Never a fan of Bluetooth, I use it for a few things that refuse to use other connections. I thought that the limited range was a good thing, both for security and to prevent confusing cross-talk. 600 km Bluetooth reception (according to the article referenced here) doesn't immediately strike me as a good thing.

A tech adjusting my BIotronik pacemaker from across the room told me he was connecting with Bluetooth. There are definitely at least two wireless communications enabled, at least one of them allows changes to the settings. The medical techs working on my pacemaker mostly have no technical knowledge of it, so he may have just referred to all wireless as "Bluetooth." It's ridiculously hard to find reliable and understandable technical information for my own use. I observed that my first implant was adjusted wirelessly at very short range through an antenna placed on my chest. The new one (battery depleted after 10 years) was adjusted from across the room. So Bluetooth is possible, and disturbing.

I'm pretty sure that the worst a hacker could do to me is turn pacing off, so I became very faint, or running it ridiculously high, which I would survive. If I had the defibrillation feature, it would be a lot worse. The really scary possibility is that insulin pumps could be vulnerable, and it would be easy to kill someone through control of the insulin pump.

ISPs like to spin their throttling and priority adjustments as providing a "fast lane."

A real fast lane would be an improvement on the network that provides greater throughput and/or lower latency.

What some ISPs are actually doing is building a slow lane by throttling traffic, then charging to get out of the slow lane.

Check out the Lucid programming language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It made the time sequence of each variable explicit. It also treated time as multidimensional, with nested time lines corresponding to nesting levels of loops in a more conventional language. It didn't catch on, but it's a good example to stimulate thinking about alternative views of programming.

"rate of downward acceleration, or g force" (from the NYTimes). Acceleration and force are different physical properties.

I had the strong impression that essentially all 78 RPM recordings are old enough that the copyrights on their contents have expired and they are in the public domain. Is this not correct? Can someone post a reliable statement of the copyright status of sounds recorded on old 78 RPM records?

From the Slashdot description (I did not dig into the sources), it appears that the study in question compared ChatGPT statements to ChatGPT's description of lliberal statements. There is no mention of comparisons to actual statements of liberal humans. Nor any mention of comparisons to anything associated with conservatives or others. I think that demonstration of "bias" requires at least two positions, so that something can be biased toward one of them vs. the other.

It would be real helpful if someone could post a way to detect this bit of malware once it's been planted, and/or the password cracker that it uses, so we can check the vulnerability of our passwords.

1. 1. Programming (plugging wires into patch boards) was automated by stored binary machine code.
2. 2. Programming in binary machine code was automated by assembly language.
3. 3. Programming in assembly language, particularly translating formulae into sequences of individual operations, was automated by FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslater).

After that , the changes in programming were more incremental, so there are not clear breakpoints. The key point is that every step automating programming changes the nature of programming and the tasks that may be addressed by programs, but doesn't eliminate programming. Perhaps some day the word "programming" will be replaced, but there will still be a task to describe what a computer should do. A number of commenters have made essentially this observation, but I thought it worthwhile to think of the specific big steps from the past.

Long before electronic digital computers, writers of fantasy and fairy tales observed the inherent difficulty of expressing a desire clearly enough to get what you actually want. My favorite is Five Children and It by Edith Nesbit. That book concerns a Psammead, or sand fairy, which is additionally amusing since like modern computers the fairy is silicon based.

I bought a Murena Teracube 2e running /e/OS early in 2022. It has the desired button behavior. https://murena.com/products/sm...

From the Slashdot headline:
"Music Steaming Services"
Music should be sautéed or broiled, never steamed.

I'm pretty sure that 100% of all alphabetical characters posted on Web pages are duplicates of the same character appearing elsewhere.

Those contemplating college tuitions in the near future should also look at Canadian colleges. No language problem (aside from adding "eh" to every sentence ;^), no greater distance than you can get within the USA.

Some years ago a neighbor's child went to the private McGill University in Montreal at lower tuition than in-state tuition at U Illinois. Haven't checked this year's tuition, but I surely would if my kids weren't already done with higher education.

In the American screenings of Le Roi de coeur , which I watched several New Years' at the Biograph theater in Washington DC, double feature with A Thousand Clowns, the protagonist is an English Army Signaller in France as the Germans are retreating toward the end of The Great War (to end war, but now referred to as "World War I"). He mostly speaks French, but at one point he sends a written message by carrier pigeon to his army superiors. The written message shows on the screen in English. The original movie has a French voice over translation of the written English. Then, the American screening has a translation of the French voice over into subtitles, which are noticeably different from the written English in the movie. I found it hilarious.

There's another moment in the film where a young French woman makes a substantial philosophical speech, subtitled as "Poetry is everything." I cannot find the French dialogue there. Anyone who can find it will make a great contribution to Slashdot understanding.

There are amusing errors in subtitling, and some deliberate inconsistencies.

Way back in the late 1960s I watched Un homme et une femme in French with English subtitles. At one point, the hero is driving a night session of the Grand Prix auto race. His navigator warns, "Épingle de cheveux droite," and he turns sharply right, but the subtitle says "Hairpin turn left." Similarly, French spoken "gauche" becomes "right" in the English subtitle. My Francophonic brain cells were fine, but the English reading part of my brain panicked when the hero turned sharply in the wrong direction

I never found an authoritative description, but I speculate that the person writing the subtitles was watching the movie on a small rear projection screen, seeing a mirror image of the intended picture. The appearance of right vs. left turns overcame the French dialogue in the writer's mind, leading to the reversed subtitles.

On the other hand, (spoiler alert) De Düva makes wonderful jokes from the inconsistency of the English subtitles (which are part of the original film) and the spoken language. There is a serious spoiler in the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article. I strongly recommend watching the film before reading the spoiler, but you may choose.

Mod up, but I've forgotten how to do that.

Thanks for reminding us of the bogosity of the notion of conscious observer in physics.

The Relational quantum mechanics interpretation seems to be addressing this point sensibly, but I may not have understood it properly.