Joe

With DPRK it seems pretty simple: Are citizens permitted to leave the country of their own accord? The answer of course is no, and that is extremely telling. Combined with choreographed & escort-only tourism, one really has to question it.

My opinion: Odds are likely that it really is a removed in many ways and in many places (and for many reasons, sanctions included). That said, people will still live their lives within those constraints, because that’s what people tend to do. We won’t get accurate and verifiable information from their government about citizen health and longevity, causes of death, etc. so OP’s propaganda must be taken as just that.

At some point NK’s system will fall, and some historians and archeologists will get to do their thing, and we’ll gain some more insights.

I find it pretty useful to help get me over mental hurdle of starting something. So it’s faster than me procrastinating for another day. ;-)

https://archive.ph/2rFK4

The EU certainly has, and is using the limited opportunity to purchase as much as possible from US’s spare production capacity while the winds are only blowing softly against them and Ukraine.

This is currently needed by Ukraine, and as a condition they know that to speak up against Trump would be the demise of this deal.

The risk is that the EU’s own manufacturing capacity is not being expanded rapidly enough, and if the US supply were to be cut off in the near future, they would continue to be caught with their pants down.

I fear it would take a direct attack before EU countries make the big commitments to defence manufacturing that are needed.

A measured response is to now start shooting them down across the borders of Ukraine, belarus, and russia - if they have the potential to pass into EU and NATO countries.

russia has now well and truly established intent, and a strong but measured response is needed.

I think its popularity as a viable alternative to the google dominated browser ecosystem contradicts this.

So long as it’s an optional feature that doesn’t impact core functionality, who cares?

Adblocker, engage!

My main concerns with the US weapons purchase programmes are (a) this is likely leading to underinvestment in the european defence industry, and (b) the US then decides to pause it at a critical moment. I understand the short term needs, but europe needs to be prepared for war without US backing or involvement. It needs to be a military power in its own right in order to protect its interests and to avoid hot wars through deterrence.

DJTaco seems to be a russian asset, trying to navigate a difficult political landscape to give his russian dictator pal and other benefactors advantages whenever possible. His erratic behaviour is used as cover for the underlying goals, which aren’t even his own (edit: I seriously doubt he understands them). Such an easy to manipulate narcissistic loser was propelled to power by others to fulfill their sometimes conflicting agendas. McTaco can’t keep up and his mental state will continue to decline.

Better destroy all evidence that it was Ukrainians themselves organizing and protesting.

If russia had their way, this would be painted in history books as a handful of US diplomats and CIA agents marching alone in the square with bags of cookies, while the masses cower in fear.

Many governments get access to source code for critical systems as a condition for their use / part of contract negotiations. It’s also quite likely that Microsoft and all its services in China is operated as a Joint Venture.

China did have Red Flag Linux (with Government support) for a while, too.

I think you miss the point here, to be honest. Free as in freedom is typically considered more important than free as in gratis - at least in the open source / free software community.

Don’t get me wrong - I love that I don’t HAVE to pay for lots of quality software and tools, but the value is that it is developed openly and collaboratively, allowing me and others to adapt it to our own needs and optionally contribute back.

It’s often the software that would struggle to be successfully supported as an independent commercial product that ends up as open source. It’s natural for building block products like Operating System libraries and tools, UI toolkits, and other foundational technologies. It can also works for bigger or niche projects with enthusiastic developer communities, corporate sponsors, etc. Often companies sponsor existing useful OSS projects to maturity and beyond, as it suits their purposes.

Back to your question though: Who would decide whom receives funds on my hypothetical donation platform? Those who donate, as well as curated lists maintained by the platform and other users of the platform. eg. I choose to donate 50% to Project X, 40% to the “John’s Foundational GNU/Linux Libraries Collection”, and 10% to platform’s choice (which might be used to pay for the platform, then sponsor a competition, a project-of-the-week, etc)

Honestly, if people and companies could just pay $5-10/user/month to support their entire OSS ecosystem, many would. It’s far from that simple though. There is no central fund. If you are lucky, you have a favourite project or two with a registered charity in your jurisdiction, or a BuyMeACoffee, etc. That requires individuals to think and plan, and won’t have companies contributing in the same way.

Similar could be said for news - I’d happily pay $10/month for the news I read … but I am not going to sign up to 30 separate subscriptions just to read 1-2 articles per site each month. Microtransactions would be ideal for news, but the industry is obsessed with subscriber-lock-in. So instead I pay nothing, block ads, and use archive.ph and similar.

I could imagine central donation platforms, which OSS projects can sign up to, allowing individuals to influence where their contributions go. It would be a nightmare to administer globally - so it might have to be regional / jurisdictional initiatives. Allow companies to contribute more and choose centrally, or purchase subscriptions for employees and let them choose. Projects could set goals and redistribute donations over that amount. This could be a good EU funded project, actually.

One of the biggest benefits that I see these days comes from the use of workflow-as-code systems like Temporal or Restate. They make it super easy to add reliability and observability to normal procedural functions - no custom databases, state machine logic, message queues, etc.

I can write straight-forward code like I used to, and if something breaks, I can usually fix it on the go.

https://archive.ph/JkMcR

Boomerang-Fu ?

Hmm. You are right, but they might not need it for every region. Steam is probably big enough that existing regional companies would come to it and be eager to form partnerships. They could become more of a payment processor aggregator, focused on a low risk market segment. And of course they can do CCs directly too - that’s the easy part.

The challenge will be to get consumers on board. I know that I groan every time I need to enter my CC details online these days.

They would face anti-competitive behaviour from Peepal though. So it’s a risk.

Internally, they are probably already working on ways to appropriately segment their catalog based on payment provider. “Sorry User, you cannot purchase title X using Paypal. We recommend $Competitor instead.”

It sounds like some payment processors are treating mastercard’s contractual requirements as a hard risk in this case - maybe it’s justified, maybe not. Try getting corporate lawyers to be risk averse in the finance world. Mastercard doesn’t seem to want to soften their wording but talks platitudes in public statements. Shrug.

They could do it with significantly fewer people, for themselves and even for GOG, Itch and potentially others. Their use-case is digital payments for games, which is limited in scope and risk. PCI and compliance is a PITA, but manageable.

Do you get billed every 4 months, or why frame it that way? Or is this a weird danish thing, like your numbers? :-)

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Hacker

“The media’s definition of the real term malicious cracker. A hacker used to be a well respected individual who loved to tinker with gadgets.”, plus a few other definitions.