Agreed. Amazing that I read all the comments =>2 and saw only two mentions of the circles, which seemed brilliant to me. The ability to direct a post toward my family or my out of town friends or friends interested in linux or whatever seems absolutely necessary to making the thing usable.

Circles took a tiny bit of effort to set up and maintain, but the payoff seemed huge. I was drifting toward biting the bullet and signing up for a FB account right when G+ was launched. The obvious superiority of the interface and capabilities compared to FB (as it seemed to me) convinced me just how terrible FB really is.

In the end, the network effects killed it, I think. Many of my friends had G+ accounts, but they all also used their FB accounts to interact with family and other groups of people. While they may or may not have felt that G+ had technical advantages, it was not worth the effort to be simultaneously on FB and G+.

The FA may not talk about it, but most people are riding them on the sidewalk in San Diego. I would say about 3/4, but it probably varies by neighborhood. Some scooter riders use bike lanes and follow normal bike safety protocols around traffic, but less than 1 in 10 wears a helmet.

https://github.com/JuliaLang/j...

Probably someone watching Oracle asserting ownership of the Java base classes. Use was allowed, but not alterations or compatible implementations.

> I imagine that local libraries that have gone down this route buy ONE e-copy which they make available to their borrowers.

No, they buy a license that allows lending electronic copies.

https://www.boston.com/news/te...

The pricing structure and attached permissions are completely different.

Amazing how easy it is to throw in 'section 108 "h" of the copyright act gives libraries the power' and appear to be an authority. A quick google search (for an SF author's name and openlibrary) shows that they are lending books written in the 2000s that are very popular, still in print, and have authorized electronic versions, so none of the criteria are satisfied.

Success: I have been running Amazon's Kindle for PC under Wine for years. This (plus Calibre) allows me to put Kindle ebooks on my non-Kindle e-ink device. If I had an installable licensed copy of MSWindows and a PC that would run it under a VM, I would do that, but Kindle runs under Wine on my 10-year-old Thinkpad.

Failure: I have never trusted Wine enough to run Turbotax on it.

Since people are making snide comments below, and I am typing this on a 4:3 laptop (old thinkpad from ebay!) I will explain. Many tasks benefit from a minimum amount of vertical screen real estate: some UIs have too many menus and notification bars, sometimes you want a vertical stack of windows because of how things line up, sometimes you need to read large blocks of text in pdfs. A screen vertical of 8.4" with a 4:3 ratio makes a compact, easy-to-carry laptop without miniaturized keys. A screen vertical of 8.4" on a 16:9 makes for a gigantic laptop which is more of a portable desktop. As long as a run Linux and stay away from Gnome, everything runs effectively instantly or is limited by the network even on a core 2 duo.

It is worth noting that the same issue applies to the output window of the laser truck, though to a lesser degree. Very high transmission substances are available for windows, and they are much more robust than reflective coatings. A scratch or coating of dust could probably still destroy the system.

Maybe a better way to put it is to think of three ranges: At low enough power, a coating isn't needed. At high enough power, any practical coating will be burned through. The in-between range where a reflective coating can make a difference is surprising narrow, not much more than a factor of 10 in power, because really good wide-spectrum reflectivities will be less than 99%.

The best reflectivity is fragile. A 10 W laser can burn a crater in a beautiful lab-grade mirror. (Flaw in the coating? minuscule deterioration? speck of dust?)

This can be translated into time instead. So if the laser damages the target in a microsecond, no coating will help. But if the beam has to be held on target for tens of seconds, some reflectivity will turn this into minutes and may make a difference.

he answer seems to be Javascript. When I have NoScript blocking everything, then browser load is minimal and stays minimal indefinitely regardless of the number of tabs. Certain sites that require Javascript must periodically have their tabs killed and then reloaded to keep the CPU usage reasonable.

Maybe what we need is Javascript sandboxing that can pause scripts in tabs without focus, limit CPU usage, autokill pages, and so on. I have no idea whether the engine is buggy or the site code is buggy or the frameworks are broken or whatever, but if it hasn't been fixed yet, then we need a drastic solution.

Snowcrash here we come. We are my sword and motorcycle?

(I like the idea of moderating /. with a katana.)

In fairness, on the Fedora page of pending tasks to compete, remote display is listed first. I think we can assume this indicates that the importance of the issue is recognized.

And if X on Wayland works as well as XQuartz, it is just barely better than useless. When I run remote programs on XQuartz, it crashes a lot. Some programs can't reasonably be used at all, because XQuartz crashes so often (accidently hitting the mouse scroll wheel while in emacs seems to cause a crash every time). Real X on Linux has always worked beautifully in comparison. If X on Wayland is only as good as XQuartz, it is worth having in an emergency but no good for daily work. YMMV.

May I suggest that you remember seeing Empire Strikes Back and being puzzled by "Episide V"? That is my experience.

#blackpaintspatters