
A company of Google's size & influence, pulling this kind of shenanigans repeatedly, should either be forced out of business or become unprofitable. Oh and have the responsible leaders up top (CEO?) serve actual jail time.
Many hobbyist users don't check optical discs' contents after being written. Instead just rely on the "success" or "fail" provided by recording software. Or simply re-insert a written disc & take a glance at the directory structure. As opposed to read back an entire disc's contents & compare bit-for-bit with the source data.
Read: discs could be bad on day 1. Or mostly ok but with some corrupted files in there. But user didn't check, notice or even care. Decades of storage don't improve anything (other than the data not being needed anyway).
Hmm... "STAY ON THE BUS is excerpted from the commencement speech at delivered at the New England School of Photography in June 2004" (sources seem to differ on the year)
What he found was that as cable marched across Norway intelligence fell in its wake: “for each year that their hometown had full coverage, IQ dropped by 0.08 points”. “Higher exposure to commercial television”, Hernæs’s study bluntly concludes, “reduces cognitive ability”
No doubt that effect is real. But I think of it as this: some activities excercise your brain in ways that improve it, make new connections between neurons etc. While other activivities don't. Or worse: degrade your brain. Aaand: which is which, also depends on what you've done before. Or how often you do it. Or in what environment.
People who read books all day, every day, may become walking libraries who know all their classics. Are they smarter? Have more 'agile' brains? I doubt it. Perhaps the brain specializes on that activity & becomes veeery good at it. Potentially becoming worse at other activities. Granted: there's probably a lot of 'unused' capacity in most people's brains such that improving one area doesn't come at the cost of other abilities.
But I do suspect there's the rub: a healthy brain must be excercised regularly. Not just by doing again & again something it's already good at (however challenging). But also by trying new stuff. Activities not done before. Explore new subjects in entirely different fields. Especially stuff that promotes imagination / creativity as opposed to more passive consumption like movies or music. Couch potato? Move your muscles!
I'm not sure whether there's a way to max out that brain excercise part (if healty, and assuming it's possible in the 1st place). But chances are reading would be part of it. Longreads & a broad range of fiction in particular. Some puzzle or exploration / building type games could be. Mechanical construction stuff a la Lego surely is. As well as a variety of sports (doing, that is! Not watching or discussing). Socializing in various ways: in moderation.
As for people choosing (?) to spend a big chunk of their lives on passive consumption (great Dutch wording: "je leven wegflixen"): let 'em. If post-scarcity, information-overloaded society moves the masses' lives there, so be it.
Personally I prefer a hike up a mountain, improving a hands-on creative skill, a thoughful discussion, or a deep dive into an interesting new subject.
Such a powerful and well-written essay! Please read it through, internalize its message, extend that to clean drinking water, housing, physical safety, and realize the many millions of people who can't reach their full potential because such mind fog pervades their entire day, every day. That's ignoring their time & physical effort.
Then try to imagine how much human capital is wasted this way. Because for 'reasons', humans won't let their fellow humans enjoy the most basic necessities of life. While it would be so easy to fullfill them.
I'll cut mr. Gates some slack if scanned from original printouts, and done so to avoid OCR'ing errors. That said: it's an under 4K binary right? How much effort to check that text version matches original printouts? (or even paper tape!) The guy is a billionaire ffs! If he cares, hire some people to double-check OCR output. Errors in comments aren't end of the world anyway.
Then maybe throw some small(er) sized images in that pdf + link to full-sized ones on the web.
> People concerned about global warming might be misled and support allocating capital to space exploration rather than to overhauling transportation and power grids here on Earth.
Assuming jjk166's position that space industry's environmental impact is akin to a rounding error overall: it's hardly competing with "overhauling transportation and power grids here on Earth" because these 2 activities are limited by different bottlenecks.
For both, government funding is an important factor. But the space industry is limited by long development/testing cycles (spacecraft & their engines, designing & building satellites, etc). Or simply commercial demand for satellite-related services.
Whereas the energy transition is largely depending on permitting issues (for new power cables, land for solar or wind parks), production capacity of specialized companies, shortage of qualified workers, price vs. market tipping points, geopolitics & more.
Apart from governments' limited role here, cutting back one doesn't speed up the other.
The bigger issue is presenting [moving to space] as a fix for problems back on Earth. That's just ridiculous. Building & putting anything in space is waaayy more difficult & expensive (read: more resource-consuming) than doing the same on Earth. Not even a tiny fraction of Earth's population can be moved to space in the forseeable future. Surviving in space (long-term) is harder still than surviving on the open ocean, in a desert, or on Antarctica.
So humankind is stuck on Earth for the time being. To survive as a species we MUST make things work on this planet.
Space industry should focus on complementing that: science / exploration, telecom, Earth observation, maybe some niche manufacturing that's small-mass but enabled by 0-G, etc. Building datacenters in space? Send up mirrors to aid the energy crisis? Anyone saying such things with a straight face has lost their marbles and/or is BSing you.
But for believers: okay! Research what's needed, do the math & see how that works out. Maybe surprise us all.
"In addition to the difference in the number of sides," Sánchez-Lavega explained, "the decagon is situated at a less polar latitude than the hexagon in the southern hemisphere,
Just a thought: how do lengths of the sides compare between north pole's hexagon and this south pole decagon? Causes might be unclear but perhaps that side length corresponds to a 'wavelength' that's more-or-less a constant?
Google is too big a company to let something this essential slip through. Therefore the only reasonable position is to assume it's intentional, unless somehow proven that it was just incompetence.
If intentional, that would count as a repeat offense. I hope EU regulators throw a crack team of coders/researchers at this, disassemble every last bit of binaries involved, check history of changes, turn Google offices upside down for relevant internal docs/memo's etc. The works.
Then -unless proven to be an honest mistake- fire up another anti-trust case. But this time tripling or x5 the fine.
A company of Google's size & influence, pulling this kind of shenanigans repeatedly, should either be forced out of business or become unprofitable. Oh and have the responsible leaders up top (CEO?) serve actual jail time.
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