They wiggle forward. They wiggle backwards. And occasionally they fuck themselves. That’s it.

I feel a kinship with these worms.

The fucking anal cleanliness of all pop music production these days. The need to have a Ph.D. in "sound design" to gain entry to the world of music. The need for all music to be so fucking locked down, produced to death, carefully sculpted to the tiniest microbeat and fraction of a kiloherz. The crushing humourless stylishness of it all. It feels so stifling and unspontaneous.

That and Post fucking Malone.

So do we have to admit, however reluctantly, that Trump takes some of the credit for making progress where others failed? What part did his combination of sanctions and the offer of talks play in bringing the two Korean leaders to the table?

an organization that is... looking to capitalize on fertile conditions

Is it just me, or is that not the best choice of words when describing a socialist party?

I use it and I like it. It's fast and the user interface is nice and clear. And I like having ads and trackers blocked by default. And I like that it's open source. Brave is the browser I go to when Firefox is acting buggy. However, it doesn't support any extensions, which can be a pain.

But I have some doubts about their business model, which is basically to have users pay some money that gets distributed among the websites they visit, based on the amount of traffic they give to each site. The aim is to give the site owners a way to make money that doesn't depend on intrusive ads, and thereby to improve the quality of the web. Meanwhile, Brave takes a cut of the payments so they can stay in business.

It's a noble enough goal, but I wonder about the practicalities of it.

Firstly, buying bitcoin: I tried setting up their Brave Payments and got bogged down in the process of trying to buy Bitcoin. After a couple of attempts I decided it was too time consuming and I'd have to do it when I had a spare hour or two. This is a disincentive. (As is having your wallet managed by some site you have no reason to trust.) They need a more frictionless payment system if people are going to buy in.

Secondly, how are they going to pay the website owners? How do you track down and pay every owner of every website out there? How do you verify you're paying the real owner of the site? Grooveshark was a great music sharing site that promised to pay the rights owners based on the music you listened to, but they got shut down for not keeping up with payments. I don't know whether Grooveshark were acting in good faith but perhaps they did intend to pay, only to find the world of music licensing overwhelmingly complex. Others (Spotify, etc.) have kind of resolved the issue but only by giving too much power and money to middlepeople, while the actual content makers get squeezed. How complex is "pay everyone who owns a website"? Will we end up with a proliferation of website payment clearing houses, website rights management agencies, etc.? But maybe Brave has smart people working on this.

Thirdly, what happens when other browsers emerge using the same business model? Do they each set up independent payment systems for website owners? Do website owners have to deal with each browser maker individually? Do browsers then start to compete to get website owners to use their payments system and not their competitors', and to drive traffic towards their browser? Remember each browser maker takes a cut of the revenue. What then are the ramifications of this as it plays out across the web? When happens when one browser gets a market lead? Do you then have to use (and pay) that browser to see all the most popular websites? It seems like we could end up with something like Net Non-Neutrality Hell only with the browser rather than the intertubes.

Fourthly, isn't there way more money in amassing and selling information on users' habits than there is in one-off micropayments for content producers? Ad networks are partly about the ads and partly about the tracking. User profiling seems to be where the money's at these days (witness Microsoft charging you for Windows then using it go gather a ton of data about you). Faced with the choice of ads and trackers or micropayments and no ads or trackers, won't many websites simply choose the former because it's more lucrative?

I'm not a business person and maybe these aren't insurmountable difficulties. But I do wonder how viable the model is.

Ah the proud British tradition of being a little bit immature and useless at stuff. Now we've had our little tantrum it would be nice to quietly not-quite-admit that the grown-ups were right after all, and just hope no-one asks us about it for a few decades.

Odd that there hasn't been more noise about this. You'd think Microsoft would be celebrating the 30th birthday of Windows.

There was a pretty strong sentiment that the first thing to do was get rid of Harper and his poisonous policies, and that any other party would be preferable. People were also very conscious of the risks of splitting the non-Conservative vote. I suspect this led to a lot of strategic voting from people who might otherwise have voted NDP or Green and might have declared that as their intention in the polls.

I have been using DDG as my main search engine for a year or two now. it's really pretty good and I don't miss Google. If you want Google results without the tracking there's always startpage.com, which functions as a proxy to Google, but I find the DDG results to be just as good for most things and the presentation to be nicer. I do occasionally pop back to Google if an image search didn't turn up what I was looking for, but usually DDG's image search is fine.

Topre Realforce 87UW (SE07T0). I like it a lot - very smooth and comfortable over long sessions. It uses Topre switches.

I also use a Topre Realforce 104U (XF01T0) which has a number pad, but mousing is more comfortable on the smaller one.

And I use a Unicomp Customizer Classic 104 which uses buckling spring switches. I really like this one too, though it's too noisy to use as my main keyboard. I moved to the Topres when people complained about the noise from the Unicomp. The Topres are also gentler on the fingers.

I don't trust that they really turn it off. I suspect they just stop showing you what they have.

Sony also has a vested interest in the hack being the work of North Korea. The company is going to be on the receiving end of a dozen or more lawsuits—from employees, ex-employees, investors, partners, and so on. Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain opined that having this attack characterized as an act of terrorism or war, or the work of a foreign power, might earn the company some degree of immunity from these lawsuits.

Don't forget that it also helps them hype their movie as "the move that caused an international incident". I'm sure Sony are quite happy to have this story rather than "we had a bunch of data stolen by someone who was pissed off at us over our shitty business and security practices."

Nestor says he started toward the stairs, his hands over his head, when he came face-to-face with a trooper in full riot gear. “Get on the floor!” yelled the trooper, leveling his AR-15 at Nestor's face. Nestor complied. The cop ratcheted the handcuffs on Nestor's wrists, yanked him to his feet, and marched him into the kitchen.

Ah, US cops. Someone found a computer bug? Point an assault rifle at their face.

My instincts about this are that the company who produced the buggy software should be held responsible for the casinos' losses. Presumably there's a contract between casinos and the machine manufacturers. What does it say about responsibility for losses due to manufacturing defects?

As people on reddit have pointed out, there are two problems with this article:

1. It's inaccurate to call them "fake towers" and put up a picture of a tower, because this suggests someone is installing large-scale fake infrastructure. They are actually interception devices that could be quite small and running out of a little room or a vehicle somewhere.

2. The article has rather too many plugs for a particular model of "hardened" Android phone. Someone somewhere has been lazily recycling press releases.

With those two caveats, the concern about someone spying on our cellphones is legit.

"I made the decision about a month ago to decommission that vehicle," Federspiel said, noting he did it based on financial concerns due to unforeseen maintenance costs

So nothing to do with recognizing the stupidity of acquiring it in the first place, then. Just additional stupidity in not foreseeing that it would be expensive to maintain.

I expect they will get away with it.

Yes, there is nothing wrong with conspiracy theories per se. The problem is that some people will believe any old crappy conspiracy theory, not just the ones that are actually plausible.

It is not clear that the tonal harmony you hear was created by the crickets themselves; many people are saying that the composer slowed down the crickets but then created the harmonies himself out of the sound (e.g. playing the samples on a keyboard). The blurb does not make clear what happened, but let's not get too excited about crickets having a sense of harmony and musical structure until we test this by slowing down some field recordings of crickets ourselves.