Look down that list of winners and the list of top finishers for two decades prior to Armstrong and the amount of doping among them that we actually found about and seriously try to make the case that Armstrong is the reason for "cheat or don't bother showing up."
Bernard Thévenet won in 1975 and has said he was using steroids. Armstrong was 4 years old at the time. We don't know about all the drug cheating at the TdF, just what we do know is damning in ways we can't pin on the vile Armstrong. Do continue to loathe him as much as you like. He's earned that.
Ulrich, Riis, Fignon, Zoetelmelk, we haven't caught them all nor tried 1% as hard as those who got Armstrong did.
Look through the list and try and claim with a straight face that Armstrong was first, led the charge or that the Tour de France actually wanted to catch him or any other winner at all.
I don't care at all about Armstrong. The sport is clean now despite an ugly past. Just as it was when Armstrong won all those tours. Can I interest you in this bridge at a good price?
Who gets off scot free with the "It was all Armstrong" line.
If Armstrong stayed retired he probably would have gotten away with it, kept lying forcefully and be a secular saint by now. The TdF didn't catch him.
Note the quantity that actually got caught and with enough evidence. Lance won it 6 times without getting caught.
Looking at it systematically there's no way all of the top finishers were not taking drugs (how else could they compete with the world's best who were? The advantage isn't small.) And it had clearly been going on for many years before Armstrong entered the event for the first time.
I really don't care for Armstrong's yellow banded hypocrisy but blaming him for the "cheat or don't bother competing" reality lets rather a lot of people off the hook with a convenient scapegoat.
But I'm sure that's all in the past and it's not like that now. Just as was said when Armstrong won 6 times while correctly stating he was the most tested athlete on the planet.
Wrapping it up and tying all that to Armstrong, as has been done, stinks. He was clearly a bit player in that extensive fraud. Six titles with no meaningful positive drug test as the most tested athlete on the planet.
Google's entire "do no evil" bring your own identity to the job and all of that was pure marketing to hire better engineering talent.
Instead of monetising software sales, they monetised access to Free software performing an end run around the GPL by distributing access to it over the internet allowing them to make the public good proprietary google property. They threw out some crumbs at best.
Remember the un-publicised puzzles to paradoxically get media attention, hiring highschool kids with a demo that made the news because it made the news and all the rest of the BS. I guess it worked. Now they're big and bad and the Free software optimism is largely dead so they don't have to bother and now make killbots for the Pentagon.
Where else you gonna work? Go test the market, nerd.
When I started I learnt something about coding from VBA macros to automate excel.
Often that started with the macro recorder. Then you worked out what that "recorded" code/sludge did, removed the crud you didn't need or want, improved the logic and so on. I bought books to understand it better. Now you can ask a (different) LLM "what is this? why is it used? How would I?" etc which is probably a faster learning curve than books, newsgroups and old school personal home pages with good info.
I would have been quite surprised when I first used a VBA macro in anger just how far I would go down the rabbit hole. C, asm, verilog, Linux were no part of what I originally signed up for!
Some people will specialise in the equivalent of recording macros and go no further. And this will be fine for code that gets it done but doesn't matter too much in the other dimensions (security, reliability, usefulness without the authors' support, etc.) Much like VBA utilities inside companies that were useful way back when. Other people will want what they produce to be better, even good, and they will learn about floating point [1] and all the rest, much as I did. Probably learn pretty fast too. [2]
[2] Working out how to write an excel vba webserver and using it to collect and and collate summary data from various divisions into reports was seedy as hell, solved the actual business problem (given ridiculous but intractable constraints) and isn't something you can record. We all have stories from a misspent youth that we're simultaneously ashamed and yet somehow proud of.
“ the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the "continue to function" clause was removed”
You sound like a shill trying to muddy the waters. It’s petty clear when they silently change their web pages to delete features sold that it’s quite deliberate or did they accidentally do that too? Do you have a direct or indirect relationship with microsoft perchance or just missed it in TFA maybe?
Ok, after 5 days I think we can safley describe Pete as a muppet given the total inability of anyone to describe a meaningful difference between member function and method either dfinitionally or in understanding by a desired audience. (Arguably those who understand the latter are a proper superset of the former).
The C++ community default hostility to everyone always really sucks. Useless, counter-productive pedantry forms part of this - NOT the parent is has been polite. Yes I'm being hostile, to Pete, who does not exist. Bjarne does, he likes belittling people in public. The C++ community is not hostile to him about doing it. Should some of us be doing that sometimes?
Would Pete get made fun of if he couldn't explain the difference between a member function and a method and why this distinction matters in C++ more than using the term understood everywhere else?
So the first waymo to get to this less used road to john’s will not have the data rather than every waymo that travels down a new highway, that then becomes a problem if it rains.
One car with an issue of first coincides with rain on a less used road?
“Something you know will NOT work” Is what is written right on the page. You quote it without the “not” wTH? Kernel mods won’t work much longer if they still work at all. Gotta find something else. What? Let’s see. Won’t be kernel mods.
Doesn’t make much sense to see this level of non comprehension of plain English. There’s no point talking against it what i say makes no difference if you read the opposite. Maybe this is convo with AI? Dunno.
"Quotes" of something not said directly that you are quoting is always bad. Quotes containing a summary that is entirely false are even worse. Don't do that.
You can try to deal with cheating as chess.com and others _do_, or you can do something you know will not work. Kernel mods for chess.com would be stupid. Their anti-cheat strategy involves zero windows kernel mods. That is how it will go for all online gaming if it hasn't already. So use something else.
Windows kernel modules won't work much longer if they even still do. Pretending they will, doing nothing to stop cheating is a a nihilistic, give up, faintly ridiculous attitude.
Look down that list of winners and the list of top finishers for two decades prior to Armstrong and the amount of doping among them that we actually found about and seriously try to make the case that Armstrong is the reason for "cheat or don't bother showing up."