Here's another take: The idea that you can only choose between one set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) and another set of desperate spying and killing fools trying to create a world where they could be totally invincible (with a swarm of lesser demons trying to make a fortune serving them) is stupid.
Should be phrased as “Despite the ham-fisted bans, overheating DPI boxes, and propaganda (from both sides, and it is not always clear who is better at scaremongering), a lot of people learned to not give a fuck”.
Like, obviously, Instagram has been blocked for a long time, and, obviously, everyone who is obsessed with that social network keeps using it, including the rich kids of the top crooks (a.k.a. “the elites”) who can't miss a chance to drool over some dress they wore on a private concert of a Western pop star in Dubai (suspiciously never announced in media), and, obviously, the censors are making a fuss about it for the hundredth time, promising to fine anyone who does business there into oblivion to make users move to the competing local services that have been lobbying that under pretext of politically correct patriotic alignment.
I would advise everyone to familiarise yourself with tools like zapret. You'll need them sooner than you think.
I think you both are arguing about how to fight a bear with your bare hands. To win in that, you simply need to not fight with a bear.
Let's say someone made an expansion board with a cool feature: there are 5 documented I/O addresses, but accessing any other address fries the stored firmware. What would you do? No, not leaving a lot of comments in code in CAPS LOCK. No, not printing the correct hexadecimal values in red to put the message on the wall. You make a driver that only allows access to the correct addresses, and configure the rest of the system to make sure that it can only work through that driver.
Let's say there's a loading bay at the chemical plant with multiple flanges. If strong acid from the tanker is pumped into the main acid tank, everything is fine. If it is pumped into any other tank, the whole plant may explode and burn. What should be done? No, not promising that drivers will be fired, then shot by the firing squad if they make a mistake. Each connection is independently locked, and the driver only gets a single matching key.
You have wonderful programmable devices that allow you to solve non-standard problems with non-standard tools. What should be done is making a wrapper for dd that just does not allow you to do anything you don't want to happen. Even the most basic script with checks and confirmation is enough.
I've been using an old Symbian phone with the same Class Not-That-Good SD card bought back then. In the early 2010s, I copied a lot of MP3 files and ebooks there, and used the camera to take photos occasionally. Then it was no longer used for music and other needs, and the files just rested there. After about 10 years, I've decided to play some music on the phone, and these tracks had a lot of skips and rattle. Images copied from the card showed a lot of damage, too. So when someone on the internet posts how SD cards are a cheap and compact long term storage, I am not impressed. You probably need to refresh all previously stored data with each monthly backup.
It should be mentioned that the phone board often gets warm during operation or battery charging, and the temperature is stated an important harmful factor in a different comment.
So if you have some old files on an old device, and assume that they are still there because their records in the file system still look fine, you might be surprised.
It has been available for 20 years. To use combining characters (and client-side font layout and rendering), type the letter, then one of available dead keys two times (e. g. `a, AltGr+Shift+6, AltGr+Shift+6` gives â). To get the single code point (if it's available), type modifier once, then the letter (e. g. `AltGr+Shift+6, a` gives â). I've been touch typing em dashes for years, and can't imagine it any other way.
It seems that corresponding Russian installers are more up to date. You can gently nag the author to update the English version, or just take the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, and do it your way. Be aware that certain silly applications use hard-coded keyboard shortcut handlers that bypass the system, and therefore misbehave if system layout is anything else but default US English. Windows also sometimes likes to resurrect the deleted default layout until the last process that used it exits, or something like that.
It has been said multiple times that the absence of proper typography on personal computer keyboards is just laziness, ignorance, and lack of leadership. There are no technical reasons for that — just look at keyboards for European languages.
But covers also lie. They are mass-uploaded to various services by the similar automated matching systems with cheap human agents used for decision making. Everyone just grabs and re-uploads the existing images from the image search results if they are “similar enough”. Because if it works for instant noodles, it works for books, too. Many publishers don't even bother to provide anything but a single image that is cut from the source file for the printed cover, which might be quite different from the way the book really looks.
For my language, I know I can only rely on just a couple of shops that make a photo of an actual book under regular lights for catalogues and announcements as a matter of principle. Others just add the same image file everyone else used. For the older books that had multiple revisions, it's still strictly manual interaction with second-hand book sites and old listings to figure out the exact version.
On the other hand, most services here do care about providing table of contents, even if its crowd-sourced phone snapshots of the page. International market is insane in that regard. Not only sellers on Amazon and the like ignore them (sure, they were never going to do so much manual work for all the uploaded items anyway), the publishers don't even mention what's inside on their official pages. “Selected stories. New translation by X”. Are those the same stories that were published 5 or 10 years ago under a different name or cover? Has X translated a new set of stories and (partially) refreshed the collection? Both of these things happen. It is ironic that I need to download the full scan from the pirate library to find out what is available in print. Unless, of course, some anonymous worker in some library hasn't diligently typed the whole list of works into the description, hooray for those.
Anyone who decided to make a catalogue for any decent enough library found that out on the first day.
(By “decent enough” I mean breadth. If you are strictly collecting some genre products from a small number of commercial publishers, you might be in the walled garden where everything just works.)
SBNs were introduced when, in addition to existing mass production, mass accounting and storage management for each item became possible (with computers). Outside of the centrally controlled environments they don't work well, or mean much. Sure, national authorities make enough rules about having proper ISBNs, but they do get ignored.
There are small university/gallery/collective publications that have bigger print runs than “official” books on some specific topic. There are books that are uniquely made or uniquely altered, and therefore can't share the identifier with another item. Most common example is getting an autograph — you probably want to know precisely where you've put the copy of Bible signed by the author, not just any other Bible that looks the same. Some people oppose ISBNs for political reasons, and either ignore them, or invent bogus numbers.
Then there's International aspect. Soviet Union, for example, did not use ISBNs until the very last of its years. There are still many books printed there — including complete works every scholar needs to reference — that never had any ISBNs.
Some works have been published for that last time a century ago. Some of them might had been immensely popular back in the days, but now they are forgotten. Others have been re-printed, but you've managed to get the first printed edition, a small book of then-unknown author. Those also won't have ISBNs.
So the idea itself that any book must be an interchangeable product from the batch in which each item has the same effect, and therefore can have the same identifier, is a bit narrow.
Obviously, professional librarians could instantly tell you that ISBN is merely one of the search markers, and is not the way the inventory is kept.
It's not a big secret to journalists that such stories are just another kind of entertainment that never fails to attract the public. Certain people constantly work in that genre.
Readers want to be assured that something is excluded. I visit the good sunny side of the internet, and horrors are on some “darknet”. I live in the better part of the town, and horrors happen in bad districts. Me and my friends are “normal people”, never “victims”. Wars are far away. I am not responsible for anything.
Certain people's careers are made in such pandering.
So they tell a thrilling detective story, and at the same time publicly shame Facebook to make people think that more control over “important services” and more backdoors are needed. Only for serious cases, of course. You wouldn't want to support those people, would you? Good. Now show us you licence number for internet usage.
Smaller, 6-bit code pages existed before and after that. They did not even have space for upper and lower case letters, but had control characters. Those codes directly moved the paper, switched to next punch card or cut the punched tape on the receiving end, so you would want them if you ever had to send more than a single line of text (or a block of data), which most users did.
Even smaller 5-bit Baudot code had already had special characters to shift between two sets and discard the previous character. Murray code, used for typewriter-based devices, introduced CR and LF, so they were quite frequently needed in way more than few years.
With current size of the network, it's probably managed by sending messages to operators chat “Hey, IP a.b.c.d is doing that again”.
Remember that Fido and Usenet relied on independent server admins voluntary enforcing the rules for global groups (and allowed the alternative sister hierarchies or local appendices with different rules). It is possible to give more power to local decision maker, and share the global ideas.
Link establishment mentions validation of the circle by the intermediate hops. I suppose that someone who is sending a lot of packets without participation from the other side can be put into exponentially worse and worse queues. Or maybe not. There's a lot of things to test.
I mean, this is not a solution if we want winder adoption.
I was FIDONet node (and even hub) sysop, and I remember well, that FIDO was rigid hierarchical structure — you have your NC, and NC can discommunicate any node in his network. Yes, it was elected position, but after elections it was mostly dictatorship.
It doesn't seems like «Fully self-configuring multi-hop routing over heterogeneous carriers» advertised by this project, rather opposite.
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