Comment Everything (Score 2) 397
What's wrong with farmed algae?
It's not people.
What's wrong with farmed algae?
It's not people.
One is four concentric arcs of a quarter circle. This means "wifi is receiving". Does that look like a radio wave? No.
Actually it is a pretty reasonable representation of a radio wave -- from a transmitter. I'd expect it to mean my WiFi transmitter is on, not that it is receiving.
In fact, at the top of the browser there's a symbol that looks a little like the handwritten form of the kanji for "jin" inside a dark green rectangle. That symbol, in fact, means "you're on slashdot".
To me it looks like a lower case "lamba". Why a lamba for
This is a
I wonder what the emoji for "dissertation on writing systems" would look like.
That works well for 1-2 billion people and not so well for the remaining 5-6 billion.
I think it was obvious that the OP meant that the string would be written in whatever the local predominant language is, not always in English. Someone who doesn't speak English isn't going to write "I have a peanut allergy", they're going to write it in their own language. It would be very rare for such a person to be isolated to the point that nobody around them knows what he's saying, and if someone was going to go somewhere like that (vacation, etc) they'd carry a card with that sentence written on it in half a dozen languages just in case.
Expecting everyone in the world to understand an image of a peanut and know that means "I die if you give me a peanut" and not "I like peanuts, please give me one" is inviting disaster. Since you have to express that concept in words anyway, why bother with a picture that is ambiguous?
While we're working on that universal language,
Who is working on a universal language? Do we really need one? And do you understand the difference between "language" and "character"? There are some one-letter words, but not very many, and creating a system with thousands of them would be ridiculous.
and there's no law against writing elevator next to the elevator sign.
I've always wondered, is there a law that says where braille signs must be posted? I see braille signs for all kinds of things (office numbers, "elevator", "men's room", etc.) and I can only imagine that blind people looking for a bathroom must have to walk down the hall rubbing their fingers on the wall -- if that braille sign has any value. If the wall has a textured surface, just what kinds of things does it say to a blind person? Is it like the room full of monkeys with typewriters, eventually the blind person will have read all of the great novels if he finds enough bathrooms?
And the most unusual place for a braille sign: next to the earphone jack at the drive-up ATM. I mean, someone who is hard of hearing may be driving a car and may need audio assistance, but blind people should probably not be driving up to an ATM and expecting to get service.
I don't quite see what existing use case these symbols are supposed to cover,
Call them "images" and create a standard set. There is no reason to push "images" into a character set as if they were letters that make up words.
I'll agree that the average car of the 1980s was ugly as sin, and nearly as bad from a quality standpoint.
The 1970s were characterized by awful design coupled with 1960s technology. The cars of the 1970s are no more advanced than the cars of the 1960s. By contrast, the cars of the 1980s are dramatically more advanced... the imports, anyway. Japanese and German shitboxen got sequential fuel injection and advanced suspension designs. Most American cars were still using throttle body injection in the 80s, but at least they had discovered fuel injectors.
Because plant sources of fat are not environmentally sustainable?
Not as modern agriculture is practiced.
Ensure is 1/3 of a daily meal plan and costs $1.19/unit. In order to be successful, a new product has to be cheaper and better. If your definition includes sustainability then it might be "better", but at literally twice the price of the entrenched competition, it's got to be twice as good. But it's little more than half the food value... So it's got to taste almost four times as good as Ensure to be compelling. Guess what?
What we don't have is an unspecified, unplanned, unwritten way to somehow insert a "pictogram" inside my stream of "glyphs".
No, I think we DO have an unspecified, unplanned way of doing that. Or maybe we DO have a specified way -- any of any number of markup languages.
What we need is a way to draw shapes on a screen or piece of paper where a designer gets to pick roughly what they look like. Unicode does that,
PostScript beat them to it, and I'm going to bet there are a lot of other systems out there for doing graphics. What we DON'T need is a "character" that looks like a peanut.
You do realize that the person who uses the "character" for "peanut" doesn't get to "pick roughly" what it looks like when it is displayed, don't you? He gets whatever the guy who designed the system being used to display that "character" chooses. For example, right now I see five "things" following the string "Follow us:" at the top of this screen. The first one is a small white circle with the string "E85A" (I think it is, it is very small and hard to read) in red inside. Did the author of this
Now, I'm assuming this is some stupid "character" that is supposed to look like a Twitter logo, but I have no way of knowing. And actually, I don't care.
When I will care is if someone sends me an RSVP to a party I'm having and she responds with "Great! See you there! small-circle-with-E82D", by which she meant to tell me she's got a peanut allergy, but since I don't read raw UNICODE I went ahead and bought a lot of snacks with peanuts in them. I know, when I call 911 I'll tell the dispatcher I've got someone who is dying from small-circle-with-E82D and see if they know what I'm talking about.
2. Those who fall for some unknown social-engineering trap.
Well, that's every Mac user. You bought into the idea that you were buying a lifestyle, but actually you were just buying a PC made by slaves at Foxconn like every other PC.
I've heard it tastes like ass.
You're thinking of Soylent Brown.
There isn't a "revoke privileges" kernel feature either despite years of trying (it is a hard problem).
You can't do it through a capabilities interface, even?
That means userspace have to have a sophisticated session manager like logind with kernel integration in order to keep the multi-seat sessions safe.
Why would it need to be married to the init daemon? That's the part that's unclear. cgroups permit management of process groups no matter how, why, or when they were created, or who created them. It doesn't matter if init starts the process, any other daemon could have done that job.
Ok, so it's a small sample size, but every article I've submitted has appeared exactly as I typed it.
Well, it's possible that you made higher-quality submissions than I did, or that you just tripped over lazy editors. It would be interesting to have some actual statistics on this, but hahaha. I mean, the editors are already lazy.
All the init-systems in use at the time where just "slightly improved SysVinit" style init-systems.
You're missing the point, deliberately I hope because the alternative is too pathetic to contemplate. Those init systems were in use at the time because you could swap between them freely. Systemd deliberately breaks that state of affairs and that is what is primarily wrong with it.
They all relied on executable config scripts to manage daemons, and none of them tried to step up an take proper responsibility for the boot and init process.
Proper responsibility? No, you have that wrong. They did everything they had to do.
You are probably thinking of the old cgroups interface, but that is being deprecated in the near future in favor of the "single writer"/"unified hierarchy" that requires a writer that abstract away the kernel cgroup API so userland doesn't use it directly.
Oh great, more influence of systemd shitting up my Linux. Just want I wanted to hear about. So instead of a simple, working interface to cgroups, they want to make it harder to use. Why would you do that? Just to make systemd look more useful? You make it harder to do what they do in a script so that people like me can't say "but a script could do that"?
To my knowledge nobody in the non-systemd camp is even working on similar ideas, or even on an alternative cgroups single writer implementation.
What the fuck does "writer" mean here?
Isn't that an argument that everything should be written in shell script?
It's an argument that everything which reasonably can and should be written in a shell script (that is, without compromising security or performance) should be. A shitload of what makes a modern Linux go is just scripting. Sadly, many of them are python scripts; shell scripting will do the jobs they do without exception, but people jumped on the new shiny (like they did with perl, as well) and that results in a system where you have to understand three scripting languages to maintain it, not just one. Clearly scripting is not a panacea. You have to understand what you are doing.
People often argue that shell scripts are slow, but they aren't if you have free memory, because process creation is cheap on Unix. Creating new shells, firing off all those inlines, is as cheap as thread creation on Windows. It's not a problem these days, when RAM is basically free.
Everything which can reasonably be implemented as a very small shell script absolutely should be. Anything which legitimately needs to be written in C absolutely should be. The right tool, not just a random tool.
Battery swapping has negligible effect on the ability of EVs to compete with ICEVs for consumer travel. The only case where it's of use is in long-distance, non-stop travel, which is a miniscule percentage of road miles and which can in most cases be done with a rental vehicle.
You don't think being forced to abandon your vehicle and hire another one is a significant effect? This is why people laugh at the proponents of EVs. You don't actually give a shit about cars. To you, a car is just a box. But most people have a relationship with their car, it takes on personality to them. Being forced to walk away from it and drive another vehicle in which the person is less comfortable is a major event which significantly impairs the vehicle's suitability.
Now, can anybody explain to me why battery swapping is worth additional credits in the first place? CARB's mandate is supposed to be cleaner air.
The idea is that fast refueling is supposed to draw more people to alternative-fuel vehicles, because the idea is that some people don't buy AFVs because they are less convenient than gasoline or diesel-powered vehicles. The extent to which the idea was tied to fuel cells, though, is definitely driven by the mechanism you stated.
"It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it." -- Henry Allen
