I'm quite disappointed... no Isaac Asimov / I, Robot reference in all the discussion? Or Arthur C. Clarke with 2001 and HAL? People don't know their classics any more?
A most interesting take was Iain M Banks' in the Culture series, with AIs really herding most of humanity, but leaving them their freedom.
As a once-user of cassettes, I'm astounded anyone would buy a record on tape - I only ever used them to record music from other media (straight from a radio receiver, a CD deck, sometimes another cassette).
And I used what I was told were high-quality tapes - Maxell XL II or later Maxell XL II-S.
Matter of fact, I might still have some empty ones around... certainly, those with records are still there. I guess I'll pick them out for some memories... having recently put the old hi-fi set back into service (needed some work on the amplifier's potentiometers, otherwise still fine - we took pride in those pieces of equipment).
Playing MP3s off the computer just isn't the same.
If you're in a booth, with other people around (voting officers and other members of the public), you'll be able to vote on your own without interference, secretly. Taking a picture of your filled-out voting bulletin as some sort of proof is a no-go (punishable in many places).
What if you're wherever, voting electronically - who's to say you won't be coerced (e.g. by a violent spouse) to vote in a certain way? Who's to say it's even you who's voting, not somebody else who's taken your credentials from you (say, personnel from a caring facility voting in place of the elderly)?
Voting by correspondence falls largely into the same categories, it should be kept to a minimum, not extended, for the reasons above.
The Firefox browser is far older and can trace it's origins back to Mosaic.
Not quite... Internet Explorer was Mosaic's bastard child. Netscape, Mozillas predecessor, was independently developed. Chromium is descended from webkit, in turn coming from the KDE project's khtml.
Yes, I'm old enough to have used Mosaic myself, back in 1993.
If I recall correctly, Windows ME was really bad and irrelevant.
Our support folks recommended that everyone wait a year for Windows XP. Irrelevant.
One department in my lab played with it a bit, just to see if their Windows product ran OK it. They gave up on it, because of constant BSODs. Bad.
Actually, anyone with any sense having to use Windows (yes, I also was on Linux back then, dual-booting with OS/2 Warp 3), went with Windows 2000. IMHO one of the best releases of Windows - NT with decent performance and sensible GUI, no activation yet (came with XP), none of the instabilities of the DOS-based versions (i.e. Win95/Win98 or ME), and of course no telemetry yet.
There may not be air / wind in space, but what about the one destination for BFR that's being talked about so much - i.e. Mars? There's an atmosphere (thin maybe), there's wind, there are sandstorms. What will those do to a freshly landed BFR not weighted down with loads of fuel?
While it may not be like in "The Martian", some calculations are warrented to be on the safe side.
Sure can - if you invest in a tracker. With that 50mm lens even a simple mechanical, wind-up tracker will do, provided you do a proper north alignment. For the 300mm lens, you'll have to go for a better model, something like a SkyWatcher StarAdventurer. There's some things to watch over, mirror lockup, ISO settings etc., lots of post-processing, but it is perfectly doable. You'll have to invest quite some time though, it's not point and shoot.
What do you mean by "hit ignition"? If you're talking about achieving fusion, it's been done ages ago - in "simple" farnsworth fusor, in tokamaks, in stellarators. The fusion reaction has even been kept on for quite some seconds. They might even have reached break-even (i.e. produced more energy from fusion than has been pumped into the reactor).
Now, what nobody has achieved is to actually make use of the energy. That's not even on the roadmap for ITER, but would be for its successor DEMO.
As for the NIF, has anyone believed they were going for anything other than star wars (i.e. developing the tech for high-power lasers) and nuclear research (simulating nuclear explosions)? Considering the design, I highly doubt it ever was meant for energy production.
I find it humorous that you are discussing this topic in a forum that has been designed specifically to silence ideas that fall outside acceptable groupthink parameters. Censorship is what groups really want, as long as its just limited to their personal flavor of it. Just like every other group. Hence the problem, of which this particular venue cannot speak to as being anything other than a part of that problem.
I see the/. moderation system as the equivalent of an email spam filter. I don't need nor want to see goatse or whatever bullshit, I also don't want to get flooded by the russian troll army. What I'm here for is the gold nuggets, rare as they are. Signal-to-noise is bad enough, without any kind of filtering things would simply be unusable and worthless. Call it censorship if you like, but that's not my definition of this term.
In my case, it can be a normally less-than-10-minutes drive turning into half an hour. Which is what I'd need by foot. For commuters from abroad, a normal 30-45 min drive can easily turn into several hours of being stuck on the highway or country road, which happens all too often. Traffic really is at a breaking point - the least hiccup leads to monster jams. And it's literally 200k such commuters, so it really adds up.
First off - the state already pays for something like 80% of the cost of public transport. Going 100% won't make much of a difference on the budget.
Traffic is indeed quite horrible, with all the commuting and street works. Luxembourg (which isn't only one city btw) is by far the most active economic center of the region, and so pulls in a lot of workers who live up to 2h (in normal conditions) driving away. It's also gotten a lot worse these past decades.
Public transport isn't very effective now on many lines, because it will suffer from works too (trains as well as buses), buses will be stuck in traffic just as much as cars. And "people incidents", let's not forget those. Lots of economic areas are badly covered, as the public transport lines are mostly aligned for Luxembourg City only - if you want to go somewhere else, good luck, count in a lot more time. To get people to switch from private cars to public transport would take a massively better quality, different lines... which isn't really on the to-do list as far as "we the people" can see.
Making things free won't automatically improve the quality of public transport, thus... things will probably remain as they are.
There's also the impression that something free isn't worth anything, some people will think they're entitled, will show poor respect to personnel etc., so we're really not that happy about this upcoming change, fearing that quality will actually go down.
Not much impact for me anyway - I live close enough to work for walking, which I do when weather won't permit the use of the motorbike (much easier to find parking space that using a car!).
I still don't have the ISDN service out here the industry was subsidized to provide years ago. In fact, the phone service theoretically available out here doesn't even reliably support dial-up.
Seriously? What kind of 3rd-world country is that? North Korea?
With even ISDN being decommissioned around here (western Europe), I guess we should petition our telecom providers to donate their old stuff, maybe Orange Guy will even consider is as NATO payment.
Sheesh!
And please don't tell us about low-density areas, Scandinavia has those, and they still have decent connections.
What makes you say a "professional" driver is any better? From my sole visit to the USofA back in 1991, I distinctly recall a bus driver who couldn't handle the buses stick shift. Seriously? Any youth having passed the (automobile, not bus) driving test home (in Europe) would've fared better, if not legally. And this guy could legally have had a bus full of people killed.
I'm quite convinced that the more tech you build into the cars/buses/trucks/whatever, the less the driver will actually retain competence to drive them. Just have a look at all those news about people following a satnav system into a river or somesuch... just don't ask them to read a map or follow road signs. It's quite the same with all the other helps... and physics aren't laws you can break.
The guy who administered my driving test took points off for shoulder checking. "You won't be able to do that when you're old." And yes I used my mirrors first.
Sounds like that guy should be fired from that job, he's very obviously incompetent. Also, he should be forced to drive a motorbike - he'll learn to curse all those people not looking over their shoulder (which he passed) before changing lanes, at least until he'll have been killed by one of them.
Even if this works - the default should *always* be safety and privacy. Not spying. It seems most companies have willfully forgotten this.
For giggles, have a look at the GDPR notifications you get at different places. E.g. at engadget, I earlier today got presented with this. You get information on the cookies etc. they set/collect, and supposedly you should be able to modify settings... no, nope... you accept things the way they are or quit the page... which I did. No, I don't want any of that shit. If you don't want to be read, so be it.
Here, as with pretty much any statistic about Luxembourg, numbers are not comparable. Why? Well simply because half the working force cross the border every day, coming in from France, Belgium and Germany. If you factor those in, suddenly most statistics look much less interesting.
Where I live, this is solved by picking up the different bins on different dates. At my place, non-recyclable trash is collected on Tuesdays, plastics (bottles etc.) are picked up every 2nd Monday, organics are picked up on Fridays. No special trucks required.
There are containers for paper, glass and clothes in many places around the town, so you just deposit those there when you've collected a bunch.
Other recyclables get collected in a larger center - you drive there, deposit whatever it is (electronics, wood, metals, etc) in the proper bins. If you are in doubt which is right or for large or heavy stuff, you'll get help from the employees. They also accept still functional stuff you don't want to keep that anyone can then pick up.
Pretty much the only challenge is to have enough burnable stuff left in the non-recylables bin, for when it gets incinerated (for energy).
Stripping bare to text? Might just use one of the classics, like w3m, links, lynx.
Or while we're at it, telnet to port 80, pipe through openssl as neccesary?
No kidding though, I still regularly use w3m from the command line to circumvent "funny" JavaScript stuff used to block access if you visit a site "too often" (pay after limited use news sites), or just plain avoid all those pesky ads especially with pop-in video and such.
For you web developers out there, this is also a rather healthy test of your websites - if it won't properly deliver content in such a text browser, they will also suck from a search engine perspective, and probably from the usability side too. Obvious exemptions for picture or video oriented websites.
Then Slate does not conform to the GDPR, and are exposing themselves to being sued by european users. Acceptance for different kinds of use of data *must* be separate, and service *may not be denied* when only the minimum required for delivery of service is accepted (e.g. the online shop 3suisses using your address for delivering goods to you and invoicing you, but denied from selling your data to 3rd parties, where they used to make most of their money).
Oh well, Slate has a lot of company that way, few have bothered to implement GDPR properly so far. Of course, they'll cry a river when the fines start coming...
On the + side: the data they are not allowed to collect can't be leaked. Or it'll seriously bite them if they collect them anyway, and they get loose.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm quite disappointed... no Isaac Asimov / I, Robot reference in all the discussion? Or Arthur C. Clarke with 2001 and HAL? People don't know their classics any more?
A most interesting take was Iain M Banks' in the Culture series, with AIs really herding most of humanity, but leaving them their freedom.
As a once-user of cassettes, I'm astounded anyone would buy a record on tape - I only ever used them to record music from other media (straight from a radio receiver, a CD deck, sometimes another cassette).
And I used what I was told were high-quality tapes - Maxell XL II or later Maxell XL II-S.
Matter of fact, I might still have some empty ones around... certainly, those with records are still there. I guess I'll pick them out for some memories... having recently put the old hi-fi set back into service (needed some work on the amplifier's potentiometers, otherwise still fine - we took pride in those pieces of equipment).
Playing MP3s off the computer just isn't the same.
A vote is also supposed to be secret.
If you're in a booth, with other people around (voting officers and other members of the public), you'll be able to vote on your own without interference, secretly. Taking a picture of your filled-out voting bulletin as some sort of proof is a no-go (punishable in many places).
What if you're wherever, voting electronically - who's to say you won't be coerced (e.g. by a violent spouse) to vote in a certain way? Who's to say it's even you who's voting, not somebody else who's taken your credentials from you (say, personnel from a caring facility voting in place of the elderly)?
Voting by correspondence falls largely into the same categories, it should be kept to a minimum, not extended, for the reasons above.
You don't need to replace 100% of energy production. Start with not wasting energy as much!
... and Trump told the Raptor, "You're fired!"
S,cnr
The Firefox browser is far older and can trace it's origins back to Mosaic.
Not quite... Internet Explorer was Mosaic's bastard child. Netscape, Mozillas predecessor, was independently developed. Chromium is descended from webkit, in turn coming from the KDE project's khtml.
Yes, I'm old enough to have used Mosaic myself, back in 1993.
Was Windows ME really bad, or just irrelevant?
If I recall correctly, Windows ME was really bad and irrelevant.
Our support folks recommended that everyone wait a year for Windows XP. Irrelevant.
One department in my lab played with it a bit, just to see if their Windows product ran OK it. They gave up on it, because of constant BSODs. Bad.
Actually, anyone with any sense having to use Windows (yes, I also was on Linux back then, dual-booting with OS/2 Warp 3), went with Windows 2000. IMHO one of the best releases of Windows - NT with decent performance and sensible GUI, no activation yet (came with XP), none of the instabilities of the DOS-based versions (i.e. Win95/Win98 or ME), and of course no telemetry yet.
There may not be air / wind in space, but what about the one destination for BFR that's being talked about so much - i.e. Mars? There's an atmosphere (thin maybe), there's wind, there are sandstorms. What will those do to a freshly landed BFR not weighted down with loads of fuel?
While it may not be like in "The Martian", some calculations are warrented to be on the safe side.
What, did they recycle DECs Alpha processors for this application to warrant a "digital" logo on this story? Sheesh, kids these days...
Sure can - if you invest in a tracker. With that 50mm lens even a simple mechanical, wind-up tracker will do, provided you do a proper north alignment. For the 300mm lens, you'll have to go for a better model, something like a SkyWatcher StarAdventurer. There's some things to watch over, mirror lockup, ISO settings etc., lots of post-processing, but it is perfectly doable. You'll have to invest quite some time though, it's not point and shoot.
What do you mean by "hit ignition"? If you're talking about achieving fusion, it's been done ages ago - in "simple" farnsworth fusor, in tokamaks, in stellarators. The fusion reaction has even been kept on for quite some seconds. They might even have reached break-even (i.e. produced more energy from fusion than has been pumped into the reactor).
Now, what nobody has achieved is to actually make use of the energy. That's not even on the roadmap for ITER, but would be for its successor DEMO.
As for the NIF, has anyone believed they were going for anything other than star wars (i.e. developing the tech for high-power lasers) and nuclear research (simulating nuclear explosions)? Considering the design, I highly doubt it ever was meant for energy production.
I find it humorous that you are discussing this topic in a forum that has been designed specifically to silence ideas that fall outside acceptable groupthink parameters. Censorship is what groups really want, as long as its just limited to their personal flavor of it. Just like every other group. Hence the problem, of which this particular venue cannot speak to as being anything other than a part of that problem.
I see the /. moderation system as the equivalent of an email spam filter. I don't need nor want to see goatse or whatever bullshit, I also don't want to get flooded by the russian troll army. What I'm here for is the gold nuggets, rare as they are. Signal-to-noise is bad enough, without any kind of filtering things would simply be unusable and worthless. Call it censorship if you like, but that's not my definition of this term.
In my case, it can be a normally less-than-10-minutes drive turning into half an hour. Which is what I'd need by foot. For commuters from abroad, a normal 30-45 min drive can easily turn into several hours of being stuck on the highway or country road, which happens all too often. Traffic really is at a breaking point - the least hiccup leads to monster jams. And it's literally 200k such commuters, so it really adds up.
First off - the state already pays for something like 80% of the cost of public transport. Going 100% won't make much of a difference on the budget.
Traffic is indeed quite horrible, with all the commuting and street works. Luxembourg (which isn't only one city btw) is by far the most active economic center of the region, and so pulls in a lot of workers who live up to 2h (in normal conditions) driving away. It's also gotten a lot worse these past decades.
Public transport isn't very effective now on many lines, because it will suffer from works too (trains as well as buses), buses will be stuck in traffic just as much as cars. And "people incidents", let's not forget those. Lots of economic areas are badly covered, as the public transport lines are mostly aligned for Luxembourg City only - if you want to go somewhere else, good luck, count in a lot more time. To get people to switch from private cars to public transport would take a massively better quality, different lines... which isn't really on the to-do list as far as "we the people" can see.
Making things free won't automatically improve the quality of public transport, thus... things will probably remain as they are.
There's also the impression that something free isn't worth anything, some people will think they're entitled, will show poor respect to personnel etc., so we're really not that happy about this upcoming change, fearing that quality will actually go down.
Not much impact for me anyway - I live close enough to work for walking, which I do when weather won't permit the use of the motorbike (much easier to find parking space that using a car!).
I still don't have the ISDN service out here the industry was subsidized to provide years ago. In fact, the phone service theoretically available out here doesn't even reliably support dial-up.
Seriously? What kind of 3rd-world country is that? North Korea?
With even ISDN being decommissioned around here (western Europe), I guess we should petition our telecom providers to donate their old stuff, maybe Orange Guy will even consider is as NATO payment.
Sheesh!
And please don't tell us about low-density areas, Scandinavia has those, and they still have decent
connections.
Indeed... 779 billion dollars deficit for the first year of the Trump administration.
That's between tax breaks for the rich and spending even more on "defense".
Guess who's going to have to pay that back? I'll bet it won't be Trump's rich friends.
Of course, the proper behavior should be the default. Having to opt-out of non-privacy, non-security is just wrong.
What makes you say a "professional" driver is any better? From my sole visit to the USofA back in 1991, I distinctly recall a bus driver who couldn't handle the buses stick shift. Seriously? Any youth having passed the (automobile, not bus) driving test home (in Europe) would've fared better, if not legally. And this guy could legally have had a bus full of people killed.
I'm quite convinced that the more tech you build into the cars/buses/trucks/whatever, the less the driver will actually retain competence to drive them. Just have a look at all those news about people following a satnav system into a river or somesuch... just don't ask them to read a map or follow road signs. It's quite the same with all the other helps... and physics aren't laws you can break.
The guy who administered my driving test took points off for shoulder checking. "You won't be able to do that when you're old." And yes I used my mirrors first.
Sounds like that guy should be fired from that job, he's very obviously incompetent. Also, he should be forced to drive a motorbike - he'll learn to curse all those people not looking over their shoulder (which he passed) before changing lanes, at least until he'll have been killed by one of them.
Even if this works - the default should *always* be safety and privacy. Not spying. It seems most companies have willfully forgotten this.
For giggles, have a look at the GDPR notifications you get at different places. E.g. at engadget, I earlier today got presented with this. You get information on the cookies etc. they set/collect, and supposedly you should be able to modify settings... no, nope... you accept things the way they are or quit the page... which I did. No, I don't want any of that shit. If you don't want to be read, so be it.
Here, as with pretty much any statistic about Luxembourg, numbers are not comparable. Why? Well simply because half the working force cross the border every day, coming in from France, Belgium and Germany. If you factor those in, suddenly most statistics look much less interesting.
it will be up to the American people to elect politicians who have a backbone.
And brains, please. And of course, morals, honesty, not too much ruthlessness - else you might get a Putin.
Where I live, this is solved by picking up the different bins on different dates. At my place, non-recyclable trash is collected on Tuesdays, plastics (bottles etc.) are picked up every 2nd Monday, organics are picked up on Fridays. No special trucks required.
There are containers for paper, glass and clothes in many places around the town, so you just deposit those there when you've collected a bunch.
Other recyclables get collected in a larger center - you drive there, deposit whatever it is (electronics, wood, metals, etc) in the proper bins. If you are in doubt which is right or for large or heavy stuff, you'll get help from the employees. They also accept still functional stuff you don't want to keep that anyone can then pick up.
Pretty much the only challenge is to have enough burnable stuff left in the non-recylables bin, for when it gets incinerated (for energy).
Stripping bare to text? Might just use one of the classics, like w3m, links, lynx.
Or while we're at it, telnet to port 80, pipe through openssl as neccesary?
No kidding though, I still regularly use w3m from the command line to circumvent "funny" JavaScript stuff used to block access if you visit a site "too often" (pay after limited use news sites), or just plain avoid all those pesky ads especially with pop-in video and such.
For you web developers out there, this is also a rather healthy test of your websites - if it won't properly deliver content in such a text browser, they will also suck from a search engine perspective, and probably from the usability side too. Obvious exemptions for picture or video oriented websites.
Then Slate does not conform to the GDPR, and are exposing themselves to being sued by european users. Acceptance for different kinds of use of data *must* be separate, and service *may not be denied* when only the minimum required for delivery of service is accepted (e.g. the online shop 3suisses using your address for delivering goods to you and invoicing you, but denied from selling your data to 3rd parties, where they used to make most of their money).
Oh well, Slate has a lot of company that way, few have bothered to implement GDPR properly so far. Of course, they'll cry a river when the fines start coming...
On the + side: the data they are not allowed to collect can't be leaked. Or it'll seriously bite them if they collect them anyway, and they get loose.