Public is not the same as Private. Most commercial "VPNs" are actually Virtual Public Networks. Rule of thumb:
- Any VPN in which a corporation or an untrusted individual is a participant node should be regarded as Public.
- Any VPN running code which you haven't compiled yourself from known-good sources should be regarded as Public.
- Any VPN using non-standard encryption or pre-generating keys for member nodes should be regarded as Public.
If you really need to trust a VPN then don't deceive yourself --- don't play Security Theater, ensure that Private really means Private. Convenience is the enemy of security, and trust is almost always inversely proportional to convenience because convenience tends to introduce untrusted elements.
That was an excellent talk, containing some really great analysis. The analysis was so clear and thorough though that I was puzzled why it left one very important matter very fuzzy and poorly defined --- the title and main topic of the talk, of all things!
This is the problem: the word "jobs" (or equivalently "work") means two very different things to us, and these two things have been conflated into one single idea by our history over hundreds of years. Those two things are: (1) Doing something useful in a place of employment, and (2) Getting paid for it and using that money as the enabler of our personal survival.
I put it to you that your talk conflated the two ideas as strongly as everyone else does, and used the fear of losing (2) as the basis for examining whether AI would eliminate opportunities for (1). This is a crucial distinction to make, because survival is a non-optional imperative for most humans, whereas having an interesting occupation is merely nice-to-have and can easily bear periodic interruption.
I am an engineer, and as an engineer let me tell you something that isn't a secret among engineers but is rarely stated so directly: the practical purpose of engineering and of the science which underpins it is to eliminate (2) from the burden carried by humanity, and to enable a focus on (1) --- in other words, to give you the time to do something interesting with your life. It is sometimes said that this is the aim of civilization too, although a better observation would be that having to work for your survival is not civilized at all. Indeed, it is barbaric.
I expect that you will be giving that talk again, as the subject is a very interesting one and is highly topical today. I would definitely recommend though that in future you explain its title in more detail, because very few rational people would complain if AI eliminated the need for humans to work for their survival.
The message that Nintendo is sending fans seems clear. Don't use, buy, play or in any other way invest your time or money in Nintendo, as their only interest is in bleeding you dry by whatever means they can. As a company they are signaling that they have neither social insight nor ethics, and do not treat fans as assets nor as free publicity.
Message received and understood, so I'm adding Nintendo to my short boycott list. It's just a personal statement and of course will have no effect on Nintendo individually, but I doubt that I will be the only one making such a decision. Evil deeds and blind corporate greed should not go unpunished. Conversely, competitors now gain an extra chance.
My poor Wii will never have a brother or a sister.
This Amazon collaboration with Iridium is going to be interesting to watch on the Net Neutrality front.
As long as Bezos operates an independent walled garden then he's in the clear to make up his own rules, but as soon as he turns CloudConnect into a global ISP (if that is what he is intending) then he'll come under Net Neutrality rules wherever they apply, and that means on most of the planet. The small minority of people who reject Net Neutrality in USA for party political reasons is entirely irrelevent in this global context.
Since Bezos does not currently provide first-hop connectivity and hence is not running an ISP, his Amazon walled garden does not come under scrutiny on net nor platform neutrality grounds, only on different grounds such as privacy. As a global ISP though, it seems likely that his previous freedom to do as he pleases (for example by benefitting only his Amazon merchants) is going to be curtailed in a manner which he will dislike greatly.
Facebook seems to be moving in the same direction, and undoubtedly there will be many others too. Net Neutrality of satellite ISPs seems certain to become a major issue.
Sensible people who understand that time is our most precious and limited resource will work for others only just enough to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Any hours remaining after that need is met can be dedicated to favourite hobbies, pastimes, unpaid vocations or other personal interests --- that's called "Having a life".
If you don't understand that then you're either an employer who benefits from the depressed wages that come with a mass labour pool, which is the primary reason for promoting the work ethic, or you have fallen for it yourself.
Either way, labouring is a distressing waste of people's lives, and advocating that it should be normal in a modern technological society is a barbaric and unethical position.
From TFA, the reason why the reactors were shut down (which wasn't included in the summary) is:
Europe's heatwave, however, hasn't just increased air temperatures but also water temperatures. Regulations protecting wildlife mean that the usual water sources drawn on by nuclear plants cannot always be used for cooling, leading to shutdowns. It's not the first time this has happened: Heatwaves forced nuclear shutdowns or curtailments across Europe in 2003, 2006, and 2015.
Yeah, I know that reading TFA is no longer cool on Slashdot, but someone has to help out the editors.:P
Two decades is a reasonable age and Slashdot's first quarter century isn't all that distant, so we might as well start putting the paleohistory in order. This needs an era classification scheme, and mcmonkey seems to have given us an ideal metric for era boundaries: the number of digits in the Slashdot ID. As every proper techie will understand, this gives us a logarithmic scale which normalizes the population explosion nicely.
Well I know where to start, but the rest needs input:
1 digit - Tacomordium - life emerges by accident from the primordial nerd soup. 2 digits - [Suggestions?] 3... 4...
It's been a roller coaster ride for sure. Although the growing anti-science in the latter half of the site's existence has made it difficult for the original highly technical population to continue participating, Slashdot still manages to hold its niche together.
A 2500 pound vehicle to carry one 1-pound pizza. That's efficient. Make it a drone, obviously.
Combine the two types of autonomous vehicle for the best of both worlds. An autonomous EV van could be loaded with pizzas and able to launch short-hop delivery drones. It could keep one or more drones out delivering to the door while the rest are being recharged on the EV as their mothership.
This overcomes several issues, notably the lack of delivery to the door in Domino's (test) solution. It also ensures that pizza stays hot without needing a heavily insulated box since the trip by air would be much shorter. What's more, it allows the flying drones to be replaced with short-range wheeled delivery bots as an alternative, perhaps chosen on a house by house basis, which may be cheaper and more reliable, or even necessary in the rain.
Recharging on the mothership overcomes both efficiency and range issues, and allows smaller/cheaper batteries to be used in end-delivery vehicles. This in turn could lead towards the short-hop drones/bots becoming cheap, mass-produced, disposable delivery elements.
Musicians and enthusiasts who use music creation software usually know very well why their software tools have an interface that depicts music hardware, so I'm a bit puzzled why it's a mystery to the author of TFA.
The reason is that hardware controls like knobs, sliders, percussion pads, 2-axis touchpads, multi-axis RF field interfaces, breath controllers and many others kinds are extremely interactive and immediate in their effect, and so their use comes naturally to music creators. All of these controllers are commonly provided with a MIDI interface today. This has been so for many decades, either baseband MIDI or today commonly carried over USB. Through MIDI, these hardware interfaces are bound by the musician to any desired control points in the software tools, and the result is extremely expressive and a pleasure to use.
The author complains that controlling the s/w elements with a mouse is pretty awful, and indeed it is, but nobody with any sense does that except before they've set up their MIDI control gear. There are literally hundreds of thousands of different kinds of MIDI controllers around, often costing very little, so it's a bit unusual to find a music maker who is not aware of them and of their purpose.
A sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 C (95 F) is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature our bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it.
Just temperature alone doesn't give the complete picture when it comes to risk. That's why TFA was specifically about wet-bulb temperatures, because when they're exceeded then you can't just "put up and endure it". You die if you have no artificial means of cooling yourself, as the body's only significant temperature reduction mechanism stops working, and that's not survivable for long.
All of this drawn-out study and deliberation and the protracted uncertainty and wasted manufacturing and expense for users makes very little sense, when it's abundantly clear that all road transport is set to become electric in a very short space of time.
Just go there now and save everyone a lot of time and effort, and improve air quality at the same time.
The survey ranking of the top 3 winning technology leaders is no surprise whatsoever. One of them is revolutionizing the EV, energy, space and transport sectors with a large number of leading technologies and hence gives people great hope for the future, while the other two are best known for their profiteering and abuse of the public. It's hardly a contest.
If you want to be known as a technology leader then you shouldn't be a leeching middleman as everyone will hate you, and rightly so. And if you do something technical then you should do it well, instead of doing it absolutely appallingly on purpose because that gives you greater profit --- I'm thinking of Amazon product search here, which is undoubtedly the worst search system that has ever been implemented in online shopping (advertising unrelated things in disguise). Prime Video has a similar purpose, mainly a vehicle for Amazon to put non-Prime content in front of you and make you pay for the privilege of their direct advertising. Oh and Bezos, you really shouldn't be abusing your employees either, it's bad karma.
Regarding Facebook, there's not a lot to say in terms of technology because all the company does is provide a website which monetizes and hence abuses people, so you have to scrape the barrel to find anything technical at all to say about them. One example of FB tech is that their techies release some fine open-source packages behind the scenes (only programmers hear about this though), but this is incidental to FB's primary product which offers no technical leadership at all. In fact they've given us technical regression since FB has closed off much public communication into a walled garden. Zuckerberg offers no hope at all.
So there we have it, not really a contest among those three. I'm sure there must have been other worthy companies in the surveyed 700, but among these three corporate leaders only Musk deserves to be called a technology leader. The other two should be filed under "Abuse for profit".
That word "work" needs splitting into its constituent parts before it can be discussed in the context of Maslow, because it carries so much baggage.
The "earning money for food and shelter" part of working is firmly at the very bottom of Maslow's pyramid. The ceiling at that lowest tier is simply survival, and it's very grim to realize that by far the largest part of humanity is huddled together down there and living from day to day.
In contrast, "doing something which interests you" belongs in one of the higher tiers of the Hierarchy of Needs, one of the tiers concerned with personal fulfillment. Earning money while doing something interesting does not appear in that tier, because it has already been satisfied in a lower tier.
This is one of the reasons why a Universal Basic Income fits in well with Maslow's upward progression of a thinking species, as it frees people from the fight for survival and enables them to seek out occupations which are interesting to them in social or intellectual ways.
It's pretty hilarious that neither the Slashdot summary, nor the Budgie Remix front page (which doesn't even have an About link), nor the Budgie video, nor the Softpedia link, actually say what distinguishes Budgie from any other Ubuntu.
In the absence of information, you can't blame people for thinking that it's just a remix for the purpose of being different. If that is not so, then how about providing some information that might give people a hint? You've hidden it so well that none of the news rebloggers has any idea.
Bringing a new nuclear plant online safely takes decades, and decomissioning one takes even longer if you include its nuclear waste. Nuclear is not an agile solution. This won't change in the near future, or perhaps not at all until "nuclear" becomes synonymous with fusion, not fission like today.
Nuclear is also an extraordinarily expensive technology which limits its uptake to only the more afluent of nations. Furthermore it is highly regulated for very good reason, and the politics of nuclear power again limit its global uptake. If we have to rely on nuclear to get us out of the CO2 mess then we are doomed, because it's a global problem.
But we don't have to rely on nuclear, we can just stop burning fossil fuels, and stop using so much energy overall. It would require an immense social adjustment to achieve this, but it has no roadblocks other than making people care enough to do it.
The main showstopper to controlling our current destruction of the planet is profit-seeking capitalism, because it would die in the absence of perpetual growth. Nobody has yet come up with a solution for dealing with that.
"Would you be inclined to embrace Wolfram's approach, Apple's Swift Playgrounds, Microsoft TEALS' Java-centric AP CS curriculum, or something else (e.g., R, Tableau, Excel+VBA)?"
Choose none of those named above, nor any other proprietary language or platform. It is quite incredible and irresponsible that someone would recommend bringing up children into a form of corporate mental slavery and proprietary dependency.
Give your children freedom. There is no shortage of unencumbered free and open source programming languages that will serve their educational needs very well indeed. Once they are young adults armed with some knowledge and experience, they can choose their own proprietary chains if they so wish.
When authentication secrets are stored centrally on a website then they are always at risk, regardless of the methods used to protect them. Good sites make the stored information hard to crack, and poor sites make it easy, but they are all at risk --- from internal employee corruption if nothing else. Those secrets will leak because when stored at a single point then they are all accessible to the attacker at a single point. Mass leakage is just a matter of time.
A vastly more secure approach that has been well known for decades is based on PKI, in which the user stores their auth secret locally in a private key, one half of a {private,public} PKI key pair. The server only gets to know the user's public key, and it's pointless for an attacker to crack that because the public key is public information that can be distributed freely through keyservers. (The PGP/GnuPG keyserver network has been doing this for decades.)
When a user creates an account on some website, she provides the identifier of her chosen public key (she may have lots of them). When logging in to the account subsequently, the server looks up her public key identifier in the info held for this account, fetches her public key from the keyservers, then it sends her a random string encrypted with her public key. She decrypts it with her private key (which is only held locally by the user, nowhere else) and sends the decrypted string back. The server accepts the login if the returned string matches the random string that it picked, which is not stored anywhere and varies on every login, and it rejects the fraudulent login attempt if the match fails. All this can be completely automatic.
That's strong distributed security, and it's resistant to MITM attacks and does not store any authentication secrets on the central service so those secrets cannot leak when the service is compromised.
This kind of PKI-based approach is not rocket science. Why this old but secure scheme isn't used by websites is a big mystery. The reason isn't user inconvenience, since PKI can be packaged up to look trivial to end users if developers take the trouble. And so, websites get hacked and their users' auth secrets get revealed by the millions, surprise surprise.
Rebranding and image polishing are undertaken only when a company knows that things aren't going too well for them. Many Firefox users would probably agree with that, at least the technical users know it all too clearly.
However, the problems are not caused by the brand being unsavoury or the image tarnished. The brand and image are fine. Where problems have appeared it is because Mozilla developers have been forcing unwanted change on their users, forcing them continually to find remedial fixes to preserve friendly and productive old functionality. Browsers are not kettles, people don't want a completely different look each year.
The fact that Mozilla is now undertaking brand and image refurbishment clearly indicates the nature of the problem. The immense and unbridled ego of Firefox developers has put them in complete denial that Mozilla's problems are caused by them and them alone, and that has left their management with only one alternative, to play with branding and image.
We've done little to nothing to move people to IPv6..... The majority of home connections are still IPv4 and the majority of ISPs still only offer this.
What you say is not wrong, but many people will interpret it incorrectly as suggesting that there is a "switchover" from IPv4 involved. That's not how IPv6 was designed and planned at all. IPv6 was designed right from the start to run alongside IPv4, and "migration" or "transition" are poor words for what will mainly be an expansion of IPv6 use, and it may have very little early effect on IPv4.
Nothing will stop IPv4 from continuing to run other than the failure of old IPv4-only equipment and its replacement by IPv6-only gear, which will be uncommon (most replacements will be dual stack). IPv4 is quite likely to remain with us for many decades ahead, even if consumer ISPs cut it off earlier to save costs. IPv6 adoption may not even decrease IPv4 usage much at all, with the full 32 bits of IPv4 address space continuing to be used right up until the bitter end until it's stopped wholesale simply out of embarrassment. But that would be a long way off.
Short version: IPv6 merely expands IP use. It will be seen as a (very drawn-out) "switchover" only by individual users as their communication involves more and more IPv6, because single users don't scale. But on the Internet as a whole the rising adoption of IPv6 doesn't require a decrease in IPv4 use at all.
It is NOT a zero-sum game, but a growth of IP because the IPv4 bucket is too small.
Don't make these cars into superheroes or some retarded wish like that.
When's the last time you saw a manually operated air bag?
In these high-speed, blink of the eye situations, cars already perform as if they were superheros, and that is exactly what we want. We are greatly outclassed by machinery in most high-speed tasks, and this will become ever more so because it is to our advantage.
From the perspective of an automaton, choosing between alternative outcomes in the event of an imminent crash is no harder than choosing to deploy an airbag. Calling such functionality "superheroic" doesn't really add anything useful to the topic, but if you insist, they'll certainly behave that way.
Can anyone explain any way this would be worthwhile?
Sure. It's obvious to most people but it might as well be explained in case some folks haven't thought about it.
1) Energy will be cheap during the day because the sun is overhead and that power source is effectively free and limitless.
2) The sun isn't available at night, but solar power could be captured during the day and used at night, if storage were available.
3) The battery storage of the article provides that storage.
There you go, it's pretty simple and very sensible. It's also a good idea to add the following prediction to the above as well, as it's really a foregone conclusion and hence very safe to forecast:
4) All normal land vehicles will be electric in just a few decades. Burning fossil fuels may even become illegal, if not because of global warming and pollution then because it's far more valuable to use hydrocarbons as a raw material for industry. Burning money is silly.
Adding item (4) means that everyone will want the energy storage of (3) for recharging their cars when they get home. Paying the grid for that power when the sun can provide it for free during the day would be poor domestic economics. This pushes towards needing even more battery capacity.
Elon Musk is quite a visionary, but he's also a clever cookie when it comes to business. He knows where all this is going and is sewing up the future in EVs, mobile power storage, recharging stations, solar panels, and fixed power storage. He's got it all covered.
Slashdot Mirror
Public is not the same as Private. Most commercial "VPNs" are actually Virtual Public Networks. Rule of thumb:
- Any VPN in which a corporation or an untrusted individual is a participant node should be regarded as Public.
- Any VPN running code which you haven't compiled yourself from known-good sources should be regarded as Public.
- Any VPN using non-standard encryption or pre-generating keys for member nodes should be regarded as Public.
If you really need to trust a VPN then don't deceive yourself --- don't play Security Theater, ensure that Private really means Private. Convenience is the enemy of security, and trust is almost always inversely proportional to convenience because convenience tends to introduce untrusted elements.
Apparently Tesla is giving potential customers 7 days of full possession and 1,000 miles of test drive instead, if I understood it correctly.
That seems enormously superior to sniffing around in a showroom for an hour, to me at least.
That was an excellent talk, containing some really great analysis. The analysis was so clear and thorough though that I was puzzled why it left one very important matter very fuzzy and poorly defined --- the title and main topic of the talk, of all things!
This is the problem: the word "jobs" (or equivalently "work") means two very different things to us, and these two things have been conflated into one single idea by our history over hundreds of years. Those two things are: (1) Doing something useful in a place of employment, and (2) Getting paid for it and using that money as the enabler of our personal survival.
I put it to you that your talk conflated the two ideas as strongly as everyone else does, and used the fear of losing (2) as the basis for examining whether AI would eliminate opportunities for (1). This is a crucial distinction to make, because survival is a non-optional imperative for most humans, whereas having an interesting occupation is merely nice-to-have and can easily bear periodic interruption.
I am an engineer, and as an engineer let me tell you something that isn't a secret among engineers but is rarely stated so directly: the practical purpose of engineering and of the science which underpins it is to eliminate (2) from the burden carried by humanity, and to enable a focus on (1) --- in other words, to give you the time to do something interesting with your life. It is sometimes said that this is the aim of civilization too, although a better observation would be that having to work for your survival is not civilized at all. Indeed, it is barbaric.
I expect that you will be giving that talk again, as the subject is a very interesting one and is highly topical today. I would definitely recommend though that in future you explain its title in more detail, because very few rational people would complain if AI eliminated the need for humans to work for their survival.
The message that Nintendo is sending fans seems clear. Don't use, buy, play or in any other way invest your time or money in Nintendo, as their only interest is in bleeding you dry by whatever means they can. As a company they are signaling that they have neither social insight nor ethics, and do not treat fans as assets nor as free publicity.
Message received and understood, so I'm adding Nintendo to my short boycott list. It's just a personal statement and of course will have no effect on Nintendo individually, but I doubt that I will be the only one making such a decision. Evil deeds and blind corporate greed should not go unpunished. Conversely, competitors now gain an extra chance.
My poor Wii will never have a brother or a sister.
stephanruby wrote:
It would be unethical for the human to impersonate a bot.
What's more, the bot has no means to give the human legal authority to impersonate itself. Conundrum! :P
[Oh dear. By the time I got to the end of this post, I began to realize that I was no longer quite so sure that I was joking.]
This Amazon collaboration with Iridium is going to be interesting to watch on the Net Neutrality front.
As long as Bezos operates an independent walled garden then he's in the clear to make up his own rules, but as soon as he turns CloudConnect into a global ISP (if that is what he is intending) then he'll come under Net Neutrality rules wherever they apply, and that means on most of the planet. The small minority of people who reject Net Neutrality in USA for party political reasons is entirely irrelevent in this global context.
Since Bezos does not currently provide first-hop connectivity and hence is not running an ISP, his Amazon walled garden does not come under scrutiny on net nor platform neutrality grounds, only on different grounds such as privacy. As a global ISP though, it seems likely that his previous freedom to do as he pleases (for example by benefitting only his Amazon merchants) is going to be curtailed in a manner which he will dislike greatly.
Facebook seems to be moving in the same direction, and undoubtedly there will be many others too. Net Neutrality of satellite ISPs seems certain to become a major issue.
Sensible people who understand that time is our most precious and limited resource will work for others only just enough to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Any hours remaining after that need is met can be dedicated to favourite hobbies, pastimes, unpaid vocations or other personal interests --- that's called "Having a life".
If you don't understand that then you're either an employer who benefits from the depressed wages that come with a mass labour pool, which is the primary reason for promoting the work ethic, or you have fallen for it yourself.
Either way, labouring is a distressing waste of people's lives, and advocating that it should be normal in a modern technological society is a barbaric and unethical position.
From TFA, the reason why the reactors were shut down (which wasn't included in the summary) is:
Yeah, I know that reading TFA is no longer cool on Slashdot, but someone has to help out the editors. :P
Two decades is a reasonable age and Slashdot's first quarter century isn't all that distant, so we might as well start putting the paleohistory in order. This needs an era classification scheme, and mcmonkey seems to have given us an ideal metric for era boundaries: the number of digits in the Slashdot ID. As every proper techie will understand, this gives us a logarithmic scale which normalizes the population explosion nicely.
Well I know where to start, but the rest needs input:
1 digit - Tacomordium - life emerges by accident from the primordial nerd soup. ... ...
2 digits - [Suggestions?]
3
4
It's been a roller coaster ride for sure. Although the growing anti-science in the latter half of the site's existence has made it difficult for the original highly technical population to continue participating, Slashdot still manages to hold its niche together.
I look forward to another 20 years. :-)
Combine the two types of autonomous vehicle for the best of both worlds. An autonomous EV van could be loaded with pizzas and able to launch short-hop delivery drones. It could keep one or more drones out delivering to the door while the rest are being recharged on the EV as their mothership.
This overcomes several issues, notably the lack of delivery to the door in Domino's (test) solution. It also ensures that pizza stays hot without needing a heavily insulated box since the trip by air would be much shorter. What's more, it allows the flying drones to be replaced with short-range wheeled delivery bots as an alternative, perhaps chosen on a house by house basis, which may be cheaper and more reliable, or even necessary in the rain.
Recharging on the mothership overcomes both efficiency and range issues, and allows smaller/cheaper batteries to be used in end-delivery vehicles. This in turn could lead towards the short-hop drones/bots becoming cheap, mass-produced, disposable delivery elements.
Musicians and enthusiasts who use music creation software usually know very well why their software tools have an interface that depicts music hardware, so I'm a bit puzzled why it's a mystery to the author of TFA.
The reason is that hardware controls like knobs, sliders, percussion pads, 2-axis touchpads, multi-axis RF field interfaces, breath controllers and many others kinds are extremely interactive and immediate in their effect, and so their use comes naturally to music creators. All of these controllers are commonly provided with a MIDI interface today. This has been so for many decades, either baseband MIDI or today commonly carried over USB. Through MIDI, these hardware interfaces are bound by the musician to any desired control points in the software tools, and the result is extremely expressive and a pleasure to use.
The author complains that controlling the s/w elements with a mouse is pretty awful, and indeed it is, but nobody with any sense does that except before they've set up their MIDI control gear. There are literally hundreds of thousands of different kinds of MIDI controllers around, often costing very little, so it's a bit unusual to find a music maker who is not aware of them and of their purpose.
From WP's Wet-bulb_temperature page:
Just temperature alone doesn't give the complete picture when it comes to risk. That's why TFA was specifically about wet-bulb temperatures, because when they're exceeded then you can't just "put up and endure it". You die if you have no artificial means of cooling yourself, as the body's only significant temperature reduction mechanism stops working, and that's not survivable for long.
All of this drawn-out study and deliberation and the protracted uncertainty and wasted manufacturing and expense for users makes very little sense, when it's abundantly clear that all road transport is set to become electric in a very short space of time.
Just go there now and save everyone a lot of time and effort, and improve air quality at the same time.
The survey ranking of the top 3 winning technology leaders is no surprise whatsoever. One of them is revolutionizing the EV, energy, space and transport sectors with a large number of leading technologies and hence gives people great hope for the future, while the other two are best known for their profiteering and abuse of the public. It's hardly a contest.
If you want to be known as a technology leader then you shouldn't be a leeching middleman as everyone will hate you, and rightly so. And if you do something technical then you should do it well, instead of doing it absolutely appallingly on purpose because that gives you greater profit --- I'm thinking of Amazon product search here, which is undoubtedly the worst search system that has ever been implemented in online shopping (advertising unrelated things in disguise). Prime Video has a similar purpose, mainly a vehicle for Amazon to put non-Prime content in front of you and make you pay for the privilege of their direct advertising. Oh and Bezos, you really shouldn't be abusing your employees either, it's bad karma.
Regarding Facebook, there's not a lot to say in terms of technology because all the company does is provide a website which monetizes and hence abuses people, so you have to scrape the barrel to find anything technical at all to say about them. One example of FB tech is that their techies release some fine open-source packages behind the scenes (only programmers hear about this though), but this is incidental to FB's primary product which offers no technical leadership at all. In fact they've given us technical regression since FB has closed off much public communication into a walled garden. Zuckerberg offers no hope at all.
So there we have it, not really a contest among those three. I'm sure there must have been other worthy companies in the surveyed 700, but among these three corporate leaders only Musk deserves to be called a technology leader. The other two should be filed under "Abuse for profit".
That word "work" needs splitting into its constituent parts before it can be discussed in the context of Maslow, because it carries so much baggage.
The "earning money for food and shelter" part of working is firmly at the very bottom of Maslow's pyramid. The ceiling at that lowest tier is simply survival, and it's very grim to realize that by far the largest part of humanity is huddled together down there and living from day to day.
In contrast, "doing something which interests you" belongs in one of the higher tiers of the Hierarchy of Needs, one of the tiers concerned with personal fulfillment. Earning money while doing something interesting does not appear in that tier, because it has already been satisfied in a lower tier.
This is one of the reasons why a Universal Basic Income fits in well with Maslow's upward progression of a thinking species, as it frees people from the fight for survival and enables them to seek out occupations which are interesting to them in social or intellectual ways.
It's pretty hilarious that neither the Slashdot summary, nor the Budgie Remix front page (which doesn't even have an About link), nor the Budgie video, nor the Softpedia link, actually say what distinguishes Budgie from any other Ubuntu.
In the absence of information, you can't blame people for thinking that it's just a remix for the purpose of being different. If that is not so, then how about providing some information that might give people a hint? You've hidden it so well that none of the news rebloggers has any idea.
Bringing a new nuclear plant online safely takes decades, and decomissioning one takes even longer if you include its nuclear waste. Nuclear is not an agile solution. This won't change in the near future, or perhaps not at all until "nuclear" becomes synonymous with fusion, not fission like today.
Nuclear is also an extraordinarily expensive technology which limits its uptake to only the more afluent of nations. Furthermore it is highly regulated for very good reason, and the politics of nuclear power again limit its global uptake. If we have to rely on nuclear to get us out of the CO2 mess then we are doomed, because it's a global problem.
But we don't have to rely on nuclear, we can just stop burning fossil fuels, and stop using so much energy overall. It would require an immense social adjustment to achieve this, but it has no roadblocks other than making people care enough to do it.
The main showstopper to controlling our current destruction of the planet is profit-seeking capitalism, because it would die in the absence of perpetual growth. Nobody has yet come up with a solution for dealing with that.
AC asks:
When a robot is designed to kill in violation of Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics, then Newton's Third Law comes into play:
-- Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
This law operates even in the absence of robots.
Choose none of those named above, nor any other proprietary language or platform. It is quite incredible and irresponsible that someone would recommend bringing up children into a form of corporate mental slavery and proprietary dependency.
Give your children freedom. There is no shortage of unencumbered free and open source programming languages that will serve their educational needs very well indeed. Once they are young adults armed with some knowledge and experience, they can choose their own proprietary chains if they so wish.
When authentication secrets are stored centrally on a website then they are always at risk, regardless of the methods used to protect them. Good sites make the stored information hard to crack, and poor sites make it easy, but they are all at risk --- from internal employee corruption if nothing else. Those secrets will leak because when stored at a single point then they are all accessible to the attacker at a single point. Mass leakage is just a matter of time.
A vastly more secure approach that has been well known for decades is based on PKI, in which the user stores their auth secret locally in a private key, one half of a {private,public} PKI key pair. The server only gets to know the user's public key, and it's pointless for an attacker to crack that because the public key is public information that can be distributed freely through keyservers. (The PGP/GnuPG keyserver network has been doing this for decades.)
When a user creates an account on some website, she provides the identifier of her chosen public key (she may have lots of them). When logging in to the account subsequently, the server looks up her public key identifier in the info held for this account, fetches her public key from the keyservers, then it sends her a random string encrypted with her public key. She decrypts it with her private key (which is only held locally by the user, nowhere else) and sends the decrypted string back. The server accepts the login if the returned string matches the random string that it picked, which is not stored anywhere and varies on every login, and it rejects the fraudulent login attempt if the match fails. All this can be completely automatic.
That's strong distributed security, and it's resistant to MITM attacks and does not store any authentication secrets on the central service so those secrets cannot leak when the service is compromised.
This kind of PKI-based approach is not rocket science. Why this old but secure scheme isn't used by websites is a big mystery. The reason isn't user inconvenience, since PKI can be packaged up to look trivial to end users if developers take the trouble. And so, websites get hacked and their users' auth secrets get revealed by the millions, surprise surprise.
Rebranding and image polishing are undertaken only when a company knows that things aren't going too well for them. Many Firefox users would probably agree with that, at least the technical users know it all too clearly.
However, the problems are not caused by the brand being unsavoury or the image tarnished. The brand and image are fine. Where problems have appeared it is because Mozilla developers have been forcing unwanted change on their users, forcing them continually to find remedial fixes to preserve friendly and productive old functionality. Browsers are not kettles, people don't want a completely different look each year.
The fact that Mozilla is now undertaking brand and image refurbishment clearly indicates the nature of the problem. The immense and unbridled ego of Firefox developers has put them in complete denial that Mozilla's problems are caused by them and them alone, and that has left their management with only one alternative, to play with branding and image.
It will achieve nothing of substance.
What you say is not wrong, but many people will interpret it incorrectly as suggesting that there is a "switchover" from IPv4 involved. That's not how IPv6 was designed and planned at all. IPv6 was designed right from the start to run alongside IPv4, and "migration" or "transition" are poor words for what will mainly be an expansion of IPv6 use, and it may have very little early effect on IPv4.
Nothing will stop IPv4 from continuing to run other than the failure of old IPv4-only equipment and its replacement by IPv6-only gear, which will be uncommon (most replacements will be dual stack). IPv4 is quite likely to remain with us for many decades ahead, even if consumer ISPs cut it off earlier to save costs. IPv6 adoption may not even decrease IPv4 usage much at all, with the full 32 bits of IPv4 address space continuing to be used right up until the bitter end until it's stopped wholesale simply out of embarrassment. But that would be a long way off.
Short version: IPv6 merely expands IP use. It will be seen as a (very drawn-out) "switchover" only by individual users as their communication involves more and more IPv6, because single users don't scale. But on the Internet as a whole the rising adoption of IPv6 doesn't require a decrease in IPv4 use at all.
It is NOT a zero-sum game, but a growth of IP because the IPv4 bucket is too small.
When's the last time you saw a manually operated air bag?
In these high-speed, blink of the eye situations, cars already perform as if they were superheros, and that is exactly what we want. We are greatly outclassed by machinery in most high-speed tasks, and this will become ever more so because it is to our advantage.
From the perspective of an automaton, choosing between alternative outcomes in the event of an imminent crash is no harder than choosing to deploy an airbag. Calling such functionality "superheroic" doesn't really add anything useful to the topic, but if you insist, they'll certainly behave that way.
Sure. It's obvious to most people but it might as well be explained in case some folks haven't thought about it.
There you go, it's pretty simple and very sensible. It's also a good idea to add the following prediction to the above as well, as it's really a foregone conclusion and hence very safe to forecast:
Adding item (4) means that everyone will want the energy storage of (3) for recharging their cars when they get home. Paying the grid for that power when the sun can provide it for free during the day would be poor domestic economics. This pushes towards needing even more battery capacity.
Elon Musk is quite a visionary, but he's also a clever cookie when it comes to business. He knows where all this is going and is sewing up the future in EVs, mobile power storage, recharging stations, solar panels, and fixed power storage. He's got it all covered.