I've never really put much stock in the dark energy theory. For one - its another "placeholder" theory. IE, this thing exists with no proof because our equations don't work with this as a fudge factor.

That said, even assuming dark energy exists, and is what is driving expansion of the universe, then there's no guarantee that it will continue to strengthen over time. Indeed the expansion hasn't just been accelerating since the beginning. At the very beginning of the big bang expansion was much more rapid, then slowed down dramatically, then has been gradually speeding back up again.

The thing is, without knowing what caused the first slowing of expansion, there's no guarantee that expansion won't slow again eventually.

Even if the history of Russian 'import substitution' weren't littered with farces where someone gets a gold star for domestically producing tractors...from imported Polish kits with the serial numbers filed off...or the like; "game console" seems like a strikingly hard target, especially relative to its value.

It's a consumer product, rather than the state or state owned or heavily influenced companies being the customer, so there's a lot less leverage in terms of just making 'domestically produced' patriotic and mandatory; and it's a toy that only some people are even interested in, so it's even more difficult to distinguish between people who don't buy Super Motherland 3 because they just don't play video games and ones who don't buy it because they are playing Genshin Impact on something imported from China or a cracked copy of CoD on the wintel they say they use for work. Obviously possible, if you wanted to divert even more statesec guys from keeping an eye on planned terrorist attacks in order to do traffic analysis to look for game pirates; but not obviously worth the trouble.

It's also a pretty demanding category: customers tend to be pretty cost-sensitive and tend to expect frankly remarkable levels of hardware and software punch that are deliverable only thanks to mass production at all levels(whether you are talking ICs, game engines, asset packs, or very large numbers of sales of the final product). This isn't some military thing where you'd like more; but it's workable, and arguably worth it, to be able to reliably deliver domestic clones of some 20-year-old TI DSP even at twice the market price. Unless you are running a crackdown on the alternatives that would make North Korea blink that's not going to work on the gaming side: expectations are high and prices are low; and 'good enough' is defined in large part relative to what other people have, rather than to specific requirements.

In a perfect world this might work, but in reality most of your DVD's will walk off never to be seen again.

Doesn't even have to be malicious - back in the real days of Netflix and Blockbuster people would keep DVD's all the time because they just forgot to take them back or were too lazy to. Plus a dwindling number of people even have DVD players at home. I could technically connect up an older game console but that's the only way I'd have to watch one now.

Um, no. Capitalists are always looking out for themselves. That means trying to get your business (and capital) - either by making a product better, or by selling it for cheaper, because in a free market economy if your product isn't good enough a customer will buy a competitor. There's a reason Wal-mart and Amazon are the behemoths that they are - they sell products cheaply and conveniently and as a result TONS of people shop there.

Similarly, you as a customer in a capitalist market are also always looking out for YOURSELF (trying to maintain your capital). You seek out the product that best suits your needs - either by function or by cost, and purchase that one instead of the competitor.

Occasionally the market needs some guardrails to prevent monopolies or price fixing collusion, but overall it works tremendously well.

It sounds like that's what they're already doing, and they're saying that a technology that allows them to see the movies more often as a boon.

Your comment was akin to responding to a guy who says "I'm having trouble financially. I'm not starving but I'd like to eat more often." with "How about you eat less if the food costs so much?". It's pointless and not productive.

I think the issue is that while human faces are generally infinite in variation, voices are a lot less varied (at least to the extent that humans can distinguish them).

SOME people have very, very distinctive voices, but others are much less precise.

Its not that farfetched.

Back in the early days of television there was an actor's uproar against recording of performances. They preferred that each time a show was to be on it would be broadcast live as it was performed - much like a play. Afterall, if you can just record the actors once and replay that an infinite number of times, how will the actors make a living?

As with all other such cases, eventually we worked it out. You can't fight the progress of technology.

At least on initial inspection "bespoke teams" and "long-term collaboration" sounds like they will be at odds with one another:

I'm curious whether the assumption is just that people who aren't the author are fungible cogs to be picked up and discarded with as much 'agility' as possible; or if they believe that first-time authors getting decent sized advances is an inefficiency and they seek to rectify that by ensuring that authors who don't sell can be discarded at minimal cost; just with a less-depressing focus on the part where authors who do sell do get paid.

ERP systems typically don't fail because of their databases or frontends(and, when they do, they tend to be big, huge, must-talk-to-all-the-legacy-systems-and-support-analysis-and-reporting-at-nontrivial-scale situations that isn't a trivial matter to handle with just some basic web experience). They fail because the process of capturing(and where necessary taking a hard look at and changing) all the business processes so that the dev side can implement them or make sure that they are handled by the product they've chosen is ugly and complex.

Similarly; nobody picks excel because of confusion about its power and capabilities: overwrought-but-inadequate excel is what happens when there is no effort, or no successful one, to get business practices codified into requirements that can be shoved over to the devs and implemented; so you get ad-hoc development of local bandaid tools; typically bolted together by a fair amount of manual copy-paste and futzing; implemented in whatever the people who are familiar with the processes are familiar with. Not uncommonly excel ends up being that; as it's at a pretty favorable intersection between "power" and "number of basically nontechnical users at least partially qualified to work with it".

Title says universe has no dark matter. The summary quotes indicate no dark energy.

I'm a little skeptical of both. They're both effectively a placeholder/corrective value to make the math work.

Sometimes that is indeed the case. Using effectively a placeholder value like this looking at the orbit of Uranus they found Neptune. Other times it doesn't. Looking at the orbital data for Mercury they deduced using a placeholder value the existence of the planet Vulcan. In that case it just turned out that their base math was wrong.

This article seems to posit that our math was just wrong in the first place and dark energy isn't needed.

Its also the case that almost all the average developers consider themselves above average.

The techbros can obviously buy their way in to the party readily enough(realistically, unless you are talking grungy underground scene events in disused warehouses, it's probably not art-for-art's-sake money that is even throwing the party; though it may be the entertainment industry side sponsoring the artistic side because that's prestigious for the sector as a whole, the way a certain number of Oscar-bait movies that are expected to be critical successes and commercially middling is accepted practice); but that's significantly different from being able to buy the regard of people who they've been more or less directly threatening.

Are they just high on their own supply and didn't realize how it would go over? Is forcing the soon-to-be-replaced labor units to watch videos with you rambling about how brilliant their obsolescence is part of the fun?

It wouldn't be surprising if there will be some demand for bite-sized physical machines from people who think that they can't assume hypervisors will be security boundaries; but I suspect that getting actual improvement will be harder than it looks; especially if you aren't willing to sacrifice convenience:

VMs are, certainly, in no small part about utilization and economies of scale: until you get to the point of systems 'big' enough that they seriously restrict your choice of vendors(eg. basically everybody sells 1-2 socket systems; 4-8 means Xeon, and only certain more expensive Xeons, more than 8 sockets means some fancy custom interconnect) it's basically always cheaper to slice a bigger system in half than it is to buy two smaller ones: much less redundant hardware that way.

However, they are also about management convenience that you can't really get out of a physical server without adding a (potentially dangerously) capable BMC or similar computer-inside-the-computer(like the "nitro" controllers that AWS uses): and the history of BMC vulnerabilities(both against their network interfaces and against the components they expose to the OS running on the system) is not entirely cheery; with the situation probably looking worse if you want a BMC that can do all the various management things vsphere can do to an ESX VM.

There's also the question of OS driver vulnerabilities and hardware/firmware vulnerabilities: this VM escape relies on ESX's virtual USB device being buggy; it's not as though you would necessarily have greater confidence in the virtual USB device the BMC uses to interact with the OS; or even the firmware of some of the physical devices on the motherboard.

If anything, while they clearly aren't perfect and can't be trusted enough to avoid much greater attention to how to keep guests from interfering with one another; my suspicion would be that the complexity, and thus bug potential, of real peripherals is considerably higher than that of VM peripherals; especially the newer ones that are explicitly abstractions designed to be convenient for virtualization; rather than close imitations of common physical hardware intended for compatibility with OSes that don't expect to be running in a VM.

There are some 'usb devices over IP' software offerings that add a virtual USB root and can be used to connect USB devices that are physically connected to other hosts(obviously this works better with relatively low-bandwidth and latency-insensitive things; it's more about license dongles and USB to serial converters than video capture devices); so you do have options(and those offerings also tend to have explicit support for relatively easy switching of the USB devices being redirected between multiple hosts, if that's required); but it seems pretty unlikely that their virtual USB devices have gotten the same amount of probing that the vmware ones have, since they are relatively niche offerings vs. being the de-facto on-prem virtualization option(at least until Broadcom showed up).

Potentially still worth it, if you've got some absolutely unpatchable ESX host running at least one guest that must have USB, since the vulnerability on the vmware side is now a known one; but quite likely to not be a net gain in security vs. a patchable host; just given the relative amount of attention given.

There was a somewhat similar(also a bug in the virtual USB device allowing manipulation of the VM host from inside a guest with virtual USB a few years ago. There have also been a couple(CVE-2015-3456 and CVE-2021-3507) targeting the virtual floppy drive device.

They seem to be relatively rare; though tend to be pretty alarming when they do come up because their relative rarity means that people often treat a hypervisor as a reliable security boundary so there isn't necessarily a lot of backup built in to handle cases where that assumption is invalidated.