I can assure you, as a professional game programmer, that I've never even heard of such a practice. That's not to say it hasn't ever been done or tried, but I certainly haven't heard of such an instance, at least from inside the industry. I'm pretty sure that videogame companies don't want people to associate their games with malware either, even if they're not getting a sale. I also don't believe that it's the groups who crack programs' DRM that do this. Like you said, they've also got a reputation that would be damaged.
As an author myself, I'll be releasing my game DRM-free (well, the PC versions at least, but other platforms are out of my control) and cryptographically signed. Even when it's pirated (which is pretty much inevitable), people will know it's not been tampered with and is safe to play. I'd prefer them to have fun with the game, and maybe in the future they'll become a paying customer.
I think this is the new God for highly successful people. Life is so easy and fun, it can't be real - this easy to "win". Maybe it also assuages their guilt as they stomp all over peons on their way up the ladder of success. After all, if we're just simulations, then morality is rather pointless, right? Notice how dirt poor and miserable people are not flocking to this new religion, because they wouldn't believe someone would create such a cruel and painful simulation for them to exist in.
I'd imagine we'll see some e-mails or something telling us what we have access to at some point. Or else their marketing people are pretty awful at their jobs.
This is good, because Amazon's streaming video selection for Prime members is somewhat lackluster, and I've been considering dropping it. I've been buying a lot of audiobooks to listen to during my commutes lately, which actually turns it into a somewhat pleasant diversion during the day rather than a daily annoyance. I'll see whether this can convince me that Prime is worthwhile or not.
The USA has a shadow government in the form of the Demopublican establishment, with a death grip on the selection of those who stand for election to Congress and for President.
Trump is anything but the Republican party elite's nominee of choice.
You must have forgotten about the TNG episodes where it was revealed that all sentient species were actually artificially seeded by an advanced parent race. Of course, even that one didn't end quite as nicely as the parent race had envisioned, so maybe you've got a point.
My guess is that humanity won't have a lot of interest in artificially seeding life unless it's with the express purpose of terraforming planets for later habitation by humanity, and we're not going to want to wait a billion years for evolution to do the job.
as a species - we have to stop multiplying and cut down our numbers to a sustainable number of people,yes.
It's already happening in first world countries. As soon as third world countries catch up with living standards, urbanization, and education of women, the same thing will happen with them as well. The world's population is probably going to peak out at around 10 or 11 billion or so at the end of this century, and then level off or decline from there to a perhaps 9 billion or so.
What about the ecosystem? As a species we are guilty of repeatedly taking actions without thinking about the effects on the environment. Considered in isolation, anything that damages "the ecosystem" sounds universally bad. In this case, the ecosystem in question is cans, buckets, pots, water storage jars, trash, tires, and whatever else is lying around collecting rainwater. Aedes aegypti does not breed in ponds, marshes, swamps, or wetlands, and thus there are no frogs and no fish to eat these mosquitoes—one of the reasons they have done so well as a species.
A little reading of the linked articles answers some questions about this. In short, it's not at all clear this would have a significant effect on anything other than our own man-made ecosystem, and that effect would likely be nothing but positive.
I also find it a tad hypocritical when people pontificate on theoretical consequences while they are nearly completely immune to the consequences of the status quo. It's pretty damned easy to be opposed to actions that could save tens of thousands of lives a year when you personally are at nearly zero risk of dying from a tropical, mosquito-borne disease.
I'm not saying to rush into eliminating a species without due diligence, but let's not let knee-jerk reactions prevent us from at least investigating the viability of this.
Unless you like staying up all night tracking down errors in pointer arithmetic.
Lumping C and C++ together generally means you haven't looked at how dramatically the C++ language has changed recently, especially if you talk about pointer arithmetic. If you're using modern C++ and are still worrying about pointer arithmetic (i.e. you're not abstracting it away), you're probably doing it wrong.
The nice thing about C++ is that, quite often, those abstractions either cost nothing at all, or at worst, far less than interpreted languages. Also, having used modern C++ for a few years now, I think garbage collection is vastly overrated compared to reference counted pointers and simple RAII. C++ is still harder to use than Java or C# in many subtle ways, but basic memory management is no longer one of those persistent thorns.
Efficient compilation? Yeah, sadly, that's not C++, and likely never will be. There are some newer alternatives that have these features and compile quite efficiency, since they don't come with the baggage of backwards compatibility, but I'm not sure how much traction they're going to gain in practical measurements outside of some niche locations. Their biggest downside? Yeah, they're not backwards compatible with billions of lines of C or C++ code out in the wild.
if I want something to run on most Linux distributions, as well as the BSDs with minor modifications, C is the obvious choice
Well, C++ could make that same claim, as well as many other languages. In fact, some are arguably much *better* at cross-platform functionality.
I think where C shines is that it's sort of a "common denominator" language. Just about every language (C++ included) can make use of a C library, or with minimal effort can create hooks into it, like with C#, Objective-C, Lua, or dozens of other languages that rely on low-level code for lots of their functionality. It's also a reasonably simple language, rather easy to wrap your head around (if written well), and is straightforward to learn, with power enough to get close to the metal when needed. So, if you write some code in C, just about anyone else can use it, even if they have to write a bit of "glue" first.
That makes it a hell of a pragmatic choice for many projects, even considering C's more problematic aspects.
"Pre-releases of the Yakkety Yak are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu flavor developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this bos grunniens ready. Beta 1 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. These images are still under development, so you should expect some bugs," says Set Hallstrom, Ubuntu Studio project lead. He adds: "While these Beta 1 images have been tested and work, except as noted in the release notes, Ubuntu developers are continuing to improve the Yakkety Yak. In particular, once newer daily images are available, system installation bugs identified in the Beta 1 installer should be verified against the current daily image before being reported in Launchpad. Using an obsolete image to re-report bugs that have already been fixed wastes your time and the time of developers who are busy trying to make 16.10 the best Ubuntu release yet. Always ensure your system is up to date before reporting bugs."
So... there may be some bugs then? I was a little unclear on that point.
Anyhow, it's great that the article talks about the silly name of the release, the song it's named after, and about how buggy it is, rather than talking about what sort of new features come with the latest and greatest bugs. I mean, no one gives a crap about boring things like that, right? Or did I miss a link somewhere?
I'll agree with your sentiment, if not your particular example. My old flip-phone from 10 years ago lasted about a week on a single charge. Obviously, though, that's because it was doing jack-crap processing-wise compared to the mini-supercomputers we now all have in our pockets, not due to a lack of progress in battery tech. I think many tech-types have just been spoiled by Moore's Law, not realizing how abnormal it is for technology to improve on an exponential scale.
Anyhow, I'm always glad to see more research into this field. A lot of our current tech is tethered to battery life, and batteries are, I think, going to be more and more important as we transition more toward renewable energy for much of our everyday power needs.
I think I've previously called this "perceptual randomness".
Generally, when you talk about randomness for human consumption, perceptual randomness is far preferable to true randomness. For instance, when creating an audio engine for an upcoming videogame, I made sure the code that chose "random" samples among a group of sample variations always made sure not to choose the same sample twice in a row by keeping a record of the last sample of that group played, and excluding it from the next playback. To humans, any repetition at all tends sounds out of place in a soundscape, as our brains are exceptionally good at recognizing the patterns inherent in any aural repetition.
I did the same thing with music playlists with the "shuffle" function, making sure it didn't accidentally play the last song and the identical first song in the next set. Probably one better would be to do something like perform a weighted distribution based on the song's last position, discouraging them from re-appearing too closely together, perhaps with a hard limit of x% of the total songlist length. However, given that each region had a fairly small playlist, that would have been overkill for our purposes. It would probably be worthwhile in a standalone music player though.
I always wondered if anyone else paid attention to stuff like this other than me.
I distrust any blanket assertion that such things are "technologically impossible." I'd agree to "highly improbable", given the ridiculous frequency with which consumers' or citizens' private data is regularly leaked, by corporations and government agencies alike. And given the stupidly insecure and inaccurate electronic voting machines we've seen before, I'd say it's probably "impossible" for some companies to create a secure system.
But properly working, secure authentication and crypto is a thing. It's damned hard to get right, but it's not impossible. At some point, we'll probably figure out how create a system that uses authenticated electronic ledgers to prevent fraudulent tampering (blockchains, etc) while still preserving anonymity. Still, until we figure out how to put such a system in place and make sure it's reasonably secure, paper ballots are at least a bit harder to manipulate on a mass scale, although still not impossible.
Tablets and phones are consumption devices, not creation devices. They are a hideously bad match for trying to do any sort of serious development work, or even your bog standard PowerPoint deck. A Surface is about as tablet-y as you can get while still being able to do reasonable work, but a Surface is still a real computer under the hood. Anyone who works with touch-only systems could probably give you a long list of design decisions that slow them down when trying to do anything serious.
No one's talking about developers or other power users here, of course. They'll need a true computer with a more traditional desktop and powerful OS. But if all you need is web apps like Google Docs, or maybe even MS Office apps, and you attach a keyboard, what exactly prevents you from getting actual work done on a tablet? Or what if your work involves reading books or reports, research, communication, or other "consumption-friendly" tasks for large portions of the day?
I've noticed many tech people have a somewhat narrow view on what "work" can be done with a computer. It generally equates to "stuff I do with a computer." Note that I completely agree with you that tablets and phones ARE more suited for consumption than production, but as these devices and operating systems get more powerful, and as web-based work becomes more feasible by the day, the lines are beginning to blur a bit.
It would be entirely unfair - and misleading - to draw connections between the outsourcing of customer support services to third-world locations and then the rise in boiler-room scams from those locations.
I'm not entirely sure about that, but there's blame to go around. There have been plenty of investigations that have shown that companies occasionally provide these call centers with a shocking amount of personal information about their customers. These sorts of scam operations are probably more likely to occur from places outside of US jurisdiction, where they'll be a bit safer from prosecution, since richer US citizens are obviously a prime target. There have been other cases, though, where fraudulent operations are actually outsourced to foreign call centers, in which case you can blame the one providing those call centers with false information and instructions.
I think perhaps the rise of call centers in foreign countries has simply given such foreign scammers more legitimately. No one blinks to hear heavily accented callers these days, whereas a few decades ago, you'd be suspicious of such a call that might not be coming from the US.
So give them a pencil and a pad of paper, right? Simpler is not always better. Even for someone who hunts and pecks, a keyboard with properly designed local software is a lot more productive for most people than laggy, underpowered touchscreen devices coupled with badly designed SaaS interfaces.
Not at all. "The simplest tool fit for the job." If that's a desktop, fine. But not all work is that complex, or requires what are literally the equivalent of yesteryear's supercomputers sitting on a desk. Maybe some people need a laptop, since they're on the go. Or maybe even just a tablet with detachable keyboard, if all they really need is a browser to run some lightweight web apps.
My point is that we as techies really shouldn't be so attached to a particular form factor that not everyone requires. Is KDE dying? Yeah, I guess, but only because the desktop itself is... if not dying, then shrinking a bit in significance. It's becoming just one of many viable form factors or computing paradigms. Sure, we developers will always need a desktop environment because of what we do, but the world at large is not like us.
A lot of tech people tend to forget that for most people, a computer is not an end unto itself. It's just another tool for getting their real work done. Why "advocate" a desktop if people can get their work done on a tablet or phone? A desktop system has a lot of complexity that, for most people, probably tends to get in the way of actually getting their work done as much as it helps them. I say, just use the simplest tool fit for the job, nothing more.
People laugh at me for using Midnight Commander for file operations on my various computers...but it's way faster than navigating a GUI or the command line if you know what you're doing!
I'd argue that very few people's productivity is measured in how efficient their file operations are. It's sort of like believing you're going to be vastly more efficient as a programmer if you memorize a bunch of keyboard shortcuts or type 60wpm instead of 30. Unlike the movies, programming isn't about how fast you type.
If it works for you, fantastic. But don't kid yourself... you use it because it's what you know and you're comfortable with it. People hate change, because change forces cognitive dissonance, meaning you have to focus more on the task rather than the work you're trying to get done until the new system is committed to muscle memory. That means many people hate change even if it's change for the better, let alone if it's just change for change's sake.
I didn't see anywhere in the article that these were "autonomous fighters", just that they were "drones", or "unmanned fighter jets". My assumption is that human controllers will still very much be in control of these things at some tactical level. You're still going to need to regularly train whoever controls, commands, and maintains these things.
I'd agree that they'd need to fly less frequently, but they'd probably still need to regularly perform in training missions, just like every other military asset currently in existence.
This is a waste of money. There are plans to decommission parts of the ISS in the pretty near future. Why do this for something that's not going to be around all that much longer?
Why? Just to piss off humbugs like you. Totally worth every penny.
It's still not a usable browser. Even Paul Thurrott can't endorse it yet. He talked recently about its many small frustrations, about how basic copy and paste features don't work, or how when you scale text up on a single page, ALL other tabs get scaled as well. Stupid, annoying stuff like that creates a terrible user experience.
The potential for offshore wind energy in the US is massive. If we build in all of the available ocean space, the winds above coastal waters could provide more than 4,000 gigawatts a year. That's more than four times the nation’s current annual electricity production.
So, gosh, all we have to do is use all the available coastal ocean space, and we'll get four times the annual electrical output. That's a bit like saying "If we covered every square foot of the contiguous US in solar panels, we'd have about 1300x the current electrical output." Technically true, but somewhat misleading in its sheer improbability.
Yeah, a good thing to start diversifying our energy needs, but let's not get carried away with over-optimistic nonsense like that.
Slashdot Mirror
I can assure you, as a professional game programmer, that I've never even heard of such a practice. That's not to say it hasn't ever been done or tried, but I certainly haven't heard of such an instance, at least from inside the industry. I'm pretty sure that videogame companies don't want people to associate their games with malware either, even if they're not getting a sale. I also don't believe that it's the groups who crack programs' DRM that do this. Like you said, they've also got a reputation that would be damaged.
As an author myself, I'll be releasing my game DRM-free (well, the PC versions at least, but other platforms are out of my control) and cryptographically signed. Even when it's pirated (which is pretty much inevitable), people will know it's not been tampered with and is safe to play. I'd prefer them to have fun with the game, and maybe in the future they'll become a paying customer.
I think this is the new God for highly successful people. Life is so easy and fun, it can't be real - this easy to "win". Maybe it also assuages their guilt as they stomp all over peons on their way up the ladder of success. After all, if we're just simulations, then morality is rather pointless, right? Notice how dirt poor and miserable people are not flocking to this new religion, because they wouldn't believe someone would create such a cruel and painful simulation for them to exist in.
I'd imagine we'll see some e-mails or something telling us what we have access to at some point. Or else their marketing people are pretty awful at their jobs.
This is good, because Amazon's streaming video selection for Prime members is somewhat lackluster, and I've been considering dropping it. I've been buying a lot of audiobooks to listen to during my commutes lately, which actually turns it into a somewhat pleasant diversion during the day rather than a daily annoyance. I'll see whether this can convince me that Prime is worthwhile or not.
The USA has a shadow government in the form of the Demopublican establishment, with a death grip on the selection of those who stand for election to Congress and for President.
Trump is anything but the Republican party elite's nominee of choice.
You must have forgotten about the TNG episodes where it was revealed that all sentient species were actually artificially seeded by an advanced parent race. Of course, even that one didn't end quite as nicely as the parent race had envisioned, so maybe you've got a point.
My guess is that humanity won't have a lot of interest in artificially seeding life unless it's with the express purpose of terraforming planets for later habitation by humanity, and we're not going to want to wait a billion years for evolution to do the job.
as a species - we have to stop multiplying and cut down our numbers to a sustainable number of people,yes.
It's already happening in first world countries. As soon as third world countries catch up with living standards, urbanization, and education of women, the same thing will happen with them as well. The world's population is probably going to peak out at around 10 or 11 billion or so at the end of this century, and then level off or decline from there to a perhaps 9 billion or so.
China and North Korea are intrigued by your idea, and wish for you to subscribe to their newsletter, comrade.
What about the ecosystem? As a species we are guilty of repeatedly taking actions without thinking about the effects on the environment. Considered in isolation, anything that damages "the ecosystem" sounds universally bad. In this case, the ecosystem in question is cans, buckets, pots, water storage jars, trash, tires, and whatever else is lying around collecting rainwater. Aedes aegypti does not breed in ponds, marshes, swamps, or wetlands, and thus there are no frogs and no fish to eat these mosquitoes—one of the reasons they have done so well as a species.
A little reading of the linked articles answers some questions about this. In short, it's not at all clear this would have a significant effect on anything other than our own man-made ecosystem, and that effect would likely be nothing but positive.
I also find it a tad hypocritical when people pontificate on theoretical consequences while they are nearly completely immune to the consequences of the status quo. It's pretty damned easy to be opposed to actions that could save tens of thousands of lives a year when you personally are at nearly zero risk of dying from a tropical, mosquito-borne disease.
I'm not saying to rush into eliminating a species without due diligence, but let's not let knee-jerk reactions prevent us from at least investigating the viability of this.
Unless you like staying up all night tracking down errors in pointer arithmetic.
Lumping C and C++ together generally means you haven't looked at how dramatically the C++ language has changed recently, especially if you talk about pointer arithmetic. If you're using modern C++ and are still worrying about pointer arithmetic (i.e. you're not abstracting it away), you're probably doing it wrong.
The nice thing about C++ is that, quite often, those abstractions either cost nothing at all, or at worst, far less than interpreted languages. Also, having used modern C++ for a few years now, I think garbage collection is vastly overrated compared to reference counted pointers and simple RAII. C++ is still harder to use than Java or C# in many subtle ways, but basic memory management is no longer one of those persistent thorns.
Efficient compilation? Yeah, sadly, that's not C++, and likely never will be. There are some newer alternatives that have these features and compile quite efficiency, since they don't come with the baggage of backwards compatibility, but I'm not sure how much traction they're going to gain in practical measurements outside of some niche locations. Their biggest downside? Yeah, they're not backwards compatible with billions of lines of C or C++ code out in the wild.
People get into accidents all the time without any help from autopilot.
Yeah, but that's not *news*. You'll be hearing another spate of these stories once fully autonomous vehicles are on the road in significant numbers.
if I want something to run on most Linux distributions, as well as the BSDs with minor modifications, C is the obvious choice
Well, C++ could make that same claim, as well as many other languages. In fact, some are arguably much *better* at cross-platform functionality.
I think where C shines is that it's sort of a "common denominator" language. Just about every language (C++ included) can make use of a C library, or with minimal effort can create hooks into it, like with C#, Objective-C, Lua, or dozens of other languages that rely on low-level code for lots of their functionality. It's also a reasonably simple language, rather easy to wrap your head around (if written well), and is straightforward to learn, with power enough to get close to the metal when needed. So, if you write some code in C, just about anyone else can use it, even if they have to write a bit of "glue" first.
That makes it a hell of a pragmatic choice for many projects, even considering C's more problematic aspects.
Bigger eyes, bigger heads, longer arms, and etc are what people find pleasing to their eye.
So... anime?
"Pre-releases of the Yakkety Yak are not encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage. They are, however, recommended for Ubuntu flavor developers and those who want to help in testing, reporting and fixing bugs as we work towards getting this bos grunniens ready. Beta 1 includes a number of software updates that are ready for wider testing. These images are still under development, so you should expect some bugs," says Set Hallstrom, Ubuntu Studio project lead. He adds: "While these Beta 1 images have been tested and work, except as noted in the release notes, Ubuntu developers are continuing to improve the Yakkety Yak. In particular, once newer daily images are available, system installation bugs identified in the Beta 1 installer should be verified against the current daily image before being reported in Launchpad. Using an obsolete image to re-report bugs that have already been fixed wastes your time and the time of developers who are busy trying to make 16.10 the best Ubuntu release yet. Always ensure your system is up to date before reporting bugs."
So... there may be some bugs then? I was a little unclear on that point.
Anyhow, it's great that the article talks about the silly name of the release, the song it's named after, and about how buggy it is, rather than talking about what sort of new features come with the latest and greatest bugs. I mean, no one gives a crap about boring things like that, right? Or did I miss a link somewhere?
I'll agree with your sentiment, if not your particular example. My old flip-phone from 10 years ago lasted about a week on a single charge. Obviously, though, that's because it was doing jack-crap processing-wise compared to the mini-supercomputers we now all have in our pockets, not due to a lack of progress in battery tech. I think many tech-types have just been spoiled by Moore's Law, not realizing how abnormal it is for technology to improve on an exponential scale.
Anyhow, I'm always glad to see more research into this field. A lot of our current tech is tethered to battery life, and batteries are, I think, going to be more and more important as we transition more toward renewable energy for much of our everyday power needs.
I think I've previously called this "perceptual randomness".
Generally, when you talk about randomness for human consumption, perceptual randomness is far preferable to true randomness. For instance, when creating an audio engine for an upcoming videogame, I made sure the code that chose "random" samples among a group of sample variations always made sure not to choose the same sample twice in a row by keeping a record of the last sample of that group played, and excluding it from the next playback. To humans, any repetition at all tends sounds out of place in a soundscape, as our brains are exceptionally good at recognizing the patterns inherent in any aural repetition.
I did the same thing with music playlists with the "shuffle" function, making sure it didn't accidentally play the last song and the identical first song in the next set. Probably one better would be to do something like perform a weighted distribution based on the song's last position, discouraging them from re-appearing too closely together, perhaps with a hard limit of x% of the total songlist length. However, given that each region had a fairly small playlist, that would have been overkill for our purposes. It would probably be worthwhile in a standalone music player though.
I always wondered if anyone else paid attention to stuff like this other than me.
I distrust any blanket assertion that such things are "technologically impossible." I'd agree to "highly improbable", given the ridiculous frequency with which consumers' or citizens' private data is regularly leaked, by corporations and government agencies alike. And given the stupidly insecure and inaccurate electronic voting machines we've seen before, I'd say it's probably "impossible" for some companies to create a secure system.
But properly working, secure authentication and crypto is a thing. It's damned hard to get right, but it's not impossible. At some point, we'll probably figure out how create a system that uses authenticated electronic ledgers to prevent fraudulent tampering (blockchains, etc) while still preserving anonymity. Still, until we figure out how to put such a system in place and make sure it's reasonably secure, paper ballots are at least a bit harder to manipulate on a mass scale, although still not impossible.
Tablets and phones are consumption devices, not creation devices. They are a hideously bad match for trying to do any sort of serious development work, or even your bog standard PowerPoint deck. A Surface is about as tablet-y as you can get while still being able to do reasonable work, but a Surface is still a real computer under the hood. Anyone who works with touch-only systems could probably give you a long list of design decisions that slow them down when trying to do anything serious.
No one's talking about developers or other power users here, of course. They'll need a true computer with a more traditional desktop and powerful OS. But if all you need is web apps like Google Docs, or maybe even MS Office apps, and you attach a keyboard, what exactly prevents you from getting actual work done on a tablet? Or what if your work involves reading books or reports, research, communication, or other "consumption-friendly" tasks for large portions of the day?
I've noticed many tech people have a somewhat narrow view on what "work" can be done with a computer. It generally equates to "stuff I do with a computer." Note that I completely agree with you that tablets and phones ARE more suited for consumption than production, but as these devices and operating systems get more powerful, and as web-based work becomes more feasible by the day, the lines are beginning to blur a bit.
It would be entirely unfair - and misleading - to draw connections between the outsourcing of customer support services to third-world locations and then the rise in boiler-room scams from those locations.
I'm not entirely sure about that, but there's blame to go around. There have been plenty of investigations that have shown that companies occasionally provide these call centers with a shocking amount of personal information about their customers. These sorts of scam operations are probably more likely to occur from places outside of US jurisdiction, where they'll be a bit safer from prosecution, since richer US citizens are obviously a prime target. There have been other cases, though, where fraudulent operations are actually outsourced to foreign call centers, in which case you can blame the one providing those call centers with false information and instructions.
I think perhaps the rise of call centers in foreign countries has simply given such foreign scammers more legitimately. No one blinks to hear heavily accented callers these days, whereas a few decades ago, you'd be suspicious of such a call that might not be coming from the US.
So give them a pencil and a pad of paper, right? Simpler is not always better. Even for someone who hunts and pecks, a keyboard with properly designed local software is a lot more productive for most people than laggy, underpowered touchscreen devices coupled with badly designed SaaS interfaces.
Not at all. "The simplest tool fit for the job." If that's a desktop, fine. But not all work is that complex, or requires what are literally the equivalent of yesteryear's supercomputers sitting on a desk. Maybe some people need a laptop, since they're on the go. Or maybe even just a tablet with detachable keyboard, if all they really need is a browser to run some lightweight web apps.
My point is that we as techies really shouldn't be so attached to a particular form factor that not everyone requires. Is KDE dying? Yeah, I guess, but only because the desktop itself is... if not dying, then shrinking a bit in significance. It's becoming just one of many viable form factors or computing paradigms. Sure, we developers will always need a desktop environment because of what we do, but the world at large is not like us.
A lot of tech people tend to forget that for most people, a computer is not an end unto itself. It's just another tool for getting their real work done. Why "advocate" a desktop if people can get their work done on a tablet or phone? A desktop system has a lot of complexity that, for most people, probably tends to get in the way of actually getting their work done as much as it helps them. I say, just use the simplest tool fit for the job, nothing more.
People laugh at me for using Midnight Commander for file operations on my various computers...but it's way faster than navigating a GUI or the command line if you know what you're doing!
I'd argue that very few people's productivity is measured in how efficient their file operations are. It's sort of like believing you're going to be vastly more efficient as a programmer if you memorize a bunch of keyboard shortcuts or type 60wpm instead of 30. Unlike the movies, programming isn't about how fast you type.
If it works for you, fantastic. But don't kid yourself... you use it because it's what you know and you're comfortable with it. People hate change, because change forces cognitive dissonance, meaning you have to focus more on the task rather than the work you're trying to get done until the new system is committed to muscle memory. That means many people hate change even if it's change for the better, let alone if it's just change for change's sake.
I didn't see anywhere in the article that these were "autonomous fighters", just that they were "drones", or "unmanned fighter jets". My assumption is that human controllers will still very much be in control of these things at some tactical level. You're still going to need to regularly train whoever controls, commands, and maintains these things.
I'd agree that they'd need to fly less frequently, but they'd probably still need to regularly perform in training missions, just like every other military asset currently in existence.
This is a waste of money. There are plans to decommission parts of the ISS in the pretty near future. Why do this for something that's not going to be around all that much longer?
Why? Just to piss off humbugs like you. Totally worth every penny.
Edge has extensions now.
It's still not a usable browser. Even Paul Thurrott can't endorse it yet. He talked recently about its many small frustrations, about how basic copy and paste features don't work, or how when you scale text up on a single page, ALL other tabs get scaled as well. Stupid, annoying stuff like that creates a terrible user experience.
...already knew that. And it's not quite as hard as they make out.
This was another good one:
The potential for offshore wind energy in the US is massive. If we build in all of the available ocean space, the winds above coastal waters could provide more than 4,000 gigawatts a year. That's more than four times the nation’s current annual electricity production.
So, gosh, all we have to do is use all the available coastal ocean space, and we'll get four times the annual electrical output. That's a bit like saying "If we covered every square foot of the contiguous US in solar panels, we'd have about 1300x the current electrical output." Technically true, but somewhat misleading in its sheer improbability.
Yeah, a good thing to start diversifying our energy needs, but let's not get carried away with over-optimistic nonsense like that.