That would be pointless, though.

Doing something that another country has already done long ago, doesn't impress anyone. If they want to be perceived as advanced leaders in scientific research, they have to do something that has NOT already been done decades ago by other countries, especially hated Western countries.

If there were any conceivable way they could send a manned mission to Mars, that's what they'd be doing. The dark side of the moon, is the loftiest space-exploration goal they thought they had any realistic chance of achieving.

> Whatever happened to the goal of Windows 10 being the last version of Windows

That was never intended to actually be true. They said that because IT people with actual discernment were looking at Windows Ten and going "Eh, this version is pants, I think we're gonna stick with Seven for now and see if Microsoft can get their act together for the *next* release." And that would be a disaster, because then they (and more importantly their companies) might not pay Microsoft any money for upgrade licenses for Ten.

Once just about everyone who ever pays for software upgrades let go of Seven and upgraded, the "Ten is the last version" line was promptly dropped, because it was no longer needed.

There is one significant way in which Eleven is better than Ten: the "is your PC ready for the upgrade" check is significantly more realistic about system requirements. Ten will happily install on a system with 8 GB of RAM, which is less than a quarter of what is needed to run it at an even vaguely acceptable level of performance, and it doesn't even *warn* you that there might be a problem. The result, is that the system can't be used for anything because it's too busy swapping, because the core of the OS doesn't fit in physical RAM, let alone any applications (and the Eight/Ten/Eleven virtual memory subsystem is even more pants than the NT/XP/Vista/Seven one). Eleven doesn't have this problem: it actually tells you your PC isn't good enough.

I still say Seven is the best operating system Microsoft has ever produced. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it ends up being the best one Microsoft *will* ever produce.

WhatsApp is owned by the same company as Facebook.

There has never been another company in the entire history of the Earth, that has been caught violating its own stated privacy policy and doing things with user data that it had specifically promised *not* to do, more times than this company.

I'm not saying they're the most evil company ever. They're not. There have been companies that have done worse things to people. Like, participating in genocide, for example. And there are companies that are in bed with totalitarian governments and directly exploit user data for Orwellian surveillance purposes (*cough* ByteDance *cough*). Which is not great.

But when we're talking specifically about whether the company will distribute your data to various third parties after promising that they wouldn't do that, *nobody* has ever had a worse track record for that, than Facebook/Meta. In particular, if a company comes along and offers them money for some user data, for marketing purposes, the only reason the deal would ever break down would be if they don't offer *enough* money. A little thing like "our privacy policy says we won't do that" would never get in the way.

I actually wrote my own text editor, in Emacs lisp. Unfortunately it was pretty much the first thing I wrote for Emacs back in the late nineties when I was a rank newb, so the code is absolutely terrible, and so I have never distributed it. But I do still use it. Maybe someday I'll do a proper rewrite and make the code available.

Is it even possible to run systemd on Emacs? I thought it only ran on systems with a C API. (Emacs has a lisp API instead. Which is better. Fight me.)

That's Poettering for you. His lack of self-awareness is legendary.

This is why I use Devuan.

When Poettering wrote code for Avahi, I didn't notice any problems, because absolutely nothing relies on the protocol Avahi implements, for any purpose whatsoever, so if it doesn't work, the situation is exactly the same as it would be if Avahi worked perfectly. There's no way to notice the difference, without actually attempting to use wireless zeroconf for something, which as far as I am aware not one person in the entire history of computing has ever tried to do. So if he'd stuck to working on that, we wouldn't have a problem.

But after the pulseaudio debacle (in which Poettering's software screwed up the sound my system so badly, I wasn't able to get it working again even after completely uninstalling the package that caused the problem and reverting to my former configuation, and so I ended up reinstalling the entire operating system distribution from scratch), I swore off ever installing any software written by Poettering on any computer ever again. And then somebody decided to let him rewrite the init daemon, which is *kind* of important. Nope. Hard pass. That is NOT going to be a thing on any of my computers, or any of my employer's computers, or any other computer that I ever have to touch.

That was a deliberate choice.

Slashdot was always intended to be an American site for technically-inclined people who are comfortable conversing in ASCII. After it became popular, lots and lots of Europeans started reading it, and commenting, and stuff; and many of them started asking for better foreign language support, which at that time probably would have meant ISO-8859-1. (This was a while ago; almost nothing supported Unicode at the time.) Slashdot said no, and has continued to stick to that answer decade after decade, because we don't *want* junk like Microsoft SmartQuotes, and foreign languages, and dumb emoji, and all the other things that Unicode support enables. Do Not Want.

DO. NOT. WANT.

Take your weird characters to Reddit. We don't want them here.

Right, I'm just saying, I can understand why some otherwise reasonably intelligent people might imagine they needed to involve their bank in the process of stopping the billing. Even if they don't have personal experiences with needing to resort to such measures, they've probably heard horror stories.

We're talking about the China market, so yeah, it's gonna be price. The Samsung model has whatever price it has, and there'll be a Songsom (or maybe Sumsang) phone for 30% less, and a Huawei one for less than that (because it's subsidized), and various trash brands no one has ever heard of selling for *much* less (because they have no QA at all and cut every corner it is possible to cut).

Unfortunately, our society (and, particularly, the lack of meaningful regulations regarding how complex the process of canceling a subscription is allowed to be) has trained a lot of people to believe that it's going to be extremely difficult to ever get a company to voluntarily stop billing you every month. Netflix may not be guilty of this, but enough other companies are, that it's what people *expect* based on their past experiences.

I came to the comment section on this story, expecting people to be talking about tactics like opening an account with a different bank and closing the old account entirely. It didn't even *occur* to me that the answer might be "click a red cancel button on your account page".

And, I mean, it's moot for me, personally. I have zero interest in Netflix, and also I don't use credit cards, at all. (I'm... atypical in some ways.) But Netflix actually making it easy to cancel, is not what I expected to read in the comments.

If it won't run on the 8008, I don't understand why anyone is even interested.

Ahem.

> Better than the USSR is a pretty low bar.

Eh, it depends what your standard of comparison is. The Soviets were (mostly) actually trying to govern their country, and sure they made a bunch of mistakes, and did a lot of harm in order to secure their own power, but they also did some important things right. They consistently promoted education, for example, particularly in the STEM fields. They built meaningful infrastructure that benefitted the country: roads, railroads, ports, etc. They pursued trade relations with other countries and genuinely attempted to build their nation's economy.

I'm not saying they didn't also do lots of stuff wrong, because they did, both accidentally and on purpose. But if you want a really *low* bar you look at stuff like the Khmer Rouge, or the Kim regime. They make the Soviets look magnificent by comparison.

> ... the two unidentified engineers were representatives
> of the FAA, which delegates some of its oversight
> authority and certification process to Boeing workers...

Wait, wait, wait.

The FAA delegated some of its oversight authority, to _employees_ of the company being overseen?

Seriously? Who signed off on THAT blatant conflict of interests, and why are we just now finding out about it? To me that seems worse than all the other corruption we've seen in this case, added together.

They didn't create it for the purpose of making money. They created it for narrative-shaping purposes. And while shutting down costs them most of what they do with the platform, at least it lets them at least keep up the "US government is censoring American citizens" rhetoric they've been pushing. Selling it wouldn't net them any gain at all, in terms of their narrative. They could get _money_ out of it, but that's not what they want.

TIL.

I always thought it jumped from 3.3 (which IBM was more directly involved in, and which was as stable as any version of DOS ever was) to 5.0 (which IBM were not involved with in any substantial way, and which was pretty buggy, especially in terms of floppy disk handling IIRC; later versions fixed some, but not quite all, of these bugs). I was not aware that there ever *was* a version 4.x.