Sure. 'Lots of species' have gone extinct in the 4.5B years of Earth's lifespan so far, but we are the the dominant, and very-much sentient, self-aware, tool-making-and-using species of Earth, that distguishes ourselves by being the only one on the planet that changes our environment to suit us, rather than allowing the environment to dictate our adaptation. Other, lesser species have gone extinct for that reason; we don't have to. Of course, we might go extinct anyway -- but only if we sit on our opposable thumbs, contemplating our navels, until it's too late to do anything about it. Another unique ability that homo sapiens has? Planning for the future.
We're overrunning the planet. Trying to get Humans to curb their hardwired instinctual drive to reproduce is almost completely futile for various reasons ranging from religions frowning upon any sort of birth control methods, to people too poor to afford birth control, to people who just won't stop having kids -- and since geriatric medicine is getting better, people are living longer. Meanwhile it's harder and harder every decade to feed everyone, and the world seems to be increasingly full of agitators and aggressors making life more difficult and dangerous for everyone else. We do need to make a way to get off this planet to relieve the ever-growing population pressure -- and to give the restless types something to conquer that doesn't involve attacking someone else. Personally I'm big on the idea of a permanent colony on the Moon for starters. Give it 50 years to build infrastructure and industry, and you've got a great jumping-off point for the rest of the solar system. Then, maybe, Mars? The Asteroid belt?
...no, that's not at all what I'm getting at. I'm pointing out that the 'blue sky/rose-colored glasses/what-could-POSSIBLY-go-wrong' crowd is, as usual, ignoring the Murphy factor in an endeavor like this. We're going to go to Mars, sooner or later, but it's going to be messy, and perhaps catastrophic. Luckily for whoever is going, bigger brains than anyone on/. are thinking through What Can Go Wrong, and are making the best contingency plans they can.
Short answer: We need manufacturers of so-called 'Internet of Things' to get their HEADS out of their ASSES and stop skimping on (or skipping altogether!) security of their gods-be-damned devices! It would also be nice if they didn't make every damned thing to use 'the cloud' or otherwise require connection to one of their damned servers in order to work AT ALL.
Press plungers leave far too much fine sediment in your cup.
Funny, I've never had that problem, but then again I grind the beans correctly -- that being, as coarse as possible. Hence the 8 minute steep time when brewing it, to allow proper extraction.
Also, I don't have hundreds of dollars for an espresso machine. A press is the best of all possible worlds, requires no electricity, I can make coffee anywhere, so long as I can get hot water to make it.
You can also get wimpy coffee out of a press by cutting the steep time.
No kidding, that's why I said 8 minutes steep time. Any more than that does you no good, any less than that and you're not getting the most out of the grounds.
There are people who hate the bitter and add paper to press like methods.
Those are people who probably don't really like coffee that much in the first place. They should stick to light roast, or just make tea. Keep in mind the average person doesn't know really good coffee from a hole in the ground, they only notice when it's really, really bad; the average person also drinks a 'coffee-like beverage' that is little more than brown water that someone gently whispered the word 'coffee' at to flavor it. Furthermore the average person thinks the syrupy 'drinks' they sell at Starbucks, that are maybe 10% coffee and 90% sugar and other things are 'coffee'; they're more like 'diabetes precursors'.
In an age where we're trying to promote reusability and recycling and reduce waste, Your K-cups are a throwback, they're a waste of money, and you have little control over how your coffee is made.
Drip coffee is crap, plain and simple. You want decent-tasting coffee? Use a press instead. With drip coffee, the oils that make it taste really good end up floating on top and don't get down into the pot, are wasted, and you get inferior-tasting brew. With a press, you get everything the grounds have to offer, resulting in a richer, more complex, better-tasting brew. Yes, it takes longer (8 minutes plus prep time) but if you want to not waste perfectly good (and expensive) coffee, then that's what it takes to get the most out of it.
Simple: infiltrate, then subvert. It's more of a 'cold-war' strategy than a 'hot war' strategy. If they get Microsoft employees working on Linux to the point where they're a large fraction or majority, then Microsoft de-facto 'owns' it and do what they want with it. Also, by investing heavily in financial 'support' of the Linux Foundation, they can use that as leverage to make things go their way in the meantime. You THINK it's all unassailable, but it all ends up coming down to money and power; you have the money, you can influence things, and if you have enough people in key positions, you have the power. That's where I think they're going with this.
By heavily funding it they can de-facto own it. They can also use that as leverage to guide it's development to do things like include their so-called 'telemetry' spyware and other malware, under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or 'improving user security', and only people with the chops to manually remove it and recompile it would be free of it -- or they might so firmly embed it all into the kernel that you'd have to rewrite it completely to get rid of it. Then also isn't there the problem of 'secure boot' and signing of bootloaders, and who exactly controls all that?
SIASL was fine as a stand-alone work of fiction; it had a point to make about human nature and human culture and society, and it accomplished that. I see no reason why, or even how it could be a weekly series.
You want to do something with a Heinlein novel? Make The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress into a feature-length film!
You're forgetting a few Ultimate Truths that you, as an engineer, should know:
It always costs more and takes longer
Murphy's Law, in general
Can we get them there? Sure. Will they survive the trip? Maybe. Will they survive long living on Mars? Coin-flip, at best. By the time we got anyone there and established, there'll be a thousand little problems that nobody thought of, or thought wouldn't be as serious as they turn out to be, any one of which will kill everyone. Anyone volunteering to be in the first wave of 'colonists' to Mars should consider it to be not only a one-way trip, but a suicide mission.
I think they want to own Linux outright, and this is one more step in that plan. I also think they want to be the ONLY OS in the free world, and this is one step in that plan. Once the eliminate Linux as a competitor, they'll target Apple.
'Violence' isn't necessarily a physical thing, either, it can be verbal, and it can be quietly emotional, too. The same concept applies. If you're taught as a kid to give in to fear and not try to be brave then you'll get dominated just as easily in non-physical ways. This is especially important for girl children, but for boy children, too.
I'd like to point out something else very relevant to this discussion. Bullying of various kinds doesn't stop when your kid becomes and adult. It happens everywhere. What, theoretically, do you think is going to happen to a kid who grew up being told to run away or submit to someone bullying them, when they're an adult and a coworker or even a boss challenges them, and their ingrained response is to become submissive and passive and not rise to the challenge? They get passed over for promotions, they fail to get recognized for good work they do, they get paid less money, they fail to become leaders, and they fail to gain the respect of others. That's no way to go through life, and preventing that from happening begins as a kid, at school, when some other kid bullies you and you learn to stand up to them, and defend yourself (verbally, with actions, and physically if necessary).
First, can we please remain calm about this subject and not have it turn into the typical Internet shouting match that I seem to see every single day? Not even saying you're doing that, but I am pre-emptively tryingt to prevent that..
For the record: I don't like violence any more than any other rational adult person does. But I do recognize that sometimes you can't avoid it without the long-term consequences being worse; you shouldn't start fights, but you should finish them.
Now, then: I'm not saying to tell your kid 'tough luck, deal with it', I'm saying tell your kid 'stand up to {whoever}, and if he insists on getting physical about it, don't back down, take him on'. You counsel your kid on how to defend himself, physically. You tell him 'don't start fights, but if someone starts one with you, you defend yourself with everything you've got'. I can't imagine anything worse for a kid than to be considered a coward by his peers; that's something that follows you around forever, and no kid needs that sort of sabotage in his young life. That's all I'm saying.
That worked for some bullies, some not. It also worked for some of those being bullied, some not.
As I just said to someone else: There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to NOT teach kids to stick up for themselves, and NO reason whatsoever to go through life as a perpetual victim.
Victims do not "deserve" to be bullied because they are cowards
I never said that, you're completely reading that into it and corrupting what I'm saying.
"Standing up to them" may work in the movies, but it almost never works that way in real life
There is literally no point in going through life as a perpetual victim and every reason to teach kids to stick up for themselves, and you should be ashamed to suggest anything different.
I don't think you remember what it was like, internally, to be a kid, or maybe you never experienced being bullied as a kid? Back before the Internet, dealing with bullies only required a little courage, since most bullies are cowards to start with, and standing up to them usually has them back down. Even if they beat you, you stood up to them and that gains the respect of other kids. 'A coward dies a thousand deaths' is the saying, as I remember. In some cases bullies will even respect you if you stand up to them, ending the problem. Since the advent of the Internet, however, courage has more or less become nullified. Online bullies ('trolls') can use anonymizing tactics to multiply their attacks on someone, limited only by the amount of time they want to spend arranging to harass someone, and the target can't really do anything of substance about it. Even staying off the Internet doesn't help because they'll continue to be attacked in absentia, and since it's the Internet, those attacks persist long after they've been posted. This is not as simple a problem to solve as it used to be, when a punch in the nose usually ended the problem once and for all.
See, the problem here isn't the authoritarian dictatorship attitude of MS about updates, it's the spyware they force on users, even of older versions of Windows, and forcing Win10 on people through various ruses. You're assuming MS has the best interests of the end users at heart, when clearly, through their actions, they do not; they're more interested in ensuring their revenue stream, and what the users want is not particularly relevant to them. How can you trust a company that clearly doesn't listen and doesn't care about your rights?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, Nations of Earth, let's all agree to not have nuclear weapons anymore, so everyone is safer, what do you say?
Nations of Earth:..sure, great idea! We're all for it!
One or two Nations, in private: LOL, We'll pretend to go along with this, and hide our nukes, so we can be dominant, LOL! What a bunch of idiots!
***Everything gets fucked up***
We need to grow up, as a species, before we're really mature enough to do things like this without someone being an underhanded dick about it.
Sure. 'Lots of species' have gone extinct in the 4.5B years of Earth's lifespan so far, but we are the the dominant, and very-much sentient, self-aware, tool-making-and-using species of Earth, that distguishes ourselves by being the only one on the planet that changes our environment to suit us, rather than allowing the environment to dictate our adaptation. Other, lesser species have gone extinct for that reason; we don't have to. Of course, we might go extinct anyway -- but only if we sit on our opposable thumbs, contemplating our navels, until it's too late to do anything about it. Another unique ability that homo sapiens has? Planning for the future.
We're overrunning the planet. Trying to get Humans to curb their hardwired instinctual drive to reproduce is almost completely futile for various reasons ranging from religions frowning upon any sort of birth control methods, to people too poor to afford birth control, to people who just won't stop having kids -- and since geriatric medicine is getting better, people are living longer. Meanwhile it's harder and harder every decade to feed everyone, and the world seems to be increasingly full of agitators and aggressors making life more difficult and dangerous for everyone else. We do need to make a way to get off this planet to relieve the ever-growing population pressure -- and to give the restless types something to conquer that doesn't involve attacking someone else. Personally I'm big on the idea of a permanent colony on the Moon for starters. Give it 50 years to build infrastructure and industry, and you've got a great jumping-off point for the rest of the solar system. Then, maybe, Mars? The Asteroid belt?
...no, that's not at all what I'm getting at. I'm pointing out that the 'blue sky/rose-colored glasses/what-could-POSSIBLY-go-wrong' crowd is, as usual, ignoring the Murphy factor in an endeavor like this. We're going to go to Mars, sooner or later, but it's going to be messy, and perhaps catastrophic. Luckily for whoever is going, bigger brains than anyone on /. are thinking through What Can Go Wrong, and are making the best contingency plans they can.
Who said anything about a fork? They'd just guide the development of existing forks into the direction they want it to go.
Short answer: We need manufacturers of so-called 'Internet of Things' to get their HEADS out of their ASSES and stop skimping on (or skipping altogether!) security of their gods-be-damned devices! It would also be nice if they didn't make every damned thing to use 'the cloud' or otherwise require connection to one of their damned servers in order to work AT ALL.
Press plungers leave far too much fine sediment in your cup.
Funny, I've never had that problem, but then again I grind the beans correctly -- that being, as coarse as possible. Hence the 8 minute steep time when brewing it, to allow proper extraction.
Also, I don't have hundreds of dollars for an espresso machine. A press is the best of all possible worlds, requires no electricity, I can make coffee anywhere, so long as I can get hot water to make it.
Hello new friend-of-mine, you'll probably appreciate the conversation we're having below: https://science.slashdot.org/c...
You can also get wimpy coffee out of a press by cutting the steep time.
No kidding, that's why I said 8 minutes steep time. Any more than that does you no good, any less than that and you're not getting the most out of the grounds.
There are people who hate the bitter and add paper to press like methods.
Those are people who probably don't really like coffee that much in the first place. They should stick to light roast, or just make tea. Keep in mind the average person doesn't know really good coffee from a hole in the ground, they only notice when it's really, really bad; the average person also drinks a 'coffee-like beverage' that is little more than brown water that someone gently whispered the word 'coffee' at to flavor it. Furthermore the average person thinks the syrupy 'drinks' they sell at Starbucks, that are maybe 10% coffee and 90% sugar and other things are 'coffee'; they're more like 'diabetes precursors'.
I have a drip coffee maker in it's box in the closet that came with a metal filter. Still inferior to the press method IMNSHO.
K-cups
In an age where we're trying to promote reusability and recycling and reduce waste, Your K-cups are a throwback, they're a waste of money, and you have little control over how your coffee is made.
You're welcome. :-)
Simple: infiltrate, then subvert. It's more of a 'cold-war' strategy than a 'hot war' strategy. If they get Microsoft employees working on Linux to the point where they're a large fraction or majority, then Microsoft de-facto 'owns' it and do what they want with it. Also, by investing heavily in financial 'support' of the Linux Foundation, they can use that as leverage to make things go their way in the meantime. You THINK it's all unassailable, but it all ends up coming down to money and power; you have the money, you can influence things, and if you have enough people in key positions, you have the power. That's where I think they're going with this.
By heavily funding it they can de-facto own it. They can also use that as leverage to guide it's development to do things like include their so-called 'telemetry' spyware and other malware, under the guise of 'improving the user experience' or 'improving user security', and only people with the chops to manually remove it and recompile it would be free of it -- or they might so firmly embed it all into the kernel that you'd have to rewrite it completely to get rid of it. Then also isn't there the problem of 'secure boot' and signing of bootloaders, and who exactly controls all that?
You want to do something with a Heinlein novel? Make The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress into a feature-length film!
Can we get them there? Sure. Will they survive the trip? Maybe. Will they survive long living on Mars? Coin-flip, at best. By the time we got anyone there and established, there'll be a thousand little problems that nobody thought of, or thought wouldn't be as serious as they turn out to be, any one of which will kill everyone. Anyone volunteering to be in the first wave of 'colonists' to Mars should consider it to be not only a one-way trip, but a suicide mission.
I think they want to own Linux outright, and this is one more step in that plan. I also think they want to be the ONLY OS in the free world, and this is one step in that plan. Once the eliminate Linux as a competitor, they'll target Apple.
Seems to have broken some of the Extensions I'm using.
'Violence' isn't necessarily a physical thing, either, it can be verbal, and it can be quietly emotional, too. The same concept applies. If you're taught as a kid to give in to fear and not try to be brave then you'll get dominated just as easily in non-physical ways. This is especially important for girl children, but for boy children, too.
I'd like to point out something else very relevant to this discussion. Bullying of various kinds doesn't stop when your kid becomes and adult. It happens everywhere. What, theoretically, do you think is going to happen to a kid who grew up being told to run away or submit to someone bullying them, when they're an adult and a coworker or even a boss challenges them, and their ingrained response is to become submissive and passive and not rise to the challenge? They get passed over for promotions, they fail to get recognized for good work they do, they get paid less money, they fail to become leaders, and they fail to gain the respect of others. That's no way to go through life, and preventing that from happening begins as a kid, at school, when some other kid bullies you and you learn to stand up to them, and defend yourself (verbally, with actions, and physically if necessary).
For the record: I don't like violence any more than any other rational adult person does. But I do recognize that sometimes you can't avoid it without the long-term consequences being worse; you shouldn't start fights, but you should finish them.
Now, then: I'm not saying to tell your kid 'tough luck, deal with it', I'm saying tell your kid 'stand up to {whoever}, and if he insists on getting physical about it, don't back down, take him on'. You counsel your kid on how to defend himself, physically. You tell him 'don't start fights, but if someone starts one with you, you defend yourself with everything you've got'. I can't imagine anything worse for a kid than to be considered a coward by his peers; that's something that follows you around forever, and no kid needs that sort of sabotage in his young life. That's all I'm saying.
That worked for some bullies, some not. It also worked for some of those being bullied, some not.
As I just said to someone else: There's absolutely no reason whatsoever to NOT teach kids to stick up for themselves, and NO reason whatsoever to go through life as a perpetual victim.
Victims do not "deserve" to be bullied because they are cowards
I never said that, you're completely reading that into it and corrupting what I'm saying.
"Standing up to them" may work in the movies, but it almost never works that way in real life
There is literally no point in going through life as a perpetual victim and every reason to teach kids to stick up for themselves, and you should be ashamed to suggest anything different.
I don't think you remember what it was like, internally, to be a kid, or maybe you never experienced being bullied as a kid? Back before the Internet, dealing with bullies only required a little courage, since most bullies are cowards to start with, and standing up to them usually has them back down. Even if they beat you, you stood up to them and that gains the respect of other kids. 'A coward dies a thousand deaths' is the saying, as I remember. In some cases bullies will even respect you if you stand up to them, ending the problem. Since the advent of the Internet, however, courage has more or less become nullified. Online bullies ('trolls') can use anonymizing tactics to multiply their attacks on someone, limited only by the amount of time they want to spend arranging to harass someone, and the target can't really do anything of substance about it. Even staying off the Internet doesn't help because they'll continue to be attacked in absentia, and since it's the Internet, those attacks persist long after they've been posted. This is not as simple a problem to solve as it used to be, when a punch in the nose usually ended the problem once and for all.
See, the problem here isn't the authoritarian dictatorship attitude of MS about updates, it's the spyware they force on users, even of older versions of Windows, and forcing Win10 on people through various ruses. You're assuming MS has the best interests of the end users at heart, when clearly, through their actions, they do not; they're more interested in ensuring their revenue stream, and what the users want is not particularly relevant to them. How can you trust a company that clearly doesn't listen and doesn't care about your rights?