Yeah, it's a fucking advertisement. Way to pay the bills, Slashvertisements!
'Store your data in the cloud so we can sell more server-room class hard drive arrays! Don't store that shit at home. You know you what happens at home? Mexicans. Mexicans break into your house and steal the platters right out of your cheap TB hdds. DO NOT STORE YOUR DATA AT HOME. WE'RE BEGGING YOU!'
Companies in the U.S. are vastly less honorable and loyal to their employees than they've been in a long time, and they're getting worse every year.
Loyalty and respect are a two-way streets. If you treat employees like mindless tools, they're going to treat the company like a tool-- in this case, 'getting fair compensation' by hook or crook. They know that a board-room full of executives are still going to be super-wealthy at the end of the day, even if they five-finger every piece of kit they can lay their hands on. That's not an environment that breeds loyalty or honesty.
>Another down side to this is that because I am in a music bubble of my own making and have probably been missing a bunch of new music that I would actually like.
I think you may be grossly overestimating the quality of current North American-produced music. There are only a very few tracks worth listening to.
Europop was getting *just* listenable again, but has suffered a setback in 'old steady' acts incorporating autotune. K- and J-Pop have become so bland over the last decade that it's like trying to enjoy the sound of pipes draining.
The big problems making NA pop music unlistenable are
a) a divorce between instrumental melody and vocals. The vocalists aren't just making the music 'their own', but are taking it home, microwaving it, and serving it as appetizers without ever listening to the rest of the song.
b) increasing repetitiveness within songs. Consider Fleetwood Mac, which is typically really repetitive. They typically have songs that consist of a few, repeated verses and choruses. However, they have solid instrumentals backing their vocalists up. Now consider a slightly more recent act like Imagine Dragons, which frequently plays tracks consisting of an imaginative idea, very few lyrics to go along with it, and what amounts to synthesizer, drum and bass to back it. There are frequent repetitions *within* the verse and chorus, with very little attempt at structure, rhythm, or aesthetics.
>but not enough pro media apps and games without WINE.
I couldn't really comment about the media apps. It seems like we've got a fairly nice selection of multimedia producers and photography workers - Darktable, etc... but I've not been doing a lot of media work lately.
However, the Linux gaming environment has changed dramatically over the last 3-5 years. Aside from the games that run well under WINE (WoWarcraft is a good example) There is a now a huge selection of Linux-native games on Steam and gog.com.
Frequently the 4A studios give Linux a miss. However, Steam has dramatically cut that number. The 'SteamOS + Linux' category has grown just as dramatically.
GoG focuses on bringing older and niche games to players that would otherwise miss them. There is a very wide selection of Linux games available on GoG.
Many, if not most, indie game devs want their games to be available to as wide an audience as possible, so frequently develop with Linux and/or Android in mind. For example, I'm currently playing 'Terraria'. Small dev team. 29th most popular game ever-- Linux native install with some help from Mono.
Now, in addition all to that, let's go back to WINE. Steam has, in the last few weeks, begun testing 'SteamPlay', which uses a custom build of WINE called 'Proton' that runs underneath steam to run some previously Windows-only titles with fantastic quality. In the last week or so, I've been able to run some games I loved, but abandoned along with Windows like 'MagicMaker' and 'PixelJunk Eden'. Steam is giving back to WINE, which just released a new version.
It's worth noting that the Java version of Minecraft has always worked on Linux and Fortnite apparently plays very well under Wine.
Right now, Linux gaming is in a period of Renaissance. If you've despaired of gaming on Linux, it might be time to give it another look.
You jest, but at this point, I think we'd get a lot more out of shuttering all our coal-based power-plants than yanking tobacco.
Most of the boomer smokers, many of whom took 'Tobacco is good for you' to their graves, are dead. Folks who smoke *today* don't only know they have it coming, but they've been told all about it by their doctors, teachers, and television for most if not all their lives. They're doing it to themselves and they know it.
What we need to address that problem is more education and recovery programs for tobacco addicts, just like with any other terribly addictive drug. (Opiate crisis deniers, I'm lookin' at you here.) Smokers need help. Blanket bans and kneejerks won't accomplish much.
While Nuclear plants need a hell of a lot more scrutiny than they're getting (Fukushima Daichi was a lot worse than it had to be because folks at Tokyo Electric Power Co were cuttin' corners to maximize personal profits -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), they are, in general, ANGELS compared to the Coal industry.
For individuals, coal work is pretty damn deadly all on its own. Besides the twenty-odd thousand deaths from Black Lung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker%27s_pneumoconiosis) each year, there are thousands of accidental deaths around the world in coal mines. We're actually a low point as safety regulations and technology advances. China is a pretty poor example compared to the U.S., which actually stays in the double digits these days. In 2013, the last year China has on public record, there were more than a thousand accidental deaths in coal mines. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_in_China#2013)
For communities, Coal Seam Fires are pretty damn serious problems, making whole towns uninhabitable. Coal fires dump 40 tons of mercury into the atmosphere, yearly, and are responsible for 3% of the worlds total CO2 emissions. They are, of course, almost, but not always triggered and/or made worse by mining. Imagine that! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire)
For the world as a whole, one of the major producers of CO2 emissions are hydrocarbon-/fossil fuel-burning electrical power plants. In the U.S., a little less than a third (28%) of our total CO2 emissions are from generating electricity. (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions) Additionally, about a third of our power is generated by Coal, and another third is generated by other fossil-fuel hydrocarbons including Natural Gas and Petroleum. (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3)
Happily, the amount of renewable energy generated is growing and the amount of fossil-fuel energy is dropping. It's not enough, though. Nowhere NEAR enough.
If we just *bam* shut down all coal power-plants, (or better yet, Natural Gas plants too) and dealt with the economics of the situation, we'd take a massive bite out of our greenhouse gas emissions. I think the U.S. and most of Europe could do it as a whole, but that it may not be in the 'industrializing' world. We can hope that China manages. They talk a big gain, but, well, we know what kind of game China actually plays.
tl;dr: Global Warming is going to get a WHOLE lot worse before it gets better, and shutting down all our coal production would help a lot, and not just in that area.
About a year and a half ago, I purchased a Dell Laptop (Core i5, integrated graphics, 500gb HDD) because a) my Samsung tablet had just shattered and b) I needed something to do schoolwork on that could be taken to my local 2 year college and used on their premises.
(Note that a pencil and a spiral notebook would have been just as effective for 90% of my work there...)
It cost me ~ $450 US. The Chromebooks and Android tablets that were equivalent and available were in the $300-$400 range. The laptop came with win10 preinstalled. I could not get a 'bare' laptop for less since I was taking advantage of several overlapping discounts. I never let win10 boot on it. I immediately blew it away in favor of a Mint Linux install.
The amount of computing power that laptop wields in comparison to a Chromebook or Tablet is, frankly, ridiculous and unnecessarily. Unbound by Windows idiocy, it is far more powerful than many 'enterprise server' (*gag*) class machines that I've worked with in the not-too-distant past. Not only can I be running 1080p video on the thing, I can run the IDE and development environment of my choice, including a database server, Libre Office, a real email client, Firefox *and* Chrome, simultaneously, *and* still have cycles and resources left for downloading more crap to watch.
I'm almost completely unbound by proprietary and/or closed-source software. I don't have to run any closed source software if I don't want to. I don't *have* to run any mandatory spyware. (Chromium gets launched if I'm developing against it.) I'm immune to any kind of lock-in and thanks to my IT background, feel no bonus for keeping my crap 'in the cloud'. I am not a 'sync-er'. (If it's not backed up and stored in a fireproof container, etc..., etc...)
Now a lot of that power is conditional on the fact that I understand how to install and take care of a linux desktop. I understand how to do my own backups as well as their value. I understand how to work to protect my privacy with encryption and VPNs. I understand how to troubleshoot little, niggling problems that would drive an Android or MacOS user insane. (You poor Windows guys. I just ache for you. I've been there, and I'm so very sorry there aren't more ways out for you.) I don't *have* to get nickeled and dimed to death by the 'Android Store.'
About the only places that any given Chromebook really outshines my setup is on weight and electrical power consumption... and that's not really an issue for me since there are charging stations near everywhere these days. It's also a reflection of the kind of power I'm sitting on. If a Chromebook is an electric smart-car, my Laptop is a highly-tuned muscle car, with the gas mileage to match.
Yeah, there are benefits to be had in ditching a Windows Laptop for a Chromebook. However, if you're willing to take the time to understand what you're doing, and that's NOT a little thing, you can get a WHOLE LOT MORE bang for your buck with a laptop equivalent in price to that Chromebook.
IANAGP/C......BUUUT, the 8th element by atomic number just ain't that rare in the cosmos.The general asshattery of the DeBeers family and corp aside, the fact that we've known about one of its molecular allotropes for most of our written history SHOULD tell us that allotrope ain't that rare on Earth, either. Yeah, you need special conditions to press a 2-d lattice into a 3-d lattice, but we're doing that in labs with, literally, waste gasses from sewage. The fact that uur pressure-cooker of a planet's interior does the same thing should come as a surprise to small children and the illiterate..
So, in order to facilitate micro-trades, we're going to allow them to trade in terms of less than a second... which is disturbing all by itself when you think that even very fast internet destinations in the U.S. have latency on the order or 100ms or so. Even very slight congestion means that the financial exchanges have to simply trust the timestamps issued by the traders to get the prices and volume correct and cannot depend on the receive sequence.
There's no room for malicious action there at all, and as we all know, the U.S. has absolutely no outside actors interested in manipulating events inside the country for their own ends.
So ultimately, we're going to depend on some sort of time service run by Google and Nasdaq to validate those signatures. The problem there is that both those organizations have and will be aggressively targeted by bad apples the world over. TFA is a little light on the technical aspects of how, exactly, Google and/or Nasdaq is going to ensure that there's no forgery of timestamps. That service goes down... and Google and Nasdaq do have network problems from time to time... and suddenly all transactions are suspect? Heaven forfend that whatever algorithm used to synchronize and sign the transactions down to the nanosecond level is ever cracked. There's going to be a huge economic impetus for even very powerful countries to work on this. Imagine Chinese supercomputers manipulating American stock exchanges for their own benefit. I don't think that's too far fetched.
And we're not just depending on Google or Nasdaq, but on everyone who takes part in issuing and signing these timestamps. Wow, that's a huge amount of attack surface.
The open beta has been out for about a month prior to the mirrors starting their seed yesterday. It's had some fairly serious issues, mostly related to video. I've personally had some hardware lockups while watching videos on an integrated Intel adapter with VLC (and have submitted bug reports). I've also seen other bug reports and feature requests go simply ignored... Not even addressed as 'will fix' or 'won't fix'.
I love me some Mint, but I personally feel that I'm going to have to treat this as a 'wait for the.1 release' before I personally consider it stable.
Firefox was ditched for the same set of reasons that Netscape was ditched:
- Both Firefox and Netscape had become or were perceived as slow and bloated compared to the competition. I vividly remember my eye twitching back in the late 90s during my phone tech support days when I heard a fellow phone jockey recommend Internet Explorer 3 to a customer over Netscape because it was 'so much faster'. This was back in the 28.8/56k dial-up era, so take that into account. Chrome is widely perceived to be faster and more powerful at running webapps than Firefox... and regardless of the reality, this perception goes top to bottom. Developers frequently choose to develop against Chrome and then test against Firefox... if they bother to test against Firefox.
- Privacy, browser configuration, and Internet safety are widely perceived to be 'too difficult'. This was as true in the 90s as it is today. People are intimidated by the reality of what it takes to be safe and private on the Internet and/or far too lazy to learn to configure their browser. Netscape and Mozilla have never quite made it as easy to 'click click click dubya dubya dubya' as their competition. Microsoft and Google both are much better at hand-holding... and leading their 'customers' down the garden path. Installing ad or script blockers *seems* more intimidating on Firefox than similar plugins for Chrome because Google has successfully 'App-Store-Ized' their plugin ecosystem.
- Netscape and Firefox have never been 'The Internet'. Microsoft did its damndest to make sure that Windows users all directly equated that blue 'e' icon with 'The Internet'. Google is its own damn verb. Both companies' marketing divisions have made very good pushes to make themselves synonymous with 'The Internet'.
- Netscape and Mozilla have never had a strong pre-install base. Every Windows Install since 95 has come with IE. Every Android device comes with Chrome. Most folks simply can't be assed to install another browser. Sad but true. If Firefox ever wants to become really relevant, it's going to have to get some kind of mainstream pre-install base going. We're not talking Linux distros here. They're going to have to pull off the Firefox equivalent of an 'Android OS' or 'Chromebook'. It's doable, but Mozilla is not strongly steered the way Microsoft was or Google is. Moz has a long history of dropping the soap far too often.
That would make it a lot safer to install packages from sources you don't really trust.
Even think about installing from sources I don't really trust? This was one of my big joys when I was finally able to ditch Windows. I didn't have to install *anything* I didn't trust any more.
Snaps abstract too much away, IMHO. You don't know what runtime a given snap is going to require unless you dig. There's *another* place for insecure code to run if everything is not perfectly vetted.
...and the companies involved will always be ethical and judicious in what they do with the massive amount of biometric data such a system would collect.
I mean, seriously, Ticketmaster. They're above reproach, right up there with luminaries like Monsanto, Haliburton, and Comcast. There's no way we could ever regret this move.
Tim, Mark, this is not a pissing match in a schoolyard. This is about the breach of the trust of an entire country's populace in a grievous way. Neither Apple nor Facebook has treated its customers or others well in the past. Rather than two little kids crying, 'We're better than...' or 'We told them so...', we need two adults saying 'This is the situation. These are our faults. This is why we're vulnerable. This is what we're going to do.'
Apple and Facebook are both soulless corporations with real, breathing people behind, inside, and in front of them, and everyone of them are being hurt in a myriad of ways. Neither one has great records of behavior. Facebook's sins are simply more recent and raw. I don't need to go into details.
BOTH have a huge responsibility to the public that go beyond excuses, stock prices, or personal ego. Denying that responsibility is why we're in this mess. Live up to that responsibility, huh?
Too much to ask, I'm certain. This is why I ditched MS and EA products a long time ago and have never personally paid for Apple or Facebook products with either cash nor my personal data.
City of Heroes is an interesting example because there's a fairly significant developer presence on the 'City of Titans' project, which aims to be a 'spiritual successor' to CoH/CoV.
Currently, those folks are developing in a 'Clean Room' state, building what will hopefully be a great game.
Imagine, however, if an 'abandonware' exemption is passed. Would it ONLY give rights to non-profits like MADE, or would it give rights to individuals like myself who are damn pissed their favorite MMO got canned and/or folks like the CoT crew who are seeking to replace said MMO with a new model. If there was suddenly no penalty for examining reverse-engineered or decompiled code, would it help them or would it hinder them in their efforts. Some would argue that the latter might be true. It's better to make a clean break from old client/server limitations and build something new. I personally take the middle ground. Yes, you do want to erase any limitations you can, but you'd be foolish not to try to learn from the past if that past is available to you.
Personally, I doubt the DMCA is going to budge much in the current political climate. I'd love to see an 'abandoned code' exemption of some kind put in regardless.
than a Micro$oft proprietary language running on a machine that can't be debugged in real time at unimaginable speeds, and you know it'll be connected to AI shortly afterwards somehow.
Really, that was all you needed right there. The 'tying yourselves to Google and MS' rant is simply preaching to the choir at this point.
Srsly, those of us who can get off MS (and Google) products do so when we can. (I've been MS Clear for a while now.) Steam and Minecraft both run on Linux, and pretty much every new PC game does as well with the exceptions of a few big studios. GOG's DRM-free catalog contains almost every PC game worth having. (And WINE runs a f-ton of games these days. Oh, and Photoshop CS2. The one that Adobe allows you to download for free 'because it's out of date'. Duckduckgo isn't *quite* as powerful a searcher as Google, but it's still damn nice, and if you're keeping business on Google's servers that you don't want the world to know about, well, that's a problem on your end.
Knowledge will set ye free. Don't rant. Educate. When a family member or friend complains that their Windows install is crapping out on them again, offer to install Mint. Extoll Duckduckgo. 'But I want to play Warcraft'. Wow runs fine under the latest version of WINE.
IMO, Facebook and Twitter are far worse demons to personal liberty and privacy than MS ever was.
After years of threats, I finally managed to eliminate all the apps that were tying me to a Windows 7 desktop or a Macbook workstation. I've used Linux heavily for years, but never as my desktop OS. It was always my app, web, or build server, and I'd interact with the machine via bash over SSH.
Now that I'm on a Linux desktop, I'm fairly comfortable with Mint's 'Cinnamon' UI, which I understand is a forked version of Gnome 2.
Normally, if I wanted to experiment with a new UI, I'd just dive in, but I'm still in the phase of building my expectations and lists of needs. (Do I really need Sublime or will Gedit suffice? How do I change that default icon for Firefox to one I'm more likely to recognize?)
Does KDE offer me any great advantages over Cinnamon or Gnome? Any of you more experienced desktop aficionados have an opinion you'd care to share with a relative novice?
The problem here is that normal people don't threaten to kill other people. They certainly don't challenge another person's bodyguards in public.
Threats of violence are usually actionable (by arrest or civil lawsuit), no matter who you are or who you threaten.
There is certainly a case for making jokes about the death of a sitting President, but actually lashing out with a punch-line-less threat about killing ANYONE is simply not acceptable in our society.
It's not really even a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of speech would be saying something like: 'This person has committed serious crimes. They should be put on trial and executed'.
Threats, however, are a kind of attack-- a verbal attack, certainly, but one that promises, however vaguely, a physical attack to follow.
I like to be VERY liberal when it comes to freedom of speech and allow even the most extreme speech. I feel that if you can't stomach the extremes, you don't really deserve the middle ground.
This guy wasn't stating an extreme opinion, though. He was making a declaration of intent.
Happily, we don't have nearly the financial problems Germany immediately before Hitler's rise to power that made him seem like such a good idea to many Germans. The Weimar Republic had suffered balloon inflation after WW1 and mass poverty covered a lot of what's now Germany. The Deutsch Mark was worthless and women and children were often forced to prostitute themselves in order to eat.
In comparison, we've had a relatively minor recession, and are recovering nicely, and have had one of the strongest currencies in the world the entire time. We also had and still have the world's financial markets by the balls the entire time, since EVERYBODY on the planet treats U.S. debt as an investment of choice. (That's a pretty neat trick for a country going through even a minor recession.)
We're not nearly desperate enough to elect a 'Hitler'.
History will tell if we were stupid enough, but I suspect we won't.
Shame Bernie's not getting nearly as much mindshare as Hillary.
Inkscape is one of those 'Best of Breed' open source apps where it's pretty much all you need to do the task you're downloading it for. It beats the ever-living SNOT out of Illustrator on simplicity, ease-of-use, and, of course, price. You're not locked into Adobe's new SasS model or a huge license fee, yet can create great looking vector art with fantastic compatibility.
Compare to, say, PuTTY, or VLC Media Player. They do a single job, and they do it REALLY freakin' well.
GIMP does not. GIMP's UI is STILL a cluster@#$@ after years and years of development and user feedback, and the last time I checked, it still lacked the support for color matching that would make it viable for creating images that were print-ready.
Frankly, if you're working on Windows, you are far more behooved to use Paint.Net than you are The GIMP.
Slashdot Mirror
HP's 'Enterprise' blog.
Yeah, it's a fucking advertisement. Way to pay the bills, Slashvertisements!
'Store your data in the cloud so we can sell more server-room class hard drive arrays! Don't store that shit at home. You know you what happens at home? Mexicans. Mexicans break into your house and steal the platters right out of your cheap TB hdds. DO NOT STORE YOUR DATA AT HOME. WE'RE BEGGING YOU!'
Companies in the U.S. are vastly less honorable and loyal to their employees than they've been in a long time, and they're getting worse every year.
Loyalty and respect are a two-way streets. If you treat employees like mindless tools, they're going to treat the company like a tool-- in this case, 'getting fair compensation' by hook or crook. They know that a board-room full of executives are still going to be super-wealthy at the end of the day, even if they five-finger every piece of kit they can lay their hands on. That's not an environment that breeds loyalty or honesty.
>Another down side to this is that because I am in a music bubble of my own making and have probably been missing a bunch of new music that I would actually like.
I think you may be grossly overestimating the quality of current North American-produced music. There are only a very few tracks worth listening to.
Europop was getting *just* listenable again, but has suffered a setback in 'old steady' acts incorporating autotune. K- and J-Pop have become so bland over the last decade that it's like trying to enjoy the sound of pipes draining.
The big problems making NA pop music unlistenable are
a) a divorce between instrumental melody and vocals. The vocalists aren't just making the music 'their own', but are taking it home, microwaving it, and serving it as appetizers without ever listening to the rest of the song.
b) increasing repetitiveness within songs. Consider Fleetwood Mac, which is typically really repetitive. They typically have songs that consist of a few, repeated verses and choruses. However, they have solid instrumentals backing their vocalists up. Now consider a slightly more recent act like Imagine Dragons, which frequently plays tracks consisting of an imaginative idea, very few lyrics to go along with it, and what amounts to synthesizer, drum and bass to back it. There are frequent repetitions *within* the verse and chorus, with very little attempt at structure, rhythm, or aesthetics.
>but not enough pro media apps and games without WINE.
I couldn't really comment about the media apps. It seems like we've got a fairly nice selection of multimedia producers and photography workers - Darktable, etc... but I've not been doing a lot of media work lately.
However, the Linux gaming environment has changed dramatically over the last 3-5 years. Aside from the games that run well under WINE (WoWarcraft is a good example) There is a now a huge selection of Linux-native games on Steam and gog.com.
Frequently the 4A studios give Linux a miss. However, Steam has dramatically cut that number. The 'SteamOS + Linux' category has grown just as dramatically.
GoG focuses on bringing older and niche games to players that would otherwise miss them. There is a very wide selection of Linux games available on GoG.
Many, if not most, indie game devs want their games to be available to as wide an audience as possible, so frequently develop with Linux and/or Android in mind. For example, I'm currently playing 'Terraria'. Small dev team. 29th most popular game ever-- Linux native install with some help from Mono.
Now, in addition all to that, let's go back to WINE. Steam has, in the last few weeks, begun testing 'SteamPlay', which uses a custom build of WINE called 'Proton' that runs underneath steam to run some previously Windows-only titles with fantastic quality. In the last week or so, I've been able to run some games I loved, but abandoned along with Windows like 'MagicMaker' and 'PixelJunk Eden'. Steam is giving back to WINE, which just released a new version.
It's worth noting that the Java version of Minecraft has always worked on Linux and Fortnite apparently plays very well under Wine.
Right now, Linux gaming is in a period of Renaissance. If you've despaired of gaming on Linux, it might be time to give it another look.
As soon as we figure out how to torrent Higgs Bosons, Gravity will be the same kind of free that music is.
You jest, but at this point, I think we'd get a lot more out of shuttering all our coal-based power-plants than yanking tobacco.
Most of the boomer smokers, many of whom took 'Tobacco is good for you' to their graves, are dead. Folks who smoke *today* don't only know they have it coming, but they've been told all about it by their doctors, teachers, and television for most if not all their lives. They're doing it to themselves and they know it.
What we need to address that problem is more education and recovery programs for tobacco addicts, just like with any other terribly addictive drug. (Opiate crisis deniers, I'm lookin' at you here.) Smokers need help. Blanket bans and kneejerks won't accomplish much.
While Nuclear plants need a hell of a lot more scrutiny than they're getting (Fukushima Daichi was a lot worse than it had to be because folks at Tokyo Electric Power Co were cuttin' corners to maximize personal profits -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...), they are, in general, ANGELS compared to the Coal industry.
For individuals, coal work is pretty damn deadly all on its own. Besides the twenty-odd thousand deaths from Black Lung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalworker%27s_pneumoconiosis) each year, there are thousands of accidental deaths around the world in coal mines. We're actually a low point as safety regulations and technology advances. China is a pretty poor example compared to the U.S., which actually stays in the double digits these days. In 2013, the last year China has on public record, there were more than a thousand accidental deaths in coal mines. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_in_China#2013)
For communities, Coal Seam Fires are pretty damn serious problems, making whole towns uninhabitable. Coal fires dump 40 tons of mercury into the atmosphere, yearly, and are responsible for 3% of the worlds total CO2 emissions. They are, of course, almost, but not always triggered and/or made worse by mining. Imagine that!
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_seam_fire)
For the world as a whole, one of the major producers of CO2 emissions are hydrocarbon-/fossil fuel-burning electrical power plants. In the U.S., a little less than a third (28%) of our total CO2 emissions are from generating electricity. (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions) Additionally, about a third of our power is generated by Coal, and another third is generated by other fossil-fuel hydrocarbons including Natural Gas and Petroleum. (https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3)
Happily, the amount of renewable energy generated is growing and the amount of fossil-fuel energy is dropping. It's not enough, though. Nowhere NEAR enough.
If we just *bam* shut down all coal power-plants, (or better yet, Natural Gas plants too) and dealt with the economics of the situation, we'd take a massive bite out of our greenhouse gas emissions. I think the U.S. and most of Europe could do it as a whole, but that it may not be in the 'industrializing' world. We can hope that China manages. They talk a big gain, but, well, we know what kind of game China actually plays.
tl;dr: Global Warming is going to get a WHOLE lot worse before it gets better, and shutting down all our coal production would help a lot, and not just in that area.
About a year and a half ago, I purchased a Dell Laptop (Core i5, integrated graphics, 500gb HDD) because a) my Samsung tablet had just shattered and b) I needed something to do schoolwork on that could be taken to my local 2 year college and used on their premises.
(Note that a pencil and a spiral notebook would have been just as effective for 90% of my work there...)
It cost me ~ $450 US. The Chromebooks and Android tablets that were equivalent and available were in the $300-$400 range. The laptop came with win10 preinstalled. I could not get a 'bare' laptop for less since I was taking advantage of several overlapping discounts. I never let win10 boot on it. I immediately blew it away in favor of a Mint Linux install.
The amount of computing power that laptop wields in comparison to a Chromebook or Tablet is, frankly, ridiculous and unnecessarily. Unbound by Windows idiocy, it is far more powerful than many 'enterprise server' (*gag*) class machines that I've worked with in the not-too-distant past. Not only can I be running 1080p video on the thing, I can run the IDE and development environment of my choice, including a database server, Libre Office, a real email client, Firefox *and* Chrome, simultaneously, *and* still have cycles and resources left for downloading more crap to watch.
I'm almost completely unbound by proprietary and/or closed-source software. I don't have to run any closed source software if I don't want to. I don't *have* to run any mandatory spyware. (Chromium gets launched if I'm developing against it.) I'm immune to any kind of lock-in and thanks to my IT background, feel no bonus for keeping my crap 'in the cloud'. I am not a 'sync-er'. (If it's not backed up and stored in a fireproof container, etc..., etc...)
Now a lot of that power is conditional on the fact that I understand how to install and take care of a linux desktop. I understand how to do my own backups as well as their value. I understand how to work to protect my privacy with encryption and VPNs. I understand how to troubleshoot little, niggling problems that would drive an Android or MacOS user insane. (You poor Windows guys. I just ache for you. I've been there, and I'm so very sorry there aren't more ways out for you.) I don't *have* to get nickeled and dimed to death by the 'Android Store.'
About the only places that any given Chromebook really outshines my setup is on weight and electrical power consumption... and that's not really an issue for me since there are charging stations near everywhere these days. It's also a reflection of the kind of power I'm sitting on. If a Chromebook is an electric smart-car, my Laptop is a highly-tuned muscle car, with the gas mileage to match.
Yeah, there are benefits to be had in ditching a Windows Laptop for a Chromebook. However, if you're willing to take the time to understand what you're doing, and that's NOT a little thing, you can get a WHOLE LOT MORE bang for your buck with a laptop equivalent in price to that Chromebook.
IANAGP/C... ...BUUUT, the 8th element by atomic number just ain't that rare in the cosmos.The general asshattery of the DeBeers family and corp aside, the fact that we've known about one of its molecular allotropes for most of our written history SHOULD tell us that allotrope ain't that rare on Earth, either. Yeah, you need special conditions to press a 2-d lattice into a 3-d lattice, but we're doing that in labs with, literally, waste gasses from sewage. The fact that uur pressure-cooker of a planet's interior does the same thing should come as a surprise to small children and the illiterate..
So, in order to facilitate micro-trades, we're going to allow them to trade in terms of less than a second... which is disturbing all by itself when you think that even very fast internet destinations in the U.S. have latency on the order or 100ms or so. Even very slight congestion means that the financial exchanges have to simply trust the timestamps issued by the traders to get the prices and volume correct and cannot depend on the receive sequence.
There's no room for malicious action there at all, and as we all know, the U.S. has absolutely no outside actors interested in manipulating events inside the country for their own ends.
So ultimately, we're going to depend on some sort of time service run by Google and Nasdaq to validate those signatures. The problem there is that both those organizations have and will be aggressively targeted by bad apples the world over. TFA is a little light on the technical aspects of how, exactly, Google and/or Nasdaq is going to ensure that there's no forgery of timestamps. That service goes down... and Google and Nasdaq do have network problems from time to time... and suddenly all transactions are suspect? Heaven forfend that whatever algorithm used to synchronize and sign the transactions down to the nanosecond level is ever cracked. There's going to be a huge economic impetus for even very powerful countries to work on this. Imagine Chinese supercomputers manipulating American stock exchanges for their own benefit. I don't think that's too far fetched.
And we're not just depending on Google or Nasdaq, but on everyone who takes part in issuing and signing these timestamps. Wow, that's a huge amount of attack surface.
The open beta has been out for about a month prior to the mirrors starting their seed yesterday. It's had some fairly serious issues, mostly related to video. I've personally had some hardware lockups while watching videos on an integrated Intel adapter with VLC (and have submitted bug reports). I've also seen other bug reports and feature requests go simply ignored... Not even addressed as 'will fix' or 'won't fix'.
I love me some Mint, but I personally feel that I'm going to have to treat this as a 'wait for the .1 release' before I personally consider it stable.
Firefox was ditched for the same set of reasons that Netscape was ditched:
- Both Firefox and Netscape had become or were perceived as slow and bloated compared to the competition. I vividly remember my eye twitching back in the late 90s during my phone tech support days when I heard a fellow phone jockey recommend Internet Explorer 3 to a customer over Netscape because it was 'so much faster'. This was back in the 28.8/56k dial-up era, so take that into account. Chrome is widely perceived to be faster and more powerful at running webapps than Firefox... and regardless of the reality, this perception goes top to bottom. Developers frequently choose to develop against Chrome and then test against Firefox... if they bother to test against Firefox.
- Privacy, browser configuration, and Internet safety are widely perceived to be 'too difficult'. This was as true in the 90s as it is today. People are intimidated by the reality of what it takes to be safe and private on the Internet and/or far too lazy to learn to configure their browser. Netscape and Mozilla have never quite made it as easy to 'click click click dubya dubya dubya' as their competition. Microsoft and Google both are much better at hand-holding... and leading their 'customers' down the garden path. Installing ad or script blockers *seems* more intimidating on Firefox than similar plugins for Chrome because Google has successfully 'App-Store-Ized' their plugin ecosystem.
- Netscape and Firefox have never been 'The Internet'. Microsoft did its damndest to make sure that Windows users all directly equated that blue 'e' icon with 'The Internet'. Google is its own damn verb. Both companies' marketing divisions have made very good pushes to make themselves synonymous with 'The Internet'.
- Netscape and Mozilla have never had a strong pre-install base. Every Windows Install since 95 has come with IE. Every Android device comes with Chrome. Most folks simply can't be assed to install another browser. Sad but true. If Firefox ever wants to become really relevant, it's going to have to get some kind of mainstream pre-install base going. We're not talking Linux distros here. They're going to have to pull off the Firefox equivalent of an 'Android OS' or 'Chromebook'. It's doable, but Mozilla is not strongly steered the way Microsoft was or Google is. Moz has a long history of dropping the soap far too often.
Ahem.
*Cough* /Ron Swanson >
< Ron Swanson >
Do you want 'Wargames' with Matthew Broderick? Because this is how you get 'Wargames' with Matthew Broderick.
<
That would make it a lot safer to install packages from sources you don't really trust.
Even think about installing from sources I don't really trust? This was one of my big joys when I was finally able to ditch Windows. I didn't have to install *anything* I didn't trust any more.
Snaps abstract too much away, IMHO. You don't know what runtime a given snap is going to require unless you dig. There's *another* place for insecure code to run if everything is not perfectly vetted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's some Grade 'A' Marketing Bullshit right there:
not aligned with our long-term strategy
That's MBA-ese for 'We be laying some bitches off!'
Somewhere there is an exasperated coder trying to get his resume in order.
...and the companies involved will always be ethical and judicious in what they do with the massive amount of biometric data such a system would collect.
I mean, seriously, Ticketmaster. They're above reproach, right up there with luminaries like Monsanto, Haliburton, and Comcast. There's no way we could ever regret this move.
Tim, Mark, this is not a pissing match in a schoolyard. This is about the breach of the trust of an entire country's populace in a grievous way. Neither Apple nor Facebook has treated its customers or others well in the past. Rather than two little kids crying, 'We're better than...' or 'We told them so...', we need two adults saying 'This is the situation. These are our faults. This is why we're vulnerable. This is what we're going to do.'
Apple and Facebook are both soulless corporations with real, breathing people behind, inside, and in front of them, and everyone of them are being hurt in a myriad of ways. Neither one has great records of behavior. Facebook's sins are simply more recent and raw. I don't need to go into details.
BOTH have a huge responsibility to the public that go beyond excuses, stock prices, or personal ego. Denying that responsibility is why we're in this mess. Live up to that responsibility, huh?
Too much to ask, I'm certain. This is why I ditched MS and EA products a long time ago and have never personally paid for Apple or Facebook products with either cash nor my personal data.
Apropos captcha: syndrome
http://www.discovery.com/tv-sh...
Basically, they tried to build a boat with 'pykrete' in the arctic and found that it fell apart PDQ.
They had a little more success building a boat with a mix of ice and sheets of newspaper, but it still didn't last an hour before coming apart.
NFW an aircraft carrier would ever manage to finish construction, let alone... y'know... launch aircraft.
City of Heroes is an interesting example because there's a fairly significant developer presence on the 'City of Titans' project, which aims to be a 'spiritual successor' to CoH/CoV.
https://cityoftitans.com/
Currently, those folks are developing in a 'Clean Room' state, building what will hopefully be a great game.
Imagine, however, if an 'abandonware' exemption is passed. Would it ONLY give rights to non-profits like MADE, or would it give rights to individuals like myself who are damn pissed their favorite MMO got canned and/or folks like the CoT crew who are seeking to replace said MMO with a new model. If there was suddenly no penalty for examining reverse-engineered or decompiled code, would it help them or would it hinder them in their efforts. Some would argue that the latter might be true. It's better to make a clean break from old client/server limitations and build something new. I personally take the middle ground. Yes, you do want to erase any limitations you can, but you'd be foolish not to try to learn from the past if that past is available to you.
Personally, I doubt the DMCA is going to budge much in the current political climate. I'd love to see an 'abandoned code' exemption of some kind put in regardless.
Really, that was all you needed right there. The 'tying yourselves to Google and MS' rant is simply preaching to the choir at this point.
Srsly, those of us who can get off MS (and Google) products do so when we can. (I've been MS Clear for a while now.) Steam and Minecraft both run on Linux, and pretty much every new PC game does as well with the exceptions of a few big studios. GOG's DRM-free catalog contains almost every PC game worth having. (And WINE runs a f-ton of games these days. Oh, and Photoshop CS2. The one that Adobe allows you to download for free 'because it's out of date'. Duckduckgo isn't *quite* as powerful a searcher as Google, but it's still damn nice, and if you're keeping business on Google's servers that you don't want the world to know about, well, that's a problem on your end.
Knowledge will set ye free. Don't rant. Educate. When a family member or friend complains that their Windows install is crapping out on them again, offer to install Mint. Extoll Duckduckgo. 'But I want to play Warcraft'. Wow runs fine under the latest version of WINE.
IMO, Facebook and Twitter are far worse demons to personal liberty and privacy than MS ever was.
After years of threats, I finally managed to eliminate all the apps that were tying me to a Windows 7 desktop or a Macbook workstation. I've used Linux heavily for years, but never as my desktop OS. It was always my app, web, or build server, and I'd interact with the machine via bash over SSH.
Now that I'm on a Linux desktop, I'm fairly comfortable with Mint's 'Cinnamon' UI, which I understand is a forked version of Gnome 2.
Normally, if I wanted to experiment with a new UI, I'd just dive in, but I'm still in the phase of building my expectations and lists of needs. (Do I really need Sublime or will Gedit suffice? How do I change that default icon for Firefox to one I'm more likely to recognize?)
Does KDE offer me any great advantages over Cinnamon or Gnome? Any of you more experienced desktop aficionados have an opinion you'd care to share with a relative novice?
The problem here is that normal people don't threaten to kill other people. They certainly don't challenge another person's bodyguards in public.
Threats of violence are usually actionable (by arrest or civil lawsuit), no matter who you are or who you threaten.
There is certainly a case for making jokes about the death of a sitting President, but actually lashing out with a punch-line-less threat about killing ANYONE is simply not acceptable in our society.
It's not really even a freedom of speech issue. Freedom of speech would be saying something like: 'This person has committed serious crimes. They should be put on trial and executed'.
Threats, however, are a kind of attack-- a verbal attack, certainly, but one that promises, however vaguely, a physical attack to follow.
I like to be VERY liberal when it comes to freedom of speech and allow even the most extreme speech. I feel that if you can't stomach the extremes, you don't really deserve the middle ground.
This guy wasn't stating an extreme opinion, though. He was making a declaration of intent.
Bangfit's Single Player Mode == 'News for Nerds'.
You too can improve your arm strength to Hentai. Watch out for those difficult right-to-left switches!
Happily, we don't have nearly the financial problems Germany immediately before Hitler's rise to power that made him seem like such a good idea to many Germans. The Weimar Republic had suffered balloon inflation after WW1 and mass poverty covered a lot of what's now Germany. The Deutsch Mark was worthless and women and children were often forced to prostitute themselves in order to eat.
In comparison, we've had a relatively minor recession, and are recovering nicely, and have had one of the strongest currencies in the world the entire time. We also had and still have the world's financial markets by the balls the entire time, since EVERYBODY on the planet treats U.S. debt as an investment of choice. (That's a pretty neat trick for a country going through even a minor recession.)
We're not nearly desperate enough to elect a 'Hitler'.
History will tell if we were stupid enough, but I suspect we won't.
Shame Bernie's not getting nearly as much mindshare as Hillary.
The GIMP *wishes*.
Inkscape is one of those 'Best of Breed' open source apps where it's pretty much all you need to do the task you're downloading it for. It beats the ever-living SNOT out of Illustrator on simplicity, ease-of-use, and, of course, price. You're not locked into Adobe's new SasS model or a huge license fee, yet can create great looking vector art with fantastic compatibility.
Compare to, say, PuTTY, or VLC Media Player. They do a single job, and they do it REALLY freakin' well.
GIMP does not. GIMP's UI is STILL a cluster@#$@ after years and years of development and user feedback, and the last time I checked, it still lacked the support for color matching that would make it viable for creating images that were print-ready.
Frankly, if you're working on Windows, you are far more behooved to use Paint.Net than you are The GIMP.