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.

The survey ranking of the top 3 winning technology leaders is no surprise whatsoever. One of them is revolutionizing the EV, energy, space and transport sectors with a large number of leading technologies and hence gives people great hope for the future, while the other two are best known for their profiteering and abuse of the public. It's hardly a contest.

If you want to be known as a technology leader then you shouldn't be a leeching middleman as everyone will hate you, and rightly so. And if you do something technical then you should do it well, instead of doing it absolutely appallingly on purpose because that gives you greater profit --- I'm thinking of Amazon product search here, which is undoubtedly the worst search system that has ever been implemented in online shopping (advertising unrelated things in disguise). Prime Video has a similar purpose, mainly a vehicle for Amazon to put non-Prime content in front of you and make you pay for the privilege of their direct advertising. Oh and Bezos, you really shouldn't be abusing your employees either, it's bad karma.

Regarding Facebook, there's not a lot to say in terms of technology because all the company does is provide a website which monetizes and hence abuses people, so you have to scrape the barrel to find anything technical at all to say about them. One example of FB tech is that their techies release some fine open-source packages behind the scenes (only programmers hear about this though), but this is incidental to FB's primary product which offers no technical leadership at all. In fact they've given us technical regression since FB has closed off much public communication into a walled garden. Zuckerberg offers no hope at all.

So there we have it, not really a contest among those three. I'm sure there must have been other worthy companies in the surveyed 700, but among these three corporate leaders only Musk deserves to be called a technology leader. The other two should be filed under "Abuse for profit".

Work also satisfies Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

That word "work" needs splitting into its constituent parts before it can be discussed in the context of Maslow, because it carries so much baggage.

The "earning money for food and shelter" part of working is firmly at the very bottom of Maslow's pyramid. The ceiling at that lowest tier is simply survival, and it's very grim to realize that by far the largest part of humanity is huddled together down there and living from day to day.

In contrast, "doing something which interests you" belongs in one of the higher tiers of the Hierarchy of Needs, one of the tiers concerned with personal fulfillment. Earning money while doing something interesting does not appear in that tier, because it has already been satisfied in a lower tier.

This is one of the reasons why a Universal Basic Income fits in well with Maslow's upward progression of a thinking species, as it frees people from the fight for survival and enables them to seek out occupations which are interesting to them in social or intellectual ways.

It's pretty hilarious that neither the Slashdot summary, nor the Budgie Remix front page (which doesn't even have an About link), nor the Budgie video, nor the Softpedia link, actually say what distinguishes Budgie from any other Ubuntu.

In the absence of information, you can't blame people for thinking that it's just a remix for the purpose of being different. If that is not so, then how about providing some information that might give people a hint? You've hidden it so well that none of the news rebloggers has any idea.

Bringing a new nuclear plant online safely takes decades, and decomissioning one takes even longer if you include its nuclear waste. Nuclear is not an agile solution. This won't change in the near future, or perhaps not at all until "nuclear" becomes synonymous with fusion, not fission like today.

Nuclear is also an extraordinarily expensive technology which limits its uptake to only the more afluent of nations. Furthermore it is highly regulated for very good reason, and the politics of nuclear power again limit its global uptake. If we have to rely on nuclear to get us out of the CO2 mess then we are doomed, because it's a global problem.

But we don't have to rely on nuclear, we can just stop burning fossil fuels, and stop using so much energy overall. It would require an immense social adjustment to achieve this, but it has no roadblocks other than making people care enough to do it.

The main showstopper to controlling our current destruction of the planet is profit-seeking capitalism, because it would die in the absence of perpetual growth. Nobody has yet come up with a solution for dealing with that.