How the hell would a video driver actually damage a monitor? It sounds like the article is being a bit overblown and really it's that the monitors simply can't work with MacOS anymore (but would work fine on any other computer.)
Back in the day when people had to configure X (or xfree86) manually, there were warnings in the documentation about how the wrong settings could damage your monitor. You see, in the old days, the monitor didn't have any hardware in it to sanitize or limit its inputs. If the driver instructed the video card to send... I think it was refresh pulses, to the monitor at a rate too high for the monitor, it could overdrive the circuits responsible for refreshing the screen. (You know how CRTs work, right? How the incoming data signal includes refresh information telling the inductive ring around the neck of the tube to direct the flow of charged particles coming out of the electron beam gun at the back of the tube, to deflect in such a way as to flick the point of contact of the beam with the backside of the screen horizontally across, with the information to be displayed, (forming one line of the image,) then to go back to the start, iterate down one line, and start again, sweeping from one side to the other, to repeat however many times? Well, there was no circuitry in the monitor or TV set to control or limit how quickly this happened, or to set meaningful parameters on how much energy could be applied either to the gun, (brightness,) or the ring, (coils controlling beam deflection) so yeah, bad drivers COULD in fact cause too much electrical current, and damage those parts, OR direct so much energy at one spot on the monitor that it burns out the phosphors, giving you a permanent fuzzy, discolored, or even black spot on the screen.) It is possible there are other ways the driver (directing the video hardware,) could have damaged the monitor, which I simply can't think of all this time later. The configuration instructions didn't go into this much detail, they mainly stated that...
One, it is possible to damage your monitor if you're not careful, and...
Two, the way in which power is sent to the monitor by your video hardware is determined by what driver the X server is sending digital data to, regarding what the screen is supposed to look like. So...
Three if you use the WRONG driver, due to misidentification of your equipment, or because your specific video card is not supported, it could send what SHOULD BE (but isn't) good information to drive your monitor properly, but it's bad because the signals passed from video card to monitor aren't what the ACTUAL video card and monitor SHOULD have.
I recall something in the config utility (xf86config) that warned that even though the names may be SIMILAR, there could be a world of difference between a GemStar Snail64 Video Graphics Card, and a GemStar Snail64+ Video Graphics Card. (Stuck in my mind because the example name was, I thought, funny, and a nice touch.) I may not be remembering the warning precisely, but it was something along these lines.
Now today, seems like nearly every piece of equipment has its own controller and any DECENTLY MADE piece of computing hardware, a screen, a printer, hell, even a mouse, has been designed not to let information coming to it damage it, or "brick" it. But if it's capable of receiving data, (anything wireless must be, if it features full-duplex communication, which everything does; an example of simplex communication, just by contrast, is a radio station; for anything YOU use with your computer, mostly there's two-way communication, even if only to establish the link. A wireless mouse receives information FROM the computer even though it does nothing you can SEE with that information, but it's necessary so that the computer can know that the information it's receiving from the mouse is actually from THAT mouse, and not from some other device, or for link-management, etc., to get to both be on the same radio channel, or same time
They could very well introduce a touchscreen MAC...
I have several of those. No, really, I do. I Hackintoshed a Surface Pro, Surface Pro 3, and I'm currently using a Dell XPS 15 with a 4k touchscreen. Using touch is a terrible experience, mainly because the UI elements are so small. Trying to minimize a window or close a tab is an exercise in frustration. Apple would need to redesign most of the GUI in order to accommodate touch.
You make it sound far harder than it is. You just tweak it so that, for example, where the close, minimize/iconify, fullscreen/resize buttons are, is a single button, that when you touch, pops up a larger area with those three buttons, AROUND the spot where you touched. So you touch anywhere in that area, and the buttons all stretch out, inwards towards the window in question, into three sectors, and you slide along the sector to do the action in question. (Basically, a quadrant of a circle (Quadrant IV, from geometry, if you'll recall,) trisected from the center to the edge, expands into the window space, and you slide your finger or Apple iPencil along to activate the button.) You could do the same with the lower right corner of a window, with it expanding a quadrant split into two, resize or move, or three, resize, move, and sticky/stays-on-top options, or "other" which then pops up a semicircle from the nearer edge, with additional options, like "move one virtual desktop to the left" or "... to the right" in addition to sticky/stays-on-top.
The very idea that it would be a huge deal to add a few of these elements for Apple would be like saying, "I'd ask Superman to help me open this jar of pickles, but I'm not sure he's strong enough." It's... kinda their thing. It's what they do. "Innovate." Remember? It'd be nice to see them ADD a feature in the name of innovation, for once, rather than ripping them out so they can sell more of their other products, like their headphones that you wouldn't need to buy along with a new iPhone because you already have ten pairs of perfectly good wired ones... with integrated remote controls and microphones, (which is the reason, by the way, why I won't by another iPhone until they put the goddamned headphone jack back).
I thought they already made the RAM and the HDD not upgradable in the MacMini. I thought they'd already done away with that in the last update; I expect the next MacMini, all kidding aside, if there even IS one, to be locked from the inside in such a way as to make opening them impossible without an angle grinder.
Steam Machines were supposed to take PC gaming mainstream by simplifying setup and moving the games in your living room.
HOW did they expect, in this day and age, to get people to buy a computer powered by STEAM? What do they think this is, the eighteen eighties?!? First, there's the fact that powering them with electricity is FAR more convenient, and although modern high-end graphics cards DO seem to produce enough heat to fire a boiler off of, that would imply having a computer powered by electricity already, meaning no need for a Steam Machine... and who wants to be constantly interrupted while gaming, having to feed logs or filthy, dirty coal into the firebox?!? Then you get that crud all over your controller... also there's the risk of steam getting the electrical devices it's hooked up to wet, and while I'm sure steampunk fans would LOVE a Steam Machine, there simply aren't enough fans out there to... what's that? They're NOT literally powered by steam? It's just a name?
I think the point is that Linux at heart is a Server OS. Yes it can be used as a Workstation/Desktop OS, and it can play games without a problem. But being that it was designed and its primary use is a server OS means there is little effort in porting games to it.
I love when people try to read into things that which was never there in the first place. Linux (I assume you meant, "GNU/Linux," the complete OS as packaged and distributed by many distribution maintainers worldwide, and not just the kernel, which alone, by itself, without a host of utilities is capable of doing nothing whatsoever..., like a director of a stage-play with no actors, or a producer with no... well, with no director OR actors, sitting glumly and forelorn in an empty theater, with also no audience, since there's no PLAY to see, no actors to perform it, and no director... you get the idea, hopefully,) was and I believe IS, at its heart, a reimplimentation of the original UNIX philosophy. That's it. It's a different way to solve the same problem, in such a way as to allow users (by which I mean whoever is using the computer, not dividing into classes, people who use a computer to do one thing versus another,) to do the same things they could do with a pricey UNIX license, without having to pay for the UNIX license. You see, since Thompson and Ritchie came up with their philosophy for how a multitasking, multiuser OS should be built and function, and published... um... the API? or whatever it was, detailing how processes should communicate with one another, be invoked, and what a program should do and how it should act, it became possible, with lots of effort, to duplicate it, withOUT violating any intellectual property rights or law.
It's kinda like how the first digital electronic calculator was created, and the process for representing decimal numbers in binary and manipulating them was patented, or copyrighted, or whatever... and someone, (who would have either had to pay royalties or been barred from making a competing product,) who wanted to make a competing product, worked out another way to solve the same problem that did NOT infringe, (one was "ten's complement," the other "nine's complement," or something like that, can't recall which is which and NOT looking it up...) both the authors (Linus T. & Co.,) of the Linux kernel, and those of all the various and sundry GNU, UNIX-replacing-but-not-actually-UNIX-in-fact utilities, could do something similar. Use the widely-distributed knowledge of how those binaries worked, even if you couldn't see the innards, the original UNIX source-code, you could cobble together another program, and as long as it reliably gives the same output in response to the same inputs, and has at least the same range of inputs as the original, (and ideally does it as well, as quickly, and as efficiently, or preferably better,) what you have is a drop-in-replacement for that utility or program. Do that for ALL the core programs, and you have a drop-in-replacement for the whole damned operating system. As far as I know, that's what Linux (by which I mean, "GNU/Linux,") was. That is what (GNU/)Linux is at it's heart. The fact that it's popular as a server OS is a side-effect of the fact that it's built to be like UNIX, and UNIX is powerful and works well as a server OS, but is NOT known to be especially user-friendly. In fact, it's RENOWNED for being fairly user-UNFRIENDLY, hence its popularity with computer experts, who feel insulted, I think, by the dumbed-down, crippleware coming out of Redmond, for example.
Just my two cents.
Also, the fact that a LOT of what became the internet had legacy software that works well on or with UNIX, since it PREDATED M$ WinDOS, there was an entrenchment factor here, operating in both directions. You see, early PCs simply COULDN'T run UNIX, as they weren't powerful enough to do so. M$-DOS was a solution to that problem, which I'm not even interested in getting started discussing; suffice it to say, it worke
"virtually anything free leaves *you* as the product, not an actual customer."
but then continue,
Firefox is no longer the darling of the tech world, but it doesn't need to be. It's still the most customisable browser out there.
Um... how much did you pay for your copy of Firefox? You can't bash Chrome for being free, implicating Google in using you in an untoward manner, while then asserting Firefox is better, when Firefox is also free; if there is a direct causal link here, if browser == free, then YOU == product, meaning unavoidably your privacy MUST be in the process of being compromised as a matter of general course, as the price of the "free" product, then it MUST unavoidably follow that ANYONE giving you software for free, i.e., Firefox, is ALSO using you the same way, inasmuch as TANSTAAFL. Or, in the field of computing software, TANSTAFSW, which everyone in the FL/OSS movement would vehemently disagree with, of course. I have always kinda wondered, WTF ***IS*** Mozilla selling that they can give this stuff away for free? T-Shirts and coffee mugs?!?
But then you also said...
Want a real eye-opening experience? Install a Raspberry Pi and a Pi-hole and watch the real-time DNS traffic as it exits your network. You would be gobsmacked by what is phoning home. Even your router is "phoning home" to entities besides the router OEM. This insight allows you to block via the Pi-hole, router, or both. Using a Pi-hole also cuts down on used bandwidth, because it blocks content at the DNS level, which means it doesn't even get called. Highly recommended.
A PlayStation 3 to be exact... the removal of the "Other OS" option. It's why I'm never buying anything from Sony again. (Frankly, the fact that they deliberately and intentionally handicapped it from the outside is justification enough, but then they removed it altogether, so... there's a permanent Sony ban in my home, for anything that uses software. I still use their headphones, but that's IT.)
I am surprised by the time estimate. Five years? Maybe. Two years: I don't think they are ready for that. Their Ax CPUs are good enough to power mobile devices and their small electronics like the AppleTV and the HomePod. I don't think they are ready for laptops and desktops yet.
I disagree. Their A10X Fusion chip is already "desktop class," and I'm SURE part of the limitation on its processing power is thermal dissipation, and the need for balance between performance and battery life. They could very well introduce a touchscreen MAC, with a keyboard... oh, wait, they kind of already have that, it's called an iPad Pro, (the 12.9 is almost the size of a MacBook Air or Pro, 13", and almost indistinguishable from a MacBook... Nothing. You know, the new MacBook? Add a keyboard and all it's really missing is the ability to run Mac Apps and Programs.
Anyway, imagine what Apple could do if they built a Mac using, oh, a couple, or a trio, or a quartet of chips out of the new iPad 9.7 they just announced? The WHOLE THING costs like, 330 bucks, which is kinda crazy... the parts you can leave OUT mean the processor alone is only probably like, 50 bucks, maybe? A board containing several of these, with a heatsink to help provide extra TDP capacity, could mean they could clock them up by a factor of... well, I don't know enough about the specifics to speculate on the specifics, but given how the iPad doesn't heat up much in use, with NO external fan ports, I'd have to guess they could kick it up to double or triple its current speed, then as for graphics, again, they could jam several together to get enough GFX grunt to drive a 4k monitor.
They COULD maybe start out with a new MacMini. Discontinue the archaic one now, introduce the NEW... hmm... what could they call it? OH! How about a solid glass square-based pyramid, and call it the iMac Pharaoh, a limited edition Mac that runs macOS apps UNDER iOS, starts out like the original Apple computer at $666, outperforms the iMac Pro, uses less power, and while we're dreaming, projects a holographic display using laser into the user's eyes, allowing for total privacy, and reads microscopic eye-movements for the interface... users would just lay there, eye's half-way glazed over, drooling on themselves quietly, while experiencing the raw computing power of a modern-day supercomputer which they wouldn't have to move a muscle beyond just their eyes, to operate...
Sorry, what were we talking about again? Oh, yeah. Chips. The A-line of chips are more than adequate, I think, especially if scaled up by adding more power, more ability to dissipate heat, and the proper infrastructure underneath to direct and drive it all, i.e., data bus, cache memory, and so on. But all kidding aside, they DO have the opportunity to make something new, to replace the ridiculously agèd MacMini line, and make a clean break from it. Consider this: the eMac and PowerMac or whatever they called that stupid little tower, had those god-awful, ugly plastic cases, which while they had the fun colors, to set them apart from the beige boxes of yeaster-year, or the looming, towering, usually black behemoth towers people (including yours, truly put together themselves,) to appeal to teenaged girls, gave way to generally unfinished aluminum chassis MacPro's and then aluminum clam-shell laptops, the MacBook Pro, then Air, then just "MacBook" and the MacMini followed a similar trend, if you'll recall, they originally had the white plastic chassis, (or was it just the top, and then the surround on the sides and back was aluminum?) then went to all-aluminum, and they eliminated the formerly built-in Super-Drive... and these days it's been several years since the last MINOR update, and so now the base-model, $500 MacMini has, (just checked RIGHT NOW at https://www.apple.com/mac-mini...,) LITERALLY the exact same specifications as a mid-2013 BASE MODEL MacBook Air, except i
You guys do realize that the news is THIRD hand, posted on April SECOND, which could mean that the information originated on April FIRST... just saying.
If your main employment is in the "gig" economy, then you're unemployed. This thing where we are all being forced into "gigs" instead of real jobs with real, actual benefits, is a new form of slavery. Row, number 41. No, fuck that shit.
The more advertisers try to target me the more vehement I get about ignoring ads. I don't read them, I don't watch them, I generally ignore them. Unless they are some kind of ad that is either difficult or impossible to ignore, then I get good and mad and make a point to remember the ad. Well, actually, I remember precisely two details: who the ad was for, and how incredibly angry their attempts to influence me made me, and to make sure never to buy their products, patronize their services, etc. (I am keenly aware that there is a danger that the memory of the company, brand, organization, etc., will outlast the anger, so every time I see their name, logo, or another ad, I make it a POINT to get GOOD AND ANGRY, to counteract their efforts to subvert my will and alter how I make decisions. It never quite develops to the point of murderous rage, but I like to keep it at a gentle boil to ensure that anyone attempting to mess with me that way, and (as far as I'm concerned, rip me off,) NEVER, EVER gets a penny from me.
I am also of course, aware of the possibility of astroturfing, but I believe advertisers believe that astroturfing in this particular way, (trying to piss people off by making an annoying ad that pretends to boost a competitor's product(s) so they'll AVOID that brand,) would, in most sales contexts, be counterproductive. So mostly when it comes to ads, I just ignore them if I can possibly manage it, unless and until I decide to seek a good, a product, or a service. I am probably not the only one who thinks and operates this way, but there are brands I can tell you, that when I see their ads, I deliberately contemplate how much I hate them, how much they suck, how much they've pissed me off, and if it is, for example, for food, a restaurant, etc., I tell myself their food tastes like shit, their employees don't wash their hands, or possibly are jerking off into the food. It really helps counteract their efforts, and on-balance, I think, makes me LESS likely to patronize them.
Now you might of course think, "but hey, ads fund the internet, so by refusing to buy..." but let me just stop you right there. The companies that make ads COULD fund websites and NOT try to track everything I do, and follow me around the internet, effectively shouting advertising messages at me. But they choose the shotgun approach to advertising and I reserve the right NOT to patronize someone just because they fund a website I use. As for all the unobtrusive ads I block or ignore, and the companies behind THOSE, I say, "blame the ones who have pissed me off, because they're the ones who fucked it all up for you." They're the reason your messages have basically zero chance of reaching me. But hey, be comforted. I might use your service or buy your product, but only when, where, how, and if I decide to do so. When *** I *** decide. Not when you decide. Got it? So Adobe and Google and Apple and Facefuck and all the others can try to "track" me all they want, but the more ads they shove at me, the angrier I get, and the less likely the ads are to do any good.
Also, I think there's an ideal saturation point that when they pass, even people who don't normally operate as I do, vis-a-vis advertisements, who will tend to start acting more as I do, the more ads that are blasted at them. At that point, advertising actually will do the advertisers themselves more harm than good, so... keep it up, assholes.
There are no such laptops (assuming that's even true, didn't bother to check,) because there isn't enough demand, and it's too easy to have a something that would function that way, without having to have a special-purpose device; you just take a laptop, and duck-tape (yes, duck, not DUCT, look it up if you don't believe,) a tablet to the back of the screen, facing out, and use them according to which is cerrtified to handle sensitive info. Of course, THAT would be a little bit like having a cop whose beat is in a landlocked city with no bodies of water, no lakes, rivers, or streams nearby, let alone an ocean, carrying a handgun with a harpoon strapped to it, in case of, you know, shark attack. The original question here seems to be similar to, "why are there no handguns that also shoot harpoons". You simply don't have a real need for something like that given the different situations in which you'd need ONE, versus the other.
Also, anyone with a REAL need for that level of security, i.e., government and military personnel, would not be able to use the "secure" device in anywhere other than a secure facility, under normal circumstances, i.e., in a SCIF, (or whatever they call it,) which normally would make the "secure" device redundant, since the SCIF will likely already have one.
Just about the only thing I wonder when I see a story like this is "How the hell is Microsoft still even in business at this point?" Who is propping them up? Isn't everyone using GNU/Linux (or Macs) now? What business is stupid enough to be using Microsoft Office or any other of their crappy software at this point? What government is so careless with their taxpayer's revenue that they can afford to waste it, squander it really, on trash software that causes more problems than it solves? Especially when there are better, free alternatives to everything Microsoft makes? The appropriate response in the future to any story having anything to do with Microsoft should be, "who?"
Let's start an internet rumor that Elon Musk's Boring Company, (so named to try to divert attention away from it, as the saying goes, if you want to do something evil, wrap it in something boring!) has purchased and intends NOT to use, or is otherwise suppressing existent teleportation technology that would allow, in only 3 to 5 years, people to beam from one place to another, Star Trek style, for a trivial amount of money, so as to charge people huge amounts of money to move their carcasses, cave-man style, that is, physically, from one location to another, with all the tedious TIME that takes up, having to occupy, iteratively, EVERY SINGLE POINT IN BETWEEN the start point for movement, and the end-point, rather than avoiding both through the power of teleportation.
For good measure, let's spice this up by throwing in the assertion that, ironically, given Musk's car company is named "Tesla," that the teleportation technology was initially developed BY genius electrical pioneer and inventor Nikola Tesla, and that's part of why it's being suppressed! Should be fun!
Also, regarding stone LEGO-like bricks... imagine finding one of THESE in the dark with your foot! You thought PLASTIC bricks were no fun to step on or kick in your kids' bedroom... whoo-boy!
You mean Apple did not have this problem, as far as you know? Fixed that for you. Apple does or did have this problem, and many others, you just are not aware of it. Also, it is most certainly NOT an Android problem, it is a GOOGLE problem. Android is an operating system, and as an inanimate object, cannot harbor intent, either good or ill. It is the PEOPLE BEHIND it that do. Google dropped their laughable motto about not being evil behind a long time ago. They are at least moderately evil now, like every other for-profit thing there is MUST be.
The Free/Libre Open Source Software movement and its proponents, boosters, users, and contributors are the most honest and trustworthy group you can find, among people who create software because unlike any for-profit entity, their intent is to create software for themselves to use and share with others, following the stone-soup paradigm of creation and development. By contrast, companies that publish software for money have to be viewed with at least mild suspicion. Their motives are to make money, rather than to make software they themselves want to use, and so it would be prudent to wonder what OTHER thing they are doing to make money, i.e., selling your data which they harvest. COULD someone in the FL/OSS movement do this too? Of course, but since the source-code is available to examine, theyâ(TM)d more than likely quickly get caught, exposed, and the time and effort they put into their software would end up having been squandered. Just saying. The only way to harvest your user base data, metadata, etc., and have any hope of doing it for any length of time and not get caught by convincing people to put software on their own devices that spies for you, is to ensure they cannot see the source. Even if you yourself are not knowledgeable enough for a code-audit or review, other people out there are. That doesnâ(TM)t mean that one should trust FL/OSS implicitly, but of software made on the closed-source versus open-source model, I find the open-source the one generally more worthy of trust. Usually. Come to think of it, maybe I SHOULD learn to code and start reviewing all the source code to my entire GNU/Linux install... hehehe, sure. I have time for that.
Have you tried Not-Facebook? Not-Facebook is a lot like Facebook, but only you donâ(TM)t use Facebook. For example, when you find yourself wanting to take a selfie, and share it with people but only those YOU choose, and NOT those Facebook decides to sell your personal, private data to, use Not-Facebook, and instead of posting it, do Not-Post it. Want to get status updates from your friends? Instead of using Facebook, instead try using Not-Facebook, and instead CALL your friend and ask how he (or she,) IS. Itâ(TM)s so much more personal and rewarding taking the time and effort to pick up the smartphone you were probably already holding in your hand anyway, and selecting the dialer app, going into your contacts, and finding your friend, selecting his or her entry, and pressing the CALL button, then using noises you produce with your mouth and nose, instead of using Facebook.
Donâ(TM)t have your friendâ(TM)s phone number, or does your friend not have time to talk to you on the phone in real life? Well, then he or she wasnâ(TM)t really your friend in the first place, and what youâ(TM)ve been doing on Facebook all this while, besides helping make Mark Zuckerberg several billion dollars richer than he has any right to be, and letting a bunch of people know stuff about you that youâ(TM)d be far better served keeping to yourself, is deluding yourself about how many friends you really have, and ironically, probably losing whatever friends you have in real life, because youâ(TM)re spending all your time staring at that stupid little glowing rectangle, wasting electricity, becoming more isolated and depressed, and contributing to the downfall of our civilization. Also, looking at cats in absurdly small boxes.
So try Not-Facebook today, and stop giving random nefariously-intentioned strangers your personal information, and reconnect with real-life, and real-friends, not fake Facebook âfriendsâ
YouTube Kids, the supposedly child-friendly version of YouTube that's been shown to often play host to troves of slop content and disturbing videos, apparently was showing videos from British conspiracy theorist David Icke, a guy who believes reptilian aliens secretly control the world and are responsible for the Holocaust. According to a Saturday report in Business Insider, searching for the term "UFO" on YouTube kids turned up a video purporting "to show a UFO shooting at a chemtrail." The suggested followups for that video featured a number of Icke's clips, including a nearly five-hour lecture on how aliens built the pyramids and secretly run the planet through a ruling class extraterrestrial-human hybrids. The video also delves into a number of other conspiracy theories, including claims Freemasons indulge in human sacrifice and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own government.
According to Business Insider, "Two other conspiracy theory videos by Icke appeared in the related videos, meaning it was easy for children to quickly go from watching relatively innocent videos about toys to conspiracy content." Searching for the term "moon landing" also resulted in a number of conspiratorial videos emerging, including one making the claim that CERN's Large Hadron Collider had opened a portal to another world that an unfortunate employee then vanished in.
I have to wonder if this has anything to do with Google engineers thinking they're more clever than they really are, when it comes to trusting their precious algorithms. Unless of course, someone's doing this stuff manually. But just in case this is the feature and not a bug, that someone at Google / YouTube WANTS kids seeing this kind of stuff, it asks to be answered, and so I shall on a completely unrelated website in the form of a humorous musing:
Reptilians DID rule the Earth, until about 65 million years ago, when the entire planet's population of mega-fauna, a kind of reptile-oid known as the dinosaurs, ran smack right into something we used to call the K-T Boundary, (not sure what they call it now, I think it's been renamed to something else,) a moment in time when the surface of the earth became, ironically, frozen in time, by becoming briefly very hot. The K-T Boundary is also a location in space, in a sense. Though it's all over the planet, in places left untouched by geological action (not subducted into the Earth,) or erosion, forming a thin geological stratum (so a location in terms of where it's deposited vertically in the layers of the Earth,) as a function of time itself. Since then, anyway, reptilians have taken a back-seat to mammals, who have come to dominate the dry parts of the world, at the scale we are ourselves most familiar with.
As for UFOs, there are LOTS of UFOs; I saw one the other day. It was an airplane, but I can't tell you what kind. It was very high up. I certainly couldn't even tell you what company made it, or what company, group, or individual operated it. I can say unequivocally that it was unidentified, at least by me. Probably lots of other people also could not identify it. But I'm pretty sure the men and/or women on board or who paid for its fuel knew EXACTLY what it was, as likely did also, Air Traffic Control, SOMEWHERE. Now as for what most people actually mean when they say "UFO," as in a saucer or other oddly-shaped flying object from some other planet, that's a bit of a laugh. First, let's debunk the "it HAD to be ALIENS" nonsense in a sentence or two. One, just because you can't think of a way for something to happen without "aliens," such as the invention of the magnetron at the heart of a microwave oven, doesn't constitute proof of extra-terrestrial aliens, let alone their coming here at some point, if, that is, you do in fact think that; all it proves is you lack imagination, and are prone to falling for weak arguments. If you learn how things work, you'll find very quickly that humans could EASILY have invented it, withou
Teaching rote MSFT junk.
Like in India, where it is some supposed "benefit" to receive free licenses and materials, it's an attempt to undermine the efforts of a society under the guise of assistance as benevolent market leader.
Garbage.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's the EXACT same tactic Apple Computers, Ltd. (which has since renamed itself to "Apple, Inc.") used in the 1980's and probably 90's as well, to boost adoption of their (at the time, clearly inferior) computers, such as the Apple ][, Apple//e, etc. versus the far-superior IBM PC, (superior for the purposes we'd have put them to if we'd had them in computer labs then, instead of crappy little Apple 2's,) since otherwise they'd probably never have gained sufficient foothold to matter, and the Apple Macintosh (later Apple Mac, then eMac, then iMac, etc.) would not even exists. Actually, those I think Apple just DISCOUNTED, rather than gave them outright, but... it's the same idea. "Get 'em hooked while they're young."
You're right though, but we can all take solace in the thought that as these Ghanaians grow up, they'll figure out that the "gift" is really a Trojan Horse, and then they'll put GNU/Linux on the computer(s,) and LibreOffice, and join the better, smarter members of the developed world in giving the bloated, decaying, stinking corpse of Microsoft the finger, as they turn to F/L-OSS like the rest of the world SHOULD.
vim is great because it's on all platforms is like saying anal sex is great because it works on all genders.
I think vim is better because you don't need a functioning control key to do stuff, just an escape key, and a working colon button... for example, the commands to abandon a document and exit without saving, and the one to save and then exit are esc-colon-q, (with a "!" character, if changes have been made since last save, of course,) and esc-colon-x, respectively. With emacs, everything is control-this and control-that, which all kidding aside, means that vim is not just more portable in terms of what it will work on, but also in terms of what kind of keyboard or keyboard emulation you need to work WITH it, and also if your terminal emulator grabs or intercepts the control key, it won't hamper you or require special settings, since you don't need to use the control key in vim.
Hey... I just realized, with vim, you can escape the colon, while emacs is preferred by CONTROL freaks!
When the guy says, "uh oh, honey, looks like we're about to run out of gas," out in the middle of nowhere, (like in Earth orbit,) it is often really a pretense for some foolin' around.
I think ol' Kep is about to try to put 'the moves' on Hubble! Hehehe
Apple needs new leadership in all its high-level executive positions. This group has lost its way. This "electrical power and wear-and-tear on your computer's internal components doing math for other people's profits" scheme is just gross. Apple is now the pimply, skinny, obviously diseased, strung-out, illicit-drug-using-prostitute hanging out near the hotel, just... you know... waiting. Just hanging out, waiting for a ride. From a friend. Not loitering illegally, oh, no sir... are you a cop? Well, then in that case...
Having DST in 2018 is like requiring all cellphone and smartphone manufacturers to include PULSE DIALING on their phones, and an RJ-11 port, just in case, you know, you ever want to plug it into a POTS wire and use it like it's a landline?
Here's a simpler solution. Put everyone on GMT/UTC/ZULU time for coordination, (so you might hear someone say, "the plane departs at 0235Z,") and let each city or town determine its own local time based on SOLAR NOON, which is how they did it in the old days, back when things made SENSE. Everyone would just set their watches and clocks to GMT/ZULU time, and know their own local offset, or set them to the local time, and again, know their own local offset.
BTW, this would be trivial in today's modern world, given the ubiquity of smart-devices; anyone who objects, "but I don't have a fancy, new-fangled, smart device!" can be handed a simple digital wrist-watch with a Dual-Time feature, (yeah, they actually used to make those,) and let them set the time as they need. Most people whose lives are not massively connected could likely survive just with local time, and those who are connected would find it easy to live with their lives primarily on the global UTC standard.
Some might view this as a global tyranny of time, but it's not, instead it abolishes the STATE tyranny of arbitrary time zones, and allows any locality to use their own time that works best for them. It makes NO SENSE for Eastern Maine and Western Michigan to pretend it's the same time in the two locations, nor for Eastern Alabama and the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles to pretend they exist in the same time, given the absurdity of having SOLAR NOON, the ACTUAL middle of the day, occur between ONE and TWO in the afternoon, or very early in the morning! Meanwhile, a lucky few people happening to live somewhere where for at least PART of the year, ACTUAL (solar) noon closely coincides with clock-noon, according to their local BS "time-zone".
The only adjustment this will require is that when you talk to your friends, family, and coworkers, whenever you say a time, and add "A.M." or "P.M." to it, it be understood to mean BEFORE OR AFTER the SUN crosses over the line where you are, between the north and south POLES, or the meridian, hence (from the Latin,) ANTE MERIDIEM, (A.M.) and POST MERIDIEM (P.M.) versus if someone says some four-digit number, followed by "zulu," it be understood to be the Universal Coordinated Clock (UTC) time, which is basically equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time, give or take a fraction of a second.
Then, when people post events, such as "Soccer Practice will be at 2100Z" will be easily understood NOT to mean that they're supposed to meet at 9:00 P.M. local time, but instead at... say, 5:55 A.M. local time, at that particular location, safe and happy knowing that where they meet, the sun will be up then, (since the planners of the even know that that particular day happens to have 13 hours and 53 minutes of sunshine that day, which means 6 hours and about 56 minutes of daylight BEFORE (and then again, AFTER) noon that day, will put sunrise there WELL BEFORE the time they have to meet.
Remember that once upon a time, this is how things were done, and it went FINE until trains came along and ruined everything for everyone. Well, thanks to modern conveniences like dual-time wrist-watches, and smart phones, and computers, etc., there's no real excuse for the NONSENSE of insisting everyone living in regions of vast swathes of the planet have to all be on the same time because adding, say, three hours and thirty six minutes to UTC is too hard.
Also, maybe we take this golden opportunity to stop worrying so damned much about time, and stop letting people enslave us to the goddamned clock ANYWAY. People in and around the Mediterranean Sea (by reputation, anyway,) seem to have it right. This obsession with maximizing value by obsessing about TIME is slowly killing us. They don't worry about crap like that NEARLY as much as we do, and they live longer, happier lives. We really need to try to follow their example, rather than dying, second by second, according to the tyranny of a clock.
MIT announced yesterday that it and Commonwealth Fusion Systems -- an MIT spinoff -- are working on a project that aims to make harvesting energy from nuclear fusion a reality within the next 15 years.
We already HAVE a nuclear fusion reactor. It has been operating for YEARS with an unmatched safety record, harming no one directly except occasionally causing problems for people over-exposed to it without proper shielding. I have spoken of this before, I think, probably right here on slashdot. In their wisdom, our ancestors chose to live a safe distance away from it, at about 98 million miles, give or take a few. which makes the only issue harvesting its output, and storing it for periods when the reactor is unavailable for periods of time, as it often is.
The beauty of this reactor is that it's so big, we can all share it and it won't ever, (from our perspective, anyway,) run out.
HOWEVER, like manna raining down from heaven, all that needs be done is collect enough of the output of this fusion reactor to go until the next time it becomes available. FORTUNATELY, its availability is pretty regular and fairly predictable; in fact, you can set your clock by it, and historically, people have and still do, even if a touch indirectly. All schemes to avoid using the power of this reactor and instead prefer some other, can mostly be attributed either to ignorance, or greed. Ignorance that a better, cheaper, and safer way already exists, and greed that by providing a more "convenient" alternative, you can get people to pay you money for the privilege of using what they could already get for free. Ugh.. people.
An unauthorized launch would also call into question the ability of secondary satellite "ride-share" companies and foreign launch providers to comply with U.S. space regulations
Um, who the fuck died and made the US government king of the whole fucking world, let alone gave it the power to "regulate" space?!? Has anyone else on Earth claimed the entire rest of the cosmos yet? Because if not, I, Hallux Fucking Sinister, (yes, that IS in fact what the "F" stands for,) hereby lay claim to all of the cosmos, all universes past, present, and future, as sole owner and god-king, including any multiverse or polyverse(s) or omniverse(s), etc... This unavoidably includes all regions located within my new domains and dominions, including the planet known as (among other things,) the Earth. I therefore own all of you, puny little humans. In my magnanimity, I hereby grant to my measly little subjects, general rights to exist, to have mass, and to occupy space, subject to the following condition, that no one may deny any OTHER one the same right, to exist, or to have mass, and occupy space, this right being throughout my domains and dominions. I require no special tribute or acknowledgement, because I, (unlike certain shitheads with ridiculous haircuts,) do not crave constant attention, like a petulant, tantrum-throwing child.
HOWEVER, you, by availing yourself of this right I grant today, indemnify me against any and all harms that may befall you whatsoever, on behalf of not only yourselves, but your heirs, assignee(s), etc., throughout the universe of time and space. The universe can be a dangerous and uncertain place, and I don't want to get sued if you stumble around in it, unseeing, and stub your toe on a black hole, or something.
Slashdot Mirror
How the hell would a video driver actually damage a monitor? It sounds like the article is being a bit overblown and really it's that the monitors simply can't work with MacOS anymore (but would work fine on any other computer.)
Back in the day when people had to configure X (or xfree86) manually, there were warnings in the documentation about how the wrong settings could damage your monitor. You see, in the old days, the monitor didn't have any hardware in it to sanitize or limit its inputs. If the driver instructed the video card to send... I think it was refresh pulses, to the monitor at a rate too high for the monitor, it could overdrive the circuits responsible for refreshing the screen. (You know how CRTs work, right? How the incoming data signal includes refresh information telling the inductive ring around the neck of the tube to direct the flow of charged particles coming out of the electron beam gun at the back of the tube, to deflect in such a way as to flick the point of contact of the beam with the backside of the screen horizontally across, with the information to be displayed, (forming one line of the image,) then to go back to the start, iterate down one line, and start again, sweeping from one side to the other, to repeat however many times? Well, there was no circuitry in the monitor or TV set to control or limit how quickly this happened, or to set meaningful parameters on how much energy could be applied either to the gun, (brightness,) or the ring, (coils controlling beam deflection) so yeah, bad drivers COULD in fact cause too much electrical current, and damage those parts, OR direct so much energy at one spot on the monitor that it burns out the phosphors, giving you a permanent fuzzy, discolored, or even black spot on the screen.) It is possible there are other ways the driver (directing the video hardware,) could have damaged the monitor, which I simply can't think of all this time later. The configuration instructions didn't go into this much detail, they mainly stated that...
One, it is possible to damage your monitor if you're not careful, and...
Two, the way in which power is sent to the monitor by your video hardware is determined by what driver the X server is sending digital data to, regarding what the screen is supposed to look like. So...
Three if you use the WRONG driver, due to misidentification of your equipment, or because your specific video card is not supported, it could send what SHOULD BE (but isn't) good information to drive your monitor properly, but it's bad because the signals passed from video card to monitor aren't what the ACTUAL video card and monitor SHOULD have.
I recall something in the config utility (xf86config) that warned that even though the names may be SIMILAR, there could be a world of difference between a GemStar Snail64 Video Graphics Card, and a GemStar Snail64+ Video Graphics Card. (Stuck in my mind because the example name was, I thought, funny, and a nice touch.) I may not be remembering the warning precisely, but it was something along these lines.
Now today, seems like nearly every piece of equipment has its own controller and any DECENTLY MADE piece of computing hardware, a screen, a printer, hell, even a mouse, has been designed not to let information coming to it damage it, or "brick" it. But if it's capable of receiving data, (anything wireless must be, if it features full-duplex communication, which everything does; an example of simplex communication, just by contrast, is a radio station; for anything YOU use with your computer, mostly there's two-way communication, even if only to establish the link. A wireless mouse receives information FROM the computer even though it does nothing you can SEE with that information, but it's necessary so that the computer can know that the information it's receiving from the mouse is actually from THAT mouse, and not from some other device, or for link-management, etc., to get to both be on the same radio channel, or same time
Intel Unveils New Coffee Lake 8th Gen Core Line-Up With First Core i9 Mobile CPU
I wonder how jittery a processor designed with a LAKE of coffee will be. Bet it makes the computer really good at taking a SHIT though, amiright?!?
They could very well introduce a touchscreen MAC...
I have several of those. No, really, I do. I Hackintoshed a Surface Pro, Surface Pro 3, and I'm currently using a Dell XPS 15 with a 4k touchscreen. Using touch is a terrible experience, mainly because the UI elements are so small. Trying to minimize a window or close a tab is an exercise in frustration. Apple would need to redesign most of the GUI in order to accommodate touch.
You make it sound far harder than it is. You just tweak it so that, for example, where the close, minimize/iconify, fullscreen/resize buttons are, is a single button, that when you touch, pops up a larger area with those three buttons, AROUND the spot where you touched. So you touch anywhere in that area, and the buttons all stretch out, inwards towards the window in question, into three sectors, and you slide along the sector to do the action in question. (Basically, a quadrant of a circle (Quadrant IV, from geometry, if you'll recall,) trisected from the center to the edge, expands into the window space, and you slide your finger or Apple iPencil along to activate the button.) You could do the same with the lower right corner of a window, with it expanding a quadrant split into two, resize or move, or three, resize, move, and sticky/stays-on-top options, or "other" which then pops up a semicircle from the nearer edge, with additional options, like "move one virtual desktop to the left" or "... to the right" in addition to sticky/stays-on-top.
The very idea that it would be a huge deal to add a few of these elements for Apple would be like saying, "I'd ask Superman to help me open this jar of pickles, but I'm not sure he's strong enough." It's... kinda their thing. It's what they do. "Innovate." Remember? It'd be nice to see them ADD a feature in the name of innovation, for once, rather than ripping them out so they can sell more of their other products, like their headphones that you wouldn't need to buy along with a new iPhone because you already have ten pairs of perfectly good wired ones... with integrated remote controls and microphones, (which is the reason, by the way, why I won't by another iPhone until they put the goddamned headphone jack back).
I thought they already made the RAM and the HDD not upgradable in the MacMini. I thought they'd already done away with that in the last update; I expect the next MacMini, all kidding aside, if there even IS one, to be locked from the inside in such a way as to make opening them impossible without an angle grinder.
Steam Machines were supposed to take PC gaming mainstream by simplifying setup and moving the games in your living room.
HOW did they expect, in this day and age, to get people to buy a computer powered by STEAM? What do they think this is, the eighteen eighties?!? First, there's the fact that powering them with electricity is FAR more convenient, and although modern high-end graphics cards DO seem to produce enough heat to fire a boiler off of, that would imply having a computer powered by electricity already, meaning no need for a Steam Machine... and who wants to be constantly interrupted while gaming, having to feed logs or filthy, dirty coal into the firebox?!? Then you get that crud all over your controller... also there's the risk of steam getting the electrical devices it's hooked up to wet, and while I'm sure steampunk fans would LOVE a Steam Machine, there simply aren't enough fans out there to... what's that? They're NOT literally powered by steam? It's just a name?
OH. Never mind. XD
I think the point is that Linux at heart is a Server OS. Yes it can be used as a Workstation/Desktop OS, and it can play games without a problem. But being that it was designed and its primary use is a server OS means there is little effort in porting games to it.
I love when people try to read into things that which was never there in the first place. Linux (I assume you meant, "GNU/Linux," the complete OS as packaged and distributed by many distribution maintainers worldwide, and not just the kernel, which alone, by itself, without a host of utilities is capable of doing nothing whatsoever..., like a director of a stage-play with no actors, or a producer with no... well, with no director OR actors, sitting glumly and forelorn in an empty theater, with also no audience, since there's no PLAY to see, no actors to perform it, and no director... you get the idea, hopefully,) was and I believe IS, at its heart, a reimplimentation of the original UNIX philosophy. That's it. It's a different way to solve the same problem, in such a way as to allow users (by which I mean whoever is using the computer, not dividing into classes, people who use a computer to do one thing versus another,) to do the same things they could do with a pricey UNIX license, without having to pay for the UNIX license. You see, since Thompson and Ritchie came up with their philosophy for how a multitasking, multiuser OS should be built and function, and published... um... the API? or whatever it was, detailing how processes should communicate with one another, be invoked, and what a program should do and how it should act, it became possible, with lots of effort, to duplicate it, withOUT violating any intellectual property rights or law.
It's kinda like how the first digital electronic calculator was created, and the process for representing decimal numbers in binary and manipulating them was patented, or copyrighted, or whatever... and someone, (who would have either had to pay royalties or been barred from making a competing product,) who wanted to make a competing product, worked out another way to solve the same problem that did NOT infringe, (one was "ten's complement," the other "nine's complement," or something like that, can't recall which is which and NOT looking it up...) both the authors (Linus T. & Co.,) of the Linux kernel, and those of all the various and sundry GNU, UNIX-replacing-but-not-actually-UNIX-in-fact utilities, could do something similar. Use the widely-distributed knowledge of how those binaries worked, even if you couldn't see the innards, the original UNIX source-code, you could cobble together another program, and as long as it reliably gives the same output in response to the same inputs, and has at least the same range of inputs as the original, (and ideally does it as well, as quickly, and as efficiently, or preferably better,) what you have is a drop-in-replacement for that utility or program. Do that for ALL the core programs, and you have a drop-in-replacement for the whole damned operating system. As far as I know, that's what Linux (by which I mean, "GNU/Linux,") was. That is what (GNU/)Linux is at it's heart. The fact that it's popular as a server OS is a side-effect of the fact that it's built to be like UNIX, and UNIX is powerful and works well as a server OS, but is NOT known to be especially user-friendly. In fact, it's RENOWNED for being fairly user-UNFRIENDLY, hence its popularity with computer experts, who feel insulted, I think, by the dumbed-down, crippleware coming out of Redmond, for example.
Just my two cents.
Also, the fact that a LOT of what became the internet had legacy software that works well on or with UNIX, since it PREDATED M$ WinDOS, there was an entrenchment factor here, operating in both directions. You see, early PCs simply COULDN'T run UNIX, as they weren't powerful enough to do so. M$-DOS was a solution to that problem, which I'm not even interested in getting started discussing; suffice it to say, it worke
"virtually anything free leaves *you* as the product, not an actual customer."
but then continue,
Firefox is no longer the darling of the tech world, but it doesn't need to be. It's still the most customisable browser out there.
Um... how much did you pay for your copy of Firefox? You can't bash Chrome for being free, implicating Google in using you in an untoward manner, while then asserting Firefox is better, when Firefox is also free; if there is a direct causal link here, if browser == free, then YOU == product , meaning unavoidably your privacy MUST be in the process of being compromised as a matter of general course, as the price of the "free" product, then it MUST unavoidably follow that ANYONE giving you software for free, i.e., Firefox, is ALSO using you the same way, inasmuch as TANSTAAFL. Or, in the field of computing software, TANSTAFSW, which everyone in the FL/OSS movement would vehemently disagree with, of course. I have always kinda wondered, WTF ***IS*** Mozilla selling that they can give this stuff away for free? T-Shirts and coffee mugs?!?
But then you also said...
Want a real eye-opening experience? Install a Raspberry Pi and a Pi-hole and watch the real-time DNS traffic as it exits your network. You would be gobsmacked by what is phoning home. Even your router is "phoning home" to entities besides the router OEM. This insight allows you to block via the Pi-hole, router, or both. Using a Pi-hole also cuts down on used bandwidth, because it blocks content at the DNS level, which means it doesn't even get called. Highly recommended.
and so now I have to go read up on this. Thanks.
A PlayStation 3 to be exact... the removal of the "Other OS" option. It's why I'm never buying anything from Sony again. (Frankly, the fact that they deliberately and intentionally handicapped it from the outside is justification enough, but then they removed it altogether, so... there's a permanent Sony ban in my home, for anything that uses software. I still use their headphones, but that's IT.)
I am surprised by the time estimate. Five years? Maybe. Two years: I don't think they are ready for that. Their Ax CPUs are good enough to power mobile devices and their small electronics like the AppleTV and the HomePod. I don't think they are ready for laptops and desktops yet.
I disagree. Their A10X Fusion chip is already "desktop class," and I'm SURE part of the limitation on its processing power is thermal dissipation, and the need for balance between performance and battery life. They could very well introduce a touchscreen MAC, with a keyboard... oh, wait, they kind of already have that, it's called an iPad Pro, (the 12.9 is almost the size of a MacBook Air or Pro, 13", and almost indistinguishable from a MacBook... Nothing. You know, the new MacBook? Add a keyboard and all it's really missing is the ability to run Mac Apps and Programs.
,) LITERALLY the exact same specifications as a mid-2013 BASE MODEL MacBook Air, except i
Anyway, imagine what Apple could do if they built a Mac using, oh, a couple, or a trio, or a quartet of chips out of the new iPad 9.7 they just announced? The WHOLE THING costs like, 330 bucks, which is kinda crazy... the parts you can leave OUT mean the processor alone is only probably like, 50 bucks, maybe? A board containing several of these, with a heatsink to help provide extra TDP capacity, could mean they could clock them up by a factor of... well, I don't know enough about the specifics to speculate on the specifics, but given how the iPad doesn't heat up much in use, with NO external fan ports, I'd have to guess they could kick it up to double or triple its current speed, then as for graphics, again, they could jam several together to get enough GFX grunt to drive a 4k monitor.
They COULD maybe start out with a new MacMini. Discontinue the archaic one now, introduce the NEW... hmm... what could they call it? OH! How about a solid glass square-based pyramid, and call it the iMac Pharaoh, a limited edition Mac that runs macOS apps UNDER iOS, starts out like the original Apple computer at $666, outperforms the iMac Pro, uses less power, and while we're dreaming, projects a holographic display using laser into the user's eyes, allowing for total privacy, and reads microscopic eye-movements for the interface... users would just lay there, eye's half-way glazed over, drooling on themselves quietly, while experiencing the raw computing power of a modern-day supercomputer which they wouldn't have to move a muscle beyond just their eyes, to operate...
Sorry, what were we talking about again? Oh, yeah. Chips. The A-line of chips are more than adequate, I think, especially if scaled up by adding more power, more ability to dissipate heat, and the proper infrastructure underneath to direct and drive it all, i.e., data bus, cache memory, and so on. But all kidding aside, they DO have the opportunity to make something new, to replace the ridiculously agèd MacMini line, and make a clean break from it. Consider this: the eMac and PowerMac or whatever they called that stupid little tower, had those god-awful, ugly plastic cases, which while they had the fun colors, to set them apart from the beige boxes of yeaster-year, or the looming, towering, usually black behemoth towers people (including yours, truly put together themselves,) to appeal to teenaged girls, gave way to generally unfinished aluminum chassis MacPro's and then aluminum clam-shell laptops, the MacBook Pro, then Air, then just "MacBook" and the MacMini followed a similar trend, if you'll recall, they originally had the white plastic chassis, (or was it just the top, and then the surround on the sides and back was aluminum?) then went to all-aluminum, and they eliminated the formerly built-in Super-Drive... and these days it's been several years since the last MINOR update, and so now the base-model, $500 MacMini has, (just checked RIGHT NOW at https://www.apple.com/mac-mini...
You guys do realize that the news is THIRD hand, posted on April SECOND, which could mean that the information originated on April FIRST... just saying.
If your main employment is in the "gig" economy, then you're unemployed. This thing where we are all being forced into "gigs" instead of real jobs with real, actual benefits, is a new form of slavery. Row, number 41. No, fuck that shit.
The more advertisers try to target me the more vehement I get about ignoring ads. I don't read them, I don't watch them, I generally ignore them. Unless they are some kind of ad that is either difficult or impossible to ignore, then I get good and mad and make a point to remember the ad. Well, actually, I remember precisely two details: who the ad was for, and how incredibly angry their attempts to influence me made me, and to make sure never to buy their products, patronize their services, etc. (I am keenly aware that there is a danger that the memory of the company, brand, organization, etc., will outlast the anger, so every time I see their name, logo, or another ad, I make it a POINT to get GOOD AND ANGRY, to counteract their efforts to subvert my will and alter how I make decisions. It never quite develops to the point of murderous rage, but I like to keep it at a gentle boil to ensure that anyone attempting to mess with me that way, and (as far as I'm concerned, rip me off,) NEVER, EVER gets a penny from me.
I am also of course, aware of the possibility of astroturfing, but I believe advertisers believe that astroturfing in this particular way, (trying to piss people off by making an annoying ad that pretends to boost a competitor's product(s) so they'll AVOID that brand,) would, in most sales contexts, be counterproductive. So mostly when it comes to ads, I just ignore them if I can possibly manage it, unless and until I decide to seek a good, a product, or a service. I am probably not the only one who thinks and operates this way, but there are brands I can tell you, that when I see their ads, I deliberately contemplate how much I hate them, how much they suck, how much they've pissed me off, and if it is, for example, for food, a restaurant, etc., I tell myself their food tastes like shit, their employees don't wash their hands, or possibly are jerking off into the food. It really helps counteract their efforts, and on-balance, I think, makes me LESS likely to patronize them.
Now you might of course think, "but hey, ads fund the internet, so by refusing to buy..." but let me just stop you right there. The companies that make ads COULD fund websites and NOT try to track everything I do, and follow me around the internet, effectively shouting advertising messages at me. But they choose the shotgun approach to advertising and I reserve the right NOT to patronize someone just because they fund a website I use. As for all the unobtrusive ads I block or ignore, and the companies behind THOSE, I say, "blame the ones who have pissed me off, because they're the ones who fucked it all up for you." They're the reason your messages have basically zero chance of reaching me. But hey, be comforted. I might use your service or buy your product, but only when, where, how, and if I decide to do so. When *** I *** decide. Not when you decide. Got it? So Adobe and Google and Apple and Facefuck and all the others can try to "track" me all they want, but the more ads they shove at me, the angrier I get, and the less likely the ads are to do any good.
Also, I think there's an ideal saturation point that when they pass, even people who don't normally operate as I do, vis-a-vis advertisements, who will tend to start acting more as I do, the more ads that are blasted at them. At that point, advertising actually will do the advertisers themselves more harm than good, so... keep it up, assholes.
There are no such laptops (assuming that's even true, didn't bother to check,) because there isn't enough demand, and it's too easy to have a something that would function that way, without having to have a special-purpose device; you just take a laptop, and duck-tape (yes, duck, not DUCT, look it up if you don't believe,) a tablet to the back of the screen, facing out, and use them according to which is cerrtified to handle sensitive info. Of course, THAT would be a little bit like having a cop whose beat is in a landlocked city with no bodies of water, no lakes, rivers, or streams nearby, let alone an ocean, carrying a handgun with a harpoon strapped to it, in case of, you know, shark attack. The original question here seems to be similar to, "why are there no handguns that also shoot harpoons". You simply don't have a real need for something like that given the different situations in which you'd need ONE, versus the other.
Also, anyone with a REAL need for that level of security, i.e., government and military personnel, would not be able to use the "secure" device in anywhere other than a secure facility, under normal circumstances, i.e., in a SCIF, (or whatever they call it,) which normally would make the "secure" device redundant, since the SCIF will likely already have one.
Just about the only thing I wonder when I see a story like this is "How the hell is Microsoft still even in business at this point?" Who is propping them up? Isn't everyone using GNU/Linux (or Macs) now? What business is stupid enough to be using Microsoft Office or any other of their crappy software at this point? What government is so careless with their taxpayer's revenue that they can afford to waste it, squander it really, on trash software that causes more problems than it solves? Especially when there are better, free alternatives to everything Microsoft makes? The appropriate response in the future to any story having anything to do with Microsoft should be, "who?"
Let's start an internet rumor that Elon Musk's Boring Company, (so named to try to divert attention away from it, as the saying goes, if you want to do something evil, wrap it in something boring!) has purchased and intends NOT to use, or is otherwise suppressing existent teleportation technology that would allow, in only 3 to 5 years, people to beam from one place to another, Star Trek style, for a trivial amount of money, so as to charge people huge amounts of money to move their carcasses, cave-man style, that is, physically, from one location to another, with all the tedious TIME that takes up, having to occupy, iteratively, EVERY SINGLE POINT IN BETWEEN the start point for movement, and the end-point, rather than avoiding both through the power of teleportation.
For good measure, let's spice this up by throwing in the assertion that, ironically, given Musk's car company is named "Tesla," that the teleportation technology was initially developed BY genius electrical pioneer and inventor Nikola Tesla, and that's part of why it's being suppressed! Should be fun!
Also, regarding stone LEGO-like bricks... imagine finding one of THESE in the dark with your foot! You thought PLASTIC bricks were no fun to step on or kick in your kids' bedroom... whoo-boy!
You mean Apple did not have this problem, as far as you know? Fixed that for you. Apple does or did have this problem, and many others, you just are not aware of it. Also, it is most certainly NOT an Android problem, it is a GOOGLE problem. Android is an operating system, and as an inanimate object, cannot harbor intent, either good or ill. It is the PEOPLE BEHIND it that do. Google dropped their laughable motto about not being evil behind a long time ago. They are at least moderately evil now, like every other for-profit thing there is MUST be.
The Free/Libre Open Source Software movement and its proponents, boosters, users, and contributors are the most honest and trustworthy group you can find, among people who create software because unlike any for-profit entity, their intent is to create software for themselves to use and share with others, following the stone-soup paradigm of creation and development. By contrast, companies that publish software for money have to be viewed with at least mild suspicion. Their motives are to make money, rather than to make software they themselves want to use, and so it would be prudent to wonder what OTHER thing they are doing to make money, i.e., selling your data which they harvest. COULD someone in the FL/OSS movement do this too? Of course, but since the source-code is available to examine, theyâ(TM)d more than likely quickly get caught, exposed, and the time and effort they put into their software would end up having been squandered. Just saying. The only way to harvest your user base data, metadata, etc., and have any hope of doing it for any length of time and not get caught by convincing people to put software on their own devices that spies for you, is to ensure they cannot see the source. Even if you yourself are not knowledgeable enough for a code-audit or review, other people out there are. That doesnâ(TM)t mean that one should trust FL/OSS implicitly, but of software made on the closed-source versus open-source model, I find the open-source the one generally more worthy of trust. Usually. Come to think of it, maybe I SHOULD learn to code and start reviewing all the source code to my entire GNU/Linux install... hehehe, sure. I have time for that.
Have you tried Not-Facebook? Not-Facebook is a lot like Facebook, but only you donâ(TM)t use Facebook. For example, when you find yourself wanting to take a selfie, and share it with people but only those YOU choose, and NOT those Facebook decides to sell your personal, private data to, use Not-Facebook, and instead of posting it, do Not-Post it. Want to get status updates from your friends? Instead of using Facebook, instead try using Not-Facebook, and instead CALL your friend and ask how he (or she,) IS. Itâ(TM)s so much more personal and rewarding taking the time and effort to pick up the smartphone you were probably already holding in your hand anyway, and selecting the dialer app, going into your contacts, and finding your friend, selecting his or her entry, and pressing the CALL button, then using noises you produce with your mouth and nose, instead of using Facebook.
Donâ(TM)t have your friendâ(TM)s phone number, or does your friend not have time to talk to you on the phone in real life? Well, then he or she wasnâ(TM)t really your friend in the first place, and what youâ(TM)ve been doing on Facebook all this while, besides helping make Mark Zuckerberg several billion dollars richer than he has any right to be, and letting a bunch of people know stuff about you that youâ(TM)d be far better served keeping to yourself, is deluding yourself about how many friends you really have, and ironically, probably losing whatever friends you have in real life, because youâ(TM)re spending all your time staring at that stupid little glowing rectangle, wasting electricity, becoming more isolated and depressed, and contributing to the downfall of our civilization. Also, looking at cats in absurdly small boxes.
So try Not-Facebook today, and stop giving random nefariously-intentioned strangers your personal information, and reconnect with real-life, and real-friends, not fake Facebook âfriendsâ
YouTube Kids, the supposedly child-friendly version of YouTube that's been shown to often play host to troves of slop content and disturbing videos, apparently was showing videos from British conspiracy theorist David Icke, a guy who believes reptilian aliens secretly control the world and are responsible for the Holocaust. According to a Saturday report in Business Insider, searching for the term "UFO" on YouTube kids turned up a video purporting "to show a UFO shooting at a chemtrail." The suggested followups for that video featured a number of Icke's clips, including a nearly five-hour lecture on how aliens built the pyramids and secretly run the planet through a ruling class extraterrestrial-human hybrids. The video also delves into a number of other conspiracy theories, including claims Freemasons indulge in human sacrifice and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by his own government. According to Business Insider, "Two other conspiracy theory videos by Icke appeared in the related videos, meaning it was easy for children to quickly go from watching relatively innocent videos about toys to conspiracy content." Searching for the term "moon landing" also resulted in a number of conspiratorial videos emerging, including one making the claim that CERN's Large Hadron Collider had opened a portal to another world that an unfortunate employee then vanished in.
I have to wonder if this has anything to do with Google engineers thinking they're more clever than they really are, when it comes to trusting their precious algorithms. Unless of course, someone's doing this stuff manually. But just in case this is the feature and not a bug, that someone at Google / YouTube WANTS kids seeing this kind of stuff, it asks to be answered, and so I shall on a completely unrelated website in the form of a humorous musing:
Reptilians DID rule the Earth, until about 65 million years ago, when the entire planet's population of mega-fauna, a kind of reptile-oid known as the dinosaurs, ran smack right into something we used to call the K-T Boundary, (not sure what they call it now, I think it's been renamed to something else,) a moment in time when the surface of the earth became, ironically, frozen in time, by becoming briefly very hot. The K-T Boundary is also a location in space, in a sense. Though it's all over the planet, in places left untouched by geological action (not subducted into the Earth,) or erosion, forming a thin geological stratum (so a location in terms of where it's deposited vertically in the layers of the Earth,) as a function of time itself. Since then, anyway, reptilians have taken a back-seat to mammals, who have come to dominate the dry parts of the world, at the scale we are ourselves most familiar with.
As for UFOs, there are LOTS of UFOs; I saw one the other day. It was an airplane, but I can't tell you what kind. It was very high up. I certainly couldn't even tell you what company made it, or what company, group, or individual operated it. I can say unequivocally that it was unidentified, at least by me. Probably lots of other people also could not identify it. But I'm pretty sure the men and/or women on board or who paid for its fuel knew EXACTLY what it was, as likely did also, Air Traffic Control, SOMEWHERE. Now as for what most people actually mean when they say "UFO," as in a saucer or other oddly-shaped flying object from some other planet, that's a bit of a laugh. First, let's debunk the "it HAD to be ALIENS" nonsense in a sentence or two. One, just because you can't think of a way for something to happen without "aliens," such as the invention of the magnetron at the heart of a microwave oven, doesn't constitute proof of extra-terrestrial aliens, let alone their coming here at some point, if, that is, you do in fact think that; all it proves is you lack imagination, and are prone to falling for weak arguments. If you learn how things work, you'll find very quickly that humans could EASILY have invented it, withou
Teaching rote MSFT junk. Like in India, where it is some supposed "benefit" to receive free licenses and materials, it's an attempt to undermine the efforts of a society under the guise of assistance as benevolent market leader. Garbage.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's the EXACT same tactic Apple Computers, Ltd. (which has since renamed itself to "Apple, Inc.") used in the 1980's and probably 90's as well, to boost adoption of their (at the time, clearly inferior) computers, such as the Apple ][, Apple //e, etc. versus the far-superior IBM PC, (superior for the purposes we'd have put them to if we'd had them in computer labs then, instead of crappy little Apple 2's,) since otherwise they'd probably never have gained sufficient foothold to matter, and the Apple Macintosh (later Apple Mac, then eMac, then iMac, etc.) would not even exists. Actually, those I think Apple just DISCOUNTED, rather than gave them outright, but... it's the same idea. "Get 'em hooked while they're young."
You're right though, but we can all take solace in the thought that as these Ghanaians grow up, they'll figure out that the "gift" is really a Trojan Horse, and then they'll put GNU/Linux on the computer(s,) and LibreOffice, and join the better, smarter members of the developed world in giving the bloated, decaying, stinking corpse of Microsoft the finger, as they turn to F/L-OSS like the rest of the world SHOULD.
vim is great because it's on all platforms is like saying anal sex is great because it works on all genders.
I think vim is better because you don't need a functioning control key to do stuff, just an escape key, and a working colon button... for example, the commands to abandon a document and exit without saving, and the one to save and then exit are esc-colon-q, (with a "!" character, if changes have been made since last save, of course,) and esc-colon-x, respectively. With emacs, everything is control-this and control-that, which all kidding aside, means that vim is not just more portable in terms of what it will work on, but also in terms of what kind of keyboard or keyboard emulation you need to work WITH it, and also if your terminal emulator grabs or intercepts the control key, it won't hamper you or require special settings, since you don't need to use the control key in vim.
Hey... I just realized, with vim, you can escape the colon, while emacs is preferred by CONTROL freaks!
XD
When the guy says, "uh oh, honey, looks like we're about to run out of gas," out in the middle of nowhere, (like in Earth orbit,) it is often really a pretense for some foolin' around.
I think ol' Kep is about to try to put 'the moves' on Hubble! Hehehe
Apple needs new leadership in all its high-level executive positions. This group has lost its way. This "electrical power and wear-and-tear on your computer's internal components doing math for other people's profits" scheme is just gross. Apple is now the pimply, skinny, obviously diseased, strung-out, illicit-drug-using-prostitute hanging out near the hotel, just... you know... waiting. Just hanging out, waiting for a ride. From a friend. Not loitering illegally, oh, no sir... are you a cop? Well, then in that case...
Just nasty.
Having DST in 2018 is like requiring all cellphone and smartphone manufacturers to include PULSE DIALING on their phones, and an RJ-11 port, just in case, you know, you ever want to plug it into a POTS wire and use it like it's a landline?
Here's a simpler solution. Put everyone on GMT/UTC/ZULU time for coordination, (so you might hear someone say, "the plane departs at 0235Z,") and let each city or town determine its own local time based on SOLAR NOON, which is how they did it in the old days, back when things made SENSE. Everyone would just set their watches and clocks to GMT/ZULU time, and know their own local offset, or set them to the local time, and again, know their own local offset.
BTW, this would be trivial in today's modern world, given the ubiquity of smart-devices; anyone who objects, "but I don't have a fancy, new-fangled, smart device!" can be handed a simple digital wrist-watch with a Dual-Time feature, (yeah, they actually used to make those,) and let them set the time as they need. Most people whose lives are not massively connected could likely survive just with local time, and those who are connected would find it easy to live with their lives primarily on the global UTC standard.
Some might view this as a global tyranny of time, but it's not, instead it abolishes the STATE tyranny of arbitrary time zones, and allows any locality to use their own time that works best for them. It makes NO SENSE for Eastern Maine and Western Michigan to pretend it's the same time in the two locations, nor for Eastern Alabama and the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles to pretend they exist in the same time, given the absurdity of having SOLAR NOON, the ACTUAL middle of the day, occur between ONE and TWO in the afternoon, or very early in the morning! Meanwhile, a lucky few people happening to live somewhere where for at least PART of the year, ACTUAL (solar) noon closely coincides with clock-noon, according to their local BS "time-zone".
The only adjustment this will require is that when you talk to your friends, family, and coworkers, whenever you say a time, and add "A.M." or "P.M." to it, it be understood to mean BEFORE OR AFTER the SUN crosses over the line where you are, between the north and south POLES, or the meridian, hence (from the Latin,) ANTE MERIDIEM, (A.M.) and POST MERIDIEM (P.M.) versus if someone says some four-digit number, followed by "zulu," it be understood to be the Universal Coordinated Clock (UTC) time, which is basically equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time, give or take a fraction of a second.
Then, when people post events, such as "Soccer Practice will be at 2100Z" will be easily understood NOT to mean that they're supposed to meet at 9:00 P.M. local time, but instead at... say, 5:55 A.M. local time, at that particular location, safe and happy knowing that where they meet, the sun will be up then, (since the planners of the even know that that particular day happens to have 13 hours and 53 minutes of sunshine that day, which means 6 hours and about 56 minutes of daylight BEFORE (and then again, AFTER) noon that day, will put sunrise there WELL BEFORE the time they have to meet.
Remember that once upon a time, this is how things were done, and it went FINE until trains came along and ruined everything for everyone. Well, thanks to modern conveniences like dual-time wrist-watches, and smart phones, and computers, etc., there's no real excuse for the NONSENSE of insisting everyone living in regions of vast swathes of the planet have to all be on the same time because adding, say, three hours and thirty six minutes to UTC is too hard.
Also, maybe we take this golden opportunity to stop worrying so damned much about time, and stop letting people enslave us to the goddamned clock ANYWAY. People in and around the Mediterranean Sea (by reputation, anyway,) seem to have it right. This obsession with maximizing value by obsessing about TIME is slowly killing us. They don't worry about crap like that NEARLY as much as we do, and they live longer, happier lives. We really need to try to follow their example, rather than dying, second by second, according to the tyranny of a clock.
MIT announced yesterday that it and Commonwealth Fusion Systems -- an MIT spinoff -- are working on a project that aims to make harvesting energy from nuclear fusion a reality within the next 15 years.
We already HAVE a nuclear fusion reactor. It has been operating for YEARS with an unmatched safety record, harming no one directly except occasionally causing problems for people over-exposed to it without proper shielding. I have spoken of this before, I think, probably right here on slashdot. In their wisdom, our ancestors chose to live a safe distance away from it, at about 98 million miles, give or take a few. which makes the only issue harvesting its output, and storing it for periods when the reactor is unavailable for periods of time, as it often is.
The beauty of this reactor is that it's so big, we can all share it and it won't ever, (from our perspective, anyway,) run out.
HOWEVER, like manna raining down from heaven, all that needs be done is collect enough of the output of this fusion reactor to go until the next time it becomes available. FORTUNATELY, its availability is pretty regular and fairly predictable; in fact, you can set your clock by it, and historically, people have and still do, even if a touch indirectly. All schemes to avoid using the power of this reactor and instead prefer some other, can mostly be attributed either to ignorance, or greed. Ignorance that a better, cheaper, and safer way already exists, and greed that by providing a more "convenient" alternative, you can get people to pay you money for the privilege of using what they could already get for free. Ugh.. people.
An unauthorized launch would also call into question the ability of secondary satellite "ride-share" companies and foreign launch providers to comply with U.S. space regulations
Um, who the fuck died and made the US government king of the whole fucking world, let alone gave it the power to "regulate" space?!? Has anyone else on Earth claimed the entire rest of the cosmos yet? Because if not, I, Hallux Fucking Sinister, (yes, that IS in fact what the "F" stands for,) hereby lay claim to all of the cosmos, all universes past, present, and future, as sole owner and god-king, including any multiverse or polyverse(s) or omniverse(s), etc... This unavoidably includes all regions located within my new domains and dominions, including the planet known as (among other things,) the Earth. I therefore own all of you, puny little humans. In my magnanimity, I hereby grant to my measly little subjects, general rights to exist, to have mass, and to occupy space, subject to the following condition, that no one may deny any OTHER one the same right, to exist, or to have mass, and occupy space, this right being throughout my domains and dominions. I require no special tribute or acknowledgement, because I, (unlike certain shitheads with ridiculous haircuts,) do not crave constant attention, like a petulant, tantrum-throwing child.
HOWEVER, you, by availing yourself of this right I grant today, indemnify me against any and all harms that may befall you whatsoever, on behalf of not only yourselves, but your heirs, assignee(s), etc., throughout the universe of time and space. The universe can be a dangerous and uncertain place, and I don't want to get sued if you stumble around in it, unseeing, and stub your toe on a black hole, or something.