Honestly, right now the research currently being done is all incremental tweaking focused on getting things like ChatGPT and its ilk to be slightly less embarrassingly bad at doing the limited range of things they do. None of that research has *any* chance of leading to human-like intelligence, in a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium. It's like expecting to make a breakthrough in space travel by engineering a slightly more aerodynamic bicycle. The more aerodynamic bicycle may be valuable, but it isn't *ever* going to fly through space under its own power at a significant fraction of light speed, sorry, that's just not what it's going to do. Such an advance wouldn't come from that approach. If it comes at all, it will come from someone trying something new that hasn't already had millions of man-hours poured into it.

By 1998, hard drives were either IDE or SCSI, and most new computers also had (usually ATAPI) CD-ROM drives.

Admittedly, floppy disks were also still in widespread use; but it wasn't for lack of hard drives. It was for lack of USB 2.0 and the (flash-EEPROM-based) mass storage devices that it enabled.

How do you know it's not an American spoofing a European spoofing an American?

I will admit that I have occasionally been mildly annoyed that I couldn't use actual Greek characters when discussing things like etymology and math on here. But given how bad the Spam problem is already, do I want all discussions to get buried under a huge pile of hanzi and emoji and whatnot? No, I do not. I've seen what that did to Usenet, and I am not keen on it.

Slashdot walks a fine line. It has never attempted to gate itself behind geolocation checks, for example. But the site has consistently refused to make any changes specifically to accommodate foreigners. It's an American site, that is open to the public, so others *can* choose to participate, if they want to, but they're choosing to participate (or not, as the case may be) in an American site.

Do Americans go onto French discussion boards and complain that all the conversations are in French, that everything is discussed from a French perspective, and so on, and ask for that to be changed? (I almost asserted that we don't, but then I remembered that there are over 300 million of us, and I don't frequent French discussion fora, so who knows, maybe it does actually happen and I'm simply unaware of it. There are, after all, idiots in every country.)

He was obviously using the word "munitions" as shorthand for "munitions-bearing missiles and ordnance and whatnot". Technically he didn't actually *say* all that, but it's implied.

It could potentially also be directly useful if it can be made affordable at any kind of reasonable scale. Methanol is much easier to store than electricity, and entirely straightforward to use as a fuel. It's already somewhat commonly used as fuel for a few things (mostly recreational stuff, rather than anything industrial, but still, the fact that we're already using it this way means we already have significant experience doing so; methanol as fuel is a known quantity, and that's a useful property for it to have).

Slashdot is and always has been totally unapologetically an American site, by design. It is not *intended* for Europeans, or Asians, or cetera.

This is also why it's still ASCII-only, decades after widespread adoption of utf-8 elsewhere. Diacritical marks aren't needed in English, and comments in other languages would be considered spam here.

Europeans who don't like this aspect of Slashdot, are always free to go find another site.

Eh. Apple is definitely guilty of engaging in competition-suppressing behavior. But Microsoft is even *more* guilty of it, and Amazon's hands aren't entirely clean in this regard either, and in general these companies are large enough to take care of themselves. (Also, Windows Phone is so terrible, nobody would ever use it voluntarily even if it were free. This is part of the background story behind why Windows 8 was so bad.) Holding these companies up as victims is ridiculous. It's like arguing that Tesla is unfairly locking Ford and Toyota out of the electric vehicle market.

As for HTC, they've been in the cellphone business longer than Apple has, so the line about preventing new companies from entering the market doesn't hold water there.

The real concern is that these companies' anti-competitive behavior effectively suppresses *smaller* companies and prevents them from gaining a toehold in the market. For example, one might argue that Apple's app store policies are unfair to small software companies who want to distribute a cellphone app that competes with one of Apple's own apps, or one of their partners' apps.

> EVs as rentals might start to make sense after the charging infrastructure in
> this country has been built out further and most people are familiar with EVs.

Those things would help, but there are additional issues as well. The power
grid needs to be able to back up the charging infrastructure, which will likely
continue to be a problem in some areas (e.g., on the west coast) for the
forseeable future. Also, as you'd expect for any new technology, the price of
EVs, and of _parts_ for them, also still needs to come down some more. It's
been on its way down for a while already, but it still has some more falling to
do. Although, that may happen by the time the charging infrastructure and
power grid are ready. Range also still needs to improve a bit more, although
it's already *much* better than it used to be; ongoing improvements to battery
technology are really helping here. (Range is already more than adequate
for the types of renters who are flying to a city and then renting a car to drive
around that city, which is a fair number of them. But it's not *all* of them,
and maintaining a secondary fleet of gas-powered vehicles to serve other
customers creates unwanted logistical problems, greatly increasing the
expense of shuffling vehicles around. It's bad enough you've already got
renters who either specifically do or else specifically don't want a large
vehicle like an SUV. Compounding that with "I specifically need a vehicle
that can make the drive from Seattle to Chicago" is a business problem.)
The publicity issues related to exploding EV batteries also aren't helping.
(In practice, none of the vehicles Hertz was using had that problem. The
vehicles that do have that problem, aren't sold in North America, because
over here folks who can't afford something better than that, consistently
buy secondhand vehicles. But the internet has gazillions of videos of the
phenomenon, and many consumers don't understand all the nuances.)
Finally, a large part of the *point* in moving to EVs is significantly less
impactful than you've been told and will remain that way until more
of the grid power production infrastructure can be moved to renewable
sources, which is going to take *longer* than you've been told, because
apart from hydropower (which is only available in select geographical
areas), most renewable energy sources can't be quickly turned on and
off when needed to match supply to demand, and so switching over the
last 30% or so of production, is going to require very large amounts of
energy storage on the grid, which is very expensive. This is being
worked on, quite actively, but it's not going to happen overnight.

I just use NoScript. The difference it makes is so substantial, that when I forget and try to browse the web on a computer that doesn't have it, I am consistently appalled. Have you ever tried to use Slashdot with Javascript enabled? Yikes. Wikia/Fandom is even worse. Corporate sites (including ones you need to visit to download things like manuals and drivers) can be pretty bad too. ISP websites are typically unusable. Mainstream media sites, terrible. Don't even get me started on social networks.

There are a handful of legitimately useful things that don't work without Javascript. I open them in a secondary browser, which I close as soon as I'm finished with it. My main browser, which stays open 24/7, only has Javascript whitelisted on three or four sites, and I personally wrote the scripts on two of them. What these whitelisted sites have in common is, none of their scripts run except in response to a click action, and never for more than a couple of seconds even then.

Off the top of my head, I know of one (1) widely-used website that behaves more or less acceptably when Javascript is enabled. But it also works just fine with Javascript turned off, so whatever. (The site in question is Wikipedia.)

I used to make sure my pages loaded reasonably quickly over dialup connections. Most of them probably still would, if dialup were still a thing, apart from inherently image-heavy things like the photo gallery. Although the need to add media queries to make things reasonable on handheld devices with absurdly small screens has more than doubled the length of my stylesheets.

And yeah, if a web page exists principally to show an hour-long high-definition video, then it's excused from fast-load-over-slow-connection requirements, for obvious reasons. That sort of thing is data-heavy inherently because of its raison d'etre, which is fair enough.

But I think most data-heavy web pages these days are suffering from a surplus of entirely gratuitous Javascript frameworks that mostly just make the page harder to use and maintain, rather than easier. Half the time the page isn't even actually *using* any of the framework's functionality, it's just on the list because someone was testing out a feature at some point and it never got pruned.

We were afraid we were going to have to _abandon_ CoBOL in favor of some new-fangled programming language like Lisp or even <<shudder>> C. Perish the thought!

> You're right that this has to be accounted for in the energy use, but it's still more
> energy effective to recycle than to throw it out and make new plastic. The one
> virtue of plastic is that it's light, it's actually not very energy intensive to transport.

You've been lied to. All that transportation is environmentally pointless, because
when the plastic gets to its destination, it is not, in fact, actually recycled. It's picked
through by somebody who makes a dollar a day, for the 1% of it that's actually
worth anything, and then the rest of it is either incinerated (in a cheap incinerator
that would never pass inspection in a developed country) or put into a landfill (that,
likewise, would never have passed inspection in a developed country). The end
result is worse for the environment than if the plastic had just been thrown away
in its country of origin.

But, you know, the third-world company that it was all shipped to is willing to *say*
they're a recycling company, if it gets them the contract. There's no law against
lying about stuff like that, in the country they operate in, and even if there were,
it wouldn't be enforced.

> Aluminum is indeed very easy to recycle, but as stated, plastic is light.

The issue with aluminum isn't so much that it's easy to recycle, although it is (most
metals are); the issue is more that it's energy intensive to refine it from ore.
Look up the Hall-Heroult process for an explanation of the details, but the short
version is, high-temperature high-voltage electrolysis.

Plastic is light, but mass-recycling it is borderline impossible with current
technology. You can't just melt it all down and make junk out of it, for two big
reasons. First, there are a gazillion different kinds of plastics, and you'd need
a separate process for each one, and sorting it is impracticable. Second, a
high percentage of plastic is thermoset, i.e., the hardening/curing process
that occurs when it's produced is not straightforwardly reversible.

But sure, if you can somehow collect a whole bunch of one specific uniform type
of thermosoftening plastic, then you could recycle it. This is the trick used for
those plastic recycling projects used for Earth Day celebrations in the schools,
wherein they have all the students bring in a whole bunch of one very specific
plastic object (e.g., milk jugs) and get it turned into a picnic bench or whatever.

Paper has only ever been worth recycling if you're making cheap brownish cardboard out of it. Even then it's only really viable if the paper can be collected cheaply in bulk, which could potentially be where you were going with the newspapers: a lot of households used to get those things daily, and they were a lot thicker than the modern weekly ones, so they added up to a substantial pile of paper fairly quickly. But to the extent that you can find an easy-to-collect supply of junk paper, this can still be worth doing, because the world uses a fair amount of cheap brownish cardboard.

But for actual paper, the reason (non-subsidized) recycled paper is consistently more expensive than new paper, is because making it is more energy intensive. Cleaning all the inks and whatnot from existing paper, costs more than using cheap farmed fast-growth pine, because it uses more energy, and energy costs money. In other words, making recycled paper is not worthwhile from an economic standpoint, because it's not worthwhile from an environmental standpoint. This has always been true.

> P.S. Cans and other metals are probably worth the attention for recycling

Virtually all metals are worth recycling, yes. Also glass. It saves energy, because melting and reforming them is significantly less energy intensive than making them from raw materials (or, sand, whatever). Aluminum is particularly worthwhile to recycle, even though the ore is abundant, because the refining process is quite energy intensive. But even mundane, easy-to-refine base metals, like iron, are definitely worth recycling.

Plastics, no. Unless by "recycle" you mean disposing of them in a controlled incineration process that recaptures as much energy as it is practical to recover. It's either that or the landfill, pick your poison. Whichever one you do, for the love of all that is sane, do it in a developed country where there are meaningful environmental regulations, so that the incinerator or landfill meets actual standards. Shipping plastic waste to a second- or third-world country for "recycling" is pretty much the *worst* thing you can do with it, environmentally speaking.

Paper, only if it can be collected cheaply and you're making cheap brownish cardboard out of it. Otherwise, it's less energy-intensive to make new paper out of cheap farmed fast-growth pine. New paper is cheaper than (non-subsidized) recycled paper, specifically *because* making it uses less energy. Energy costs money.

Traditionally, if you weren't signed in yet they would recommend the most egregious drivel they could find. Computer voices reading copy-pasted content from reddit, compilation videos made entirely of two-second clips from dozens of other users' videos, that sort of thing. Absolute garbage.

Just giving you a blank search form would be a large improvement, honestly.