The EFF has some info about the practice - https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-display-tracking-dots.

I imagine there are ways and means of obfuscating / anonymizing the dots such as blocking the printer from emitting them (e.g. an empty yellow cartridge that the printer perceives as full), modifying the firmware, using a burner printer, or using a mono laser jet.

As a side issue, most modern bank notes have a bunch of yellow circles integrated into the design on each side. They look random but they’re in a recognisable pattern called a constellation that enables devices like copiers / scanners to recognize when people are trying to copy money or other financial instruments like checks.

I wonder if there shouldn’t be a way of federating duplicate groups after the fact so one doesn’t have to “win”, they just all combine as one.

If you look at any modern desktop application, e.g. those built over GTK or QT, then they’re basically rendering stuff into a pixmap and pushing it over the wire. All of the drawing primitives made X11 efficient once upon a time are useless, obsolete junk, completely inadequate for a modern experience. Instead, X11 is pushing big fat pixmaps around and it is not efficient at all.

So I doubt it makes any difference to bandwidth except in a positive sense. I bet if you ran a Wayland desktop over RDP it would be more efficient than X11 forwarding. Not familiar with waypipe but it seems more like a proxy between a server and a client so it’s probably more dependent on the client’s use/abuse of calls to the server than RDP is when implemented by a server.

Some US news websites still geoblock European visitors rather than fix their site to not track the ever loving fuck out of visitors who say no. So imagine what they’re doing to their domestic visitors.

A lot of subjectivity about what is a success or not, but I would say many nationalised companies (and most were only nationalised for 20-30 years) were absolutely stagnating and/or suffering from widespread union disruption and should have been cut loose. But just picking out a handful of privatisations that went well, I think British Telecom, British Gas & British Airways did much better as privatized companies. Some privatisations went not-so-well - look at steel or coal privatisations or British Rail.

And an example of successful nationalisation - hospitals & doctors were a loose arrangement of private / charitable causes before being nationalised as the NHS. I think we can agree the situation is far better for everyone as a public health service than if it were run for-profit.

That’s literally uncomparable. Government does things that ignore profit. That’s what government is for. The provide services at a loss. The only “profit” might be things like societal improvement, education, security, and such.

People pay taxes that fund the government. If the money is wasted then services suffer. So it’s not profit or loss but they must deliver value. Value is harder to quantify than profit but governments have to figure a way out of doing it and provide incentives to staff to deliver it.

This is something you really can’t say one way or the other.

I could cite examples of sick, failing government owned companies that did better under privatization, or simply shouldn’t have been governments owned in the first place. On the other hand, I could cite disastrous privatization efforts that should never have happened because they were vital services, or in the national interest. I lived through most of it in the UK when they were privatising stuff left right and centre - some succeeded, others didn’t.

And if they stay under the control of government then they need incentivization and means for measuring success. Success doesn’t just mean profit but it does mean value and quality of service. And in some ways that would require operating similar to if it were a private company.

I live in Europe where trucks are fairly rare but you still see large SUVs, 4x4s and vans around. My own feeling is that certain classes of vehicles should be considered commercial for the purposes of insurance, taxation, VAT, inspection, tolls, permitted usage and everything else. The legislation already exists for commercial vehicles so extend it to these kind of vehicles.

So is someone must have a stupidly oversized vehicle purely for personal reasons they can enjoy all the bullshit and restrictions that goes with it. Doesn’t stop them complying but making it more onerous to do it will take demand for these vehicles off the market entirely.

The issue is that Rockstar never remade GTA.

They outsourced that work to Grove Street Games who had already done the mobile ports and said have at it. Grove Street Games took their mobile ports (which were already compromised) and adapted them back to console & PC with a new engine. I assume everything was done on the cheap and to a deadline and what they produced is what they produced. For Rockstar it wasn’t a labour of love, it was money for old rope and if they had given a damn they wouldn’t have outsourced it or at least had stricter quality controls & acceptance on what someone made for them.

Rockstar made a slightly better job with their RDR port in that they didn’t completely fuck it up but it was still outsourced and a minimal effort.

A company like Paradox should certainly be able afford testers who run the game on a variety of configurations to see if optimization is necessary.

One thing I would say and this is a broad statement - generally you don’t do optimization unless you know you need it. And you only do it after the thing you’re writing is working correctly non-optimally. Optimize too soon, or when you don’t need to just makes code an unmaintainable mess. That doesn’t doesn’t preclude writing efficient code in the first place but efficient is not the same thing as optimal.

Gluten free pasta is much worse. If you don’t stir it a lot for the first 3-4 minutes it WILL stick together.

Gambling, alcohol, nicotine, and prescription medicine should all be banned from advertising. Sponsorship should count as advertising and thus be banned too.

I’m on some Disney Plus deal to get 3 months for 99 cents per month. You’d better believe the second the 3 months is up I’m cancelling again. Let’s face it, the platform is kind of dogshit and while there is an occasional good show, most of the new content is dreck. A month a year is sufficient to catch up on anything worth watching.

Yup. Ad blockers work on pattern matching rules. Countering them might take some work but it’s not impossible - make the URLs that do the bad shit indistinguishable from the ones that make the video works and likewise html elements. Randomise everything, make the paths to things unpredictable. I’m sure YouTube could even merge the ads into the content stream so they are unavoidable.

egalize abortion the first and second time? When did the US legalize abortion? You don’t actually have to answer this, it is a rhetorical question, but you should know the answer

Sure thing comrade. Go back and finish your first year political studies semester. That, or emigrate to one of these socialist paradises.

If you overlook the surveillance, political oppression, the beatings / torture / disappearances, the labor camps, the subjugation of minorities & religions, the squalor everyone is subject to, the censorship, the run down infrastructure, the lack of luxury goods, the imposition of “social” systems to punish non-compliance, the lack of free enterprise. It’s also amusing you hail women’s rights when the USSR banned abortion and made divorce practically impossible. Or LGBT when was and still is marginalized and persecuted in most Communist countries. Maybe ask the Uyghurs think of their lives in their re-education centres. But maybe you’re hailing Cuba taking enormous strides to recognize LGBT rights… in 2022. Well that certainly makes up for 70 years of life under Communism.

Oh they’re all such a veritable workers paradise! It’s weird why so many people attempted to escape, enduring arduous journeys, even risking drowning, being shot or entangled in barbed wire. It’s weird how so many countries got rid of Communism and the people rejoiced about it. Strange that.

When you find yourself comparing to the USSR I think you’ve already lost your argument. Since it boils down to “eradicate capitalism and rent becomes cheaper”. Maybe it does and everything else becomes a lot shittier too.

How is that the landlord’s fault?

I’ve rented plenty in my life. Then I bought a house and paid it off. Sobbing that people who rent properties actually want to make money or that they’re all “parasites” is laughable nonsense.

Imagine being so out of touch that you think people who rent property should do so out of the goodness of their hearts.