It's also worth noting that even objectively terrible movie treatments (for example, Soylent Green's failure to represent the actual storyline of Harry Harrison's Make Room, Make Room, while also being cheesy and stupid, and Without Remorse's failure to even remotely resemble Tom Clancy's book, while also being... well, lame) didn't hurt those books.

Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space!

Newton submissively begs scraps from Einstein's table, suh.

No. Leave the fucking books alone.

Protip: Just don't buy into new motion pictures based on books. Your problem, solved! Because as you probably will understand if you give it some thought, the existence of a first-time movie treatment of a book doesn't hurt the related book. Quite the contrary, most often.

For those of us who don't want to see yet another Roadhouse or Bladerunner or Poseidon or Total Recall — and for the authors — new motion pictures based on previously untreated stories are a good thing. At least once they're out on physical media. Movie theaters... [shudders] :)

Pretty much all tech we have today is entirely possible without burning fossile[sic] fuels

One of the apparent filters is simply that above a certain level of gravity, chemical rockets will not suffice to reach space. We're near the edge of that condition ourselves. Any number of civilizations might be out there, pinned against their planet's surfaces. The only way that's not true is if there are physics yet to be discovered that can accomplish surface-to-space in high gravity without using chemical rockets. We certainly haven't found any sign of such science/technology here. And fission or fusion powered rockets... the engineering for that is at least completely non-obvious thus far. And before anyone says "nukes against a pressure plate", yeah, a delightfully bang-y notion, but no.

The assumption made in the Fermi paradox that any civilization could reach space if they try may simply be wrong.

As there are so many wonderful books out there just begging for a motion picture treatment, Hollywood will oblige by... releasing more pointless, vapid remakes.

Engineers understand things and want to do a good job.

To be fair, you find greedy and thieving engineers too. It's just that being engineers they will realise that you cannot make a system like MCAS and not have it blow in your face within months the first time a bird strikes the one sensor that was keeping everyone on a plane alive.

The main problem with the McDonnel-Douglas suits was not even their greed or shortsightedness focused only on stock price. It's their outright blindness to the technical reality of the business they were running. This happens in so many sectors (I'm certain people in IT will sympathise), but in aviation you get lots of dead people who paid dear money to use your product, and millions others who will be scared of using your products again, causing the company's demise. In most other businesses, these corporate leeches are simply happy to feast on a rotting body, ready to jump onto a new one when the time is right.

Is there some other strategy that is better? It's hard to see what the "wise" strategy would be for dealing with an aggressive nuclear-armed dictatorship that may or may not be collapsing politically.

Certainly "let Russia do what it wants because they might nuke us otherwise" feels a lot like paying the Dane-geld; as soon as they realized that was our strategy, they'd control us with it.

The purpose would be to bankrupt your opponent; once they no longer have the resources to manufacture more battle-robots, your robots can march to the capital and take it over.

This is a law that will allow the federal government to take total control of AI forever

No. The tech is already out — this horse is so far out of the barn you'd need a passport and numerous border crossings to even find hoofprints.

Not only is such a law completely unable to regulate GPT/LLM/generative software in the USA's non-commercial software ecosphere, it can have no effect across national borders and you may be absolutely certain that other state actors will simply smile and wave at such ideas (for that matter, you may be certain that the US intelligence apparatus will do the same.)

At home or cloud-based? It is either-or.

Exactly. These marketing twerps no longer know WTF the words they use even mean. If they ever did. Also, using "secure" in the same context with "the cloud"... that's a similar bit of nonsense. When your data leaves your hands, even just crossing the Internet, it's no longer secure. One party can keep a secret. Anything else... can very quickly become not a secret. As we have seen many times. And of course, we should never forget about this.

> MacOS Sonoma 14.4.1.

Running Ventura 13.3.1 here. Perhaps that's it.

Thanks. I'll consider upgrading after I surf the "bugs in Sonoma" stuff.

Is John Cage's famous minimalist piece acceptable?

If not, how will they prevent people from playing it?

> There's also the Text Size slider under the Accessibility control panel.

There is no text size slider under accessibility on my machine (4k monitor, M1 Studio Ultra.)

What works, sort of, is to select the desktop then right click (or control left click), select "Show View Options" from the context menu, and then in there, select a text size from the drop down. You can also do this in the context of any finder window.

However, maximum selectable text size is 16pts — which is very small on a 4k display. As an "accessibility" setting, it's laughable. Which is perhaps why it's not under accessibility.

I have been using a free app from the Mac app store, "Loupe", which provides a comprehensive zoom capability much more convenient than Apple's "Zoom." It's not as good as actual reasonable control over system fonts would be, but it's better than being stuck with 16pt fonts.

Quoting the Heritage foundation when saying something is propaganda and a lie is hysterical as they are a massive propaganda outlet. So is Forbes. Only the IMF foundation has any credibility at all.

But this is an old dead conversation at this point.

However, remember it in 20 years when the temperature is +2.7C and we start having global food insecurity even in first world countries while the Billionaires you are stooging for live well and you suffer.

No... maybe at one point... but today? It's just excess profits for billionaires and corporations and a few cheap products that incent exactly the opposite behavior that we need-- such as $2.39 per gallon gasoline in the U.S. this year when it was still about $7 per gallon in the rest of the world.

If you've ever bought gas, you helped pay for it.

Even if you never bought any gas, your tax dollars paid for some of it, in the form of subsidies.