HN user
they're mainly complaining about proprietary OS vendors restricting users' choice in browsers
I guess they think everybody forgot about the many years and hundreds of millions of dollars that Mozilla spent trying to get people to adopt FirefoxOS. An operating system that… only allowed using Firefox as the web browser.
I would have agreed with you in the past. And I still do when it comes to defending a lot of the BBC content that doesn't come from the news department.
But BBC News is just so bad and utterly corrosive that I'd abolish the entire institution just to get rid of it. Yes I know other UK media is all as bad or worse, but none of them have the public standing or institutional power that the BBC has. I don't think there's any way of reforming the news department at this point. It's not just a matter of a few bad shows or bad 'journalists'. The entire ethos/mission of BBC News is fundamentally broken. They don't know how to do journalism as a public broadcaster, and I don't think they could ever learn how. Certainly not within the current media culture in the UK.
This incident isn't a one off. It's typical. The only unusual thing is the program got cancelled and they actually deleted the article - usually they double down for weeks and refuse to admit fault. I'm guessing that's only because crypto isn't (yet) a partisan culture war issue in the UK media.
I think experience will differ a lot based on when you were vaccinated. Earlier on (Feb/March last year) it sounds like the waiting time wasn't being strictly enforced - you were advised to wait especially if you were driving but there wasn't really any administration of it. That was the experience my parents had and I heard similar from other people vaccinated at that time.
I got vaccinated in the summer at one of the larger vaccination centres and they were being more strict about it. After getting vaccinated they gave you a card with a time written on it which was when you were supposed to leave (although both times it was only 10 mins not 15). There was a dedicated 'room' with chairs in it and a clock and a nurse watching over things. After your time was up you left the card on the chair. Nobody was physically forcing you to stay but there was an obvious expectation that you would and I didn't see anybody walk straight out either time (out of a sample of 60+ people that I overlapped with).
The defining characteristic of cancel culture has always been using collective online action to have someone ostracized from social or political circles, removed from their job or professional relationships, etc.
That's because the whole thing is a moral panic imagined by liberals in the media who were mad that people could reply to them without the filter of the NYT letter pages editor (it was then embraced by conservatives as well for similar reasons and because "you can't even say X anymore" is convenient way to push the buttons of older conservatives). Most of the supposedly dire results of being 'cancelled' are utterly irrelevant to the vast majority of people because most of them are various forms of 'not getting as many media gigs'. Ordinary people can't get 'cancelled' because we don't make a living going on CNN or giving talks at universities.
Sure you can cherry pick examples of people saying something stupid on social media and their workplace massively overreacting (similarly you could find real examples behind the moral panics of the 80s and 90s - well ok, maybe not actual demonic possession but most of the rest of it was based on at least a few semi-real cases). That's not what any of the people crying about cancel culture care about. If it was they'd be advocating for stronger protection for employees.
The desired solution is of course always to regulate social media so that the nasty mob can no longer reply to opinion columnists and they can go back to splitting their time between writing poorly researched rants and trying to get academics who disagree with them fired.
The defining characteristic of cancel culture is people with massive platforms who spend a lot of time trying to get people fired for saying then they disagree with complaining when people are rude to them on twitter (at best, much the time they are crying about people politely pointing out mistakes in what they are arguing).
'Today' is tabloid bilge and has played a big part in the dumbing down of political discourse in the UK. It's hard to take any of the rest of your recommendations seriously when they start with Today.
Certainly there are other BBC programs that are better, and a small number that are very good, but at this point I honestly don't think they are enough to make up for how awful BBC News is and how much damage it's doing to UK society. In the past I would have made excuses for the regressive way the BBC is funded, but it's really hard to do that now.
The most important counterpoint is that the Stanford study cited there is really bad: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/04/19/fatal-flaw...
The more recent numbers from New York put the IFR at 0.5 to 1%, which matches what most organisations (WHO, governments etc) have been assuming for a couple of months now. Also the actual death count from NY makes the Stanford numbers pretty much impossible (0.2% of people in NYC have already died).
Maybe you aren't old enough to remember but plenty of people were up in arms in 2000 as well.
I can't comment on what popular sentiment was in 1888.
You're getting downvoted because you're dangerously wrong. Yes some anti-vaxers send threats, but the idea that they have managed to silence the mainstream scientific opinion on vaccines is ludicrous. That information is widely available to everybody. I bet you can't find a single anti-vaxer who isn't aware of what the mainstream position on vaccine safety is. Being opposed to the orthodox position is a big part of the appeal!
Also anti-vax isn't something new. It dates back to at least the mid 90s and the original Wakefield paper. There were no cult like organisations pushing it at that time. What did exist was a mainstream media willing to push the story for many years, even long after they knew the original paper was faulty. The problem wasn't born out of fervent zealots, it was created by con artists and co-conspirators in the media who exploited liberal ideas of "free speech" and "media balance" to knowingly spread a conspiracy for their own financial gain. There was no "subculture" at the time. I'm not sure you can even really say there is one now, given that anti-vax is one of the conspiracy theories that has wide appeal across different groups (i.e. it exists across the left/liberal/conservative/right political spectrum).
You are trying to push your own ideological position (more "free speech" is good and will solve the problem) onto an issue, and it doesn't fit what actually happened at all, or what we know about how conspiracy theories spread (it's not a lack of counter-information, because conspiracy theories by definition include the fact that they are being suppressed by central authority).
It is an uninformed choice if you want to run wayland
Creating a product that only works for people who already a) know about it and b) buy their hardware specifically to support it doesn't seem like a good strategy to achieve widespread adoption, which requires converting people who don't currently use or know about wayland.
Well you can read the thread on the mailing list but to put it bluntly - because they wanted to stop ZoL from working. They view non-GPL kernel modules as a violation of the GPL.
"My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant" Greg Kroah-Hartman
"please switch to FreeBSD instead of advocating to violate the copyright and licensing rule on my and others work." Christoph Hellwig
The UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Medical_Association
Here's them going on strike the other year: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/31/bma-announce...
I invite the reader to search for any serious discourse on problems within "sex work" at Current Affairs or The Intercept, The Guardian
It's always dangerous to make generalisations about feminism, especially across different countries where the various splits evolved quite differently. The sex-positive version of feminism seems pretty dominant in the US but that's really not the case in the UK. The mainstream feminist voices you will hear in the UK media are almost exclusively not the sex-positive type that dominates in the US, other than a few younger writers. It's still very much dominated by what people call SWERF (sex worker exclusionary radical feminists) and TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) types of feminist. That's especially true of the liberal media like the Guardian and New Statesman. (Grassroots organisations aren't dominated in the same way as far as I can tell, and neither is academia, although I think you are still going to find far more 2nd wave type voices than in the US).
This stuff has been in the news fairly recently here because of an attempt by some feminist MPs to criminalise prostitution organised over the internet (and there are groups that have been pushing for it, some of them with links to the kind of evangelical US funds that you mention). There has been considerable backlash from sex workers and various grass roots feminist movements against this.
If you want an example a country where the sex industry has been regulated very differently then look at Norway and Sweden (if you start reading about this stuff you will quickly find people referring to the 'Nordic Model'). There's a huge amount of discussion of the topic academically and elsewhere. The results have not been what you are hoping for though (assuming your interest is reducing violence and exploitation).
I think we have very different definitions of 'respectable'. Maybe it's an American thing where absolutist free speech is worshipped as part of the cult of civic religion, but where I live Holocaust denial[1] isn't considered respectable or acceptable.
If you mean it should be taken seriously because it is influential, then yes I suppose it's worth knowing what they are saying (today that's defending child sex trafficking apparently, but that's not new ground for libertarians). Freep, /pol/ and Stormfront are all influential these days, but that doesn't make them respectable either.
[1] https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-r...
Even the Financial Times, notoriously partisan backers of privatisation and markets, struggles to make the case for rail privatisation these days (although they do try, bless them).
https://www.ft.com/content/d82848ca-f7ba-11e7-88f7-5465a6ce1...
There is a growing consensus among both executives and industry experts as well as the public that Britain’s unique attempt to create competition on Britain’s rail network has not delivered.
While it has led to more services, and encouraged more users to pay higher prices, it has not unleashed the productivity improvement necessary both to upgrade the network and stabilise the network’s finances.
Over the same period, for instance, London’s state-owned metro network, Transport for London, has grown just as quickly and delivered much more state-of-the-art investment.
Use of SharedArrayBuffer in timing attacks was widely predicted and there were working examples showing how it could be used to extract information from browsers long before vendors enabled it by default. It's hard to have faith that the people who ignored all those risks won't do so again.
It would be an existential crisis for several of the browser vendors if they can't add things like threads with shared memory to javascript/webassembly. The existence of those organisations is based on the idea of the browser being a replacement for native platforms, and if they can't include basic and vital features like threads then they will always be at a huge disadvantage to native platforms.
Do you think Mozilla will admit the entire browser-as-platform project is flawed and disband the organisation? Or will they push ahead with these new features despite the risks?
You misunderstood. The Uber software had sole control of the brakes (plus the human of course). The Volvo factory system was disabled so that it didn’t have negative interaction with the Uber system.
That's not how I read it, or how any of the journalists who are reporting the story are reading it. Uber disabled the self driving software's ability to do an emergency stop when it detected it was going to crash. The Volvo system is separate and also was disabled when the car was in self driving mode.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-24/uber-self...
Sensors on an Uber SUV being tested in Tempe detected the woman, who was crossing a street at night outside a crosswalk, eventually concluding “an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision,” the National Transportation Safety Board said in a preliminary report released Thursday.
But the system couldn’t activate the brakes, the NTSB said.
That's the only reading that makes sense to me, otherwise why did the car fail to attempt to stop when it detected the pedestrian and knew it was going to hit them?
The MMR scare, which is the origin of a lot of the modern antivax movement, was something that was largely created by (UK) newspapers[1]. This was back in the 90s before the subsequent decline in revenue from advertising and competition from online news; it wasn't something that happened due to lack of resources to do fact checking- papers took an active decision to 'campaign' in support of Wakefield and dedicated huge amounts of resources and column inches to the topic. It wan't just a tabloid thing either, most of the media gorged themselves on a festival of misinformation and emotive scare stories for years after the original article had been retracted by most of the authors.
You really couldn't have picked a worse example.
Brexit is a more complicated topic, but it's worth pointing out that it occurs after a decades long smear campaign by much of the UK media against the EU.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_controversy#Media_...
And doctors make most of their revenue from sick people!
Which is one of the reasons health care isn't charged for at the point of use in developed countries.
Keep in mind that a lot of high profile security people on HN and elsewhere have spent many years now telling everybody that the linux urandom man page is wrong, so don't be surprised when people ignore it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=urandom%20manpage&sort=byPopul...
users of single-user personal computers and self-hosted services are quite immune by default
Well, except for people using web browsers…
DDT was never banned internationally for use in malaria control. The idea that it was is a falsehood spread by lobbyists. Maybe you meant to post a different link, but the one that you did post is a terrible and misleading article. This article goes into some of what actually happened and the disinformation campaign:
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/rehabilitatingcar...
Select committees can ask anybody they like to appear. Although as far as I understand they don't technically have the power to force private individuals to attend.
See this briefing if you want to delve in the UK's arcane political system http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN062... (pdf)
they dont demand money
A linux developer demanding money from GPL violators is (seemingly) what triggered this action. See http://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-beats-internal-legal-thre...
McHardy has sued companies for Linux GPLv2 violations in over 38 cases. In one, he'd requested a contractual penalty of €1.8 million. The company also claimed McHardy had already received over €2 million from his actions.
what exactly does "not heavy handed" mean
It means not permanently revoking their licence to use the code again, even once they have become compliant. It's a common complaint made about the GPLv2 which was clarified in GPLv3
For those who have not read it: https://www.buzzfeed.com/heidiblake/from-russia-with-blood-1...
The Guardian isn't leftist. It's a centrist/liberal publication. Those are very different things.
(They also publish opinion pieces from other positions/ideologies, but that's a part of the whole liberal free market of ideas thing.)
Is Milo a white nationalist?
Yes
his support of Trump as a candidate.
Unlikely, since he was public about that all along so it's not something that was a secret.
Sure, it's second hand information, and the author may have had reasons to play up Thiel's dedication to the cause. But still, when white nationalists are calling him "fully enlightened" and having meetings with him it certainly suggests at best a willingness to work with an assist white nationalists to achieve his aims, which is bad enough.
The coverage of Google across all of Murdoch's media outlets speaks for itself. It's not exactly subtle. Compare the number of times some minor Google story has been on the front page of a Murdoch paper in the last few months (dozens) with how often the lead story in all the other anglosphere papers combined is about Google (I'd be surprised if it was more than one or two).
I say that as somebody who doesn't like Google and doesn't like this ad 'blocking' feature.
No editor would ever allow a line like that to make it to publication.
I'm sorry, but have you ever read an actual newspaper other than the New York Times? That kind of thing makes it into newspapers with editors all the time. Hell, a lot of the time it's the editors writing it! [1]
[1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/aishagani/muslim-and-jewish-groups-... to pick one of the more high profile recent examples from the UKs biggest selling newspaper, in a column written by a former editor