but this sounds to me like an additional call to, as a species, get our environmental practices under control and stop 'instinctifying' flora and fauna at a breakneck pace. With findings like this, I have to wonder how many illness-treating, disease-defeating compounds we may have sent into oblivion by killing off the plants, animals, and insects which produced them.
Your idiotic approach is based on very poor understanding of how much it costs to deal with people. Preventing people from getting sick is far cheaper and more effective than replacing sick people.
Corporations, (and arguably, humans in general), tend to favour 'short term gain for long term pain' rather than the other way around.
This is also why my workplace provides a free doctor, physio, gym, and additional annual leave.
You are fortunate to work for a company with a modicum of foresight. However, if some new whizz-bang CEO came along with a (real or imagined) mandate to cut costs, I suspect those perqs you mentioned would be among the first things axed. Shareholders are much more impressed by year-over-year gains, (or even quarter-over-quarter), than they are by a five-year or ten-year forecast.
Every person freed from mundane repetitive tasks easily performed by machines is a person who is free to contribute to the intellectual and spiritual growth of mankind! A future where everyone is not required to work just to survive is a bright future for the human race.
I'm pretty sure you're trolling, but I'll bite anyway, with this FTFY: "A future where everyone has no opportunity to work in order to survive, and has no other means with which to secure the necessities of survival, is a hellish future for the human race.
What makes you think the owners of all the businesses that employ all those robots will willingly support the rest of humankind? Do you really think they'll pay living wages even to those able "to contribute to the intellectual and spiritual growth of mankind"? What about those who aren't able to do so? Can you really see Roman Mir giving a portion of the profits of his business to unemployed and unemployable people, even though the raw materials which he uses in his products come from an Earth which in a moral sense is owned in common by all of humanity?
The story is newsworthy, but msmash should have given TFS a different title than TFA. I think VERY few people on Slashdot will rush out to buy one of these things, and probably the majority here are at least a little bit insulted at being implicitly lumped in with Windows Magazine subscribers and other such MS fanbois.
As for the CloudBook mentioned in the article, I'm guessing it will have all the spying and advertising of Windows 10, PLUS the additional vulnerability and privacy loss associated with all your everything being stored on Microsoft servers. Now that's what I call an enticement - NOT! I won't own one of these at any price - not unless I can entirely eliminate whatever Microsoft OS / software is on it and install Linux, or unless bits and pieces of the hardware turn out to be useful for other projects.
I guess Microsoft never gets tired of copying other companies' ideas, being late to the party, shouting "me too! me too!", and then writing off losses on also-ran products that fail to gain any worthwhile market share. But who knows - maybe all those uncritical chumps who make shit like Facebook so successful, will give this product their blessing and help ensure that the scourge from Redmond remains profitable and plagues us all for a little while longer.
Man, came here looking for Brazil, no mentions so far. I hope everyone takes the time to see this film.
Agreed - as long as you're talking about one of the versions with the real ending, not the sanitized bullshit happy ending that Gilliam fought so hard to bury.
Although I recommend Brazil highly, I've only seen it once; it was one of a handful of movies with such strong emotional impacts that I've been reluctant to watch them a second time.
... some local entrepreneur will decide that bringing good internet in a town of 20.000 in bumfuck rural america is profitable in two years and will bite the bullet. he will then be bought by another entrepreneur who's servicing the slightly bigger town next door, and soon you'll have competition.
Yes, you'll have competition - until there are only a few big players left forming an oligopoly that is the antithesis of a 'free market'. That's the thing that free marketards don't get - it doesn't STAY free. And no, don't trot out that old 'if the big players abuse the market someone else will come along to compete' BS. Anyone who comes along to challenge the oligopoly, either gets squashed by the greater resources and deeper pockets of the incumbents, or becomes big and abusive in the process, thereby joining the oligopoly. When for-profit companies get past a certain size, it's almost impossible to bring them down without regulation that has the force of law. (And when laws are purchased by big incumbents, even that's not an option - see TFS). Also, customers in a free market have no power to KEEP that market free unless they get their shit together and act collectively to boycott abusers consistently, for a long enough time to deplete the abusers' war chests. That almost NEVER happens.
... a free market works well in the rest of the world, why not in america?
... you reach the point where you wonder if it becomes possible to understand how to ensure they are being fair...
We seem utterly unable to solve this problem even with the current (allegedly) human banksters - I'm not so sure it will be significantly different with AI running the markets. Also, this is but one tiny portion of the grief that might lie ahead of us if AI becomes ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent. We don't need to worry about AI in the financial sector - we need worry about AI, period.
That's a terrific idea, and I'd be there in a heartbeat. Not just coffee shops, but also pubs. With the addition of some battery packs of reasonable capacity, the idea could be extended to public spaces, and perhaps even to food courts in shopping malls. Pop-up BBS events!
In densely populated areas, this idea could also become usefully subversive. Connections made between those local networks could form a mesh network - an open, democratic, providerless alternative to the Internet. That's definitely getting away from the retro spirit of a pure BBS, but it's still an interesting thought.
isn't the nostalgia angle. I like that it could morph into a viable, minimalist alternative to the corporately-owned, advertising-funded, privacy-annihilating crapcake that the Internet has become. It would be pretty tough for anyone to monetize BBSes in any significant way when they're running on low-bandwidth connections and have relatively small membership numbers. BBSes and modems would restore some fun and some adventure to the act of going online. There's one big difference, right there in those two words: 'going online' as a conscious decision, rather than 'being online' as a normalized state of existence.
Plus, wouldn't it be kind of 'modern steampunk' to have a modem app on a phone or tablet so you could 'dial in' to a BBS? Oh, wait - I guess that would require the Internetz again. Oh well...
I'm not sure it matters. Such arguments are made quite a bit these days and deserve critical responses, if not for the benefit of the troll who likely knows better, then for those who read his comments.
Be honest now - did you really think AC was trolling, rather than simply using sarcasm to make his point? Or did you just type so fast that your comment outpaced that whooshing sound?
Is that both of these projects goals seem to be to REDUCE choice and diversity in the open source ecosystem...
There's no "seem to be" about it - it was pretty much explicitly stated by Schaller: "...I have -- for a long time -- felt that the general level of investment in the Linux desktop has not been great enough to justify the plethora of Linux desktops out there... This change should also make life easier for ISV...". I would translate that as "All your desktop environments are belong to us, and WE will decide what DE's you are allowed to choose from, (if indeed we even allow you a choice), because we want to make life easier for independent software vendors, because business".
Also, take note of those flavour-of-the-month management phrases: "sharing a bigger set of technologies", "convergence of efforts", "share one desktop technology stack", "all pulling in the same direction", and "more clear target". With all that PHB-speak, Christian Schaller is starting to sound like Satya Nadella.
Now I feel all warm 'n' fuzzy inside, because the operating system I adopted when I got sick of Windows, seems poised to become the next Windows. Yay.
Meanwhile the handful of grown-ups who remember what Unix is don't spend their time focused on the desktop widgets, they focus on the CLI and on C programming - where the action is at for geeks of merit.
Yeah, sure - because being a 'grown-up' and a 'geek of merit' is the exclusive province of programmers and CLI gurus, right? Asshat...
Save your "but everyone is using Linux & Ubuntu these days, nobody cares about you BSD greybeards" comment. I'd point out that it's both Argumentum ad numerum and Argumentum ad populum, but then I'd have to explain logic and translate the Latin.
Oh my! You've supplied TWO argumenta - THREE if you count the implied argumentum ad hominem of which your entire comment reeks! Elitist, much? I hope you don't suffer from faintness or nosebleeds as a result of the rarefied stratum in which you (imagine) you live!
FTS: "... questions under consideration included... how (visa applicants) view the treatment of women in society".
Methinks VP Pence would fail that test miserably. His anti-abortion stance favours a law that would even prevent even rape victims from aborting the fetuses fathered by their rapists. He made a (thankfully unsuccessful) attempt to enact legislation forcing women to pay for funerals for the blood and tissue ejected when they miscarry. Now that's what I call a positive and respectful attitude towards women in society!
As for the US government becoming an even creepier Peeping Tom when it comes to probing visitors' privacy, I no longer care. I was already saying "No!" when it came to visiting the States, and now I'm saying "Hell no!", so this doesn't represent a very big change. I don't know why Trump is wasting the money that US taxpayers, (not Mexico), will pay to build his damned wall. He's already erecting a pretty effective virtual wall - lots of people around the world are staying away because of the antics of the knuckle-dragging thug that runs the place. If he keeps it up, even the most desperate Mexicans may feel safer with the drug lords, corruption, and abject poverty in their native country than they would in the land of der Trumpenfuhrer.
FTS: "... experiments found that operators monitoring screens reportedly maintained peak performance for 20 hours -- rather than experience the usual drop-off in concentration after 20 minutes.
I've read that TES helps people with ADD / ADHD - it's good to see experimental results from a different field of application that suggest it may be true. It just might be time for me to build my own TES device.
I was thinking that while Gravity says "the human body is 'the airframe'...", gravity says this is a bad idea. But on further reflection I realized that if something goes wrong, it may be better to be alone up there with a parachute already strapped to you, than to be trapped inside an airplane with no 'chute.
On the other hand, if the suit fails while you're below parachute height but still a couple dozen metres or more in the air, break out the butter, 'cause you're toast. Ironman aside, there is no suit of armor that will save you from the rapid deceleration at the end of such a fall.
... Yeah, you're going to have to have a tough hide because there are a lot of no-lifers here who...
That's an interesting post, with a few potentially worthwhile points among the insults and the assertions of 'facts' not in evidence. It's too bad you posted AC - it diminishes both your credibility, and the credibility of your argument. Then again, maybe you had no choice but to post AC - perhaps you're a paid Slashdot shill? Or even a Slashdot editor? I guess we'll never know...
I liked being able to skim the summaries quickly to decide what I wanted to read. Clicking on titles to get summaries did not take long to piss me off.
You're absolutely right - it's just too aggravating to click on every damned subject to see the summary. As soon as I saw that pain-in-the-ass 'collapsed by default' format, I was afraid they were doing it to make room for more advertising, and that we'd still be stuck with it after April Fool's was done and gone. Sometimes I hate being right. Worse, the clueless designers left it set up so that clicking on the number of comments still doesn't actually take you to the comments unless you've already clicked on the subject line to display TFS. So even if the subject line alone is interesting enough to warrant a look, I'm still two clicks away from both the summary and the comments. Fucktards.
I might be willing to put up with it if the quality of stories and comments hadn't fallen so far; but given the general decline here, this extra bit of Beta-like aggro is enough to put me over the edge. If they haven't fixed it by a week tomorrow, then I'm done with Slashdot.
Of course, the security on police kill drones will be so good that they can't possibly be taken over by hackers. Innocent citizens will never he injured or killed by hijacked police drones, and if that does by some remote chance happen, the police will certainly not deny responsibility or disclaim liability. So I guess it's all good.
This new Slashdot format better be a fucking prank.
I just assumed it was. When I checked in here at some time around 23:30 last night the site was what I've come to expect. When I reloaded at about 00:30 I noticed the change. But on further thought I'm not so sure... First, it looks more like a Hallowe'en prank than April Fool's. Second, I'm in the Eastern time zone; so if it is a prank, then they've gone to some trouble to load the prank version of the site selectively according to the user's location.
Even if it is a prank, I'm afraid they might be using it to test the waters. I'm guessing they want to maintain the 'collapsed by default' format so they can shoehorn in still more of the advertising that's been getting increasingly obtrusive of late. And if stories remain collapsed by default, and I have to click on every single subject to read TFS, with no configuration option to change that, then I'm outta here.
Which one wins the race? The USB kill stick as it does its powerful best to fry your MoBo, or the Python code trying to send out a network message before some critical component coughs up smoke? My money's on the kill stick.
Ya gotta love it when corporations say "we have no plans to harm kittens" or some such, and ya gotta love it even more when the (way too many for my liking) rubes among the citizenry believe that they won't harm kittens.
If they really meant what they want us to believe they mean, then they would simply say "we promise not to harm kittens, ever". Unless and until they make that kind of commitment, and stop making weaselly references to 'having no plans', their words are utterly meaningless. For that, they may have the steam off my piss - and fuck all else.
Just who is losing this alleged war? Everybody and his dog these days seems to be serving up some manner of self-serving propaganda. And if the 'we' she's talking about is all of society, then of course she's correct, because any entity that goes to war with itself loses. But this is not news; I'm pretty sure 'broken telephone' was a thing millennia before telephones even existed, and I'm virtually certain that much of the 'breakage' was an intentional part of advancing a variety of agendas.
The same news seeming to come from multiple independent sources is not a recent phenomenon. Even the Internet represents only a difference of degree, and not of kind, in that both information and disinformation travel faster and more broadly. The real difference between now and centuries ago, is the success of a public education regime founded specifically to create followers rather than leaders. As a result, most of society is both stupid, and addicted to novelty and spectacle. A lack of critical faculties and a need for ongoing distraction does NOT produce any effective immune response to the 'virus' of fake news.
I know I may sound like one of those Infowars conspiracy nuts; but if you read some John Taylor Gatto, and look at a few of the sources he quotes, you may realize that I'm really not foaming at the mouth and muttering about the sky falling. Alternatively, read a short story called Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, and ask yourself if there isn't a sharp, hard grain of truth in his satire.
Seriously though, some manufacturers will keep selling phones with unlocked bootloaders as long as we nerds keep telling people not to buy phones with locked bootloaders. So GET THE WORD OUT.
I keep trying to get the word out. But even among my (admittedly few) nerd friends, unlocked bootloaders are uncommon. One friend uses his personal phone so seldom that it's not worth his effort, and he has no choice in his work phone. Another two have either dumb phones or feature phones - they're probably the most sensible ones. Another likes his old Blackberry, while yet another is all Facebooked up and doesn't care about privacy anyway. As for non-nerd friends, I can't even get them to run ad blockers in their browsers, and they are all on Facebook as well; they don't know what a bootloader is, and wouldn't care if they did. I figure the consumer market is like politics - we get both the products, and the governments, that our neighbours deserve.
On a different but related note, do you ever get the sense that 'Snow Crash' might be a little bit prophetic?
Slashdot Mirror
... stop 'instinctifying' flora ...
Damn - that should have been "extinctifying". That's what I get for posting before I'm fully awake.
but this sounds to me like an additional call to, as a species, get our environmental practices under control and stop 'instinctifying' flora and fauna at a breakneck pace. With findings like this, I have to wonder how many illness-treating, disease-defeating compounds we may have sent into oblivion by killing off the plants, animals, and insects which produced them.
Your idiotic approach is based on very poor understanding of how much it costs to deal with people. Preventing people from getting sick is far cheaper and more effective than replacing sick people.
Corporations, (and arguably, humans in general), tend to favour 'short term gain for long term pain' rather than the other way around.
This is also why my workplace provides a free doctor, physio, gym, and additional annual leave.
You are fortunate to work for a company with a modicum of foresight. However, if some new whizz-bang CEO came along with a (real or imagined) mandate to cut costs, I suspect those perqs you mentioned would be among the first things axed. Shareholders are much more impressed by year-over-year gains, (or even quarter-over-quarter), than they are by a five-year or ten-year forecast.
Every person freed from mundane repetitive tasks easily performed by machines is a person who is free to contribute to the intellectual and spiritual growth of mankind! A future where everyone is not required to work just to survive is a bright future for the human race.
I'm pretty sure you're trolling, but I'll bite anyway, with this FTFY: "A future where everyone has no opportunity to work in order to survive, and has no other means with which to secure the necessities of survival, is a hellish future for the human race.
What makes you think the owners of all the businesses that employ all those robots will willingly support the rest of humankind? Do you really think they'll pay living wages even to those able "to contribute to the intellectual and spiritual growth of mankind"? What about those who aren't able to do so? Can you really see Roman Mir giving a portion of the profits of his business to unemployed and unemployable people, even though the raw materials which he uses in his products come from an Earth which in a moral sense is owned in common by all of humanity?
"We're the only ones allowed to pwn our customers", says Microsoft to the NSA.
The story is newsworthy, but msmash should have given TFS a different title than TFA. I think VERY few people on Slashdot will rush out to buy one of these things, and probably the majority here are at least a little bit insulted at being implicitly lumped in with Windows Magazine subscribers and other such MS fanbois.
As for the CloudBook mentioned in the article, I'm guessing it will have all the spying and advertising of Windows 10, PLUS the additional vulnerability and privacy loss associated with all your everything being stored on Microsoft servers. Now that's what I call an enticement - NOT! I won't own one of these at any price - not unless I can entirely eliminate whatever Microsoft OS / software is on it and install Linux, or unless bits and pieces of the hardware turn out to be useful for other projects.
I guess Microsoft never gets tired of copying other companies' ideas, being late to the party, shouting "me too! me too!", and then writing off losses on also-ran products that fail to gain any worthwhile market share. But who knows - maybe all those uncritical chumps who make shit like Facebook so successful, will give this product their blessing and help ensure that the scourge from Redmond remains profitable and plagues us all for a little while longer.
Man, came here looking for Brazil, no mentions so far. I hope everyone takes the time to see this film.
Agreed - as long as you're talking about one of the versions with the real ending, not the sanitized bullshit happy ending that Gilliam fought so hard to bury.
Although I recommend Brazil highly, I've only seen it once; it was one of a handful of movies with such strong emotional impacts that I've been reluctant to watch them a second time.
... some local entrepreneur will decide that bringing good internet in a town of 20.000 in bumfuck rural america is profitable in two years and will bite the bullet. he will then be bought by another entrepreneur who's servicing the slightly bigger town next door, and soon you'll have competition.
Yes, you'll have competition - until there are only a few big players left forming an oligopoly that is the antithesis of a 'free market'. That's the thing that free marketards don't get - it doesn't STAY free. And no, don't trot out that old 'if the big players abuse the market someone else will come along to compete' BS. Anyone who comes along to challenge the oligopoly, either gets squashed by the greater resources and deeper pockets of the incumbents, or becomes big and abusive in the process, thereby joining the oligopoly. When for-profit companies get past a certain size, it's almost impossible to bring them down without regulation that has the force of law. (And when laws are purchased by big incumbents, even that's not an option - see TFS). Also, customers in a free market have no power to KEEP that market free unless they get their shit together and act collectively to boycott abusers consistently, for a long enough time to deplete the abusers' war chests. That almost NEVER happens.
... a free market works well in the rest of the world, why not in america?
Citation, please.
... you reach the point where you wonder if it becomes possible to understand how to ensure they are being fair ...
We seem utterly unable to solve this problem even with the current (allegedly) human banksters - I'm not so sure it will be significantly different with AI running the markets. Also, this is but one tiny portion of the grief that might lie ahead of us if AI becomes ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipotent. We don't need to worry about AI in the financial sector - we need worry about AI, period.
That's a terrific idea, and I'd be there in a heartbeat. Not just coffee shops, but also pubs. With the addition of some battery packs of reasonable capacity, the idea could be extended to public spaces, and perhaps even to food courts in shopping malls. Pop-up BBS events!
In densely populated areas, this idea could also become usefully subversive. Connections made between those local networks could form a mesh network - an open, democratic, providerless alternative to the Internet. That's definitely getting away from the retro spirit of a pure BBS, but it's still an interesting thought.
isn't the nostalgia angle. I like that it could morph into a viable, minimalist alternative to the corporately-owned, advertising-funded, privacy-annihilating crapcake that the Internet has become. It would be pretty tough for anyone to monetize BBSes in any significant way when they're running on low-bandwidth connections and have relatively small membership numbers. BBSes and modems would restore some fun and some adventure to the act of going online. There's one big difference, right there in those two words: 'going online' as a conscious decision, rather than 'being online' as a normalized state of existence.
Plus, wouldn't it be kind of 'modern steampunk' to have a modem app on a phone or tablet so you could 'dial in' to a BBS? Oh, wait - I guess that would require the Internetz again. Oh well...
I'm not sure it matters. Such arguments are made quite a bit these days and deserve critical responses, if not for the benefit of the troll who likely knows better, then for those who read his comments.
Be honest now - did you really think AC was trolling, rather than simply using sarcasm to make his point? Or did you just type so fast that your comment outpaced that whooshing sound?
Is that both of these projects goals seem to be to REDUCE choice and diversity in the open source ecosystem...
There's no "seem to be" about it - it was pretty much explicitly stated by Schaller: "...I have -- for a long time -- felt that the general level of investment in the Linux desktop has not been great enough to justify the plethora of Linux desktops out there ... This change should also make life easier for ISV...". I would translate that as "All your desktop environments are belong to us, and WE will decide what DE's you are allowed to choose from, (if indeed we even allow you a choice), because we want to make life easier for independent software vendors, because business".
Also, take note of those flavour-of-the-month management phrases: "sharing a bigger set of technologies", "convergence of efforts", "share one desktop technology stack", "all pulling in the same direction", and "more clear target". With all that PHB-speak, Christian Schaller is starting to sound like Satya Nadella.
Now I feel all warm 'n' fuzzy inside, because the operating system I adopted when I got sick of Windows, seems poised to become the next Windows. Yay.
Meanwhile the handful of grown-ups who remember what Unix is don't spend their time focused on the desktop widgets, they focus on the CLI and on C programming - where the action is at for geeks of merit.
Yeah, sure - because being a 'grown-up' and a 'geek of merit' is the exclusive province of programmers and CLI gurus, right? Asshat...
Save your "but everyone is using Linux & Ubuntu these days, nobody cares about you BSD greybeards" comment. I'd point out that it's both Argumentum ad numerum and Argumentum ad populum, but then I'd have to explain logic and translate the Latin.
Oh my! You've supplied TWO argumenta - THREE if you count the implied argumentum ad hominem of which your entire comment reeks! Elitist, much? I hope you don't suffer from faintness or nosebleeds as a result of the rarefied stratum in which you (imagine) you live!
FTS: "... questions under consideration included... how (visa applicants) view the treatment of women in society".
Methinks VP Pence would fail that test miserably. His anti-abortion stance favours a law that would even prevent even rape victims from aborting the fetuses fathered by their rapists. He made a (thankfully unsuccessful) attempt to enact legislation forcing women to pay for funerals for the blood and tissue ejected when they miscarry. Now that's what I call a positive and respectful attitude towards women in society!
As for the US government becoming an even creepier Peeping Tom when it comes to probing visitors' privacy, I no longer care. I was already saying "No!" when it came to visiting the States, and now I'm saying "Hell no!", so this doesn't represent a very big change. I don't know why Trump is wasting the money that US taxpayers, (not Mexico), will pay to build his damned wall. He's already erecting a pretty effective virtual wall - lots of people around the world are staying away because of the antics of the knuckle-dragging thug that runs the place. If he keeps it up, even the most desperate Mexicans may feel safer with the drug lords, corruption, and abject poverty in their native country than they would in the land of der Trumpenfuhrer.
FTS: "... experiments found that operators monitoring screens reportedly maintained peak performance for 20 hours -- rather than experience the usual drop-off in concentration after 20 minutes.
I've read that TES helps people with ADD / ADHD - it's good to see experimental results from a different field of application that suggest it may be true. It just might be time for me to build my own TES device.
I was thinking that while Gravity says "the human body is 'the airframe'...", gravity says this is a bad idea. But on further reflection I realized that if something goes wrong, it may be better to be alone up there with a parachute already strapped to you, than to be trapped inside an airplane with no 'chute.
On the other hand, if the suit fails while you're below parachute height but still a couple dozen metres or more in the air, break out the butter, 'cause you're toast. Ironman aside, there is no suit of armor that will save you from the rapid deceleration at the end of such a fall.
... Yeah, you're going to have to have a tough hide because there are a lot of no-lifers here who ...
That's an interesting post, with a few potentially worthwhile points among the insults and the assertions of 'facts' not in evidence. It's too bad you posted AC - it diminishes both your credibility, and the credibility of your argument. Then again, maybe you had no choice but to post AC - perhaps you're a paid Slashdot shill? Or even a Slashdot editor? I guess we'll never know...
I liked being able to skim the summaries quickly to decide what I wanted to read. Clicking on titles to get summaries did not take long to piss me off.
You're absolutely right - it's just too aggravating to click on every damned subject to see the summary. As soon as I saw that pain-in-the-ass 'collapsed by default' format, I was afraid they were doing it to make room for more advertising, and that we'd still be stuck with it after April Fool's was done and gone. Sometimes I hate being right. Worse, the clueless designers left it set up so that clicking on the number of comments still doesn't actually take you to the comments unless you've already clicked on the subject line to display TFS. So even if the subject line alone is interesting enough to warrant a look, I'm still two clicks away from both the summary and the comments. Fucktards.
I might be willing to put up with it if the quality of stories and comments hadn't fallen so far; but given the general decline here, this extra bit of Beta-like aggro is enough to put me over the edge. If they haven't fixed it by a week tomorrow, then I'm done with Slashdot.
Of course, the security on police kill drones will be so good that they can't possibly be taken over by hackers. Innocent citizens will never he injured or killed by hijacked police drones, and if that does by some remote chance happen, the police will certainly not deny responsibility or disclaim liability. So I guess it's all good.
This new Slashdot format better be a fucking prank.
I just assumed it was. When I checked in here at some time around 23:30 last night the site was what I've come to expect. When I reloaded at about 00:30 I noticed the change. But on further thought I'm not so sure... First, it looks more like a Hallowe'en prank than April Fool's. Second, I'm in the Eastern time zone; so if it is a prank, then they've gone to some trouble to load the prank version of the site selectively according to the user's location.
Even if it is a prank, I'm afraid they might be using it to test the waters. I'm guessing they want to maintain the 'collapsed by default' format so they can shoehorn in still more of the advertising that's been getting increasingly obtrusive of late. And if stories remain collapsed by default, and I have to click on every single subject to read TFS, with no configuration option to change that, then I'm outta here.
Which one wins the race? The USB kill stick as it does its powerful best to fry your MoBo, or the Python code trying to send out a network message before some critical component coughs up smoke? My money's on the kill stick.
Ya gotta love it when corporations say "we have no plans to harm kittens" or some such, and ya gotta love it even more when the (way too many for my liking) rubes among the citizenry believe that they won't harm kittens.
If they really meant what they want us to believe they mean, then they would simply say "we promise not to harm kittens, ever". Unless and until they make that kind of commitment, and stop making weaselly references to 'having no plans', their words are utterly meaningless. For that, they may have the steam off my piss - and fuck all else.
Just who is losing this alleged war? Everybody and his dog these days seems to be serving up some manner of self-serving propaganda. And if the 'we' she's talking about is all of society, then of course she's correct, because any entity that goes to war with itself loses. But this is not news; I'm pretty sure 'broken telephone' was a thing millennia before telephones even existed, and I'm virtually certain that much of the 'breakage' was an intentional part of advancing a variety of agendas.
The same news seeming to come from multiple independent sources is not a recent phenomenon. Even the Internet represents only a difference of degree, and not of kind, in that both information and disinformation travel faster and more broadly. The real difference between now and centuries ago, is the success of a public education regime founded specifically to create followers rather than leaders. As a result, most of society is both stupid, and addicted to novelty and spectacle. A lack of critical faculties and a need for ongoing distraction does NOT produce any effective immune response to the 'virus' of fake news.
I know I may sound like one of those Infowars conspiracy nuts; but if you read some John Taylor Gatto, and look at a few of the sources he quotes, you may realize that I'm really not foaming at the mouth and muttering about the sky falling. Alternatively, read a short story called Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, and ask yourself if there isn't a sharp, hard grain of truth in his satire.
Seriously though, some manufacturers will keep selling phones with unlocked bootloaders as long as we nerds keep telling people not to buy phones with locked bootloaders. So GET THE WORD OUT.
I keep trying to get the word out. But even among my (admittedly few) nerd friends, unlocked bootloaders are uncommon. One friend uses his personal phone so seldom that it's not worth his effort, and he has no choice in his work phone. Another two have either dumb phones or feature phones - they're probably the most sensible ones. Another likes his old Blackberry, while yet another is all Facebooked up and doesn't care about privacy anyway. As for non-nerd friends, I can't even get them to run ad blockers in their browsers, and they are all on Facebook as well; they don't know what a bootloader is, and wouldn't care if they did. I figure the consumer market is like politics - we get both the products, and the governments, that our neighbours deserve.
On a different but related note, do you ever get the sense that 'Snow Crash' might be a little bit prophetic?