Now you just need to slay the Apostrophe Monster.

Except Gates is a piece of shit. You don’t need to shout at Gates, but nobody should ever meet him and treat him like a human.

No she wasn’t. She was never part of IBM at all.

She simply knew the chairman of IBM because they both served on the United Way board of directors. She was also a lawyer, as was Gates’ dad, which is a likely reason that the contract that Bill signed with IBM was so incredibly friendly to Microsoft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates

Who’s Gate?

If Microsoft hadn’t been around Apple would have probably defined the early PC era. The Apple II was released in 1977, 4 years before IBM decided to enter the home market with the PC.

Or Commodore might have been the one to dominate. They sold about 5 million Amigas.

Or it could have been NeXT after Jobs was forced out of Apple and started a new computer business.

The winner turned out to be Microsoft, but desktop computers were well on their way to being a standard thing long before Microsoft / IBM got into the market.

it’s the reason so few people use FOSS products.

It’s a reason. Another reason is all the stuff that Microsoft was found guilty of doing during their conviction for abusing their monopoly.

The last major American privacy law, the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1988 by Reagan. The only reason it happened is that politicians realized that their privacy was affected. Robert Bork was going through his Supreme Court confirmation hearings and someone got a hold of the tapes he had rented and published them.

Politicians were worried about their own personal privacy, so they passed a new law to protect the privacy of people’s video tape rentals.

Maybe the fact that the targets here were politicians will mean that something will happen with data privacy, for once.

There is probably also money wasted because they’re using old tech. Not that upgrading is free, but often upgrades have far more features and maintaining them is much cheaper than maintaining something that was obsolete decades ago.

But, you can’t just parachute in a contractor or a “whiz kid” to upgrade the social security or internal revenue systems. The upgrades will take a decade, and that’s not because government is inefficient. It’s because people’s lives are literally on the line. If you “move fast and break things” then Grannie Jones doesn’t get her check and she can’t afford food.

I do wish governments put more of an effort into staying up to date on computer systems. It would make hiring people easier. And, ideally, governments could be part of the open source / free software ecosystem. I think it would take a few decades of pain to become more modern. But, once it was done I think hiring would be easier and the software would be more efficient and easier to run. Most of the time when a government publishes something, it immediately enters the public domain. So, you could potentially have the government running Kubernetes clusters and adding features to Kubernetes itself. I think you’d also find a lot of open source / free software devs would like to work for the government, getting a steady paycheck and good benefits while contributing good code to open source projects. Right now those people don’t want to work for the government because having to work on decades-old stacks is soul destroying.

It’s also the #1 story on nbcnews.com, #4 on abcnews.com (after the Israel-Iran conflict, millions protesting nationwide and Trump’s birthday parade), #1 on cnn.com, #1, #2, #3 and #4 on nytimes.com.

I mean, why do people say bullshit like “why is this not a bigger story” on something that’s one of the biggest stories being covered by national news?

The best part about this is that Unilever basically just bought the brand name. Ben & Jerry’s is a perfectly good ice cream, but it’s not like there’s some amazing manufacturing knowledge that Ben & Jerry’s has that no other ice cream manufacturer could match. What they are is a popular brand with well known political leanings and, with fun popular flavours.

If Unilever ever forces them out over too much activism, it would be easy for them to start up a new Ice Cream company and bring all their old customers over. So, Unilever basically has to just accept this activism or lose their customers.

<b>Warning</b>: Undefined variable $sm_desc in <b>/www/wwwroot/middleeastmonitor.com/wp-content/themes/memouk/header.php</b> on line <b>159</b>

Well done everyone!

On one hand

C’mon, with a bit of effort you could have made this one into 5 paragraphs each one sentence long too!

English is pretty bad at naming these things. In North-American English they’re often called "Semi"s, which is short for either “Semi-Trailer” or “Semi-Truck”. Why? Who knows, I’m guessing it’s because the trailer part is only half of the whole. The front part with the engine and trailer hitch is sometimes called the Tractor Unit. But, that’s confusing because “Tractor” mostly means the thing you drive around on a farm. The purpose is basically the same, and the name comes from the fact it’s focused on something that pulls, but farming has such a hold of the “tractor” name that that’s what people think of when they hear that.

18 wheeler makes sense for the whole unit together. It’s also good because it identifies the thing that is instantly visually unique about these kinds of vehicles, all the various wheels. But, I’m sure there are many cases where it’s not 18 total wheels. And, when they’re used as road trains with more than one trailer, I’m sure it’s much more than 18 wheels.

The Brits like “lorry”, or “articulated lorry” but where does that come from? And sometimes shortened to “Artic” which makes it sound like it’s really cold.

Other names include “HGV” for “Heavy Goods Vehicle”, but that’s confusing because it’s not clear whether it’s the goods that are heavy or the truck. Presumably they’re also used for light but bulky goods.

Oh well, dumb language, we should start over with Spanish, I’m sure their name is better.

Are those the trucks that are only able to move 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 or 13 things at once? (I’ve never heard that term before)

Everyone around him must hate him so much, to allow him to go out in public looking like that.

“The average American, I think has, I think it’s fewer than three friends. Three people that they consider friends.”

This is Zuckerberg, claiming it’s normal not just to have only 3 friends, but fewer than 3. This is telling on yourself even more than “Women’s orgasms aren’t real because no woman I’ve ever been with has had an orgasm.”

If he counts his wife in that list of “fewer than 3 friends”, how many friends does he actually have? I get that being ultra rich means that often you can’t be sure who’s actually your friend, and who’s just there for the money. But, still, he should at least be able to count a handful of friends. I’ve known my 2 best friends since before I was 5 years old. Surely if Zuck had a normal childhood, he should have people who were his friends long before he got rich, who he can be sure aren’t just there for his money. If he doesn’t, it strongly suggests he was either a pretty awful kid, or he led a really weird life growing up and was isolated from anybody who could have become a friend.

The UK is hardly about to go fascist. Labour recently won power and there won’t be a national election for years. There were smaller council elections recently and Reform won a few seats, but so did the Greens and Lib Dems. Basically, there were some anti-establishment votes.

East Germany voted AfD, but the rest of the country defeated that.

Canada voted Liberal despite a strong anti-establishment sentiment. It’s likely that eventually it will flip back conservative. But, there’s a chance that before that happens, the chaos of Trumpism will make the conservatives in Canada try to become an adult, respectable party rather than Maple MAGA.

Nope.

Yeah. The level of incompetence is impressive. Full data and metadata for all customers all dumped together in one datastore, stored in the clear in AWS.

“The data includes apparent message contents; the names and contact information for government officials; usernames and passwords for TeleMessage’s backend panel; and indications of what agencies and companies might be TeleMessage customers.”

…

"The server that the hacker compromised is hosted on Amazon AWS’s cloud infrastructure in Northern Virginia."

…

"“If I could have found this in less than 30 minutes then anybody else could too. And who knows how long it’s been vulnerable?” the hacker said. "

Russia’s more a friend than hostile these days.