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.

The message that Nintendo is sending fans seems clear. Don't use, buy, play or in any other way invest your time or money in Nintendo, as their only interest is in bleeding you dry by whatever means they can. As a company they are signaling that they have neither social insight nor ethics, and do not treat fans as assets nor as free publicity.

Message received and understood, so I'm adding Nintendo to my short boycott list. It's just a personal statement and of course will have no effect on Nintendo individually, but I doubt that I will be the only one making such a decision. Evil deeds and blind corporate greed should not go unpunished. Conversely, competitors now gain an extra chance.

My poor Wii will never have a brother or a sister.

stephanruby wrote:

If the author was so confident in his bot, he would have attached his own name to it instead of making up a fake name for it.

It would be unethical for the human to impersonate a bot.

What's more, the bot has no means to give the human legal authority to impersonate itself. Conundrum! :P

[Oh dear. By the time I got to the end of this post, I began to realize that I was no longer quite so sure that I was joking.]

This Amazon collaboration with Iridium is going to be interesting to watch on the Net Neutrality front.

As long as Bezos operates an independent walled garden then he's in the clear to make up his own rules, but as soon as he turns CloudConnect into a global ISP (if that is what he is intending) then he'll come under Net Neutrality rules wherever they apply, and that means on most of the planet. The small minority of people who reject Net Neutrality in USA for party political reasons is entirely irrelevent in this global context.

Since Bezos does not currently provide first-hop connectivity and hence is not running an ISP, his Amazon walled garden does not come under scrutiny on net nor platform neutrality grounds, only on different grounds such as privacy. As a global ISP though, it seems likely that his previous freedom to do as he pleases (for example by benefitting only his Amazon merchants) is going to be curtailed in a manner which he will dislike greatly.

Facebook seems to be moving in the same direction, and undoubtedly there will be many others too. Net Neutrality of satellite ISPs seems certain to become a major issue.

Sensible people who understand that time is our most precious and limited resource will work for others only just enough to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. Any hours remaining after that need is met can be dedicated to favourite hobbies, pastimes, unpaid vocations or other personal interests --- that's called "Having a life".

If you don't understand that then you're either an employer who benefits from the depressed wages that come with a mass labour pool, which is the primary reason for promoting the work ethic, or you have fallen for it yourself.

Either way, labouring is a distressing waste of people's lives, and advocating that it should be normal in a modern technological society is a barbaric and unethical position.

From TFA, the reason why the reactors were shut down (which wasn't included in the summary) is:

Europe's heatwave, however, hasn't just increased air temperatures but also water temperatures. Regulations protecting wildlife mean that the usual water sources drawn on by nuclear plants cannot always be used for cooling, leading to shutdowns. It's not the first time this has happened: Heatwaves forced nuclear shutdowns or curtailments across Europe in 2003, 2006, and 2015.

Yeah, I know that reading TFA is no longer cool on Slashdot, but someone has to help out the editors. :P

Two decades is a reasonable age and Slashdot's first quarter century isn't all that distant, so we might as well start putting the paleohistory in order. This needs an era classification scheme, and mcmonkey seems to have given us an ideal metric for era boundaries: the number of digits in the Slashdot ID. As every proper techie will understand, this gives us a logarithmic scale which normalizes the population explosion nicely.

Well I know where to start, but the rest needs input:

1 digit - Tacomordium - life emerges by accident from the primordial nerd soup.
2 digits - [Suggestions?]
3 ...
4 ...

:P

It's been a roller coaster ride for sure. Although the growing anti-science in the latter half of the site's existence has made it difficult for the original highly technical population to continue participating, Slashdot still manages to hold its niche together.

I look forward to another 20 years. :-)

A 2500 pound vehicle to carry one 1-pound pizza. That's efficient. Make it a drone, obviously.

Combine the two types of autonomous vehicle for the best of both worlds. An autonomous EV van could be loaded with pizzas and able to launch short-hop delivery drones. It could keep one or more drones out delivering to the door while the rest are being recharged on the EV as their mothership.

This overcomes several issues, notably the lack of delivery to the door in Domino's (test) solution. It also ensures that pizza stays hot without needing a heavily insulated box since the trip by air would be much shorter. What's more, it allows the flying drones to be replaced with short-range wheeled delivery bots as an alternative, perhaps chosen on a house by house basis, which may be cheaper and more reliable, or even necessary in the rain.

Recharging on the mothership overcomes both efficiency and range issues, and allows smaller/cheaper batteries to be used in end-delivery vehicles. This in turn could lead towards the short-hop drones/bots becoming cheap, mass-produced, disposable delivery elements.

Musicians and enthusiasts who use music creation software usually know very well why their software tools have an interface that depicts music hardware, so I'm a bit puzzled why it's a mystery to the author of TFA.

The reason is that hardware controls like knobs, sliders, percussion pads, 2-axis touchpads, multi-axis RF field interfaces, breath controllers and many others kinds are extremely interactive and immediate in their effect, and so their use comes naturally to music creators. All of these controllers are commonly provided with a MIDI interface today. This has been so for many decades, either baseband MIDI or today commonly carried over USB. Through MIDI, these hardware interfaces are bound by the musician to any desired control points in the software tools, and the result is extremely expressive and a pleasure to use.

The author complains that controlling the s/w elements with a mouse is pretty awful, and indeed it is, but nobody with any sense does that except before they've set up their MIDI control gear. There are literally hundreds of thousands of different kinds of MIDI controllers around, often costing very little, so it's a bit unusual to find a music maker who is not aware of them and of their purpose.

From WP's Wet-bulb_temperature page:

A sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 C (95 F) is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature our bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it.

Just temperature alone doesn't give the complete picture when it comes to risk. That's why TFA was specifically about wet-bulb temperatures, because when they're exceeded then you can't just "put up and endure it". You die if you have no artificial means of cooling yourself, as the body's only significant temperature reduction mechanism stops working, and that's not survivable for long.

All of this drawn-out study and deliberation and the protracted uncertainty and wasted manufacturing and expense for users makes very little sense, when it's abundantly clear that all road transport is set to become electric in a very short space of time.

Just go there now and save everyone a lot of time and effort, and improve air quality at the same time.