Somehow I picture this as a scarlet letter "A" taking up at least a quarter of the screen real estate.

It's true that AI is better than most call centers already. But that's not because the AI is any good, it's because the call centers are so bad. A Speak & Spell could outperform most scripted call centers.

It's all because of "woke", huh? That's funny, I could have sworn the problem lay with the right-wing Christian theocrat-wannabes who are afraid of two dudes in bed together lest the viewer get an un-Godlike stiffie. Bondage and anything else other than man-on-top-woman-on-bottom-get-it-over-with-quick gets shut down because sex for pleasure is sinful.

But if you want to keep making "woke" your bogeyman, go for it.

That's the problem. I bet this will be applied to law enforcement to "zoom and enhance" like all the best crime dramas do. But remember, the enhanced details aren't really there. They're merely plausible fiction based on the information that is available, they're not adding any new information. People will see blurry security camera footage of a crime. The enhanced version will show a weapon where there is none, or no weapon when one was used. Detail will be added to faces that will make them look like one suspect or the other, leading to convictions based on plausible but not real extrapolations.

This is a great technology for certain uses. Cleaning up old movies or TV shows, for instance. It's great if you want something that is believable when it doesn't matter whether or not the details are entirely accurate. It's horrible if you expect the extrapolated details to provide new factual information.

I'd really love to see some samples that were filmed in high res, downgraded to be blurry, then upscaled by the AI. How do the original high res images compare to the generated ones?

I use Linux servers all the time, but not the desktop. I'm not terribly familiar with Wayland. But I'm curious about what you say about "remote desktop capability". IMHO, that was the one *huge* benefit of X11. Remote capability was granular down to the window. Every X11 program was capable of putting its display on a remote machine. You didn't have to export the whole desktop, and you didn't end up with an add-on program (a la VNC) that just bit-copied the whole screen elsewhere. Remote displays were a first-class feature of X. Some lab equipment, like logic analyzers and oscilloscopes even supported X giving a simple way to interact with the device directly from your computer. It was OS-agnostic, too, and you could get X servers for Linux, Windows, Mac, Solaris, and pretty much anything else that had aspirations of being a desktop OS.

As I said, I'm not too familiar with Wayland. The Wayland FAQ suggests that you need add-on programs for remote support, and I think then you only get full desktop replication. Am I reading that correctly?

X had its share of shortcomings and was showing its age even 20 years ago when I last used it in earnest. But I *loved* this particular feature and I sorely miss it today.

The only thing the moon offers that's better is for resupply or emergency scenarios, Earth is just a hop and a skip away.

Which is exactly what you want for prototyping. Work out the kinks close by where you can iterate designs quickly and have near real-time conversations with legions of engineers back on Earth. Then you can take all that experience and build something that has to work the first time and takes months or years to resupply.

So yes, Mars is a better colony location, but the Moon is a better testbed.

I figured someone would notice this. The system was designed around 1980, well before I started there. I'm not sure why the Z80 was chosen over the 6809. The explanation I was given was that the Z80 was more capable than the 6809. The Z80 was also less expensive, though given how much we sold the boards for I don't think a $20-ish difference in CPU price would have made a difference. It could have just been that the people designing it were more familiar with the Z80 and could design faster for it.

Ah, my first job out of college. Circa 1989, I got hired at Motorola to code Z80 on their EMX series of cellular telephone switches. But this was no ordinary Z80! This was a Z80 with blackjack! And hookers!

The board had an external MMU and a bank register gave it an effective 24-bit (16 MB) address space. There was an active processor and a standby processor, and 4 MB of the address space was shared between the active and standby. The MMU even had an NMI mask, so we could mask out non-maskable interrupts. I was super proud of myself that I taught our HP logic analyzer to understand the bank register and actually decode the full 24-bit address bus.

So many fond memories. Like counting clock cycles to make sure a task would run in the time allotted. Or the time a co-worker thought the I register was just another general purpose register. (It was actually the interrupt vector. Hilarity ensued.) Or the fact that we only had half a dozen machines in the lab, so lab time was scheduled 24 hours a day and you grabbed a slot whenever you could. Or the two weeks I spent all night, every night, sitting on the floor of a customer site in a refrigerated Bangkok switch room with a microfiche reader and stack of fiche about the size of a brick, typing opcodes into the debugging terminal on the running production system.

Wait, did I say fond memories? I meant nightmares.

Not really, most of us use Macs because we find Windows a disgusting cesspool of GUI abomination. Linux GUIs are equally as bad.

In all honesty, so is the Mac GUI. And I say this as someone who has used a Mac by choice for work for the past 15 years or so.

It's just a matter of taste. Do you personally prefer the taste of pig shit, cow shit, or horse shit? There's no point in arguing about which is better. At the end of the day, they're all shit.

Define: "Protect". If you play a game for more than about 10 hours it still becomes one of the cheapest forms of paid entertainment you've had, and you will have gotten your money worth out of it.

"Protect" means to defend against some undesired outcome, in this case the publisher making a previously purchased game unplayable. If you don't buy the game and don't play the game, they can't take it away from you. You could argue that this doesn't count, it's only "protection" in the sense that never visiting Asia is "protection" from wild tiger attacks. You're not at risk, but you don't get the benefit either. Fair enough.

But as you said, games are one of the cheapest forms of paid entertainment available. This has a relevant side-effect: Entertaining games are plentiful. Foregoing a particular game or even a particular publisher doesn't mean going without games completely. There are thousands of other titles out there, some just as fun as this game, which don't put you in danger of having the game arbitrarily removed from your library. There's no need to reward a publisher for their nonsense. Give your money to one of the many other publishers out there that make single-player games which run locally without requiring a connection to their server.

The article lands on a resounding "it depends". It depends on what you mean by "derivative", and it depends on how you measure "more".

I'm sorry, was there supposed to be a point to this article? If so I've missed it completely.

There could be microbes on Mars that Earth life has no immunity to. The chance is small, but not zero. Why take a say 1 in 500 chance of doomsday?

It's actually pretty darned unlikely, probably many orders of magnitude less likely than the 1 in 500 chance you suggested. The "has no immunity to" thing cuts both ways. The generalization of the statement is "has not evolved to affect" life from another planet. If Earth life hasn't evolved to defend against a Martian microbe, why would a Martian microbe have evolved to prey upon Earth life in the first place?

But we've already done sample returns from the Moon and asteroids, and we examine them in clean rooms with very tight controls. To be sure, the main reason is to keep Earth stuff from contaminating the samples, not the other way around, but there's still as complete a separation as possible in a lab. Scientists have read or seen The Andromeda Strain too.

It's way, WAY more likely that an existing Earth microbe would mutate into something we have no immunity to than it would be to find a random alien microbe that just randomly happens to be perfectly evolved to kill us while being able to completely dodge our immune systems.

No, the most ethical way to protect yourself is to simply not purchase (and not play) games which require you to always be online even for the single-player experience. Maybe if such games stop making money publishers will give up that stupid, stupid service model. If they continue to make money they'll continue to give us the shitty product we're so clearly willing to pay for.

They may not be right, but the fact that they've existed for as long as they have is evidence that they are not illegal. As for your car or any other thing which updates the T&C, I'm sure there's a clause buried in there that says you don't have to click anything, that if you reject the terms you need to discontinue use of the product. By continuing to use the product you've given your implicit consent to the T&C.

I'd love to see this kind of bullshit struck down in court someday, but I'm not holding my breath for it.

USAian here. IMHO, the bigger problem in US politics (I don't know about Canadian) is that the first-past-the-post electoral system by its nature polarizes the country. The system encourages it by penalizing anyone who votes for a moderate. Say that A and Z are the extreme candidates, and a moderate called J enters the race. J is closer to A in ideology, so will pull more voters away from A than away from Z. This splits the A vote and practically guarantees a win for Z, even if there's a sizeable majority who would have voted A if J wasn't an option. So, that's the first problem I see. We need an electoral system where you can vote for a moderate without fear of throwing the win to the candidate you like the least.

I'd go after political parties next. People here in both parties are actively demonizing the other. It's simply become cheering for your team. A lot of that is related to the problem above, but a lot is that we seem to like team sports. People are very loyal to "their" team. So, take away team membership. Demote political parties to the advisory level, no more or less powerful than any other group. Candidates wouldn't belong to a party, wouldn't have an (R) or (D) after their names. Instead, candidates would be endorsed by a party, just like candidates are currently endorsed by, say, the Teamsters or the NRA. The endorsement says "This candidate's goals currently align with ours." rather than "This candidate belongs to us." Just like the Teamsters and the NRA could (in theory) both endorse the same candidate, a middle-of-the-road candidate might actually get endorsed by both the Republicans and the Democrats. The aim here is to lessen the cheerleading section who think, "We want this guy to win because he's our guy!" without actually examining the candidate's actual positions or qualifications. I also want to stop the ridiculous "majority party is in charge" situation in Congress. That's just plain dumb. Remove the party identity, remove the disproportionate benefit of having a single person more in the majority party. Maybe congress will vote their consciences rather than voting strictly to score a win for their party or worse, voting simply to stop the other party from scoring a win.

It's probably hopelessly naive, but maybe it'll work for the next 250 years before it unravels like the current system has.