It also means “we don’t know (yet)” so there is a chance it’s not that toxic.

At the cost of sounding naive and stupid

It may be a naive question, but it’s a very important naive question. Naive doesn’t mean bad.

The answer is that that is not possible, because the compiler is supposed to translate the very specific language of C into mostly very specific machine instructions. The programmers who wrote the code, did so because they usually expect a very specific behavior. So, that would be broken.

But also, the “unsafety” is in the behavior of the system and built into the language and the compiler.

It’s a bit of a flawed comparison, but you can’t build a house on a foundation of wooden poles, because of the advantages that wood offers, and then complain that they are flammable. You can build it in steel, but you have to replace all of the poles. Just the poles on the left side won’t do.

And you can’t automatically detect the unsafe parts and just patch those either. If we could, we could just fix them directly or we could automatically transpile them. Darpa is trying that at the moment.

“We didn’t consider the idea because it sounded silly”

Isn’t something I want scientists to say. So good on them for taking a look at the feasibility.

How is it vague?

It’s vague in all the legal ways:

• First of all which kinds of games it applies to. It obviously can’t work for games that have a technical server requirement, … world of warcraft, but actually EVE online. The guys who run that game, get experimental hardware that’s usually military only (or at least they did in the past). The server is not something, you could run even if you wanted to. Drawing the legal boundary between what “could be” single player offline (e.g. the crew, far cry, hitman), wasn’t done.

• It’s not clear how it should apply to in terms of company scale. The new messenger legislation that was passed, made space for the EU parliament / system to declare and name, individually, who counts as a company that is is big enough, so that they have to open their messenger system to others for interoperability. It’s not clear if the law has to apply to everyone, and every game, or just e.g. companies above 20 million revenue or something.

• It’s not clear what happens if a company goes bankrupt, and the system isn’t immediately ready to keep working.

And a few more.

That being said, I think Thor’s stance on this is silly. All of that is part of the discussion that is now starting. He could raise good points and get them included, but I guess that’s not happening.

It is broken in the sense that it’s absolutely insane that they can take 30% and nobody can build a competing product that only takes 20%.

It is not broken in the sense that they keep doing what they are doing and developers and customers consistently choose their offer.

It’s not a monopoly because they exploit their position.

It’s a monopoly because nobody else is trying hard enough.

I would do this if I could order it and have it arrive in a reasonable time.

Not really motivated to build it myself.

The meritocratic, capitalist way, would be to to put a property tax on it and to increase that tax, until

• rents increase so much that people can’t afford to live in cities anymore
• cities lose essential employees
• society shuts down
• THEN property loses value
• then it can be bought cheaply again
• and also rented for a low price, because the tax on the low value property is also low

Let’s go people!

Sure. Yes. I’m aware.

The point is, if an employee isn’t productive, the company should notice, because they should be running some kind of oversight over the work either being done or not being done.

If the work is being done, even if the employee isn’t always 100% focused, the company shouldn’t care.

If the work is not being done, the company should care, regardless of how active the mouse moves.

using mouse jigglers to fake being at work is the kind of thing that keeps more companies from allowing WFH.

No, companies don’t allow WFH because they don’t trust employees or can’t verify, employees doing their work from home. Most of the time, because the company people don’t understand that work and couldn’t judge if it’s being done correctly without adults in the room.

tldr: people should be hired and fired based on their performance. Crazy talk, I know.

Ah yes. Work that tracks you, not by your output, but by whether your mouse jiggles a statistically correct amount. Nice.

France’s electricity, which were 70-80% nuclear at the time, didn’t see any increase in price.

Yes, because the government decided they couldn’t raise the price.

Électricité de France (EDF) – the country’s main electricity generation and distribution company – manages the country’s 56 power reactors.[5] EDF is fully owned by the French Government.

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