And the reasoning? As always Terrorists, pedophile, criminals, etc. Guess what: If those guys have not learned yet to make a big detour around official chat apps, they deserve getting caught. My bet is, those people already have their own secured means of communication. Maybe they have their own encrypted app, or they have a forum somewhere in the Darknet, whatever. But the chance that this new law will catch anything worthwhile is practically nil.

You don’t have them yet?

GNU Image Manipulation Program (or Project)

A bank tried to sell me a pension fund contract. Luckily, I know my math and found out that it was so bad that I’d call it a scam.

The Mitochondrial Eve.

Sometimes you learn things before, and sometime by doing them. This was the latter case.

Are you saying parking is gambling in Amsterdam?

No, but our family of four went on a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the by far most expensive part of the trip were neither the museum tickets nor the restaurant bill, but the parking: about €16 per hour.

We do have casinos. And parking in Amsterdam.

The other word for “finish the job” is “Endlösung”.

Well, a lot of the Leavers wanted to bathe in a perceived Victorian Empires’ Greatness. At least in that aspect they have reaches Victorian levels…

Let’s come back to all of this when all those “quantum breakthroughs” manage to compute anything worthwhile that is not a quantum computer benchmark, but solves a real world problem.

But that would miss out the large amount of government control over the masses! Think of the kids, not of your rights being trampled on! /s

Well, lets call it an armed robbery, then.

I’d pick Apollo, the most sciency guy of the bunch.

The phone market has been a lot like the PC market 20, 30 years ago.

Back then, you actually had an advantage by getting a new machine quite often, as the newer machine was so much better and faster than the model from the year before. It actually made a difference for 99% of the users: The text processing, calculating, or browsing programs ran way better and faster on the current model than on the one or two year older one.

Nowadays, any off-the-shelf PC fulfills the needs of 95% of the users. It runs Windows/Word/Excel (or whatever else they use) fast enough to not be an issue. The only people who still need the bleeding edge stuff are some high-end uses e.g. in engineering, and gamers.

Same with cell phones. Ten years ago, the annual new model actually provided a big leap of abilities and comfort. Nowadays, I’m replacing my 5+ year old model just because the battery is getting close to the end of it’s usability.

Counter-Argument: Each camera in a bedroom can be free entertainment for millions!

Good luck holding a company sitting in China “responsible” for about anything.

Well, at least there are people who still use Perl.

I remember being forced to learn this in university.

I started CS from the POV of someone with several commercial projects under the belt and at the time being fluent already in five or six different programming languages. But the university where I started had had an issue - they had been way to theoretical (imagine people writing their CS thesis on a mechanical typewriter, and professors telling us that one does not need computer access for mastering CS!). So they had been more or less forced to include at least a bit of real world stuff into their blackboard and paper world. Which resulted in a no-excuse-mandatory beginners course in Turbo Pascal in the first year and Turbo Prolog in the second.

And I was not alone. It was painful. They showed a programming task to be done on the overhead projector, and about 90% of us could have just typed down the answer without thinking and be done with the weekly assignment in five minutes. Nope. Instead, we had to follow (and join) a lengthy, boring, and worthless discussion about the very basics of programming, before we were allowed to work on it. And woe to us if we did not follow the precise path that we had been “taught” in that lesson, even if it was done in a way that no normal programmer would ever implement it.

If they had given us all the assignments for the semester in one go, we would probably had finished them in one afternoon, including documentation and time to spare.

At least with Turbo Prolog we learned something new. First and foremost that there are strong reasons that nobody uses Prolog for serious programming.

I once gave our telco/internet provider the permission to call me on my main number if they have an interesting update regarding our contract. That went without problems for over ten years. One or two calls a year, and usually something worth thinking about.

Then their marketing decided to pull all stops and call us, on all our numbers, not just the main one, but also the kids personal phones. And not only from their official numbers, but random numbers all over the country. We suddenly got a dozen calls a day(!) from them, offering the same two products (at least where we picked up and declined the offer) again, and again, and over again. We blocked numbers, and new ones came up. The block list went from two entries to over thirty. I had to threaten legal action got get our numbers blocked again, and get them marked as such according to our privacy laws.

Silence returned.