Here's some more info about the metalwork performed during the Salyut 7/Soyuz T-12 VE-4 mission in 1984, taken from the Svetlana Savitskaya page on Wikipedia:

"On July 17, 1984 Savitskaya launched aboard Soyuz T-12, together with Commander Vladimir Dzhanibekov and research cosmonaut Igor Volk. On July 25, 1984, Savitskaya became the first woman to spacewalk, conducting EVA outside the Salyut 7 space station for 3 hours and 35 minutes, during which she cut and welded metals in space along with her colleague Vladimir Dzhanibekov.

The importance of their mission was to test the Universal Hand Tool or Universalny Rabochy Instrument (URI). This tool created at the Paton Instituite in Kiev, Ukraine could be used to cut, solder, weld, and braze in space. During the EVA, Savitskaya performed a total of 6 cuts of titanium and stainless steel, 2 coatings of anodized aluminum, 6 tests of tin and lead solder, and test cuts of a 0.5 mm titanium sample."

NASA provides further details about the above Salyut/Soyuz mission and the Universalny Rabochy (or Ruchnoj) Instrument ("Universal Hand Tool") (URI) multipurpose electron beam cutting, welding, soldering, and brazing tool, in the PDF document "Walking to Olympus: An EVA Chronology" --- see page 55.

"Once the known bugs and vulnerabilities in an app have been eliminated and time has demonstrated the app's robustness, it has to be removed from our app stores." -- Google and Apple [implied].

A strong reason for breaking down their walled gardens and mandating that device owners be allowed to choose alternative app stores, with force of law.

VERY few people die or are injured even during the biggest quakes, etc. As much as it can reasonably be earthquakes are a solved problem.

Unfortunately, you're very misinformed about this. Go read up on the Cascadia subduction zone just off the US west coast.

The Juan de Fuca plate is subducting beneath the North American plate, but it is currently locked (stuck) and will continue to build up energy until it's suddenly released as a megathrust earthquake, the strongest kind. This has been happening every few hundred years since prehistory, and it is well documented in the sedimentary record. For extra "fun", Cascadia tends to trigger the San Andreas fault too.

The last Cascadia megathrust earthquake occurred on 26th January 1700, with an estimated magnitude of 9.0. Over and above the devastation caused by the tremor across the western 1/3rd of what today is USA, the associated tsunami wiped entire forests off the map from western North America, and many hours later destroyed whole communities in Japan.

If you still think it's a solved problem, perhaps you'd better also read FEMA's risk assessment of the next Cascadia event:

From 1700 Cascadia earthquake - Future_threats:

"Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast." -- Kenneth Murphy, Director of FEMA's Region X, the division responsible for Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska.

Open source projects are not all made in the same way. One crucial difference between them is in their respective languages of implementation, a detail which can be presumed to be highly relevant yet which does not seem to have been studied nor recognized in the report.

Some programming languages are safer than others by design, and in principle this should translate into application bugs being less easily exploitable than in applications written using less safe languages. This deserves to be studied and detailed in reports such as the above to provide evidence for best practice recommendations.

In that case, everyone already gets UBI, it's just set to 0.

Your boundary condition actually provides a perfect method for implementing UBI while overcoming the cost objections of UBI denialists.

Start UBI tomorrow, set to an initial value of $0/month per person. Then each month, add $100 to the monthly value, while watching carefully for signs of the economic sky falling. If economic indicators are unhealthy and the cause is unequivocally the cost of UBI, then pause the additions or remove one $100 increment from the monthly amount, and observe again. Rinse and repeat.

I would guess that the sky will not be falling at all, for the obvious reason that UBI money will almost always end up back in the economy anyway, thus compensating for its own cost through proportionally increased economic activity. As the monthly UBI amount rises, decrease means-tested welfare payments correspondingly, and once the monthly UBI covers primary subsistence, turn off means-tested welfare in areas where it now pays $0. And finally, the welfare agencies which are no longer paying anything can be downsized.

Just a very basic plan which will need much adjustment I'm sure, but it does seem feasible and it builds in negative feedback to address cost concerns in case they materialize. It's even reversible.

This site provides a useful breakdown of the numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths by country, plus a clickable map.
The quarantined ocean liners are listed as well, and the list ends with the totals:

- "Outbreak map of novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV"
- https://coronavirus.zone/

I've been checking a handful of entries against the data released by individual countries, and from my limited cross-checking the site is tracking the official data well. It seems to be getting updated many times a day to reflect official numbers becoming available.

Reading the comments attached to the Phoronix story, I see the responses are all about systemD partisanship, not about engineering. They even raise straw men like "Impose the cost of maintaining non-systemd init scripts on every Debian package maintainer", which of course bears no relationship to reality at all.

Based on the hopefully non-controversial premise that giving users choice is a good thing but placing a load on many developers is bad, I would have asked a different question:

That turns the issue into a matter of engineering instead of partisanship, and if addressed properly, those who have no interest in other init system simply won't be affected. And then we could all get back to using our O/S's instead of endless and very predictable frustration over the hardwiring of our choices.

Indeed, the blades are not the problem. In contrast, the idea of crushing and compacting them for disposal in landfills is sheer failure of thought, not only making the landfill problem still worse (as you point out), but wasting a very valuable resource.

The ex-turbine blades are highly engineered structural components which can still be used for structural purposes even when they are no longer usable in wind turbines.

There are very many alternative structural uses which could continue to benefit from their material strength for decades, if not centuries. Some of these could even yield profit instead of the total loss of landfill, like making sections available to the home DIY enthusiast market which is always in need of good structural materials. "Ex-wind turbine" is a statement of strength with market value, just like "ex-railroad" is for sleepers.

My preferred redeployment would be to use them as scaffolding for new habitats. Just stick one end of a few dozen of them into the ground and soon enough nature will colonize the man-made structure into a dense grove. Or embed them into the sea floor to create man-made reefs at desired locations, in the same way as sunken ships create valuable marine habitats but in unhelpfully random places around the world.

To destroy strong structural materials shows no imagination, just a destructive throwaway mentality.

The link in first sentence of summary was probably meant to be to this page:

- "Astronomers catch wind rushing out of galaxy", October 31, 2019

So what you're saying is these two posts are part of the actual meta-post?

You may be on to something there! Whether or not Slashdot intended it as such, at least "meta-posts" would be something different for the site. Making the actual meta-post implied (as here) rather than explicit would be an interesting approach.

Note the power of leading questions, especially on Slashdot where there is a meme that assigns questions-as-subjects a default answer of "No." When we have two stories back to back posing opposite leading questions, this undermines the default answer beautifully. +1 for that.

These two stories back to back is a little much.

Actually, I found the contrast between the two adjacent stories (which was probably deliberate) quite intriguing and helpful, because it showed that the correct answer to the first one was "It depends", and the correct answer to the second, something like "Yes if you value community control more than profit". Whether today we are in the golden age of FOSS or not is a value judgment that reflects an individual's basis for evaluation of the current state of FOSS.

See David Chaum's research work in the 1980's on fully anonymous digital cash.

He also founded the company DigiCash based on those theoretical foundations.

The company no longer exists --- it was ahead of its time, having entered the market before e-commerce was fully integrated within the Internet, as David Chaum explained in 1999 --- but there seems to be no technical reason why his concepts cannot be brought back to life today as a properly anonymous digital equivalent to physical cash. (Blockchain currencies are not.)

Public is not the same as Private. Most commercial "VPNs" are actually Virtual Public Networks. Rule of thumb:

- Any VPN in which a corporation or an untrusted individual is a participant node should be regarded as Public.

- Any VPN running code which you haven't compiled yourself from known-good sources should be regarded as Public.

- Any VPN using non-standard encryption or pre-generating keys for member nodes should be regarded as Public.

If you really need to trust a VPN then don't deceive yourself --- don't play Security Theater, ensure that Private really means Private. Convenience is the enemy of security, and trust is almost always inversely proportional to convenience because convenience tends to introduce untrusted elements.

A car is something that most consumers want to sit in and explore in the showroom.

Apparently Tesla is giving potential customers 7 days of full possession and 1,000 miles of test drive instead, if I understood it correctly.

That seems enormously superior to sniffing around in a showroom for an hour, to me at least.

That was an excellent talk, containing some really great analysis. The analysis was so clear and thorough though that I was puzzled why it left one very important matter very fuzzy and poorly defined --- the title and main topic of the talk, of all things!

This is the problem: the word "jobs" (or equivalently "work") means two very different things to us, and these two things have been conflated into one single idea by our history over hundreds of years. Those two things are: (1) Doing something useful in a place of employment, and (2) Getting paid for it and using that money as the enabler of our personal survival.

I put it to you that your talk conflated the two ideas as strongly as everyone else does, and used the fear of losing (2) as the basis for examining whether AI would eliminate opportunities for (1). This is a crucial distinction to make, because survival is a non-optional imperative for most humans, whereas having an interesting occupation is merely nice-to-have and can easily bear periodic interruption.

I am an engineer, and as an engineer let me tell you something that isn't a secret among engineers but is rarely stated so directly: the practical purpose of engineering and of the science which underpins it is to eliminate (2) from the burden carried by humanity, and to enable a focus on (1) --- in other words, to give you the time to do something interesting with your life. It is sometimes said that this is the aim of civilization too, although a better observation would be that having to work for your survival is not civilized at all. Indeed, it is barbaric.

I expect that you will be giving that talk again, as the subject is a very interesting one and is highly topical today. I would definitely recommend though that in future you explain its title in more detail, because very few rational people would complain if AI eliminated the need for humans to work for their survival.