The reference implementation of BLAS is in Fortran, but these days fast implementations (using the same interface) tend not to be. OpenBLAS is in C and much of MKL is in C/C++. An individual widely-used package can be rewritten, much like improving a compiler, or giving it a new output, benefits lots of software all at once.
However, OpenBLAS still links to the reference LAPACK in Fortran, because it's mostly made fast by linking it to a good BLAS implementation. It could be rewritten, or converted to C with f2c. Although there's a long tail of useful but often niche Fortran software, some in Fortran 90 that f2c can't convert. Having a fortran compiler is still useful, and covers all of them at once. Potentially that compiler could compile to another language, to cover more and future platforms all at once (like f2c does). It looks like that's what's going on here, compiling fortran to wasm.
This censorship mechanism comes from 2011, when it was created under the Spanish Socialist Party's government lead by Zapatero. There was a lot of backlash, but the Intellectual Property Comission (also known as "Comisión Sinde") was never dissolved under the next governments' rules.
Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar. Movistar used one of the subsidiaries to denounce themselves and other IPs so they would reach a friendly agreement (again, with themselves) that the judge considered enough to enforce the current Cloudflare blocks.
And just to add some more context, the Second Section (Sección Segunda), which is part of the executive branch, was created because time after time judges concluded that downloading movies from the internet was perfectly legal[1]. So the PSOE's gov at the time (with Zapatero being president) created a law that just sidesteps judges altogether, and bans access from the executive branch.
> Re: La Liga's censorship, it isn't promoted by the government but by La Liga itself with the collaboration of the largest ISP, Telefónica/Movistar
It is maybe worth looking at the overlap between La Liga / Movistar directors, and former government officials. The Venn diagram has more overlap that one would like to see
As far as I know regarding La Liga's censorship it's due to a commercial court judge in Barcelona; meaning a single local Judge has given the green light to block the internet in a whole country.
It started around 2008 when they had one of the most permissive landscapes in Europe with pressure by the US using the Special 301 whatchlist. Then Obama increased the pressure with Zapatero and after a couple of tries the timeline you describe was set in motion.
I goddamn hate this constant bombardment on medias of this "They say it is to protect the kids".
I was talking with my 60+ and 80+ family and they were like "yes, this is bad, but it's needed to fight pedos or terrorists", but that's obviously nonsense because anybody who doesn't want to get caught can still run its own encryption trivially.
So no, any pedo or terror or crime ring nowadays knows how to encrypt their comms.
This only really ends up hurting the general public safety.
Spain did not got hit by WW2 cause it was absolutely destroyed by a civil war beginning 1936. After that a dictatorship of 40 years and when it opened all industry got hit cause it was heavily protected and could not compete in open markets, add to that most of the working industries were cheaply sold to friends of the dictatorship who were, and some of them still are, in power positions.
> a distant sixth in economic size behind even Russia.
By what metric? Because Spain is sixth also by population, and I have the feeling you are using total GDP as scale. Using that, China is the richest economy, and India is the third richest country in the world. Meanwhile Switzerland and Singapore (really rich in reallity) are below 30th, and below Nigeria or Pakistan.
By per capita GDP we Spain are not even 6th, because Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland... are above us and also above Germany, UK or France.
According to GDP per capita, Spain is below Italy, but above Portugal. Has its position changed much over the last century? I would be interested to see a measure of that, but how far back is it feasible to estimate GDP per capita?
I don't know how Spain was affected by WW2, but they had a very nasty civil war just before WW2. I'm not sure if that's relevant to GDP per capita, though, because a war can sometimes improve the economy by leading to the overflow of a system in which progress is blocked by a relatively rich ruling class.
Spain was isolated due to it's political Allignment in the 40's, things changed a lot from 1954 on wards when they realized they had a friend in there now that the enemy was the USSR.
You can still get arrested in spain for saying a joke about Luis Carrero Blanco being Spain's first astronaut.
Luis Carrero Blanco, was the fascist dictator Francisco Franco's right hand man, his car war blown several stories into the air by ETA freedom fighters, hence the joke.
You mean Spain the fastest growing European country by many metrics? Not sure, we're here, been chilling all summer, time to get back to work now :) What happened to the country you live in?
> fastest growing European country by many metrics
Countries grow in secondary matters and the primary ones (civilization) remain unattended.
And by the way, when something "grows fast", do not misunderstand the indicator... Ethiopia had a 13% annual growth recently; Guyana has a 16% annual growth at this time: you are not thinking that "life is good there" and "Miami videoclip vibes everywhere", right?
Spain’s youth unemployment is the highest in Europe. I hope it’s improving, but economically Spain has not recovered post-2008 in line with others in the EU.
No, that's not it. Instead it's the right-wing "geniuses" running the government that have been a major cause of this. The NCP and Finns Party keep making a mess of things in the name of their ideology.
> With all that said it would be strange if they would be further, prosperity comes from hard work and discipline.
It must really suck for all of you living outside of Spain, looking at us taking naps and being "inefficient" with all our communism, yet we have health care, and work/life balance and have time enough for family and hobbies.
Of course, best is to just see it like there is no prosperity in the country, because there are no startup unicorns or billionaires buying up our media.
You don't know how hard is to maintain a country when you have to run in front of the bulls while making a paella at the same time you dance some flamenco./s
I guess that's your view of Spain, you should read and view things from more modern years than the 1950's. Also talk or Morocco and his allies USA and Israel about the immigrants that the mafia sent into Spain and Spain has never been communist or socialist, unless you don't what socialism and communism is.
I was been there. I mean socialist fantasy and everyone was equally poor except party members. It is astonishing to watch this shit happening in different countries with different cultures during long period of time. But with same end. And it is not prosperity. This time in Berlin as recent example: https://www.politico.eu/article/berlin-election-housing-cris...
Half of everyone in Germany can speak English. It's mandatory to learn in schools. In Berlin that percentage is even higher. So it's no obstacle. And they don't want to limit the visibility of the protest to only Germany.
Germany is one of the more native-language-enforcing countries in Europe. I've been to Slovenia and half of everything is actually written in English, unlike Germany or France where everything's written in the local language.
Instead of the eyes of their own politicians? Are their goals to actually effect change in Germany or to disparage Germany in the eyes of the global press?
Almost every German politician, most of the police and half the population of Germany speaks English, even though it shouldn't be used for official business. It's no barrier.
In Europe AI is seen as evil that must be stopped. Unlike in the US, AI doomers have Commission well manned. Ursula addressed this in her State of Union speech yesterday. The EU rather chooses consumer protection, even if it means killing AI and maintaining status quo.
Because any AI company would be hit by hate and regulation derived from this, no VC invests in the EU. It's more state and large enterprise investments, good old East Germany style. And historically it has not been that efficient.
I agree with this, the rich actually are oddly MORE greedy in Europe and take double the equity for half the money (roughly) so founders get a lot less upside or they move their businesses to the US and get US capital at better rates.
"Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle."
The gimmicky episodes were highly entertaining to my decidedly non-Trekkie wife. She loved the Star Trek Muppet episode ("Star Trek in Spaaaaaace") and the soap-opera episode.
As for taking the show seriously, I don't take any of it seriously. It's a telenovela, or maybe we should say Stellanovela. Most episodes build a fairly cohesive story, then break loose, and those old scientists have fun with the Star Trek universe. It's not like they're acting in a Chekhov play.
re: taking it seriously, I meant more in terms of whether it is "good art" vs disposable entertainment. On the whole, I felt that TNG and DS9 both eventually found the right balance of drama and humor, often with an intelligent underlying message about aspects of our society and culture. The modern Star Trek shows are sorely lacking in that area!
Eh, I mean TNG, which is probably the best-regarded series, had its fair share of duds, and not just in the not-very-good first season. In particular, I am thinking of the episode where Data's cat turned into a lizard.
> A transporter malfunction turns most of the crew into puppets while Spock fights to reclaim the ship.
The difference is the sheer number of gimmick episodes: so far half the episodes this season fall into that category. Did you actually watch that puppet episode you're quoting? Gimmick aside, it had one of the dumbest endings of any Star Trek episode I can think of.
Nope; haven’t seen any of this series. The streaming situation for it, at least in this country, is a bit of a mess. But it sounds from the description like a do-over of the cat lizard episode, more or less.
Ehh, maybe that notion times ten. These recent episodes are far goofier and more nonsensical than that TNG episode. (and again, my view on them is far less harsh than many of the reviews I've seen online...)
At least the TNG duds attempted some kind of sci fi technobabble explanation for whatever hijinks were occurring. With this season of SNW, we're getting plot devices like "missing resistance leader just happened to look identical to Enterprise's first officer by complete coincidence!" and "spooky derelict ship is haunted, no explanation even attempted!" ... there are worse ones I could reference but they're spoilers. I'm genuinely starting to wonder if an LLM is writing these scripts.
To be honest, I'm not sure to what degree my reaction to increasingly random dips into recent Trek has been around them just not being that good as a whole vs. just being tired of the franchise after many decades at this point.
TOS was what it was. Some episodes were better (and aged better) than others. After a pretty week start, TNG was pretty solid. DS9 was good too far more often than not. While other series had their strong points, I'm not going to go to the mat to defend any of them.
• Longstanding consumer complaints about aggressive upselling, scare-style scan warnings, auto-renewal, and hard-to-cancel billing
• Product often came preinstalled on PCs; many users treated it as unwanted bloatware
• Mixed reputation: lab detection scores often decent; customer-service and billing scores often poor
• 2011–2016 class action (Symantec and Digital River): alleged hidden “download insurance” / extended download service added at checkout; settled for about $60 million
• Canadian class action over alleged defects in an older Norton “decomposer” component (software sold roughly 2010–2016); later settled for tens of millions
• 2013–2022 Columbia University patent case: jury found willful infringement of malware-related patents and awarded $185 million; case later settled
• False Claims Act / GSA contracting: Symantec accused of hiding extra commercial discounts from the U.S. government; 2023 trial findings plus a 2024 Gen Digital payment of $55.1 million to satisfy the judgment
LifeLock (bought by Symantec in 2016; later NortonLifeLock / Gen Digital)
• 2010 FTC settlement: about $12 million for deceptive identity-theft advertising
• 2015 FTC action: about $100 million after LifeLock violated the 2010 order (weak security program and more false claims)
• Recurring criticism that protection/reimbursement marketing overstated what the service actually did
• 2022–2023 credential-stuffing attacks on Norton Password Manager / LifeLock logins using reused passwords from other breaches; company said its own systems were not hacked; thousands of accounts had some personal data accessed and hundreds of thousands of logins were targeted
NortonLifeLock / Gen Digital
• 2021–2022 Norton Crypto: Ethereum miner bundled with Norton 360; company said it was opt-in and took a cut; users and researchers criticized it as inappropriate in a security product; later dropped
• Ongoing complaints about subscription renewals, refunds, and support after the Symantec → NortonLifeLock
→ Gen Digital rebrands
• Privacy/tracking investigations (alleged sharing of site/app data with third-party analytics such as Quantum Metric); not a final court finding
• Separate consumer suits alleging LifeLock failed to alert users or honor “dollar-for-dollar” identity-theft reimbursement promises
> But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
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