No it doesn’t. Sometimes it means Stalin.

They didn’t stop handing out harsh punishments. Just in a highly unpredictable, unequal and arbitrary pattern.

I’ve read someplace that the main difference between modernity and middle ages in legal practice was that in modernity punishments were relatively small, but unavoidable, while in middle ages most criminals avoided punishments, but here and there some poor idiot would be made an example of in a highly disproportionate way, like being quartered for stealing some shit and being rude to a priest.

There are South African official crime stats. That’s an answer to “what stats”.

Neither did you provide any data, somehow in the Internet it’s always only the other side that should do it. That’s an answer to “you haven’t provided any stats”.

I might look up something later, no earlier than Saturday.

If lying does the job …

Well, if you’ve noticed, the punishments have been becoming less and less over many years, unless you are a small-to-medium business or an individual, in that case you have more rules and more punishments.

Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.

Unfortunately others are deciding on web standards mostly. Which makes it hard for it to keep up even if it were trying to be such.

Also Mozilla was kinda that, until it wasn’t - because they decided to go the other way and because apparently they lacked money (doesn’t look like that from their spending, but).

Crypto has literally no actual value yet people are shitting money into bitcoins of every type in hopes that one will hit it big.

That’s not entirely correct. Black and white stones used in voting in someplace antique also have no actual value, but they substitute a vote.

BTC is used as a mechanism of exchange, like a decentralized bank.

Only thing that will stop it is heavy regulation.

Would you agree if someone told you that the only thing to resolve some political problem is heavy artillery?

Or would you doubt that the person talking has good idea of the problem and the solutions, offering the bluntest one?

“Regulation” of the “property rights protection” kind is needed. Providing a service presented as a good that doesn’t work without dancing to a certain tune is simply cheating, it’s theft. Providing a “communication platform” augmenting and weighing your words for recommendation system leading to some intended effect is cheating, theft and impersonation at the same time. These should be prosecuted. But that’s not heavy regulation, that’s an update to pretty light regulation.

Maybe also obligation for every big service on the Internet to have global identifiers and provide a global API exposing all its inner entities, be that posts or users or comments or reactions, with those global identifiers. So that you could export all of Facebook to a decentralized cache, for example. That’s heavy regulation, but also pretty reasonable, in line with old approaches to libraries, press and freedom of speech.

It’s not so trivial, different BIOS’es have different hotkeys to enter setup, different functionality, and device drivers are usually provided certainly only for the main OS.

Perhaps legal obligation to provide proper datasheets (easy to do, ye-es? they already certainly have those, ye-es, otherwise how did they make that Windblows\MockOS driver?) for device manufacturers and sellers (cause I the customer shouldn’t care to look for them, everything should be in the box in paper form ; just like all other schematics, if in 1970s you’d tell someone that a complex expensive machine is sold to customers without schematics, people wouldn’t believe you, they’d say you’re nuts, they’d ask where the regulators are sleeping, and they’d wonder how it’s possible to operate a device without schematics), and obligation to not employ various technologies to prevent replacement of onboard devices and loading of unsigned drivers, should exist.

The best part about all this is that such a law could be written so that it equally well applies to a 1970s machine, a today’s machine and whatever they’ll come up with in year 2066.

There are official stats.

You know because they’re all racist over there as like the default position.

I know. This includes everyone in SA seemingly, though, not just whites.

Just informing you that good old USSR had a similar problem, except not just with the military.

It, of course, had planning inefficiency problems, but the reason some stuff costed and was funded orders of magnitude more than the Western alternatives (sometimes being clones of those alternatives) was just that industries producing this stuff were closer to important interests in internal politics. Soviet production lines were not that much less efficient.

But it isn’t wasted in the eyes of crony legislators and bureaucrats who see themselves on the receiving end of the kickback stream.

Which is also why people active against this will be killed many times before the stream made dry out.

Look up military pricing too, I remeber seeing something about how the military pays $400 for $4 bag of fuses

That “military pricing” is called “corruption”. Despite everyone knowing that it happens in most militaries (or big b2b), it still is that.

Its a complete waste of taxpayer money. Money that could be redirected into more important stuff, but alas our corrupt politicians will find other things to waste it on.

I mean, you had a truly magnificent military budget for already 30 years after the nation which was supposed to be the problem solved by it started asking for food aid and falling apart into pieces.

When the funds are provided and it’s certain they won’t have to be used, the tasks existing expand to fill the budget.

The US military budget is so over the top that even things that it achieves are not so significantly different from what Russian military budget with Russian corruption achieves, yet its size utterly dwarfs that.

If US military budget were used as efficiently as that of, say, Poland, US military would have colonized most of the Solar system already. With actual people as colonists.

That’s about that fiscal discipline the Republican party was supposedly in favor of, until it wasn’t.

OK, I live in Russia, so shouldn’t probably blabber too much about US politics.

That wasn’t a thing already? Not a requirement for military orders?

You mean they could ship something into the military without proper documentation and bill it every time maintenance has to be done?

Some things in your land of the free seem to confuse me.

Genocide is too strong a word, but South African white population does have legitimate grievances by now. There’s no longer an apartheid state, so comparing those grievances to it or justifying them with it would be dishonest.

One thing I personally like more about this than about Briar - routing of messages.

It seems Briar exchanges state of the groups with the neighboring devices, they with their neighbors, and so on.

That might take a few iterations (thus delay) to propagate a message from, say, one side of the crowd to another, and leave different members with different state all the time.

While here, apparently, messages are routed further immediately. From my own toying around - not the best thing too, but initiating synchronization by sender\relay and not by recipient seems sane.

Maybe should rewrite the toy to be nicer. It seems to be closer to real world things than I thought.

I personally think it’s not about Mozilla. It’s about the Web.

You need to see the bigger picture always.

The Web as an application for global system of hypertext documents served from different computers is fine.

The Web wasn’t intended as a platform for platforms for global applications.

It’s used as one, because that allows a certain kind of people to gather power. Networked personal computers made the civil society too powerful. Needed a solution.

Why the Web and not just “Facebook native application” and “Google native application”? Well, it’s hard to maintain a hypertext document system made application platform. It limits competition. It also allows Facebook and Google popularity to affect web browser and web techologies popularity. If these don’t work in a browser, that browser is doomed.

While the verticals and monopolies themselves allow thieves and murderers in governments to control the Internet.

So - there weren’t that many websites, if you think about it, requiring any particular web technology when it came into existence. Those mostly started specifically for Google, Facebook etc services and/or policies. Say, HTML5 to phase out Netscape plugin API, which was presented as phasing out Flash (everybody hated Flash).

Mozilla followed those policies and appeared neutral, yes.

But in general the moment using Dillo or Netsurf or Links became plainly, completely not an option for the Web, it was decided. A world standard that has only a handful of compliant realizations is not a standard. It’s an oligopoly.

So, getting back to hypertext - Flash was hated by some because it didn’t allow to turn the whole webpage into an application, but that wasn’t its purpose. JS was a mistake, I think. Any interpreted content should have been embedded in its clear place separate from the rest of the page with its own plugin, similar to Flash applets. But - one can accept that in year 1996 they didn’t think of such consequences.

And remote big services not being standardized were also a mistake. I wrote a bit on that from time to time here, gets tiring to repeat - a lot of what the server side of many applications does is just routing to another client, computation and storage. One can devise a standard for remote services. So that local applications would be different, but would use the same pooled infrastructure, found and announced via trackers similar to torrents. With global identifiers of entities to allow interoperability, so that “post #12435324646dasgtshdryh” would be the same text on any of such storage services (having it) and at any point in time.

That, of course, is a bit late. In our current world things like Briar and other mesh are probably a better direction. One can have what I described over them too, but it will also require management of bandwidth and bottlenecks and stuff not reachable directly.

It’s just a versions list. And I’m mostly joking. Rather that the “feel” of using Windows between 2000 and XP didn’t seem to change much. (I prefer 2000)

I dunno, Firefox of 3.0 times was the shit. It itself was the browser that should be, more welcoming to customization than Windows of the time was to porn winlockers. They also had XULRunner for alternative ideas. Gecko was the FOSS browser engine that various alternative “nice” MacOS and Linux browsers used.

Though between 2004 and 2008 only four years passed. Less than between Windows 2000 and Vista (let’s ignore XP as a more glossy consumer version of 2000).

Just realized that could be read as “bit chicks”, which would explain such a name choice for an IRC client in the times when there actually were some bit chicks on popular IRC channels.

Yes, I didn’t think you were, just shared … In any case under Linuxulator with Linux JRE it swears a lot, but seems to work.