It's appealing if you are a public figure or a person who values their security because someone hacking into your phone can cost you your job... IP Addresses are not a measure of location. A VPN easily changes that. My network traffic can come to you from Russia or China or Madrid or Boston with a push of a button and a little money on an online service. Also, everyone already has IP addresses. Assuming that so few people will use this security feature that those who do will be targets for IP address questioning is likely false.

I don't buy the argument that you sacrifice privacy for security. If enough people in China start using this mode, then it sends a signal to the website operators that delivering those features securely is more important to their users than the full functionality of their website.

I view this like incognito or guest mode web browsing when not wanting to leave breadcrumbs on my computer. If I'm visiting financial information or helping someone login to something, I'm going to do it in incognito or guest mode to not leave cookies / search history / PII past the end of the browser session.

You lost me on "The Nintendo Switch Emulator Protection will ensure"... Emulators are Turing complete, and you'll be forever trying to play cat and mouse with the users of the emulator. PCs are open ecosystems. If I wanted to download someone's ripped game and an emulator to play it, then I would Google for it, and be done with it already.

I wonder if a web browser that enabled people to answer these popup questions with things that get stored in one big shared cookie per site -- then when the browser loaded the site, it knew how to fetch the 3 question answers to bypass the garbage... Honestly, if a Chrome plugin _worked_ to block those popups, then I'd use that. Something like AdBlock Plus does a decent job.

Now that the data lives on Oracle servers instead of TikTok owned servers, the Chinese engineers who write and maintain the schema and all processing have no access to the data...

Thanks,
Uncle Larry!

(Score: -5, Snarky)
Let people die and move away. That's the consequence of climate change. There's an economical impact. Nobody cares about Utah Republicans as they tend to dismiss science and do whatever it takes to make the situation worse. Let this problem bite them in the behind.

Our population growth rate is screwing over the world. The natural result of which is that more people will die. Let them die.

There's a passage in the Bible which says "As you shall sow, so shall you reap." I learned it as a punishment for doing something dumb. Honestly, this problem won't go away. We as a species have priorities that are bad for the planet. War machines, jet powered airplanes, nuclear bombs, and all kinds of inventions of the last 100 years are destroying our planet faster and faster.

Just don't care. You'll live a little longer before you are burned to a crisp by the fires.

I really don't understand why everyone is so afraid of acting (militarily) against Putin - it seems that not engaging in this war is just enabling Putin to keep terrorizing and killing and claiming more for Russia. Given the amount of destruction Russia (because of Putin) has dealt to Western Europe, I'm really surprised that drone-delivered airstrikes haven't commenced against Moscow and St Petersburg, or at least the electricity grid of Russia. Literally take away the power from Russia, and the irony is that the only plane capable of delivering the big replacement parts needed was destroyed in Ukraine.

If and when the Russian economy recovers, they will be lucky to find a buyer of their now 20 year old obsolete space equipment.
In the meantime, someone please come up with a funny acronym for BROOMS.

When shareholders demand dumb things like selling the company to some other company to strip mine it for the brand name and scrap it for parts, then they are not investors - they are scum. The value of a company is more than the amount of money you can sell it to some bigger entity - it is more than the capital, it is people.

People with lots of money tend to objectify things - that's how they get so much money. They are an optimization to a bad problem. An inhumane problem. It's the same with Bitcoin and NFTs. At the end of the day, our power dynamics put in place garbage people at the top so that garbage people near the top can behave in terrible ways.

We don't need socialism to fix this, we just need common decency. Will the activist shareholder win, or will they be out-voted by the masses? We'll see....

I'm curious to hear the Slashdot profile on Roblox -- an actually successful metaverse that has captured so much of America's youth.

Roblox is a pretty great choice -- it's already available on Windows, Mac, iOS / iPad OS, Android, XBox and Oculus. It's not available on Nintendo or PlayStation, but then again, anyone would have a tough time trying to convince the Japanese gaming giants that they would add any value.

Steam is a pretty great choice on Windows / Mac / Linux -- though you really don't need Steam to buy games, it's a mostly a great way to find them. I'm really surprised that Valve beat out Google and Microsoft for this - making a better searching and buying games experience.

Apple was the pioneer in this space with the iPhone app store - when it made installing iOS apps native over WiFi around the time of the iPhone 4. The previous generations of Apple devices required using a computer with iTunes installed to find and install apps and update the OS.

But let's think about this for a moment -- suppose Epic does make a "universal" store? How is this not https://xkcd.com/927/ ?

>>> Are you even a parent? Probably just a smug asshole, otherwise definitely a helicopter parent.

I am a parent. I play Roblox with my kids and with others. My wife teaches robotics at middle school, and her students would love to use Roblox instead of microbits or something else. We give our kids Robux for things like chores. You don't need to be a helicopter parent to spend time with your kids and participate in their reality, and Roblox is kinda fun. There are addictive and bad games out there, and we make sure that our children can participate with appropriate moderation -- bedtime activities take priority for example.

>>> Saying 'Roblox drives addiction issues in kids' is clearly not the same as saying 'my kids are addicted to Roblox'.

I don't think the platform itself drives addiction, but it certainly rewards games based on hours of engagement, then again, so does every other form of entertainment - so it's not unique. What is unique is that it runs on all the devices my kids have, and costs nothing to get started. Come to think of it, it's not that unique except that it's less advertisement driven -- I have to play games like Candy Crush in airplane mode to not watch stupid amounts of ads.

>>> That I say No to Robux should show you that I care and I that I do help guide my kids - I'm not feeding that behavior. The begging behavior is driven by the way the product works, Roblox is working as designed.

My kids beg for stuff, too. It's an opportunity to teach them the value of work. We give them a modest amount of R$ for doing chores. Most of the games I play focus less on pay-to-win mechanics. I try to teach them to pay for the things that matter more -- more game passes and fewer boosts. When they run out, they need to do more chores.

>>> Not one part of your response says anything about why it would be a good idea to have Roblox in schools.

It's a creative platform that kids use to express themselves and a lot of the content is really engaging if not particularly wholesome. Simulators or clickers aren't particularly good, but they are really easy to begin playing even though they tend to not have an ending. Perhaps some high-value educationally engaging software on Roblox will cause kids to try and make more valuable content than just amusements. You have to realize that most of the successful creators on Roblox are under the age of 21. There are exceptions, but the platform has produced quite a few millionaire teenagers and tweens. Giving students time and instruction for education on consumer platforms to build stuff enables them to interface the real world. I paid for a summer course in Java / Minecraft for my older child for two summers - it was good for him.

I don't get people that think that just because something is commercially available that it is bad --- my university computer science department demonized Microsoft in the 90's for closed source software while the IT department installed and supported a whole network of practical closed-source Windows and Mac PCs full of licensed programs like Photoshop, Office, MatLab, and Mathematica. Roblox itself is free. Making educational apps in it available seems like a way to get more positive and broader engagement than just video games. Maybe some of them will be paid experiences or pay-as-you-go. This is an opportunity.

Blaming Roblox for games like Adopt Me is like blaming the Internet for sites like TikTok. Your kids are addicted. So what? Interact with them. Play games together. Steer them towards new toys. Work with them to _make_ a game on Roblox rather than just complaining. If you're a parent, do your job to teach your children the value of creating and not just consuming. They are your kids, not Roblox's kids. Roblox is a tool just like the internet. It's your job to help them navigate the tool and build a successful life.

Rural India is very far behind on its network connectivity. The fact that Starlink can enable broadband access far and wide should be seen as an opportunity to expand services and opportunities to the rest of the world. Countries in Africa and Europe and regions of the US all have poor connectivity outside the more populated city areas, and the telephone and cable companies are not invested enough in the opportunity to connect people. There are lots of remote locations that are just too expensive to connect terrestrially. There are going to be huge profits from Starlink, but the ingenious mechanism that made it all possible was the Falcon 9's landing capability. SpaceX is maybe 5-20 years ahead of its closest competitors in landing heavy orbital launch vehicles, and their research on Starship is at a necessary speed to remain the worldwide leaders when countries like China can out-invest companies in the USA.

Nationalism is OK in my book if the competition breeds advancements for humanity.

I think the problem with trying to bribe NASA with a scheme like this is that it reeks of desperation after SpaceX won the bid with better technology. SpaceX will make a profit with a cheaper solution - this is a better deal than a one time discount. Moon tested is a big deal. Maybe if Bezos put his $2B discount deal first, he might have had a shot.

1) The pilot should have filed a design patent first.
2) If the app was valuable to the entire airline market, then the value was far greater than the pilot's salary, and he could afford to pay engineers and lawyers to protect his invention.
3) The pilot's lawyer needs to thoroughly examine the pilot's employment agreement for intellectual property clauses - if the pilot signed something to the effect that any improvements they make to the airlines operations belong to the company then even a design patent based on the airlines' operation could be subject to ownership by the company.

These kinds of invention provisions are common in engineering and large corporations.